From left: The NRS Expedition DriDuffel, the Watershed Yukon, the SealLine Zip, the Ortlieb Duffle, and the Seattle Sports Nav Duffel.
In small boats, space is limited so it’s important to have good ways to stow gear. Many of today’s open boats have buoyancy chambers that can double as watertight storage space, but it can be awkward to stuff gear through small hatches and even more awkward to pull it out. Compartments at the ends of the boat put the weight where it will make the boat less nimble in a seaway.
I prefer to store the bulk of my gear in waterproof duffels lashed securely near the center of the boat. They offer better access to the contents and additional buoyancy if the boat gets swamped, especially if inflated with air after packing. At the end of a long day, I find it far more convenient to pull one big dry bag from under a thwart, carry it ashore, and sort through my gear in camp than it is to manage several small dry bags. Duffel dry bags have long side openings and are easier to pack and unpack than top-loading dry bags.
The five waterproof duffels here are all well-built and made of tough, high quality materials. I evaluated them for ease of use and tested them for waterproofness by submerging each bag at a depth of 3′ for 10 minutes.
Expedition DriDuffel from NRS
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The NRS Expedition DriDuffel has webbing handles that wrap all the way around the bag, relieving the strain a heavy load would put on the fabric. Daisy chains on each side offer multiple tie-down points, and there are additional dedicated tie-down points on each end of the bag. A conventional handle and additional carrying handles on each end make this bag easy to carry for short distances. A shoulder strap is included for longer carries. The centerline Tizip zipper runs the full length of the bag and a little beyond, providing easy access for packing and unpacking. The zipper passed the immersion test and kept the duffel’s interior dry.
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The Expedition DriDuffel has a waterproof Tizip zipper, a shoulder strap, and handles on each end.
A tube of lubrication for the zipper is included with the bag, as is a shoulder strap. The NRS Expedition Duffle is a little more expensive, but it is the toughest, burliest bag I tested and should last many years.
Yukon Duffel from Watershed
Tom Pamperin
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Watershed’s Yukon Duffel was completely dry after the immersion test. The opening—a beefed-up zip-lock closure—runs the full length of the bag on the centerline, making it easy to pack and unpack. To open the Yukon, you pull the attached center loops with your thumbs and push with your fingers to bend the ZipDry in an S shape, which breaks the seal. The ZipDry needs to be kept free of sand and grit, and requires a little patience while closing to get a watertight seal. Watershed recommends 303 Aerospace Protectant as a lubricant, but a little saliva can serve in the field. The ZipDry seal is noticeably slower and fussier to close than waterproof zippers. If you need to access the contents of your bag frequently throughout the day, it’s probably best to choose a zippered bag.
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The ZipDry has interlocking flanges that assure a waterproof seal.
The webbing handles make the bag easy enough to carry from boat to beach, but the optional shoulder strap helps for longer hauls. I’ve owned the Yukon for five years and made two month-long whitewater trips through the Grand Canyon with it. I have complete confidence in my Watershed bags, and they have never leaked, even after near-disastrous runs through Lava Falls.
Zip Waterproof Duffle from SealLine
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The SealLine Zip Waterproof Duffle has a submersible YKK zipper set at a diagonal and protected by a fabric flap. The zipper is not as long as the zippers on the other duffels and access is a little less convenient, but it kept the Zip dry in the immersion test. There are no special tie-downs, but the handles on the ends of the bag can be used for securing it aboard. With its clean design, compact oval shape, and handles on each end, the Zip was the easiest to carry. No shoulder strap is included, though there are D-rings on the ends of the bag to take one.
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The SealLine Duffle has a YKK waterproof zipper.
The bag’s low-profile oval shape makes it particularly well suited for stowing under a low thwart or bench aboard a small boat. I really liked the Zip, and depending on where you plan to stow a bag aboard your boat, it offers a good fit for tight spaces.
Waterproof Duffle from Ortlieb
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Ortlieb’s Waterproof Duffle is made of tough, abrasion-resistant fabric that will stand up to the wear and tear of camp-cruising. There are three screw fittings at each end to fasten interior pockets and a lock-down for the zipper. I’m happier without “through-hull fittings,” but these attachments seem beefy and secure. Four slots for tie-down straps on each side of the bag offer snug, secure attachments. The long centerline Tizip zipper runs the entire length of the bag and partway onto the ends to create a wide opening for easy packing.
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The Duffle has a cable under the zipper pull permits using a padlock to lock the zipper. The hook at the end of the zipper engages the button at the bottom of the duffel.
The Duffle has padded shoulder straps for use as a backpack, making it well suited for long-distance hauling. A Velcro handgrip fastens the shoulder straps together to form a standard duffel handle. There is an interior zippered pocket at each end of the bag for stowage of small, easily lost items such as keys, and one small exterior mesh zippered pocket. An interior compression strap helps hold gear more compactly and takes the strain off the zipper when closing over a full load. A cable loop at the end of the zipper makes it possible to padlock this bag shut.
Nav Duffel from Seattle Sports
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The Nav Duffel from Seattle Sports has a wide mouth, short collar, and roll-top closure. Roll-top dry bags, particularly those with large openings and those made of heavy material, don’t offer a seal that can withstand full immersion. Pressure at depth pushes water around the folds and in though the ends, so I was not surprised to see some leakage after I subjected the Nav to a brief immersion. In normal use aboard a small boat, a dry bag isn’t going to be submerged unless the boat capsizes, so the Nav would be a fine choice as an affordable duffel to keep things dry in spray or rain. Electronics, cameras, or other gear susceptible to water damage merit more than one level of protection and I’d keep them in small, lightweight dry bags inside the Nav. The roll-top doesn’t require the same care and maintenance that zippers do and is unaffected by sand and grit. The roll-top closure is a little slower and less convenient to use than the zippers on some of the other bags, but would still work well for stowing things that you need access to throughout the day.
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The ends of the duffel have buckles to secure the roll-down closure and D-rings for a shoulder strap.
Two plastic D-rings serve as tie-down attachments. It’s easy to carry this bag for short distances with the webbing handles. For longer carries, an adjustable shoulder strap is included. The padded portion of the shoulder strap is set up off-center and works very well with the bag slung over your shoulder vertically. This bag has an interior pocket with a Velcro closure for storing small items.
Any one of these duffels would serve very well for stowage aboard a small boat, and the variety provides options based on budget and individual requirements.
Tom Pamperin is a freelance writer who lives in northwestern Wisconsin. He spends his summers cruising small boats throughout Wisconsin, the North Channel, and along the Texas coast. He is a frequent contributor to Small Boats Monthly and WoodenBoat.
One morning, several years ago, I looked out the shop window to see a vibrant, bright green Friendship sloop sitting at the dock. The contrast between it and the sea of white yachts surrounding it was so dramatic that I couldn’t help but introduce myself to the owner to find out more about the boat. I asked him where I could find topsides paint in such beautiful colors, and he told me I should call George Kirby down in New Bedford, Massachusetts.
The rich palette offered by the George Kirby Jr. Paint Company is distinctively different from other marine paints, and over the years I’ve kept coming back to Kirby paint because its high quality is what the beauty of a hand-built boat deserves. The customer service is outstanding, there are 55 stock colors to choose from, and they can color-match anything.
Kirby’s Topside Hull and Deck paints are traditional oil-based alkyd enamels that come in gloss, semigloss, or matte; you can order a premix nonskid SoftSand rubber granules if you’re using it for a deck. I usually use semigloss as it hides the scrapes and dings that accumulate after years of use. Kirby’s gloss would offer an eye-catching but unostentatious shine if you have new or well-coddled boat with unblemished surfaces.
Once ignored by visitors to the Center for Wooden Boats, this Whitehall was rented more often after a facelift with Kirby paints.
We’ve seen an uptick in rentals at the Center for Wooden Boats in Seattle once we started using Kirby paints to make our small-boat color schemes more fun. We painted the hull of an old Whitehall with #7 C Green, which has a nice blue tone to it, trimmed it out with #32 Sand, which is a light cream color, and painted the interior with a light #19 Blue. Now visitors take notice of this bright little boat.
Surface preparation is pretty straightforward. I make sure everything is well sanded before the first coat, and I lightly sand with 120-grit between coats. I’ve also used the paint on fiberglass-and-epoxy sheathing. I just make sure that any blush from the epoxy is washed off with soap and water.
When you dip a brush into a can of Hull and Deck paint, you’ll notice it is rather thick. This minimizes runs on vertical surfaces; one new coat usually hides the previous color if it’s not too dissimilar. Although Kirby states that priming isn’t necessary for the paint to adhere to new surfaces, if I am applying the paint to a new surface, or one that was recently stripped, I often start with primer, and then apply two finish coats. Sometimes on the second coat the paint will drag a little too much, especially if it’s cold, in which case I’ll mix in a capful of thinner. This helps with easier flow on the surface and better leveling of brushstrokes.
The paint dries moderately hard, and I have found it to be quite durable. It tends to abrade rather than chip off, so it can withstand rubbing against a dock or from frequent hauling on a trailer. The paint also blends in pretty well if you have to touch up any big scratches. I like to try and reapply a maintenance coat every season, keeping prep work to a minimum, but I’ve had Kirby paint last a couple seasons just fine with only a little muting of the color.
The George Kirby Jr. Paint Company also produces other traditional marine products such as pine tar, canvas filler, and deck oil. The company was founded in 1846 to supply durable paint for the local fishing fleet, and is still owned and operated by the same family.
Josh Anderson attended the Apprenticeshop boatbuilding program in Rockland Maine, and has since worked at several boatbuilding and carpentry shops. He and his wife, Sarah, restored a 25′ Friendship Sloop, operated a charter business with it, and spent several years sailing the Maine coast. Josh has a Masters in Maritime Management from Maine Maritime Academy and is now the Lead Boatwright for the Center for Wooden Boats in Seattle, Washington.
Topside Hull and Deck paint is available from the George Kirby Jr. Paint Company. Quarts cost $30 to $32; gallons $75 to $80.
Is there a product that might be useful for boatbuilding, cruising or shore-side camping that you’d like us to review? Please email your suggestions.
Hannah sealed the okoume transom with epoxy before a layer of glass is added for protection. Transom was cut to fit the long-shaft outboard available at the time.
Hannah Dumser, at the age of 10, passed her Michigan boating license test on her first try. It was quite an achievement, as the state’s boater education course covers some 61 topics, ranging from tying knots to dealing with an onboard fire.
Younger sister Kyla was drafted to fill the screw holes left after attaching the Atlantic white-cedar strips. She is now hooked and will start building her own boat this summer.
Having earned her boating safety certificate for the waters near her family’s summer home, she was qualified to operate a boat powered by a motor up to 35 hp as long as she took along someone over the age of 16. Her father, Jim, happened to have an old 25-hp Honda four-stroke outboard languishing in the garage at home in Davidson, North Carolina. Now all Hannah needed was a boat.
Hannah removed the drywall screws and washers that temporarily clamped the strips in place until the thickened epoxy set up. Strips were glued with Jamestown Distributors’ “Thixo,” dispensed from a caulking gun.
She leafed through well-worn copies of WoodenBoat looking for a small skiff she could build with a little help from Dad, a teacher (and at one time the Wood Arts instructor) at Community School of Davidson, the Dumsers’ home-town high school. She soon took a shine to the Jericho skiff, and when she saw the video The Road to Jericho, her mind was made up. For her 11th birthday she was given plans for the Jericho Bay Lobster Skiff.
Hannah enlisted Kyla’s help in filling all those screw holes in the interior. The team effort really sped up the process, and working with a buddy is always more fun.
Hannah and her father made the nearly four-hour drive from Davidson to Wilmington where they picked up 98 strips of Atlantic white cedar, known locally as juniper. Some of the early work on the project took place at the school shop where, in 2015, Jim and four seniors had previously built a 22′ St. Ayles skiff. When it came time for Hannah to set up a ladder frame for the molds and put the pieces together, they moved the project into the garage workshop at home.
The vacuum really got a work out. Orbital sanding and long-board fairing produced prodigious amounts of dust to collect.
Hannah worked on the strip-built hull for several months. For Christmas she got a no-feedback steering system; when her 12th birthday rolled around she got epoxy. She took a few breaks to attend wooden boat festivals like the one in Wilmington put on by the Cape Fear Community College. She picked up ideas here and there to customize her boat to suit her tastes. The design for the steering console, for example, was inspired by a boat she saw on one of the family field trips.
Hannah Dumser was just 10 years old when she decided to build a boat. At 13 she was the master of her own Jericho Bay lobster skiff.
Hannah hadn’t finished the boat by the end of the 2016 school year, so they trailered the boat up to the family summer home in Cedarville, on the shores of Lake Huron in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. She spent the first week of summer vacation attending to the last details and then launched the boat, christened JUNIPER, at the end of June. “It was hard, frustrating, even boring at some parts, like sanding,” says Hannah, “but in the end it was worth it when we put it into the water together.”
Hannah Dumser, boatbuilder.
The skiff was quickly pressed into service, with Hannah at the helm, for runs to town with cousins and friends for ice cream and visits to the library, conveniently located right across the street from the dock. Hannah and family also cruise the Les Cheneaux Islands, the archipelago that protects the waters surrounding Cedarville. Hannah’s younger sister, Kyla, also caught the Dumser boat bug; for Christmas she got plans for a Glen-L Zip.
Have you recently launched a boat? Please email us. We’d like to hear about it and share your story with other Small Boats Monthly readers.
When I began writing this, there was a boat standing bolt-upright on its bow, held in place by a rope wrapped around its stern and pinched in a window sash on one of my upstairs bedrooms. The boat is an 18′ kayak that belongs to my friend Freya Hoffmeister, from Husum, Germany. She’s currently paddling it around North America, not in the here-and-there sense of “around,” but as in circumnavigating the continent, some 30,000 miles of paddling.
To fix a leak at the grab-loop hole, we set the kayak on end up against my house to get epoxy to settle in the bow.
I met Freya in 2005 at a sea-kayak symposium on Spain’s Mediterranean coast. She hadn’t been kayaking for long at that point, but she had already mastered dozens of the rolling techniques that are part of Greenland’s kayaking competitions. While at the symposium she so often shared her skills by teaching other kayakers there that at the end of the event, the symposium organizers returned to her the money she had paid to attend. The following year she participated in the Greenland National Championships and won the women’s division for rolling with a score that would have put her third among the men.
Freya’s kayak was designed and built to meet her specifications. The dip in the sheer line maintains buoyancy and cargo capacity in the bow while providing clearance for her paddle stroke. Stickers lined up on the hull alongside the cockpit are flags of the 19 nations where she has paddled the entire coastline.
She’s not one to do things by half measures—in past she competed in gymnastics, bodybuilding, and beauty pageants. She took an interest in skydiving, and among her 1,500 jumps, was the first tandem jump over the North Pole. She was, of course, the pilot and not the passenger. When she set her sights on sea kayaking she aimed high, then higher. She has circumnavigated Iceland, New Zealand’s South Island, Australia, South America, and Ireland. Australia had only been circumnavigated by kayak once before, by Paul Caffyn in 1981–82.
Others had tried to duplicate the feat but failed, but Freya not only didn’t fail. She bested Caffyn’s record. He did his circumnavigation in 360 days; Freya did it 322, covering 7,446 nautical miles. She paddled around South America in three legs, covering nearly 14,500 nautical miles. Her current project started in Seattle on March 25 and will cover around 27,000 nautical miles, which will be completed in several legs over the next eight to ten years. She’ll do the circumnavigation in two half-loops ending in New York City, one clockwise around the top of North America and the other counterclockwise through Central America by way of the Panama Canal.
Freya faced a lot of skepticism and criticism when she announced her plans to circumnavigate Australia. Few thought she had a chance of succeeding, and some thought she wouldn’t survive the attempt. There were unquestionably some formidable passages and dangerous waters she had to contend with. She took a 360-mile “short-cut” across the Gulf of Carpentaria, opting for box jellyfish and sea snakes rather than follow a longer route along shore dodging salt-water crocodiles. The crossing took eight days and she spent seven nights sleeping aboard her kayak; her paddle and a pair of floats served as a stabilizing outrigger. Monotony seemed to be the main challenge—Freya called me by satellite phone somewhere in the middle of the Gulf, and in the midst of this very risky endeavor, her only complaint was about the boredom.
Freya is surprisingly dismissive of things that most of us would find unnerving at best and terrifying at worst. During her circumnavigation of South America, she was crossing the mouth of the Amazon River, at night, and got caught by a tidal bore. She was side-surfed for 5 miles, bracing nonstop into the wave with her paddle. Her GPS recorded speeds of 15 miles per hour, sideways. She ultimately was freed from the wave when she capsized. The incident left the cockpit half-filled with fine sand so tightly packed that she couldn’t scoop it out with her hands—she had to dig it out with a metal spoon. She told this story to us at a family dinner—we were all wide-eyed—and ended it, as she often does with: “Yeah, well, it is like it is.”
A week before setting out from Seattle on this latest adventure, she hadn’t decided whether to head north along the Inside Passage to the east of Vancouver Island or to take on the island’s Pacific Coast. I had only a few miles of personal experience on the west side, having rowed a dory around Cape Scott at the northern tip, only to get stormbound for five days in the first bay. I knew that the Brooks Peninsula had a reputation for nasty conditions, and while I was in the middle of cautioning her about that area, it occurred to me that anyone who has kayaked around Cape Horn won’t be daunted by Brooks.
Freya went out for an afternoon paddle here in Seattle to take a break from all the work she’s been doing with logistics and gear. After a 20-mile tour that included the downtown waterfront, she discovered a half cup of water in the forward compartment. We discovered a leak in the hole in the bow for the cord of her toggle. We removed the toggle, set the kayak against the house, stern up, and pooled epoxy in the bow until a little bit wept out of the hole.
Freya favors gloves that leave her fingertips free for operating electronics and tending to to the many chores that come up while paddling. She reports that these gloves are warmer than gloves that completely cover her fingertips. The fingernail polish is more practical than decorative. It reinforces her fingernails and makes them less prone to breaking.
With that repair made—and a trip to the salon for a manicure—Freya was ready to go. We drove to a beach in a city park north of downtown Seattle. Surrounded by a group of people who had come to see her off, she packed her kayak, dragged it across the sand, and got aboard. As we post the April issue, Freya is making her way along the west coast of Vancouver Island. She’ll paddle around the Brooks Peninsula and through whatever the Pacific has to throw at her there—it is like it is—she’ll be undeterred.
Freya got her reputation as “The Lady in Black” back in 2005 and still prefers black clothing afloat and ashore.
Freya’s gear included food in bear-proof containers, a helmet for surf landings, three GPS units, an EPIRB, and a VHF radio. She carries everything she needs to be self sufficient for weeks at a time.
Almost ready to depart, Freya finishes packing her kayak at the Golden Gardens beach in Seattle. I brought my Caledonia yawl along, with outboard power, as a photo platform.
The motto that Freya has adopted at age 52 is displayed alongside the cockpit: “Never start stopping; never stop starting.”
Freya set out from Seattle on her 30,000-mile adventure on March 25, 2017.
Freya will be documenting her progress over the next eight to ten years with regular posts on her website.
The Woods Hole spritsail boat is a good example of workboats that became pleasure craft, as happened with so many New England fishing vessel designs. When a colony of summer people sprang up in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, they quickly took note of the vessels traditionally used by the local fishermen. With some modifications to the design to make it better suited for racing, members of the Woods Hole Yacht Club began building a fleet of around 20 spritsail boats in the late 1890s. H.V.R. Palmer, writing about “those handy little boats” in the December 1968 issue of the now-defunct The Skipper magazine, describes two of these old vessels, built by Edward E. Swift between 1896 and 1913, found in a Woods Hole barn in 1965.
The Woods Hole spritsail is, in many ways, similar to the iconic Cape Cod catboat, but with a few distinct differences. The most obvious difference is that the vessel is sprit rigged as opposed to gaff rigged. Many of the fishermen of Woods Hole anchored their vessels in the protected waters of Eel Pond; to enter, prior to the installation of a bascule bridge in 1940, a fisherman would have to pass under an old stone bridge that would require a sailing vessel to unstep its mast to pass underneath.
Josh Anderson
The loose-footed sail makes for a very simple rig, but takes some practice to sail well.
“The fishermen of Woods Hole,” writes Palmer, “became so proficient at this, according to old timers around the village, that they could sail to within a few feet of the bridge before lowering the mast—sail, sprit, and all. This rig also made it easier to furl sail when the fishing grounds were reached and it was time to go to work.” The sprit rig, with its unstayed mast and the absence of a boom, allowed this to be done with relative ease. The beam of the spritsail boat is narrower than that of the cat boat, to allow it to be rowed by one person instead of two, since the fishermen of Woods Hole typically worked alone. It also has a slightly deeper draft and increased freeboard for greater seaworthiness in the notoriously rough waters of Vineyard Sound.
The spritsail boat DEWEY, named in memory of Dewey S. Dugan, a Seattle longshoreman, was built for the Center for Wooden Boats in Seattle in 2000 by the students of Seattle Central College’s boatbuilding program under the direction of the former longtime lead instructor, Dave Mullens. The boat is 13′4″ long, has a beam of 6′, and draws 3′ 6″ with the centerboard down. DEWEY was built to lines taken by David W. Dillion for Mystic Seaport, from the last spritsail boat built by Swift in 1913, one of the two found in 1965. Swift had been building the boat for his brother Helon, who passed away just before it was completed. Lacking the will to launch the vessel, Swift locked it away in his barn, thus preserving the boat in mint condition.
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The mast is set without head stay or shrouds, making it easier to unstep.
The vessels in the CWB livery fleet are rented to the public year round and get quite a bit of use, so they need to be strong enough to take a beating. DEWEY has been a mainstay at the Center for over 15 years, due in large part to her stout workboat construction. The boat is built with 3/4″ Port Orford cedar carvel planking on 1″x1″ steam-bent, white-oak frames, and fastened with silicon-bronze screws. The similarly beefy stempost of sawn oak measures 2-1/2″ x 5″, and transitions into an equally thick keel.
There is a 5″-wide keelson with 3/4″ floor timbers fastened on top of the keel. The mahogany transom is 1″ thick and has a 1″ x 2″ perimeter frame, and a 1/2″x 1-1/2″ cap. It is tied into the keel with a 1″-thick knee. The centerboard trunk ties into the forward and middle thwarts. Though the spritsail boat is an open boat, it would handle well sailing in a little bit of a sea, as it has a 6″-wide side deck outside of the 1/2″x 5″ coaming. The side deck is supported by 1″-thick hanging knees screwed to the frames underneath.
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E.E. Swift built the centerboard trunk in the original boat with an open slot at the top. Enclosing the board keeps DEWEY’s interior drier in rough water.
DEWEY’s wide beam provides a roomy interior, which can comfortably seat four while sailing. The three thwarts are 11″ wide. The mid and aft thwarts tie into two 16″-wide side benches, which are supported by knees. The benches and thwarts sit 8″ above the sole, providing a comfortable sitting height for sailing. The sole covers the entire interior and transitions into a ceiling; even when the boat is heeling, the sailors’ feet never rest on the frames or planks. The 15′ 6″ mast is made of spruce and is 3-1/2″ in diameter at the gate, tapering to 1-1/2″ aloft. The bronze gate in the bow makes it easy to raise the mast—it doesn’t have to be lifted to drop through a partner. The spruce sprit is 17′ 10″-long by 2-5/8″ in diameter and tapered up to the peak of the sail. The luff is attached to the mast with steam-bent hoops.
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The broad thwarts and benches provide comfortable seating.
The Woods Hole spritsail boat was designed to be easily singlehanded and to sail well in fairly heavy weather without the need to reef. The boat is fun to sail, especially with a bit of a breeze. Interestingly, as a rental boat, DEWEY’s boomless sprit rig is sometimes passed over for the more familiar, marconi-rigged vessels. However, when provided with a bit of instruction, many of CWB’s livery customers find that sailing the Woods Hole spritsail boat is a pleasure.
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Unlike a catboat rudder, where the tiller runs horizontally along the top of the blade, a spritsail boat’s tiller is slipped into a mortise in a rudder head.
The beauty of the sprit rig lies in its simplicity. Setting and dousing the sail is easily done, with the help of a snotter that is equipped with a block instead of a thimble. Once the throat halyard has been hauled tight and cleated, the top end of the sprit is passed through a grommet on the peak of the sail and its foot is then attached to the snotter. To set the sail, the snotter is tensioned—pushing the peak up and aft to stretch the sail out—and then made fast to a second cleat on the mast. Dousing is simply the same operation done in reverse.
Josh Anderson
Having the snotter led to a cleat on the mast makes it unnecessary to reach up to the heel of the sprit, but leading the tail end of the snotter aft makes it easier to adjust the shape of the sail without leaving the tiller.
It can take a few adjustments to find the ideal tension for the snotter. This isn’t much of a problem if you are sailing with someone else, but when sailing alone, it can be a bit clumsy and even dangerous to leave the tiller to shuffle forward to make adjustments. It was an easy fix to lead the snotter through a small block at the base of the mast and aft to a cleat installed on the centerboard trunk, where it can now be adjusted without having to leave the helm. This has the added benefit of quick scandalizing; a stopper knot tied at the appropriate spot along the extended snotter line prevents the sprit from lowering too far, which could cause the heel of the sprit to get hung up on the boat.
The sail on the spritsail boat is without a boom, which has advantages and disadvantages. It’s nice not to worry about getting hit in the head by a boom, but it can also be a bit tricky to learn how to trim the sail correctly, especially in light air. When sailing close to the wind, if a boomless spritsail is sheeted in hard to the center of the boat, the clew will curl in and ruin the shape. I found this frustrating the first time I sailed DEWEY, as the boat is fitted with a conventional traveler, which makes it awkward to trim the sail correctly when sailing close to the wind. About 15 minutes into my sail, I discovered that there were two Turk’s Head knots tied on the outermost corners of the traveler that were perfect for hooking the sheet block to. This kept the clew farther outboard, which made a big difference in the boat’s performance to windward.
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This spritsail boat isn’t yet equipped with oarlocks. The original had rowing stations at the center and forward thwarts with oarlocks mounted on blocks fixed outside of the coaming.
DEWEY lacks the two rowing stations indicated in the plans, and relies upon a canoe paddle or a tow from a CWB chase boat when the wind dies. Next time DEWEY enters the CWB boatshop for maintenance, it will get a pair of oarlocks and a set of oars, as its workboat predecessors originally had.
Overall, the Woods Hole Spritsail boat is a fun and straightforward boat to sail. The sturdy workboat design is roomy and comfortable for a complement of four, while at the same time it is simply rigged and manageable enough to sail alone safely. The design provides decent windward ability for a traditionally rigged craft, and good maneuverability even in the tight quarters of CWB’s busy waterway. The greatest testament to this old workboat design is the handful of people who have discovered what fun it can be to sail this small boat and come down to CWB just to sail DEWEY. After 17 years of use in CWB’s livery, DEWEY is still in great condition, and will certainly spend many more years demystifying the sprit rig and getting people out on the water.
Josh Anderson and Sarah McLean Anderson both attended the Maine Maritime Academy in Castine, Maine. They restored a 25′ Friendship sloop, operated a charter business with it, and spent several years sailing the Maine coast. Josh also attended the Apprenticeshop boatbuilding program in Rockland, Maine, and is now the Lead Boatwright at the Center for Wooden Boats in Seattle, Washington.
The postwar market of the 1950s saw a boom in the market for home-built boats. With such a high demand for construction plans, naval architect Glen L. Witt founded his company, Glen-L Marine Designs, in 1953. That fledgling enterprise offered both plans and frame kits, making it a competitor to the Kit Boat Division of the now iconic Chris-Craft brand. Although Chris-Craft closed down its Kit Boat Division in 1958, Glen-L Marine Designs remains.
Chris Atwood
Chris Atwood gave the Utility he bought high marks, saying, “I think that it is one of the most underrated boat designs out there. It is extremely versatile and fast, and has plenty of freeboard to keep you dry, and will let you play with the big boys.”
The Utility, a small general-purpose outboard, was designed in 1953 and is among Glen-L’s earliest designs. For over six decades, it has endured as a standard offering in the Glen-L catalog, and with good reason. It was specifically designed to be affordable and easy to build for the first-time, amateur builder. So it was then, and so it is now. A rank newbie with no woodworking experience whatsoever can build this boat. I know. I’ve done it.
The boat is a planing hull intended for small outboard motors up to 15 hp. Its standard length is 11′, although the builder has the option of lengthening or shortening the hull by up to 10%—up to 12′, or as short as 9′ 7-1/2″. These variations are achieved with proportional adjustments to the spacing between the frames.
Michael Maddox
The black hose and the wiring on the transom of the author’s Utility are connected to an automatic bilge pump. The battery is housed under the foredeck.
An enduring representation of the era in which it was designed, the Utility features the characteristic curves and graceful geometry of 1950s boats. The sheer creates a sweeping curve from the broad foredeck to the narrow transom. The transom has gently curved sides that flare, ever so slightly, as they rise from the water. Typical of the era, the transom has a cutout to accommodate the short-shaft motors that were the norm of the time. Fortunately for today’s builder, new short-shaft motors are still readily available in this horsepower range. The Utility has a 5′ beam and a substantial flare in the forward section to give the hull added buoyancy and stability. As designed, the seating features a full-width thwart forward and benches aft along the port and starboard sides, though some builders omit these in favor of a second, transverse thwart.
The plans for the Utility are unmodified reproductions of the originals. Full-sized patterns make lofting unnecessary, as the parts can simply be traced onto the wood. The boat is designed for plywood-on-frame construction, and, like most Glen-L designs, is constructed upside-down on a simple form. The frame pieces are fashioned from solid stock—mahogany and white oak are recommended—joined with 1/4″ marine-plywood gussets. There are only two frames between the transom and the stem, adding greatly to the design’s simplicity. The curved stem is made from two pieces of 3/4″ plywood laminated together.
The breasthook is typical of Glen-L designs: it’s a large piece of laminated plywood—two layers of 3/4″ ply—notched around the stemhead and fastened to the sheer clamps. The forward frame includes a crowned deckbeam to support the aft edge of the 1/4″plywood foredeck. The aft frame is open at the top and its side members have small cutouts that are designed to accommodate full-length seat risers, though some builders omit these and install short risers just under the thwarts.
The transom, set at a 12-degree rake, is 3/4″ marine-grade Douglas-fir plywood, with an additional outer layer of 1/4″ BS 1088 meranti plywood to match the deck if finished bright. Its perimeter is framed with of solid 1″ (nominal) mahogany. A rectangular reinforcement is attached to the inner surface of the transom, centered under the notch for the motor. I used mahogany for this “motor board,” though oak is also recommended in the materials list.
Chris Atwood
Chris Atwood clocked his 11′ Utility at 24.2 mph with two adults aboard and a 8-hp, two-stroke outboard running wide open. His boat stays on plane down to 13 mph.
The transom knee is somewhat unusual in its design. Rather than having a single knee bolted to the transom and keel, the Utility has twin plywood knees fastened to either side of the keel. A piece of blocking, the same width as the keel, is attached to the centerline of the motor board, and the knees are fastened to the sides of the blocking. Altogether, it provides a strong structure to support the outboard motor. The keel itself is made from 1″ stock with a layer of 1/4″ plywood laminated on its top.
The 1×2 floor battens are set at toed-in angles from the transom to Frame #2, rather than parallel to each other. The inner floor battens pass through the frame; the outer ones end just shy of it, getting beveled and twisted to lie flat on the plywood bottom when installed. Sheer clamps and chine logs are sprung into place, fitting into notches in the frames. White oak is the preferred material for the chines and sheers; I substituted southern yellow pine. It bends easily and is very strong and here in Georgia, the stuff grows like weeds, so it’s plentiful and dirt-cheap. The downside is that it’s soft.
Chris Atwood
With a hull weight of just 140 lbs, the Utilty is an easy load to trailer behind a compact car. This boat is built without the full-length risers noted in the plans.
After fairing the longitudinals and framing, 1/4″ plywood panels are attached to the sides and bottom to create the hull. The plans call for Douglas-fir exterior AB plywood, which was commonly used for boatbuilding when the plans were first created; I used BS1088 meranti plywood. Fiberglassing the entire hull or just the seams is optional, but recommended. Once ‘glassing is completed, builders can add spray rails and a 1/2″ oak false stem, though some omit them, as I did. Once hull construction is completed and the boat is flipped over, the interior can be finished. I deviated from the plans only slightly, opting for a second thwart aft, rather than the twin side benches.
Chris Atwood
The plans call for two side benches in the stern, but this Utility has a second thwart instead. It helps keeps the helmsman’s weight centered.
The plans do not include dimensions for an intermediate deckbeam between Frame #2 and the breasthook. This is left up to the builder to determine, taking measurements from the partially finished boat. Copying the crown of Frame #2’s deckbeam provides a very good starting point. The intermediate deck beam is attached to blocking that is secured on the inside face of each sheer clamp. Once this is in place, the 1×5 centerline carlin is installed from Frame #2, passing through a notch in the intermediate deckbeam, to the top of the breasthook. The deck framing is faired, and then the deck is installed as two panels joining along the centerline. The plans include optional accommodations for oarlocks.
Chris Atwood
The author’s Utility gets up on plane with an 8-hp outboard and two aboard. For heavier loads, a 9-hp motor would be a better fit.
I found the Utility to be surprisingly stable, given its small size. It does roll a little bit side-to-side so I prefer to fish sitting down. However, the wide flare at the front of the boat does a superb job of providing ample buoyancy at the front of the boat and I feel comfortable leaning over the side to, say, retrieve some item from the water. The wider V-shaped sections there resist being pushed downward into the water as the boat rolls or leans. While the boat gives me a lot of confidence in doing this at the forward thwart, I would not attempt a strong lean at the stern, as the sides there are lower and almost vertical, and don’t offer the same degree of reserve stability.
Being only slightly rounded through the middle and almost flat-bottomed at the back, the Utility is certainly not a rough-water boat, and it’s a roller-coaster ride in chop. It can, however, handle boat wakes and moderate chop with confidence. An 8-hp outboard provides plenty of power and agility with only one passenger aboard. The very first time I made a full-throttle run, I was pleasantly surprised when the bow quickly eased back down as the boat came on plane. With one passenger, an 8-hp motor propels the boat about as fast as a boat its size needs to go.
With two passengers, however, the boat is somewhat under-powered with and 8-hp outboard. A 9.9-hp motor would be better. I have ridden in a 12′ version with a 15-horse, and that is about perfect for the longer hull, especially with two aboard. A 15-hp on an 11′ or shorter version of the Utility might be more than the boat could safely handle.
Chris Atwood
The author powers his Utility with an 8-hp four-stroke outboard. It didn’t perform as well with two adults aboard as Atwood’s two-stroke 8-hp did.
For a first-time builder, the Glen-L Utility is plenty easy to build. Trust me, if I can build this boat, anybody can. It offers a tangible link to the graceful designs of the past, while fitting within a modest budget. Building a Utility in your garage brings to life the curving, elegant simplicity of 1950s-era design and all in all, it’s an eye-catching boat that you’ll be proud to say you built yourself.
Michael Maddox was born and raised in Georgia, where he still lives. He’s a single father of two who works in industrial advertising. As an adolescent, his interest in wooden boats was sparked by the Venice boat-chase scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. He had gone to see the movie with his dad, and until that scene, he had never seen a wooden motorboat. A decade later, his fascination with them was cemented during a trip to northern Italy. He was more enamored with these mahogany motoscafi (water taxis) than some of the destinations they ferried him to. He has wanted one ever since. A few years ago, he discovered the world of boatbuilding, and was hooked. He is currently building his second boat and records his progress on his blog, Barnacle Mike Boats.
Five weeks into our 1987 voyage from Puget Sound to Juneau, Cindy and I were well into the daily rhythm of life aboard ROWENA, the 21′ Gokstad faering I’d built for the trip. After traveling the Inside Passage through British Columbia we were leaner and stronger, our hands and our butts had toughened up, and we could row long hours, often covering over 30 miles in a day.
Photographs by the author and from his collection
Our first landing in Alaska was on Tongass Island, the site of a U.S. Army fort in the late 1800s and a native village after that. The only remains of the settlement we saw were fragments of brick scattered on the beach. A heavy rain had soaked our tent the previous night and we spread it out to dry.
Our first camp in Alaska was on Tongass Island, just 6 miles north of the US/Canada border and the site of an Army fort established in 1868, a year after Alaska had been purchased by the U.S. from Russia. The only remnants of the fort and the native settlement that later took its place were fragments of brick scattered among the white-quartz cobbles along the beach. With ROWENA anchored, we took a walk around the island. Cindy found a large yellowed tooth, perhaps from a bear and we saw in the dirt paw prints as big as my hands. I picked up a weathered beer can and filled it with a few pebbles to make a rattle to announce our presence to whatever company we might have on the island. Back at the beach I spread our tent out to dry on the driftwood at the top of the beach—it had rained hard during our last night in British Columbia—while Cindy cooked potatoes, carrots, cabbage and beans for dinner.
Roger Siebert
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The Tree Point Lighthouse dead ahead faces the open Pacific Ocean. Automated in 1969, it guides mariners across Dixon Entrance. The area can be quite rough, but we had an easy row around the point into Revillagigedo Channel.
We woke to the alarm at 5:00 a.m. and got underway during the morning calm to round Cape Fox, the most exposed promontory at Dixon Entrance. Long fingers of dense fog stretched seaward out from the pass to the south of Tongass Island and from Portland Inlet just beyond the border, but we had good visibility to the north and got around the Cape and the tall white lighthouse at Tree Point with only a northeast breeze and some chop to contend with. Farther north, Revillagigedo Channel was quite calm under clear skies and easy going.
Ketchikan was a nice, quiet town when we arrived.
We arrived at Ketchikan, rowed past the 180′ buoy tender PLANETREE at the Coast Guard station, and pulled in at the first marina we came to. Cindy stayed with the boat while I trotted into town to check in with customs. The agent queried me about my vessel and crew and asked, “Did you have any repairs made while in B.C.?” I told him I’d had a root canal during a stop in Nanaimo.
On my way back to the boat I ran into Tony and Betty, a couple we’d been seeing regularly in ports and anchorages since we first met in Butedale. Their cruising trawler SPIRIT was, of course, much faster than ROWENA, but they stayed longer in the places they visited. They told me they’d be happy to have us spend the night aboard SPIRIT and then went off to arrange for reporters from the local newspaper to interview us that afternoon back at ROWENA.
The following morning we woke aboard SPIRIT, ate breakfast with Tony and Betty, and then Cindy and I walked into town to mail some postcards. Three cruise ships had recently arrived and passengers were flooding into town. The streets were suddenly teeming with throngs of camera-toting tourists. We quickly retreated to ROWENA and cast off.
When we left Ketchikan it was quite crowded. Hundreds poured out of the three cruise ships and the streets were suddenly packed elbow to elbow with tourists.
We rowed north along Tongass Narrows past the row of cruise ships; a woman standing on a dock just to the north of them was waving a newspaper at us. She’d read about us in the morning paper and offered to give her copy to us. The tide was carrying us too fast to get over to her so we could only wave back and shout back our apologies for not stopping. A chop picked up in mid channel so we headed toward smoother water along shore. A man in a T-shirt painting a house rust red yelled, “North to Alaska, wahoo!” A few hundred yards farther along a man stepped out of a house holding up three cans of 7-Up and yelled “Can you use these?” For that we made a U-turn and pulled ashore.
After leaving Ketchikan, we sailed north along Clarence Strait, a 4-mile wide passage between the mainland and Prince of Wales Island. While I’d made the traditional side-hung rudder for the faering, it was easier to steer with an oar. The rudder tended to loosen the ropes that held it in place and the transverse tiller, which would be behind me, was awkward to hold.
The side-hung rudder meant for the Gokstad faering creates a bit of drag that would turn the boat to starboard if not for the blade’s asymmetrical cross section, which creates a bit of port-turning lift. The rudder was effective, but because we frequently switched between sailing and rowing, we rarely used it.
Tongass Narrows dropped us in Clarence Strait where we picked up a strong wind out of the southwest. We set the square sail and reached crossed the 6-mile-wide mouth of Behm Canal. The sail occasionally got backwinded and when it popped back with a loud whump, Cindy would look at me with eyes open wide. The wind died when we finished the crossing at Caamano Point, so we dropped the sail and rowed for a while along the mainland side of Clarence Strait. When the wind picked up, from the south this time, we set sail again. The following seas built quickly and we were soon surfing at speeds we hadn’t experienced before. We could ease the sheets to keep from being overpowered, but that did nothing to reduce the sail area aloft and if the bow veered, the sail, stretched wide along the yard, would pull at the masthead and roll a rail uncomfortably close to the water. We dropped the sail, rolled it up around its yard and tucked it out of the way.
On our way to Meyers Chuck we had a fresh following breeze, too much wind for the square sail, so we set the tarp as a spinnaker. The photo was taken by some friends we made along the way who were traveling north in a cruising trawler. Many of the motor cruisers tended to stay for long periods in anchorages and harbors, so we regularly caught up with them.
Cindy threaded the halyard through the webbing loops on one end of our nylon tarp and tied sheets on the opposite corners. As a makeshift spinnaker it provided all the power we needed, and with the sail area down low we had a much more comfortable ride. The southerly carried us about 19 miles to Meyers Chuck. Cindy was at the helm as we sailed into the cove there, skimming over shoals at the entry in less than 2′ of water.
We spent the night at Meyers Chuck and woke to a thick fog. With time on our hands, we rowed into town, if a store and a post office that serve a few dozen residents could be called that. We stocked up on cookies and gingerbread, and rowed along the shore where most of the houses were perched on pilings either above the water or on the steep rocky slopes. It was past noon when the fog lifted; we rowed 2 miles along Clarence Strait, turned east into Ernest Sound and followed the ragged south shore of Etolin Island to Canoe Pass. The 9-mile-long channel between Etolin and Brownson Island funneled down from nearly a mile wide at its mouth to less than 80 yards in its northern third.
We enjoyed being in well protected water with the shoreline close by to make the scenery interesting, but horse flies found us and made a nuisance of themselves. They were a big as pinto beans and had a painful bite. We couldn’t outrun them so we had to fight back. I’d wave them off my arms and neck, but used the tops of my thighs as bait. I’d let them settle and prepare to cut into my skin and then sneak a hand up from the side and smack them from behind. Between the two of us, Cindy and I had 16 kills. We flicked the bodies overboard.
We anchored at the north end of Canoe Pass and on our second day rowing along Etolin, the skies cleared early in the day and the sun beat down on us. There wasn’t a breath of wind to cool us and the rowing was miserably hot. We found a small cove guarded by an islet at its mouth and fed with a small stream at its back. We filled our black water bag with fresh water for rinsing off, dropped anchor in the middle of the cove, and slipped over the side for a swim.
On an oppressively hot day of rowing around the east coast of Etolin Island, we ducked into a little cove for a refreshing swim and an opportunity to inspect the faering’s bottom.
After around 800 miles of cruising, ROWENA was in very good shape. We had taken great care whenever we brought the faering ashore and the varnished hull was still undamaged.
The varnish was in good shape but I was surprised to see that barnacles had made their homes in the decorative grooves on the plank edges.
I dove under ROWENA and noticed that barnacles were growing on the varnish below the waterline. They were tiny and easy to scrape off with my thumbnail. Back aboard the boat we rinsed with warm fresh water, pumped the bilge out, and left the cove to continue north to an overnight stop in Whaletail Cove.
Two powerboats came into Whaletail Cove after us, checked some crab traps, and left as quickly as they came. We had the cove to ourselves for the night.
We put an early end to the day’s rowing and settled in for a quiet evening and night in the cove.
We got a fast, if brief, ride north from Whaletail with wind and tide in our favor. We sailed 8 miles before the wind died and we had to row the last 12 miles to Wrangell.
After a stop for pizza and an overnight stay in Wrangell, we headed for the islands at the mouth of the Stikine River. We had been warned to avoid the broad mudflats that surrounded the islands, but the mud turned out to be more entertaining than hazardous. We had arrived on a rising tide, so we wouldn’t get stranded, and the mud was firm enough to support our weight when we stepped out of the boat. The thin layer of creamy fine mud on top was slick as grease. Barefoot, I could dig my toes in and run, and when I got up some speed I could jump, land on both feet and slide for about 20 yards. It was like skim boarding but without the board.
The silt deposited by the Stikine River was quite fine and and slippery, but wasn’t so soft that we couldn’t get out of the boat to stretch our legs.
We didn’t stay long because we were eager to get to LeConte Bay where we expected to find a glacier and icebergs. The mouth of the bay was five miles away and while we didn’t see any ice when we arrived there, we could feel the river of cold air flowing out between the banks. A mile in, we found icebergs, and they grew more numerous as we went farther in; the flood tide had been pushed them all back toward the glacier.
The glacier gave the inlet its own climate, cold and windy, while the weather elsewhere was warm and calm. The front of the glacier was about a mile wide and booming now and then as the ice cracked. In the years following our visit, Le Conte glacier retreated a mile from where is it here.
The bay followed a serpentine path and we didn’t get a view of the glacier itself until we were five miles in. At that point we were surrounded by ‘bergs, none of them much bigger than the boat, and most of them nearly transparent, having been melting in the sun. Closer to the glacier they were much larger, white and streaked with a Windex-like blue. One of the larger ‘bergs broke apart and the sound of the ice fracturing and the water pouring off it as it rolled echoed across the bay. The flow of cold air was kicking up a chop and was strong enough that we set sail and let it push us back out to Frederick Sound. The sun had dropped behind the mountain range that surrounded us and the shadow that swept across the ‘bergs and the glacier robbed them of their color, turning them a dusty gray. The tide had turned and many of the icebergs were now drifting out in the Sound.
The cold air sliding down the slope of the glacier created a sailing breeze on our way out of LeConte Bay.
It was late in the day and we needed to find a place to spend the night. We dropped the anchor in a small cove just to the north of the entrance to LeConte Bay. As Cindy got the stove out and started dinner—miso soup with potatoes, carrots, and cabbage—an iceberg a bit larger than ROWENA drifted by just 15′ away and came to a stop. It had grounded itself and now the tide that had carried it here was swirling around it. I pulled the anchor up and rowed us closer to shore. The ‘berg broke in half and the two pieces followed us. We had to leave.
Cindy kept cooking as I began the 7-mile row across Frederick Sound. We ate along the way and then rowed together in the dark under a moonless overcast sky for the last couple of miles. At Mitkof Island we entered a half-mile wide bay, more open than any place else we’d anchored, but it would have to do. I sounded with the anchor until I found about 20′ of water and then set it.
We had ideal conditions on Frederick Sound for our morning row to Petersburg. We could see Devils Thumb, a distinctive spire beyond the Alaska Coast Range and just across the border in Canada. The aptly named Thumb is visible here in the distance, just to the right of center.
When we stopped in Petersburg the harbormaster didn’t charge us for moorage because we had no motor. It rained all night but we were quite dry under the canopy.
After a 15-mile row to the north end of Mitkof, we took a day off in Petersburg before rowing north to Farragut Bay. We’d rowed 25 miles to get there and fought against a strong flood tide for much of the day, working the back eddies when we could, and making several sprints around points where rowing flat-out gained only a few inches per stroke. We arrived at Farragut tired. By the time we found an anchorage on the east side of Read Island, a two-mile long wooded island that lies just inside the mouth of the Bay, it was raining, and then we were tired and wet.
Crossing Farragut Bay in the fog kept us on alert, listening for fishing boats and looking for land.
We were enveloped in fog the next morning. We decided to row the 3-1/2 miles across the mouth the bay and set our course to err on the side of making land inside the bay rather than straying out into Frederick Sound. We had rowed for a long time in the murk and I was just beginning to get worried when we saw the dark shadow of land ahead. We turned south and followed the shore for 12 miles until we reached Cape Fanshaw. There fog lifted and we rowed another 4 miles and stopped for the night in a cove behind Whitney Island.
This little cove would have been the most beautiful and comfortable campsite of the entire trip, but we arrived in a flat calm that offered a quick, safe transit of Stephens Passage.
Our plan for the following day was to get in position to make the 8- to 10-mile crossing of Stephens Passage to Admiralty Island. We rowed north about 15 miles and found a cove that would put us in good position for an early start the next day. The white gravel beach allowed us to pull ROWENA ashore; the spruce trees surrounding it were draped with Spanish moss, there was a flat mossy place for the tent, there were no bugs—it was the best camp site we had found in Alaska. But Stephens Passage was glassy and absolutely windless. We looked north and south and there wasn’t so much as a cat’s paw anywhere.
Unusually calm conditions gave us an opportunity to make a quick afternoon crossing to Admiralty Island.
It was 5:20 p.m.; we’d be across in a couple of hours with daylight to spare. We shoved off and made a beeline for the south end of the Glass Peninsula, settling into a fast, steady pace. Even moving at a good clip, ROWENA hardly left a wake behind us. We made the crossing in 1 hour and 40 minutes. We rowed another 3 miles north along the west side of the peninsula and anchored in Blackjack Cove. The following day we rowed and sailed 24 miles up Seymour Canal to Pack Creek where we hoped to meet Stan Price, the man we’d heard about who lived with grizzly bears.
A fair wind gave us a chance to relax as we headed north up the 40-mile long Seymour Canal. The tiller extension and an oar serve as whisker poles to get the most out of the sail. My waterproof camera, strapped to a raft of inflatable fenders, snapped this picture with its timer.
Cindy took advantage of sailing up Seymour and napped in the shade of the main; I busied myself with raising more sail when the wind weakened.
We landed at Pack Creek that afternoon and found Stan at home in a shore-side cabin he’d built on a raft of logs to float it during especially high tides. He invited us in and Cindy took a chair by the door and I sat at his table. The walls were wide planks of rough-sawn lumber, the gaps stuffed with tissue paper and wrappers to keep breezes out.
Stan built his home on a log raft that floated at high tide in the backwaters adjacent to Pack Creek. Stan died in 1989 and little remains of his home. The area is now the Stan Price State Wildlife Sanctuary.
Stan was 87 years old but still had a full head of hair, bright eyes, and a quick smile. We asked about the danger of the brown bears that we had seen feeding on salmon in the creek. He said they had plenty of food and posed no threat to people. He added that might might attract some unwanted attention from the bears if we’d been cooking over a campfire and walking around, “smelling like a Big Mac.”
Stan Price was 87 years old when we visited him and he had been living at Pack Creek for 42 years. He told us about working in his younger years in the silver mines in Virginia City, Nevada, where the camp cook served antelope meat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
We had been chatting with Stan for about an hour and a half when an enormous brown head poked through the door right at Cindy’s shoulder, then turned to look at me, sweeping its snout right over her lap. Cindy froze, eyes wide; Stan grinned and said, “That’s Lucy.”
Lucy, the bear who had poked her head in while we were visiting Stan, took a dip in the rising waters by his cabin. She was probably looking for salmon.
We spent the night at nearby Windfall Island and in the morning rowed under a cloudy sky past Swan Island. We rounded its northern end and the skies cleared as we entered the upper reaches of Seymour Canal. The air was still and warm and the water serenely still. To the east, cottony cumulous clouds rose above the mainland; the steep, thickly wooded hills to the north and west of us were edged with grey bands of bare rock at the water’s edge.
A break in the weather made for very pleasant rowing as we headed north from Pack Creek. Here in the middle of Seymour Canal I used the mast as a floating monopod for the camera.
We didn’t have many photos of ourselves rowing, and the setting deserved to be preserved on film. I had a camera equipped with radio-controlled shutter, so I just needed a place to put my camera in the middle of the canal. I tied the anchor chain to the top of the mast and slipped both carefully over the side. The mast had just enough buoyancy to support the weight of the chain and float vertically with its heel about 4′ above the water. I taped my non-waterproof SLR camera and the attached remote receiver to the mast and Cindy and I rowed around it, triggering the shutter with the transmitter.
The “selfie stick” for the previous photo was ROWENA’s mast with the anchor chain tied to the masthead to get it to float vertically and the rowing rudder lashed at the waterline to keep the camera steadily pointed in one direction. The antenna for the radio-controlled shutter is visible just to the right of the mast.
We had heard about a railway portage across the narrow neck of land that connects the slender, 43-mile long Glass Peninsula to Admiralty Island but didn’t know if it we’d find it in useable condition. It had been built in the 1950s by members of the Juneau Territorial Sportsmen’s association using rails and trams from old gold-mining operations. The latest we’d heard was that it had been rebuilt a few years ago.
As we paddled across the shallows to the mouth of the stream leading to the rail portage, salmon whipped up the still water.
The flood tide pushed us along toward the dead end at the farthest northern reach of the canal. To the west, a 25′-tall waterfall fanned out like a veil over a large rock in the middle of the falls. We were two hours ahead of the high tide and there was a broad expanse of muddy tidal flats separating us from the tall grass that surrounded a creek that we believed led to the portage. I took the anchor rode and two other lines, tied them together and to ROWENA’s painter, and we got out of the boat to wade closer to shore. Our rubber boots stirring up black mud; the air was foul with the odor of decay. I made the line fast to a large rock at the top of the flats and we headed to the creek, crossing a trail of 6″-wide bear-paw prints on our way.
We tried hauling the boat up one creek looking for the portage. I kept an eye out for salmon and gave them time to get out of the way. This turned out to be the wrong creek and we had to back ROWENA back into deeper water.
The first creek we tried was so full of salmon that we had to pick our steps slowly and carefully to avoid stepping on them. Some had made depressions in the gravel, exposing circles of light gray sand. Some of the fish had patches of grey and white on their backs. The dead fish that were completely white. We later found the right creek. It had a cabin about 150 yards from the tide flats and the cart was parked a few yards from the end of the rails, saving us a walk to the other end of the portage to retrieve it.
The rain came down in earnest as we started the first of several trips to get all of our gear to the railhead.
The creek we had to ascend was only a couple of feet wide and half as deep for much of its length, so we wouldn’t be able to float ROWENA up to the rails even at the peak of the high tide. We had to haul all of our gear to the railhead before dragging the lightened faering up the creek.
The direct path from the boat to the railhead was through shoulder-high grass, and we feared we might startle a bear hidden there.
When we got back to the boat to carry the first load, the tide was already up to the rock I’d tied the extended painter to. We coasted ROWENA to the channel leading up to the creek and pulled her up to the edge of the grass and set the anchor upstream. The clouds had been closing in above us, and it had started to drizzle as we were about to make the first carry to the railhead. We put on our rain gear and took the quickest route to the cabin, straight through the shoulder-high grass. We were both nervous about being in bear country near a stream teeming with salmon, walking through grass tall enough to conceal a bear.
We kept ROWENA upright so that only the keel came in contact with the rocks. Its ironbark shoe could take the wear and tear.
When we picked up the second load, it began to rain hard and stayed that way for the rest of the hauls. With ROWENA empty, we dragged her to the creek and often skidded her keel across the mast partner and a 2×6 we’d brought from the cabin to keep her off the rocks. Salmon thrashed upstream as we approached. We cleared rocks that were tall enough to reach past ROWENA’s keel and scratch her garboard. Those rocks were easy to identify, even underwater, because they had silvery tips where aluminum skiffs had left their marks.
The farther up the creek we got the shallower and narrower it became. Hauling the boat over the grass was often less work.
After the long haul up the shallow creek, we had to lift the faering onto the rail cart.
When we reached the end of the rails, I brought the cart down and we eased ROWENA up on it and leveled her with two large fenders that we found by the cabin. It was about 5:00 p.m. and we didn’t have much daylight, so we quickly piled gear in and around the boat.
With the boat and gear loaded on the cart we could begin the 3/4-mile push to Oliver Inlet.
The cart scooted along nicely on the level stretches of track but the combined weight of the cart, boat, and gear made the uphill stretches hard work.
On level stretches, the cart rolled easily.
The rails took a turn to the right and took us into the woods, then ascended a hill. I pushed the cart uphill until it came to a stop and then put shoulder into it and braced my feet against one of the ties. Cindy chocked the wheels with a piece of 2×6, I took break, and then the two of us shoved the cart to the top of the rise. The effort left us panting and sweating. The rails leveled out across a broad area of muskeg, a patchwork of mossy hummocks and irregular pools of tea-brown water, dotted with crooked head-high trees. The tracks then tilted down toward a small valley and the cart picked up speed. I trotted along behind it, crossed a small trestle bridge and held the cart when it came to a stop on the uphill slope on the other side. When Cindy caught up we pushed it up to the next level stretch.
The longest stretch of rail took us across a soggy muskeg field. The boardwalk between the rails was wet, mossy, and very slippery.
We came to another valley and brought the cart to a stop to check on the tracks ahead. Everything seemed in good shape so we continued, letting the cart coast downhill, trying to keep its speed in check. I was having trouble keeping my footing on the wet planks that were set across the ties as a boardwalk, so I planted shifted to walking on the ties, pushing hard against them to slow the cart. It was no use. The cart continued to pick up speed and I had to choose between risking a broken leg and letting ROWENA fend for herself.
I released my grip and the cart raced ahead of me down the slope toward a second bridge and careened up the other side. As I ran across the bridge I could see the cart slow down and in an instant I realized I had to get to it before it started to roll back toward me or I’d have to jump off the bridge to avoid getting mowed down. I sprinted up the hill and caught the cart just as it came to a stop. I put my shoulder against it, planted my feet on one tie, held on to another with my hands, and waited for Cindy. Together we got the cart up to the top of the rise.
The last stretch of the portage descended a steep slope to Oliver Inlet. While Cindy tends our anchor rode as a belay to back up the cable winch, she waves mosquitoes away from her face.
We reached the north end of the portage where the rails take a turn and a steep drop to Oliver Inlet. A rusty cable winch anchored to a stack of ties was there to ease the cart down to the water. I had my doubts about the winch, so I tied the 110′ anchor rode to the cart and looped it around the end of a railroad a tie so Cindy could use it as a backup belay. As the cart rolled down the slope, I braked with the winch, slowing the descent until Cindy was at the tail end of the rode. I squeezed the brake tight and stopped paying out cable. Cindy walked down to the cart and set the rode up again with a turn around another tie close to the cart. It took us three pitches of the rode to get ROWENA to the end of the tracks. The tide was too low to float the boat off so we had to empty it before sliding it off the cart.
The end of the line brought us down to the tide flats of Oliver Inlet.
The air was thick with mosquitos and we batted them away as we spread a tarp out on the marsh grass and unloaded our gear on it. Cindy found our bug repellent; we slathered our faces and hands with it. We finally slipped ROWENA into the water. Cindy packed our gear while I winched the cart back up to the top of the hill.
It had stopped raining and it was hot and very muggy, but the bugs were so thick that we kept wrapped up in our rain gear.
When we finally took to the oars, a cloud of mosquitos followed us out from shore. There wasn’t a breath of wind, so we sprinted to create a bit of our own then ducked down to let the air sweep over us. We sprinted and ducked a half dozen times until we had left the swarm behind.
In the last of the daylight we sprinted away from the portage to escape the mosquitoes.
It had stopped raining, but the still air was thick with humidity, and we were drenched with sweat. We dropped the anchor in a small cove on the east side of the inlet, raised the canopy and made the cockpit ready for a late dinner of beef stew, couscous, and hummus. By the time we turned in it was 10:30, a very late night for us.
In the morning there were mosquitos all over the inside of the canopy; I smeared them with my thumb into the weave of the fabric while I waited for Cindy to wake up. We put the cockpit in order, took the canopy down, and did another sprint-and-duck session to leave the new crop of bugs behind.
We reached the mouth of Oliver inlet and could see a fog-aproned Douglas Island a little over 3 miles away across Stephens Passage. The sky was bright white with a high overcast; both air and water were still, perfect for the crossing. We took the shortest route across and by the time we reached Douglas, the fog had lifted. We rowed east to loop around the southern tip of the island into Gastineau Channel. Two fishing boats were on their way out of the channel and took a course that would take them across our bow. I was annoyed that we’d have to get tossed about by their steep wake, but then both turned to go astern of us. As they passed,a blond man at the helm of the second boat called out, “Chris, is that you?”
“Paul?” I replied. It was a friend of mine from Seattle. He brought his boat SUPREME, alongside. Apparently one of his deck hands had spotted us and reported to Paul that he’d seen “two Indians in a war canoe.” The two boats had altered course to take a closer look.
Paul Enquist, a friend from Seattle and an oarsman coached by my father, found us crossing Stephens Passage on our way to Juneau.
Paul had his cook bring up raspberry Danish and apples from the galley. We said our goodbyes and SUPREME motored off while we took turns eating our unexpected breakfast. Even with just one of us at the oars we made good progress along the steep brush-covered flanks of Douglas Island, streaked white with waterfalls.
Eight miles of Gastineau Channel were all that separated us from Juneau. SOBRE LAS OLAS, a 1929 motoryacht we crossed paths with weeks earlier, came up astern and when she was abeam a half mile to the east of us gave two blasts of her horn; the echoes bounced off the walls of the channel.
Our summer aboard ROWENA put us in good shape and in good spirits.
We reached Juneau in 54 days, having covered over 1000 miles, mostly by oar, a fair bit under sail, and a tiny stretch by railroad. Cindy and I returned to Seattle from Juneau aboard an Alaska State ferry with ROWENA riding on the car deck tucked under a semi’s trailer.
ROWENA took a well-deserved break in the lobby of a bank serving the largely Scandinavian community of Ballard, a neighborhood in northwest Seattle.
We sold the boat to my father to help finance a move to Washington, D.C., where Cindy had won an internship at the Library of Congress; I found work at the Smithsonian Institution. We later moved back to Seattle when I was offered the editorship of Sea Kayaker magazine. ROWENA was purchased by a family friend in Douglas, Alaska, right across Gastineau Channel from Juneau, and was shipped north again. Cindy and I raised a son and a daughter and went our separate ways in 2000. ROWENA’s owner moved to the Seattle area and the boat took yet another ride along the Inside Passage. The Gokstad faering proved itself to be a good sea boat and remains the most beautiful small boat I’ve ever seen.
Christopher Cunningham is the editor of Small Boats Monthly.
If you have an interesting story to tell about your adventures with a small wooden boat, please email us a brief outline and a few photos.
Four blades on a single arbor increase accuracy and dramatically shorten working time.
When I was getting ready to build a cedar-strip kayak, just the thought of ripping about 900′ of 1/4″ x 3/4″ cedar strips was daunting. Pushing 18′ planks through the tablesaw 50 times was not how I wanted to spend my time—I’m rather impatient and like getting jobs done quickly. I started playing with the idea of gang-sawing, putting more than one blade on my tablesaw to make multiple cuts with each pass. Using four blades to make just 13 passes for the kayak strips I needed sounded a little more reasonable.
A full-sized saw with an arbor long enough to take a stack of blades and spacers is required to do this. I have a 10″ tablesaw that can accommodate a stack of four blades with spacers. I didn’t need 10″ blades to cut the 3/4″ stock I needed for strips, so I bought four identical 7-1/4″ narrow-kerf carbide-toothed blades. The smaller blades are cheaper and, being lighter, don’t strain the motor when starting up. I don’t recommend using more than four blades; it would make for an awful lot of material for your tablesaw to remove.
The three plywood spacers between the blades needed to be thicker than the strips I would be cutting to make up for the difference between the kerf cut by a blade and the thickness of its body. A 5/16″ plywood spacer gave a strip just shy of 1/4″.
Randall Davie
The author’s collection of gang-ripping pieces surround a plywood mold for the stem of a canoe. The strips for the stem were cut using 1/8″ mahogany plywood spacers between the blades. The ten strips were thin enough to bend cold around the form, and added up to the 3/4″ thickness.
I can cut strips of any thickness, four at a time, by varying the thicknesses of spacers. Any high-quality panel stock—MDF, plywood, acrylic sheet—can be used for spacers. A hole saw and a drill press are nice for making the spacers but not absolutely necessary.
SBM
If you want to set up for a lot of different strip thicknesses, this hole saw modified to take a 5/8″ spade bit will make perfect spacers quickly. The shaft of a spade bit may be too large to replace the usual 1/4″ pilot bit in a hole saw; drilling the hole saw to fit is the quickest way to make this one-step tool. Shorten the shaft to fit and grind a small flat on on it for the set screw to bear against. Drill from both sides of the spacer stock to eliminate tear-out.
You’ll need to replace your saw’s table insert to accommodate the multiple blades. I make zero-clearance inserts of 1/2″ birch plywood and #6 x 3/8″ round-head screws, one in the tail to prevent kick-up and four on the bottom for height adjustment. I mark my sets of spacers and their matching inserts according to spacer thickness and the thickness of the strips they produce.
Randall Davie
Each set of blades spaced for a particular thickness of strips requires its own push block and tablesaw insert.
A purpose-built push block clears the strips all the way through the blades with almost no chance of kick-back. A thin strip can shoot back like an arrow, so even with the push block it’s always best to stand to the side.
Randall Davie
The author uses a scrap of 1/4″ MDF (medium density fiberboard) for set-up. A 3″x3″ piece gives him four tries at setting the fence to make the strip equal in thickness to the others cut in the same pass. For a laminating project, accuracy is not critical, but if you want to mill strips for a strip-built hull, set-up is crucial. A variance of 1/100″ doesn’t sound like much, but it works out to a lot of extra sanding.
With some careful setup of the fence I’m ready to rip. I found the gang-sawing process produced more consistent results than using a single blade. With any setup on the tablesaw, accuracy and safety are the secrets to success. I hope this saves you time, materials, and fingers. Work safe.
Randy Davie is a certified carpenter and tile setter living near Powell River, British Columbia, who often goes to work by boat. He has built several boats and intends to build many more, enjoys sea kayaking and canoeing, and happily notes he has “an awesome shop and an awesome wife.”
You can share your tricks of the trade with other Small Boats Monthly readers by sending us an email.
The 40-plus pounds of water that the 5-gallon Smart Bottle holds provides an effective weight for trimming a small boat.
For years I’ve carried a succession of inexpensive, 5-gallon flexible plastic water containers aboard my boats. They nestle nicely wherever I stow them, and I can head out knowing I have drinking water aboard whenever I take off for a row. The ones I’ve been using were showing their age, and on my to-do list for this season was to buy a new one. I happened to be looking in a back issue of WoodenBoat and ran across an advertisement for just the product I wanted—a clear flexible bag called a Smart Bottle. It looked interesting, and at $11.95 for the 5-gallon size, it was worth a try.
The Smart Bottle is different from my previous water containers. Using some origami-like folding, it arrived absolutely flat. There is an ordinary cap as well as a pour spout on a lanyard, and a pair of rugged metal grommets top and bottom. The handles at each end are not separate pieces, but are cut into the bag’s double-layered plastic film. According to the manufacturer “the structure of both the 10-mil outer film and the 4-mil liner is a seven-layer coextrusion with two layers of nylon bonded with resin tie layers to two layers of polyethylene. The nylon acts as an oxygen barrier and contributes stiffness. The polyethylene contributes bulk and absorbs shock within the material.”
Ben Fuller
Empty, the Smart Bottles are quite flat and easy to stow.
The Smart Bottle unfolded itself as I filled it for the first time and became a somewhat-rounded cube. I filled it pretty full, and it felt close to the 42 lbs that 5 gallons weighs. I threaded a bit of line with figure-eights on it through the top grommets and put the bottle in the back of my truck, where it froze solid in the Arctic air. After thawing it, I took it down to the dory to see how the bag would stow in the stern where I often carry water as a trimming weight. It tucked in securely, and with a frame in front of it and the sides riding up its sides, it wouldn’t be able to move in a sea.
Ben Fuller
With grommets at either end, a length of cord can be used to hang the bottle upside down or right side up.
The second time I filled the Smart Bottle, I switched the regular cap for the pour spout, shifted the lanyard to the other pair of grommets, and hung the bag from a tree. You can also set the bag on its side to pour with the spout. The spout’s lever tucks neatly into the carrying handle cutout, and the valve is tight and doesn’t leak. If you were to lose the regular cap, the spout is watertight and well protected. While my well water has a pretty strong taste and might have partially masked it, the Smart Bottle’s BPA-free plastic film didn’t impart a taste to the water I drank from it. You can also order the Smart Bottle with a valve cap with a tube to use in place of the spout.
SBM
Two types of spout are available: a tube for use with water filtration devices and a a spout for general use.
I emptied the bag, and it retained enough of its inflated shape to air out. I then hung it, upside down and cap off, in the basement to dry, something I do with all of my various water bladders and hydration packs.
SBM
The sizes offered are, clockwise from lower left, 5 gallon, 2-1/2 gallon, 1 gallon, and 1/2 gallon.
The Smart Bottle folks also make 1/2-gallon, 1-gallon, and 2 1/2-gallon bags. They even sell a 1/2-gallon beer growler, a good way to bring along some homebrew. All of the bottles are BPA-free and made in the USA.
I look forward to the coming season with the Smart Bottle, stored full in the dory swinging on the haulout, ready to row; or tucked into my sail-and-oar boat, where it will serve as both my water supply and as a bit of trimming ballast.
Ben Fuller, curator of the Penobscot Marine Museum in Searsport, Maine, has been messing about in small boats for a very long time. He is owned by a dozen or more boats ranging from an International Canoe to a faering.
Destructive Testing
The Smart Bottle web site features some testing to measure the bottles’ durability, so I duplicated the trials to prove the claims. On the advice of one of the design engineers working with Smart Bottles, I filled the bottles with water and let them hydrate for 24 hours. “The nylon in the film,” the designer wrote, “needs an opportunity to hydrate to realize its full toughness.”
SBM
The half-gallon didn’t survive being run over by a Chevy Blazer.
A photograph on the Smart Bottle web site shows a bottle under the tire of a car. The photo is labeled “puncture resistant” but I think the better term may be “rupture resistant.” The half-gallon bottle I tested, 2/3 full of water, didn’t survive being run over by my Chevy Blazer’s rear tire. The wall opposite the grommet ruptured. The photo on the web site shows a wall of the bottle stretching and taking on a balloon-like shape, just as the bottle I tested did before bursting. The car pictured is a Honda Element, though I couldn’t tell which model. I looked up the 2-wheel drive EX Element and found it has a weight around 3400 lbs with 42% of that at the rear, so 714 lbs on one tire. Looking up the same figures for my Blazer indicated around 920 lbs on a rear tire, so the bottle must have limit somewhere in between.
The web site states: “The 1-gal survived a 15′ drop, the 2 1/2-gal a 10′ drop, and the 5-gal a 7′ drop.” The bottles did well in my front-porch drop tests. The one-gallon survived a 6′ drop, a 10′ drop, and two 15′ drops before developing a 3/4″ tear on one of the vertical seams on the third 15′ drop. The 2- and 5-gallon sizes each survived two of their respective 10′ and 7′ drops. They both showed some whitening about 1 to 2 mm wide along the vertical edges where the film stretched, but there were no tears or leaks. I also didn’t see any leakage at any of the lids caused by the drops. I concluded that the bottles should hold up quite well in normal use .
I did a taste test using city tap water that has no detectable flavor. After letting the water sit in a bottle for two days at room temperature I didn’t detect any affect on taste.
Ed.
The Smart Bottles designed for outdoor use are available from Smart Bottle: $4.95 for the 1/2 gallon size, $5.95 for the 1 gallon, $10.95 for the 2 1/2 gallon, and $11.95 for the 5 gallon.
Is there a product that might be useful for boatbuilding, cruising or shore-side camping that you’d like us to review? Please email your suggestions.
Getting trailers to fit my boats, and my trailers to fit the spaces I have available, has been a challenge. I shifted 10′ of rockery back about 3′ to make room for my son’s Escargot and trailer. For my Caledonia yawl I added a garden-window-like extension to the back of my garage to make room for the stern and cut a hole in the door at the front for the trailer tongue.
photographs by the author
The hinge made it possible to use a drift-boat trailer for longer boats. The instructions advise against mounting the jack and winch on the tongue extension, but in this case there wasn’t room enough on the original tongue.
When it came to parking my garvey cruiser at home, I had a spot in front of the house for the boat, but with three other trailers at home I didn’t have any options left for reconfiguring buildings and landscape to make a space long enough for a trailer with a tongue long enough for the garvey—it would stuck out into a public sidewalk. Only a hinged trailer-tongue would solved the problem.
A trailer-tongue hinge can do two things: it can make a trailer tongue shorter to fit a limited space, and it can make a tongue longer if you’re converting a utility trailer for use as a boat trailer. I had previously extended the tongue of one of those inexpensive utility trailers by replacing the entire tongue with a longer and sturdier rectangular steel tubing. (That was the tongue that stuck out of the mouse-hole at the bottom of my garage door.) For the 17′ garvey I’d bought a drift-boat trailer. It has a nice flat deck that works for my boat, but its tongue, meant for a 14′ drift boat, was too short. I couldn’t just replace the tongue with something longer, as it would stick out over the sidewalk. A Fulton Fold-Away Hinge kit made it possible to have the length I need for towing, and keep the trailer short when parked.
Being able to fold the tongue out of the sidewalk made it possible to use a parking space too short for a full-length tongue.
The hinge is made of zinc-plated, die-cast steel, and has a 19/32″ removable hinge pin and fixed pivot bolt. The kits fit 2″ x 3″, 3″ x 3″, 3″ x 4″, and 3″ x 5″ trailer tongues. I bought the 2″ x 3″ kit from West Marine and 3′ of 2″ x 3″ steel from a local metal supplier to match the existing tongue. The Fulton website has instructions that include tables of the tongue-extension length limits for various gross trailer weights and maximum tongue loads.
The 3′ extension I added to the tongue was well within the 3,500-lb gross trailer-weight limit and 350-lb tongue load listed for the 2″ x 3″ hinge. I removed the coupler and drilled holes according to the instructions for the bolts that secure the hinge; after the bolts were installed, I reinstalled the coupler. The safety chains must remain connected to the main part of the tongue, not on the swinging section, to do any good if the hinge fails. I installed longer chains to reach past the added length.
The hinge pin has its hairpin cotter secured by a short length of cable.
The wiring here is cable-tied beneath the tongue, but the hinge halves are open to the tongue sections so wiring can be routed internally.
Contrary to the manufacturer’s recommendations, I had to mount the winch and the jack on the tongue extension, and when I park the trailer I have to support the original tongue with some wooden cribbing before I can raise the jack and swing the tongue extension out of the sidewalk. The hinge has worked well for the six years I’ve been using it. Though I haven’t seen any signs of wear or loosening, there are some rust stains, but those are most likely from salt water pouring out through the main part of the ungalvanized tongue after an outing.
Christopher Cunningham is the editor of Small Boats Monthly.
"My name is Thatcher Unfried. I have grown up in a family that thinks building boats is normal.”
Thatcher is a 14-year-old eighth grader who lives in Redding, Connecticut, with his parents, brother, and sister. Even before the kids were born, his parents built a canoe in the living room, so they were all indoctrinated in the precepts of boatbuilding at an early age. As an infant, Thatcher slept in a small boat built to be his cradle, and at one year old he was in the garage shop with his father working on an Arctic Hawk plywood kayak.
All photographs by Ken Unfried
Thatcher, catching some shuteye here, was introduced to wooden boats at an early age, beginning with this cradle boat built by his father, Ken.
A young Thatcher gave his dad a hand during the construction of a stitch-and-glue kayak kit. The Unfried family, as all normal families do, use the garage for boats and leave their cars outside.
Thatcher is the youngest of three children and wasn’t alone in his inclination to build a boat. His sister had a strip-built Night Heron kayak to her credit, and his brother had built a stitch-and-glue plywood Shearwater 17. Thatcher liked the lines of the Night Heron but preferred the tracking offered by the Shearwater’s hard-chined hull, so he set his sights on a stitch-and-glue version of the Night Heron.
Thatcher was fascinated by the process of ‘glassing the kayak: “It is crazy how the fiberglass disappears into the epoxy. You can’t even see it.”
He was in the fifth grade, just 11 years old, when he started saving money to buy a Night Heron kit from Chesapeake Light Craft. His father agreed to help pay for the kit if Thatcher would kick in $100. His allowance was $2 per week, so he went without indulgences for an entire year to save his share of the cost.
The kit for the Nick Schade–designed kayak arrived as Thatcher was finishing the sixth grade. He had built some boat models, so he had a good sense for how the Night Heron would go together, but the scale and the complexity of the project were greater than he anticipated. That didn’t deter him from adding some extra personal touches. He used some wood dyes to color some of the plywood panels before assembling them. The yellow, red, and blue accents would set his boat apart from the other boats in the family, all finished bright.
Thatcher learned a few lessons along the way. When he lapped the fiberglass covering the deck over the top of the ’glass on the hull, the loose weave of the cut edge made a bit of a mess. “What I would have done differently!” he complained. “The fiberglass fibers at the edge of the fabric got long and stringy and gloppy, and ended up making a big hard mess on the sides of the boat. It took forever to sand it down.”
It’s the thought that counts. Casting about for ways to get a nut threaded onto a deck-fitting bolt in the bow, Thatcher took a shot at holding the nut under the foredeck with his toes.
The hardest part of the job was securing the webbing deck fitting at the tip of the bow. “I had to hold it on with a machine screw that had to have a nut on the inside way at the very front where no one could reach,” he said. “I lay down and slid forward and tried to grab it with my toes, but it didn’t work. My arms and shoulders wouldn’t fit. In the end we tried a lot of things but finally got it done using a stick with a hole drilled in it, then the nut hammered into the hole, and another stick wedging it all in place, and the screw going through just right. By that time it was dark and the family was all on the front yard with flashlights trying to get the nut to catch on the threads.”
Thatcher named his kayak YELLOW SNAPPER “because she is yellow, fast, and it reminds me of the yellow snapper fish. The fish are fast and beautiful, just like my boat. The bungees make a sharp snapping noise too.”
He worked through the summer and into the school year but took a break over the winter. The unheated garage was too cold for both him and epoxy. He spent about 100 hours building the kayak over the course of a year. He finished it by the end of seventh grade. The project, aside from being its own reward, helped Thatcher earn his Boy Scouts Merit Badge for woodworking, as it met the requirement of creating a “carpentry project.” He is currently ranked as a Star Scout and aspires to be an Eagle Scout.
Thatcher has a powerful stroke with good torso rotation, not to mention the game face of a kid with no shortage of determination.
Thatcher christened his kayak YELLOW SNAPPER after he had seen that species of fish during a boating vacation and was impressed by their beauty and speed. Yellow is also his favorite color and was his choice for the deck lines.
Thatcher, nearest camera, is joined by his brother Ben in a Shearwater 17 and his mother Sarah in an Arctic Hawk.
When Thatcher took his kayak out for the first time on a pond in Huntington State Park, not far from his home, he was joined by a friend who had just bought a plastic kayak. “It’s a Tupperware tuna can,” writes Thatcher, but keeping true to Scout Law by being loyal, friendly, courteous, and kind, he adds, “We don’t make an issue of it because he is a good guy.”
Have you recently launched a boat? Please email us. We’d like to hear about it and share your story with other Small Boats Monthly readers.
When I was planning for my rowing trip down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers in the early 1980s, I read as many books as I could find on traveling those waterways in small boats. Four Months in a Sneak Box by Nathaniel Bishop was my main guide, as it was his trip that I was going to duplicate. I also read Mississippi Solo by Eddy Harris and Old Glory by Jonathan Raban, both good reads, but Shantyboat: A River Way of Life by Harlan Hubbard was my favorite and most inspiring.
In 1944 Harlan and his wife Anna built a shantyboat near Brent, a cluster of houses along a road paralleling the Ohio River just upstream from Cincinnati, Ohio. They stayed there on the banks of the river for two years, living on what they could grow in their garden or catch in the river, and left Brent on the high waters of November 1946. They stopped for the summer in Payne Hollow, about 120 miles downstream, and stayed there for the summer of 1947 before moving on. They reached New Orleans in 1950 and stayed another year in the Louisiana bayous before returning by car to Payne Hollow in 1952. They settled there, building a house and a life for themselves.
Harlan’s account of the river journey did much more than help prepare me with the details of what I might encounter on my rowing trip; it described an independent and idyllic life:
“The season for syrup making did not last long. We continued our sugar camp for nine days, boiling down washboilerfuls of sap. It was a joy to be working in the winter woods, above the river, building huge fires. I would roll some logs and big chunks of hardwood on the last trip before bed time. Then I walked back to the boat through the dark, starry woods by a path well known. Our dinner was often shad broiled over the coals and potatoes and corn dodgers baked in the ashes. The new syrup was delicious with the hot bread.”
The book played a significant part in my decision to live in a number of cabins in the woods, usually without power, plumbing, or phone.
When I was on my way rowing down the Ohio in the winter of 1985, I stopped in Brent. From my journal:
It turned cold last night, about 25 degrees at my camp in an open shanty at Shady Grove. I slept with my clothes on and managed to sleep well enough. Getting up this morning, though, was painful. My whole body ached with cold, my hands stung. The river had dropped about three feet overnight so I had to drag my boat down the bank to the water of Nine Mile Creek.
I was on the water by 7:30 rowing hard to warm up. As the sun was coming up behind a bank of high clouds to the east there was clear sky overhead and a thin vapor on the water. Vortices in the breeze spun columns of mist ten feet in the air and carried them across the river, undulating like a tall wobbling stack of dishes. Six miles into the morning the sun breached the clouds. I ferried across to the Kentucky side to Pleasant Run. Somewhere on this bank, now all covered with trees, Harlan Hubbard built his shantyboat.
Though it was still pretty early, I put ashore at a ramp leading through a tunnel under the railroad tracks. There were two old houses there in what must be the town of Brent. No one was up at the first house I knocked at. There was a light on at the second. I rang the bell and knocked. An old lady came to the door. Age was what I was looking for, since the Hubbards were there 20 or 30 years ago. The woman remembered him but didn’t know him. She said that there had been an article about him and his paintings in the Cincinnati newspaper last week. She said the Hubbards are down at some place, some hollow, and that they raise a lot of their food down there.
I got about all I could from the woman, a Willis, one of the families that Hubbard mentioned in his book. As I was walking back to the boat I remembered that it was Payne Hollow where the Hubbards spent a season on their drift downriver. I looked through my charts and found two hollows where they might be. I was 105 miles from them. I got quite excited. The Hubbards were still alive, still living on the river, and two days away. I am full of excitement that I might get to meet the Hubbards.
Tearing up the bottom of my sneakbox approaching Payne Hollow turned out to be a stroke of good fortune.
When I reached Payne Hollow I rowed ashore and ran into a sharp rock hiding just below the surface of the muddy river water. I pulled the sneakbox alongside the Hubbard’s aluminum johnboat and took a look at the damage. The rock had carved a deep gouge in the bottom of my boat and I’d have to dry it out and make a repair before moving on. I walked up into the hollow where the Hubbard’s home sat high on the left bank. I found Harlan and Anna there and introduced myself. I said that I had just come to meet them and then be on my way, but I’d damaged my boat and asked if I could stay while I made a repair. I would have been quite happy setting up camp by the river, but they insisted I spend the night in their home.
The Hubbards’s home bathed in the evening light as the sun sets over the Ohio River. Harlan’s studio is to the right.
Harlan was 85, quite lean and square shouldered. Anna was 83 and wore her long silver hair pinned up. Both of them were soft-spoken and had a very serene air about them; they were somewhat formal, especially Anna, though warm and welcoming.
I returned to the river, emptied my gear into the johnboat, and propped the sneakbox up on edge to let the sun dry the gash in the cedar hull. Harlan had another visitor that day, a man who worked at a museum or an art gallery, and I tagged along as Harlan walked us to his studio a few yards from the house to show the man his latest work. I had always admired the woodcuts and the pen-and-ink drawings that illustrated Shantyboat; Harlan had been doing paintings, mostly local landscapes in oils on Masonite boards. His studio doubled as his workshop and contained a fascinating collection of beautiful paintings and hand tools gleaming with a patina of long service.
I returned to my boat later that afternoon, cut away the torn fiberglass and wood fibers, and applied a ’glass-and-epoxy patch. There was just enough daylight left to cure the epoxy as the sun settled over the woods on the opposite side of the river.
Some of my memories have faded, but I think I sat down with the Hubbards to a dinner of homemade soup that evening. The table shared the living room with Anna’s grand piano. (Harlan’s instrument was a violin.) Their bed was stored out of the way to one side of the stone fireplace Harlan had made. When it was time to turn in I was given a bed on the uphill side of the house. On the walls around it, many of the household items Harlan had made were hung from pegs and nails. There was a popcorn popper made of screen and stout wire with a wooden handle. The room I was in was up a step but not separated by walls from the living room where Anna and Harlan would sleep. I could see Harlan’s side of the bed and the gleam of his smooth white hair was the last thing I saw before he extinguished the kerosene lantern. The last words I heard were from Anna: “You get some good rest, dear.”
In the morning I repacked the boat, and returned to the house to say goodbye. Harlan gave me a copy of his book Payne Hollow: Life on the Fringe of Society, with the inscription:
I didn’t take any photographs of the Hubbards, just the photo of the house you see here. I couldn’t imagine asking them to pose for me or to take photos of them surreptitiously. A camera takes away the being in a place, the being with someone, and I didn’t want to give up a moment with them in Payne Hollow. My memories have, of course, faded over the past three decades, and it is likely even what remains with me will fade. The one thing that I won’t forget is the tenderness in their voices as they said goodnight to each other. It gave me a glimpse of what love becomes after a long, full life lived together.
I carried on down river to the Gulf of Mexico. Anna died the following spring; Harlan two years later.
The Fairhaven Flyer is a sturdily constructed, easily rowed light dory. It is also simple to build since Sam Devlin, a master of stitch-and-glue boat design and building, refined the dory into a sleek, elegant shape created by three scarfed marine-plywood panels and a laminated plywood transom. If necessity is the mother of invention, then I am a bit involved in the birth of the 20′ 4″ Flyer.
I had built a 17′ 4″ Devlin-designed Oarling, equipped it with a sliding seat and outrigged oarlocks, and rowed it through the Canadian Gulf Islands 15 years ago. The following year, Sam and I discussed what design changes would be needed for a similar, but larger boat for me to row solo from Ketchikan, Alaska, to Bellingham, Washington. The boat would have to handle potentially large ocean swells, have reserve buoyancy that would lift the stern above breakers when driving through surf toward a beach landing, plus carry me and up to 700 lbs of food, clothing, and camping, cooking, and anchoring equipment. Simply stretching the Oarling would not produce the performance I needed.
photographs by the author
The author’s Fairhaven Flyer, BELLA, was built for solo expeditions, with watertight compartments in the ends and a single rowing rig.
Considerable tweaking created an effectively new design with increased displacement. I would have a narrow window—just six months while working a fulltime job—to build the new boat, amass provisions, dehydrate food, buy equipment, and get myself and the as-yet unnamed boat design to Ketchikan. When I let Sam know I had committed to doing the trip, he carved out time to create the new hull and sent a simple plan with offsets and stations to me shortly after I called. When I received it a week later, I called to thank him and during that conversation it occurred to us that the new design needed a name. I lived in a Bellingham neighborhood called Fairhaven and suggested “Fairhaven Flyer.”
In the decade that followed, Sam added details to the Flyer so that it could be rowed single or double, with either sliding-seat with outrigged oarlocks or with fixed thwarts and gunwale-mounted oarlocks. Light dories in general can feel quite tippy when not settled into the water with a load of cruising gear but the Fairhaven Flyer has high secondary stability, meaning it tips to a point and then stiffens up significantly and resists further rolling; anyone unfamiliar with this type of dory will soon get used to this characteristic. As the load in the dory increases, so does its stability, so it can be quite steady as an expedition boat even though it may be tippy when used for recreation and exercise.
When Walt and Susan Guterbock moved to Anacortes, a small city on the shores of Washington’s Puget Sound, five years ago, they enjoyed cruising the San Juan Islands that surround them and wondered what kind of boat would be best for two rowers and camping equipment. They joined the Old Anacortes Rowing Society (OARS), and immersed themselves in the culture of classic wooden gigs and wherries; Susan spent upwards of five hours rowing per week rowing the society’s three boats, and developed a stroke steady enough to allow her to row in the stroke seat and set the rowing pace for the crew. After Walt and Susan investigated several styles of pulling boats like Whitehalls and wherries for their personal use, they settled on the Fairhaven Flyer. They bought the plans and commissioned Andy Stewart of Emerald Marine to build the boat. Andy made a few minor modifications and additions to their new Flyer that are not in Devlin’s plans, but the Guterbocks’ boat, SCARLETT, is all Fairhaven Flyer.
SCARLETT’s fixed thwarts are supported by bulkheads that create watertight storage/flotation compartments. A harness secured to the hull allows launching by a crane or single davit.
Anyone with enough room, competent carpentry skills, and knowledge of fiberglass epoxy applications can build the Flyer. Depending on modifications and wood used, the boat will weigh between 120 and 200 lbs. I built my boat, BELLA, with okoume plywood, mahogany, and 12-oz. fiberglass cloth and tape. SCARLETT was built with Hydrotek plywood, sapele, and biaxial cloth.
Hull speed is a concern if you intend to use the Flyer for long rowing trips and need to make quick work of crossings and exposed passages. Prior to my departure for Ketchikan in 2004 I managed one sea trial with the empty Flyer. The fastest I could sustain with it was 4.7 mph. On my trip south from Ketchikan I encountered a lot of different sea states and rowing conditions, from extreme chop to very large ocean swell, flat reaches, 8-knot currents, debris, breakers, and upwellings. My average speed was 3.9 knots (4.5 mph) for the two-month trip. There were times when I was doing 7 knots with tide and wind, and times I crawled along barely above 2 knots.
All rowing craft have a their own measure of glide after each stroke, and you can judge the effectiveness of your boat length-to-glide ratio by the distance between oar “puddles.” The Flyer, outfitted with a sliding seat, outrigged oarlocks, 9.5′ oars, and carrying 500 lbs, had a consistent 25′ between strokes at 22 strokes per minute and a speed of 3.5 knots. That long glide allowed me to row at a low stroke rate, kept my heart rate low, and conserved energy for long hauls. SCARLETT, with fixed rowing stations and shorter oars than I use also has an exceptionally long glide; even when Walt and Susan stop rowing, the hull will carry them twice its length before noticeably slowing.
SCARLETT is a Fairhaven Flyer built for tandem rowing with fixed thwarts and gunwale-mounted oarlocks.
The flat bottom of the Flyer makes it easy to beach the boat. It takes to the bottom sitting upright and doesn’t roll to one side or the other like a wherry, peapod, or Whitehall. During stops ashore while cruising, I can comfortably stretch out in the cockpit to snooze or eat with an oar braced above me as a ridgepole and a tarp draped over for sun protection. Even for afternoon outings this solid footing ashore a great benefit—wineglasses don’t fall over.
In a following sea, when large steep swells came up astern, I treasured the tendency of the Flyer’s bow to slide forward and lead the stern as we raced down into the trough. A boat with a keel and a more pronounced forefoot, like a wherry, would likely catch the water and veer, and would have a greater tendency to broach. It is the dory’s ability to slide, rather than capsize on the face of a breaking wave, that Chay Blyth and John Ridgway owed their lives to when they rowed across the Atlantic in an open 20′ dory in 1966. It is also the attribute that made me suspect that my Fairhaven Flyer was smarter than me.
The stretchers in SCARLETT can be easily removed to clear the cockpit for cleaning or relaxing in the bottom of the boat. Deck plates in the bulkheads supporting the thwarts offer access to the watertight compartments.
The Fairhaven Flyer can be light enough to cartop but it is a rather long boat and does not lend itself to easy transport on a roof rack. A boat trailer is a preferable way to move it.
If, like Walt and Susan, you can keep it in a marina slip during the summer months, spontaneous picnic rows require little more than packing the sandwiches and thermos, grabbing your rowing kit, getting down to the boat, and rowing away. But if you are drawn to more ambitious outings, as I am, you can head out to the San Juan or Gulf Islands for the week, or row double from Sausalito to Angel Island, or venture from Quoddy Head Light to Grand Manan Island. The Fairhaven Flyer will get you safely and quickly there, happy to take as much gear, food, clothing, and whatever else you might think you need.
Dale McKinnon began rowing in 2002 at the age of 57, and in 2004 rowed solo from Ketchikan, Alaska, to her home town, Bellingham, Washington. In 2005 she rowed from Ketchikan to Juneau. Her previous articles for Small Boats Monthly include rowing the Columbia River and the Columbia River estuary, how to row rough water, and reviews of NewGrips and CrewStop rowing gloves, Exped sleeping pads, and the Devlin Duckling 17.
I had been hearing about New Zealand boat designer John Welford’s idea for the Saturday Night Special for a few years: a fast beach cruiser so simple to build that you could arrive a few days early for a multi-day small-boat cruise or raid with a few crucial pre-prepared components, build the boat, participate in the event, and go back home. It wasn’t entirely clear what you were supposed to do with the boat afterwards—you could disassemble it, sell it, scrap it, or donate it to the event hosts—but the notion of being able to sail your own boat in a far-flung event, eliminating the need to ship one there, was intriguing. Raid Finland? Sail Caledonia? Conquer the Everglades Challenge? I could imagine plenty of possibilities.
Tom Pamperin
A centerboard complicates the building of the Saturday Night Special and takes up some space in the cockpit, but is essential for sailing shallow waters.
As it turns out, the idea of an inexpensive, easily built, fast cruising boat went through some changes between the initial concept and its final form, and what started out as an ultra-quick-build, one-race boat evolved into a more conventional build. Part of the Saturday Night Special’s evolution was a result of the shape needed to get the performance Welsford was looking for. The 14′ 8″ Saturday Night Special was designed specifically for the Texas 200, which typically involves downwind sailing in 20–25 knots, with exposure to big fetches and steep chop. To deal with those conditions, he drew a full bow with lots of flare to provide ample volume above the waterline, protecting the boat from burying the bow or broaching when overtaking waves while surfing. That shape proved difficult to achieve in the stitch-and-glue prototype. “The proof-of-concept boat that we built was a bit of a stinker to get the shape right without stringers,” Welsford reported. “There is a lot of shape in that chine panel forward.”
Although the hull was completed in three days, getting the bow right is probably beyond the skill set of less-experienced builders. So, although experienced builders could still choose to build a Saturday Night Special in stitch-and-glue, Welsford warns, “There is a degree of skill required to get it fair.” The plans now call for conventional plywood planking over bulkheads and stringers.
John Goodman
The bow is designed with downwind sailing in mind and has fullness to keep it from burying while surfing.
Like many of Welsford’s other designs, the Saturday Night Special is built upright on a narrow flat bottom panel; a simple building jig establishes its rocker. Three bulkheads and two permanent frames, along with the transom and stem, define the shape of the boat, and two full-length stringers on each side support the hull panels, greatly simplifying the construction process. The cockpit layout is as simple as could be, with no seats of any kind. “If you want to be comfortable in this boat,” Welsford writes, “go and buy a pool beanbag seat cushion and tie it in with a lanyard so it can’t blow away.”
At the request of Texas 200 founder Chuck Leinweber, Welsford modified the design to include a pivoting centerboard rather than the simpler daggerboard he had specified for the prototype. The change made good sense for a this event, since “deep water” on much of the Texas coast means getting wet up to your knees when you step overboard. The modification required changes to the structure to support the long centerboard case and slot, and another step away from the initial concept of an ultra-simple, ultra-fast build. Texas 200 organizers planned to create a rental fleet of Saturday Night Specials for visiting sailors to use, but it became clear that anticipated savings in labor and materials weren’t enough to warrant building the boats.
But although the Saturday Night Special didn’t become a build-a-boat-and-race-it design, the design still offers a lot of bang for the buck. “It’s still a very simple build,” Welsford says of the design’s final form. “No frills, no trim, simple unstayed rig, light weight.” It’s a somewhat Spartan aesthetic with no built-in thwarts, but it works well for its intended purpose: going fast downwind while still being able to handle windward work in heavy chop. Full-sized patterns for the transom, stem, and bulkheads are included in the plans, which speeds construction significantly. Welsford estimates a 50–60-hour build for “a tidy workboat finish.” One Saturday Night Special builder I talked to reported six months of “fairly diligent work” to complete his boat.
Bobby Chilek
The transom is well suited to taking a small outboard for auxiliary power.
[DC]When I got word that several Saturday Night Specials would make their public debut in the 2016 Texas 200—a 6-day, 200-mile small-boat cruising event along the Texas coast—I was eager to see what the new design could do. The race began on June 13 and on day two, Saturday Night Special builder Bobby Chilek was sailing through the Land Cut, a narrow dredged channel that’s sheltered enough to offer flat water despite the typical 20–25-knot winds. He discovered that Welsford was right about the new design’s ability to plane freely in winds above 15 knots, even loaded with crew and gear. “I really didn’t expect the boat to plane in Texas 200 trim, what with two people, a bunch of gear, gallons of water and a full ice chest,” Chilek wrote later, “but plane she did. At times the front half of the boat must have been completely out of the water because as we were flying along, spray was shooting out both sides of the boat from about halfway back. I have to say that I have never gone this fast in a monohull sailboat in my life. We were having a blast.”
According to Welsford, a lightly loaded Saturday Night Special needs 12 knots of wind to start planing. Bobby Chilek reports that his boat will also plane under power with a 5-hp outboard at 10 knots. When I finally got a chance to go for a sail with Chilek, there wasn’t enough of a breeze to get his Saturday Night Special really moving, but it performed well anyway, tacking reliably and jibing predictably with just a touch of weather helm.
Although the boat appears simple, there are a couple of unusual construction details. The skeg does not run all the way to the transom; it’s cut short to keep lateral resistance closer to the center of the boat, which seems to help the Saturday Night Special turn quickly and tack nimbly. The unusual kick-up rudder is designed to function well even with the blade completely raised—the rudder cheeks extend down to the level of the skeg, and are equipped with horizontal end plates which not only provide effective steering in extremely shallow water, but also help reduce fore-and-aft pitching.
Mary McCowin
The 103 sq. ft. lug sail offers power in light wind and is easily reefed to keep from being overpowered when the breeze picks up.
The simple balance-lug rig provides advantages to both the cruiser (easily to reef, docile) and the daysailer (quick to set up and de-rig). The 103-sq-ft sail provides plenty of sail area for light wind and is easy to reef. Both builders I talked to recommended adding a boom vang to keep the boom from lifting and reducing the effective sail area while sailing off the wind.
The mast is designed to be built with bird’s-mouth staves, making it hollow and light. Although Welsford specifies using old-growth Douglas-fir for the staves, I saw two Saturday Night Special masts made of other woods, one of cedar and the other of pine. Both were far too bendy, even though each had a fiberglass sleeves added in an attempt to stiffen them; in 20+ knots of wind the bend was still extreme to my eye.
In small boats, comfort matters, especially during a long-distance event like the Texas 200. The Saturday Night Special’s cockpit is huge for a boat of its length, and the absence of seats and built-in furniture means lots of room for the crew. Although I chuckled when I first read Welsford’s comment about using beanbag cushions for seating, the idea made perfect sense to me once I was aboard. Lacking beanbags, though, the skipper still has several different seating options. On a broad reach or a run, they can sit comfortably either on the aft deck, or on the cockpit sole with their back against the rear bulkhead. For windward work, the side deck is probably the best choice. Hiking straps would be helpful for those who want to push the boat in higher winds.
Bobby Chilek
The Saturday Night Special was designed with racing in mind, but there is room for two to sleep aboard for cruising.
With two aboard, the crew is a little more constrained. The side deck makes a good seat (as does the aft deck on a run), but the long centerboard case divides the forward half of the cockpit, necessitating a step—an awkward one if you’re over 6’ tall, as I am—over it while ducking the boom at each tack. Chilek and his daughter Kristen, who crewed with him on the Texas 200, aren’t so tall and didn’t find it too much of a problem. After all, the Texas 200 is primarily a downwind event with little need for frequent tacking.
For cruising, there’s plenty of room to sleep two in the cockpit, with one on each side of the centerboard case; builder Phil McGowin chose to sling a hammock alongside the centerboard case instead of sleeping on the sole, and reported that it worked well. The uncluttered interior of the boat is fairly adaptable for sleeping arrangements, and the large sealed compartments under the decks fore and aft provide plenty of room for stowing gear. Beaching the boat and camping ashore is another option.
The Saturday Night Special strikes me as primarily a good “all-rounder,” equally suited for cruising or daysailing. Given its similarities to AWOL, an earlier cruiser/racer design from Welsford, that isn’t surprising. But considering the performance offered for the time invested, maybe the most interesting possibility for the Saturday Night Special would be as a one-design racer in a community more willing to invest in building a fleet than in buying one.
In the end, though, I couldn’t make up my mind about where this design best fits. That’s not necessarily a problem, of course— lots of good designs can serve several different purposes—but I decided to check with the designer himself to see what he intended. “Is the Saturday Night Special a cruiser?” I asked Welsford. “A racer? A daysailer?” His answer was an enthusiastic “Yes!”
Tom Pamperin is a frequent contributor to Small Boats Monthly and WoodenBoat.
When my parents returned home to Edmonds, Washington, from a trip to England in 1983 they brought me two green booklets about the Gokstad faering, the smallest of three ninth-century boats unearthed along with the Gokstad ship in 1880 near Norway’s Oslo Fjord. The 21′ faering was the most beautiful boat I had ever seen, and I wanted to build a replica of it. I was 30 and I’d been building boats for five years, sometimes for hire, sometimes on a whim. I waited for an opportunity to build the faering, and getting married provided it. Cindy and I were married in the summer of 1986 and we put off having a honeymoon while she finished grad school. I was self-employed, building and restoring boats along with working on a llama farm on Lopez Island in the San Juan Islands of Washington State. She would finish school the following spring, so I hatched a plan: I’d build the faering that winter and in the summer of 1987, we’d take a honeymoon cruise, rowing the Inside Passage from Washington to Alaska. I went to work on the boat in a temporary shed in my parents’ back yard not far from Puget Sound.
photgraphs are either by the author or from his collection
Carving the stems was by far the most difficult task I’d faced as a boatbuilder. It took me a week just to figure out how to start the job, and another three weeks to finish it.
I was so eager to see what the boat was going to look like right side up that I hung by my knees from a ladder to get a sneak peek.
When I finally got the faering out of the shed, my father (left) and I admired the Viking form from every angle.
I didn’t finish the project as quickly as I had planned, and the day the last coat of varnish dried was the day we launched the boat and started our row to Alaska. About 40 people attended the launch at a beach near the Mukliteo ferry dock. There was a launch ramp at the beach, but instead of backing the boat into the water on the trailer, ten of our friends lifted the faering to their shoulders, carried it across the cobbles, and set it gently in the water.
It was fitting to have the faering, built to a design over 1,100 years old, carried by hand to the water for the first time.
We christened the boat ROWENA, after the wife of Ivanhoe in Sir Walter Scott’s novel. Cindy and I took the first few strokes and I saw the boat was taking on water. I traced the leak to a pitch pocket in one of the garboards and did a quick patch with 5-minute epoxy and added duct tape inside and out. That seemed to do the trick and kept the boat dry while many of our friends took turns rowing the faering.
Soon after we took the first few stroke in the newly christened ROWENA, we discovered a leak in a garboard.
When we started putting drybags aboard to get ready to depart, it was clear that we had too much cargo and there was barely enough room left for us to squeeze in. As Cindy and I got underway, a bagpiper started playing; a newspaper photographer’s camera, clicking away with a motor drive, was buzzing like a cicada; and above all the racket and the applause of our friends, I could hear water sloshing beneath me. Soon it was rising up through the floorboards. We would have to get ashore and fast. We had gone only a hundred yards, and I couldn’t imagine turning back. A ferry was on its way to the dock, and it would soon pass between us and the crowd of waving well-wishers on the beach. Cindy and I maintained our course—north to Alaska—until the ferry blocked us from view and then we made a quick turn west toward the beach at the north side of the dock. As far as our friends knew, we were well on our way, over the horizon and swallowed up by distance. All but one. Archie knew that we should have been visible for miles. He told my parents something was up and the three of them drove around to the beach on the north side of the dock and found us there, bailing.
We hauled the boat out, privately, back at the ramp and took it to Archie’s place just up the road. Cindy and I, exhausted by the long hours we’d spent getting ready for the launch, took a four-hour nap. When we got up, we sorted through all of our gear and repacked the essentials.
The real start to the journey began in Anacortes with just my mother and father to see us off. We had culled a lot of excess gear, so ROWENA wasn’t so chock full of dry bags.
The following morning my Mom and Dad drove us to Anacortes, where we launched again without fanfare under a haze-softened sky. We rowed west across Rosario Strait, potentially a dangerous 3 1/2-mile crossing to the San Juan Islands, but very little tide was running and the water was merely scuffed by the breeze. We made good time and Cindy, who had never rowed much before, was quickly getting the hang of it. The oars felt heavy in my hands and awkward in the water. I had made them according to the drawings in the books about the Gokstad faering—9′ long with lance-like blades—but ROWENA, with a beam of just 4-1/2′ and heavily laden, sat low in the water, and the oars were way too long. It was hard to clear the handles over our thighs, and the gearing was too high for the load we were carrying. I worked out the standard oar-length formula in my head and decided I’d shorten the oars by 18″ at the first opportunity.
After crossing Rosario Strait we took a break at a small cove on Decatur Island, halfway through Thatcher Pass.
Safely across Rosario, we rowed through Thatcher Pass and pulled ashore at Spencer Spit on Lopez Island. The faering has a keel a few inches deep running the full length of the hull and a moderate V section amidships, so it didn’t take well to being dragged out of the water. We had to tuck fenders under the bilges to keep the boat upright and protect the varnished hull.
When we landed on Lopez Island for our first overnight stay, I was still finishing many of the projects that I’d started before we embarked. With ROWENA was supported with fenders, I put the finishing touches on the canopy.
We left ROWENA to settle on the beach as the tide receded, and set up our tent on high ground. I spent the following day shortening the oars, cutting 18″ off the inboard ends with the folding saw we carried, carving new grips with a crooked knife, and relocating the leathers.
The original rudder was meant for sailing and created too much drag to use for holding course while rowing in a crosswind. We spent another day at a Lopez Island marina, and I carved a slender rudder out of a piece of yellow cedar I found. I rigged a steering system with lines that allowed me to control the rudder with a small tiller on my foot brace.
The shortened oars worked much better as we rowed through the heart of the San Juans. At the end of the day we pulled into at Neil Bay, a narrow half-mile long inlet at the north end of San Juan Island. It was our first time spending the night aboard and Cindy and I hadn’t yet acquired the reflexes to move in harmony to keep the skinny faering upright, so we were regularly loosing our balance and rocking the boat. We pulled the floorboards up and set them across the risers. (The original faering didn’t have risers; I installed them when I realized that the floorboards would be roughly the same length as the thwarts and could be used to make a sleeping platform.) I set the three fiberglass tent poles in the holes in the sheer while Cindy unrolled the extension of the fabric foredeck that would enclose our covered-wagon-inspired sleeping quarters.
The canopy was a simple affair and a bit saggy, but it made a great refuge. We could get away from rain, cold, and bugs. We often set the stove just outside the flaps that closed off the aft end, and had our meals “indoors.”
We had our accommodations ready by dusk. The indigo sky pressed the last of the daylight behind the wooden shoreline to the west and the bay grew still and speckled with starlight.
Finishing the square sail would wait until we got to Nanaimo. A nylon tarp that I’d sewn 16 years earlier for backpacking served as a stand-in for the square sail. The square sail’s yard was pressed into service as a mast and I used the push-pull tiller as the yard.
In the morning we got underway early, rowed north past Spieden Island and shot the 300-yard wide gap between Stuart and Johns islands, fighting the ebb tide. The 4-mile crossing of Haro Strait to the Canadian Gulf Islands is subject to strong tides and lots of ship traffic, but we got across quickly and without any trouble other than sunburned knees (we hadn’t yet found our sunscreen). We rowed into Bedwell Harbor to clear customs. Cindy stayed aboard as I walked up to the office overlooking the dock. When I told the agent we were checking in after crossing from the San Juans, he looked out the window, and the only boat he saw was our faering. “Where’s your boat?” he asked. “That’s it,” I replied, pointing at ROWENA. “No, where’s the big boat you made the crossing in?” “That’s it. We’re on our way to Alaska.” This extra bit of information only added to his consternation, but he cleared us and we went on our way.
We needed a place to stay in Nanaimo while I got a toothache taken care of. The couple who owned the property we camped on were much more welcoming than their sign would suggest. The patchwork tent was one I salvaged from the manufacturer’s dumpster. It had been slashed to discourage employees from wandering home with slightly defective products, but a with a little sewing I’d made it functional again.
My sunburned knees weren’t the only things bothering me. I had started the day with a toothache, and it wasn’t getting any better. I toughed it out as we made our way north to Nanaimo. We found a place to come ashore, a beach in front of a private home, and got permission from the owners, Fred and Ethel, to stay as long as we wanted. We made camp next to a No Trespassing sign that was larger than our tent. The pain woke me in the middle of the night and I lay awake waiting for daylight. That morning Fred drove us to town and dropped us off at his dentist’s office. Two hours and one root canal later, I was as good as new.
We spent the rest of the day back at camp catching up on our to-do list. I had sewn the square sail and made the mast before we had launched ROWENA, but I hadn’t rigged them yet. On the beach I made a mast partner out of a yellow cedar 2×4 Fred gave us, whittled cleats, and cut and whipped lines for sheets and a halyard.
The following morning, while Cindy started packing the boat, I ran up to the house to say goodbye to Fred and Ethel. She was in a pink bathrobe already on her way to see us off. Fred was his pajamas, chasing a deer out of his yard. Their neighbors also arrived at the beach to see us off.
We had a bumpy ride in the chop kicked up by a northwest wind and angled out from Vancouver island on a 3-mile crossing to the Ballenas Islands. We came ashore on a rocky beach on the north island and pushed ROWENA back out using a Tsimshian anchoring system to keep her afloat while we explored ashore. The island was thick with arbutus trees with rust-red bark peeling back to reveal smooth new pea-soup green bark underneath. The lichen covering the rocks was so thick and dry that it crunched when we stepped on it, leaving inch-deep footprints. From the top of a knoll we had a good view across the Strait of Georgia. The water was dark blue, scuffed by the wind, but there were no whitecaps. We’d have an easy time on the 5-mile crossing to Lasqueti Island and the following 3-mile crossing to Texada Island.
The wind faded during the crossing, so we skipped Lasqueti and headed for Texada. We rounded the island’s rocky southern tip and rowed another mile and found a powerboat at anchor at the mouth of Anderson Bay. Its skipper called out to us, “You’re just in time for oysters for dinner,” and pointed into the bay.
We would have been happy enough with our dinner of oysters, but the pearls we found in them made for an unforgettable meal.
There were indeed oysters on the tide flats. Cindy picked a meal’s worth while I anchored ROWENA and we soon had the harvest roasting on the stone ring around a campfire. The oysters opened as they warmed, and we ate them straight from the shells, pausing occasionally to spit pearls the size of BBs into our palms.
The skies were clear the following morning, and we packed without having breakfast to take advantage of the fair weather. We rowed out of the bay, rounded the point, and headed northwest along the 30-mile-long east coast of Texada. The wind was from the southeast, funneling between the island and the mainland, perfect for sailing, so I stopped rowing and tied the new mast partner in place across the middle frame. With the mast raised and lashed to the partner, I hoisted the square sail and made the halyard fast to the stern as a backstay. I’d made the Viking-style side-hung rudder shown in the Gokstad booklet drawings, but this time I steered with an oar over the stern. The boat picked up a little speed, but the sail bellied forward and narrowed the span of the foot. Cindy set up the push rod for the tiller as a whisker pole for the starboard clew; the sail spread wide and we took off.
I set a course down the middle of Malaspina Strait. Running downwind, the apparent wind was quite gentle and warm and lulled Cindy to sleep in her nest of drybags in the bow. We sailed 21 miles before the wind shifted around to the northwest; we dropped the sail and rowed the last few miles to spend the night at a marina at Powell River.
Roger Siebert
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In the days that followed we continued north with overnight stops in the Copeland Islands and the Rendezvous Islands. Six miles north of the Rendezvous group sits Yuculta Rapid, and another 6 miles beyond that Dent Rapid—dangerous passages that we’d have to time just right to avoid getting caught in a chaotic rush of the tides.
With her mast raised, ROWENA had a undeniable Viking look. I never tired of the boat’s elegant form, and was continually impressed at how well it performed.
We left the middle island of the Rendezvous group and rowed in the rain and chop three quarters of a mile west to the steep, thickly forested eastern flank of Read Island. We turned north, crossed White Rock Passage to Maurelle Island and took advantage of the back eddies to work against the south-flowing flood. Every half mile or so there was a bald eagle looking down on us from a perch high overhead. We crossed Hole-in-the-Wall, the 1/5–mile gap between Maurelle and Sonora islands, and pulled into a cove over a mile short of Yuculta Rapids. We were an hour ahead of schedule for the slack tide.
When our time came, we headed north, passed through a momentarily tranquil Yuculta at slack, and rounded the corner at the Sonora Lodge, a discordant cluster of well-appointed buildings surrounded by treacherous waters and inhospitable shores. Many of the submerged rocks we passed over close to shore were covered with mussels no larger than our fingertips and so densely packed that they looked like black velvet. The ebb had begun flowing north just as we reached Devils Hole at the entrance to Dent Rapid. The water gently swirled and boiled around us, but there wasn’t any of the whitewater violence that would develop in the next few hours. Dent Rapid wasn’t going to give us any trouble, so Cindy fired up the stove and made miso soup while ROWENA spun lazily in the nascent whirlpools.
The notorious Dent Rapid would be a much more dangerous place in a few hours, but as we drifted through on the ebb we took a break for hot soup.
After getting safely across Dent Rapid we treated ourselves to a cabin and hot showers at a lodge by Cordero Channel.
We rowed west along Cordero Channel, spent the night at a floating lodge, and spent all of the following day rowing in the rain until we reached Helmcken Island in Johnstone Strait. There was a slender notch in the east end of the island where we could keep ROWENA centered over deep water with 140′ of line spanning the cove.
Our camp on Helmcken island was a bit damp, but there was a quiet cove for ROWENA and and soft mossy perch for our tent.
The trees on the island were second or third growth, spindly compared to the arm-span-thick red-cedar stumps that were scattered in the woods and still bearing the notches loggers chopped for the springboards they used to make their cut above the broad flare of the trunk at ground level. We set the tarp over a small mossy spot to make a place out of the rain for the tent. We had plenty of dead wood around camp to make a fire hot enough to dry our sodden clothes, melt a plastic cup, and scorch one of Cindy’s wool socks. The fire was still smoldering in the morning, and we cooked pancakes over twigs poked into the embers.
Our campfire on Helmcken gave us a chance to warm up and dry out rain-dampened clothes. We didn’t bother chopping up the mostly red cedar driftwood; we just fed the ends into the fire as they were consumed.
We fought against wind and tide in Johnstone Strait and after 5 miles decided it wasn’t worth the effort. We turned east around the tip of Hardwicke Island and retreated up Sunderland Channel too the first refuge we could find, a narrow inlet around a creek.
Johnstone Strait was too rough so we looped around to the north side of Hardwicke Island. The only safe haven was this inlet that was itself quite choppy. The stick stuck upright in the sand marks the level of the water when we arrived. We waited for the high tide the next day to get back under way.
Johnstone Strait was just as bad the next day and we covered only 8 miles and stopped at Port Neville. The following day, after struggling another 10 miles along the Strait, we decided to take an alternate route that looped north around the east end of Cracroft Island. The turn into Havannah Channel put the wind behind us, so we raised the mast and used our nylon tarp as a spinnaker. We sailed about 5 miles, rounded the east tip of Cracroft, and had to fight once more, rowing into chop and a headwind. By the end of the day my armpits were chafed raw.
One of the beams that once supported the roof of a longhouse still had the beautifully carved wolf’s head on one end.
We spent that night at Minstrel Island and the next day stopped at the ruins of Mahmalillikullah on Village Island. (The descendants of the First Nations people who inhabited the village live elsewhere, but the land still belongs to the band. Permission should be obtained before landing. At the time, we were unaware of the courtesy that is called for when visiting sites like this.) A totem pole with the fin of a killer whale still stands, rising above the brambles that had swallowed up the village site. The posts and beams that once supported a longhouse still stand. They had been cut from logs nearly 3′ in diameter and carved with a distinctive pattern of adze-cut grooves. We left the village, and that evening anchored among the islets of the Indian Group.
With the last of the daylight we got ready to spend the night by one of the islets of the Indian Group, 1-1/2 miles from Mahmalillikullah.
Our route took us out into Queen Charlotte Strait, a 14-mile-wide body of water that extends from the cluster of islands we’d been traveling through to the Pacific Ocean. As we had expected, the going got rougher. Rowing up the mainland coast on the north side of the Strait we encountered 25-knot headwinds and a confusion of waves reflecting off the rocky shores. As we fought our way to Blunden Harbor we noticed water sloshing under the floorboards. It was the first time we had taken on a significant amount of water since launching, and I was concerned that all of the pounding in the waves might have split a plank. I checked the aft half of the boat and found no damage; Cindy checked the bow and reported that the hull was intact but water was dripping from the gear tucked under the foredeck. Fortunately, the water was coming over the sheer, not through the hull. The fabric deck was snapped to the outside of the hull and as ROWENA drove through waves, water that would have otherwise flown away from the sheer was slipping under the cover and coming aboard. I was relieved that the boat was holding up to the beating we were taking and impressed that this 1,000-year-old design was so seaworthy.
The wind strengthened and we had to claw our way into Blunden Harbor. This half-mile-wide haven was rimmed with tall trees, but we weren’t able to rest until we had tucked into the lee right up against the shore. The beach we landed on was brilliant white, a midden of sun-bleached oyster shells that crunched loudly underfoot. We unsnapped the foredeck and took all of our gear out. A lot of things had gotten wet, including our change of dry camp clothes and the bag holding our ID and money. Cindy got started with dinner while I lined the bow with the plastic tarp and did laundry in my improvised wash basin.
There wasn’t much left of the old village at Blunden Harbor. The logs sticking out from the bank are the posts and beams of a fallen longhouse. The beach is composed almost entirely of shell fragments, the detritus of thousands of years of habitation. Scattered among the shells we found fragments of glazed pottery and glass trade beads.
This was the low point for Cindy. Queen Charlotte Strait had been hard going, and she was exhausted and discouraged. We talked over dinner and I assured her that the important thing was not to get to Alaska, but to enjoy the time we were spending together. If the voyage had ceased to become worth the effort and the discomfort, we could go home. Knowing she wasn’t obligated to keep rowing , and that she had the power of choice, seemed to make a difference.
During a midday break at Allison Harbor, I relaxed while lunch warmed on the stove. We had a short day prior to rounding Cape Caution, so we had time to dawdle.
We continued working our way along Queen Charlotte Strait, coming more under the influence of the Pacific with every mile. Shelter from the wind was harder to find and ocean swell prevented us from keeping close to shore. Cape Caution, marking the outer limit of the Strait, was going to be the most exposed part of our trip. To get around it we had to pick our moment carefully. We ducked in behind Bramham Island and rowed 2-1/2 miles to a small bay on the mainland side where we would wait for an early-morning attempt on the Cape. We had the rest of the afternoon off so I napped and Cindy read. In spite of the risky passage ahead of us, we were in good spirits. It seemed Cindy’s misgivings about our adventure had evaporated.
We spent the night aboard ROWENA and woke to the alarm clock at 4:30 a.m. Getting moving at that hour was hard, but we were ready to row in just 45 minutes. We headed down Slingsby Channel in a foggy calm; the reflections of the trees along shore reached right up to the boat. We rowed the 5-mile length of the channel and stopped at the entrance to see what was in store for us.
On our way out of Slingsby Channel we stopped at a small waterfall to replenish our supply of fresh water. When we got water from streams we just looked for fast-moving water and didn’t filter or treat it. We never suffered any ill consequences after drinking it.
The weather radio wasn’t picking up any of the stations, so we only had yesterday’s forecast to go by: light and variable winds. The swells were only about 3′ high and only slightly rippled by a light favorable breeze from the southeast. We sat for 25 minutes to see if there was any change in the wind, either in speed or direction. It stayed steady, so we took off for Cape Caution, 6 miles distant. With the wind in our favor we made good speed past Burnett Bay, a 2-mile stretch of tawny sand set between equally long rows of white breakers on one side and silver-gray driftwood on the other.
We had good conditions for a quick rounding of Cape Caution and raced past the light tower, seen here obscured by haze, to get back into more protected waters.
Cape Caution turned out to be a blunt and unremarkable point of land, distinguished only by a squat light tower that was dwarfed by the trees behind it. We still had a lot of ground to cover to get back into the safety of the inland waterways, so we kept rowing at a brisk pace. Four miles beyond the cape we closed in on Milthorp Point, the northward-pointing thumb of land guarding Protection Cove. Cindy spotted whale flukes rising from the water offshore.
As we drew even with the point, I looked over my shoulder to check our course. I saw something that looked like a rock at a first glance, but it was the ridged gray back and twin blowholes of a second whale coming straight at us, just 30 yards ahead. I called, “Way enough,” and we drifted silently forward, waiting. The whale surfaced again directly astern and a few dozen yards away, having passed right under us. We turned the corner into Protection Cove to take a short break. A fisherman at anchor there eyed us as we slipped by, saying, “You just come from Japan?”
Safely around Cape Caution and in among the islands at the entry to Smith Sound, we took a break on a small dumbell-shaped islet. Cindy isn’t doubled over with seasickness here—nausea would get to her a few hours later—she’s looking at shells.
Beyond Smith Sound and Rivers Inlet we were back inside, where we felt much more comfortable with the challenges posed to a small boat. We sailed up Fitz Hugh Sound to Namu, and then took a day off at Bella Bella.
The swells we encontered crossing Smith Sound and Rivers Inlet left Cindy a little seasick. She fell asleep as we approached the Addenbrook lighthouse on our way north into Fitz Hugh Sound.
We timed our departure from Bella Bella to be present at the arrival of LOOTAAS (“Wave Eater”), a 50′ cedar canoe carved in Skidegate by Bill Reid and a team of Haida carvers for Expo 86 in Vancouver, B.C. The canoe was now being paddled from Vancouver 600 miles back to Haida Gwaii (formerly the Queen Charlotte Islands) and stopping at all of the First Nations towns for elaborate ceremonial receptions. It seemed like all of Bella Bella had gathered on the beach. Many of the elders had black-and-red button blankets draped over their shoulders, gleaming with mother-of-pearl buttons sewn on to create animal figures in the Northwest style. LOOTAAS, carrying a team of paddlers wearing white vests, came to a stop a boat length from the beach; the crew raised their paddles, pointed blades skyward.
LOOTAAS came ashore to the enthusiastic welcome of the Bella Bella community. The paddlers in their white vests are lined up at the top of the beach.
One of the crew called out to ask for permission to come ashore; it was granted by a Bella Bella elder on the beach. LOOTAAS was paddled in stern first. The middle section of its hull was painted black; both ends were finished bright and bore bold red and black designs—stylized animals with bean-shaped eyes and rows of rounded teeth. Many of the Bella Bella residents were taken out for short rides, elders first, then children. Cindy was invited aboard for one of the last tours. I had been talking with Ron, the canoe’s steersman, and when the event was winding down, he invited me to come aboard and paddle LOOTAAS to the dock where it would spend the night. Instead of the usual crew of 12 paddlers and the steersman, Ron had just two of us at his command, but we were able to get LOOTAAS moving.
When the welcoming ceremonies were over, I got a chance to paddle LOOTAAS. There were just three of us aboard and we were going stern first, but it was an honor to be aboard.
That afternoon Cindy and I rowed west along Seaforth Channel, and spent what should have been a peaceful night at a well protected anchorage at Beasley Island. In the middle of the night I awoke to Cindy shouting, “Marty, look out!” “What’s up?” I asked, realizing she was in the middle of a dream. “We’re going to run into it!” “What?” I asked. “Do you want me to steer or something?” she replied, in a less-agitated voice as she woke. She didn’t remember much of the dream when I asked her about it. Although she had committed herself to continuing the trip when we left Blunden Harbor, at least some of her anxiousness about it was apparently still with her. I admired the grit she had been showing since Blunden in the face of the daily discomforts and demands of rowing. I never did find out who Marty was.
We had stocked up with enough supplies at Bella Bella that we could bypass Klemtu, a small native village on Swindle Island. We were headed north near along Princess Royal Channel when we heard a rhythmic thumping coming from the haze that obscured the channel leading south to Klemtu. A dark spot emerged from the fog, and we could soon tell by the flash of paddle blades that it was LOOTAAS.
A drummer aboard LOOTAAS kept twelve paddlers working in a precise rhythm.
We kept rowing and when the canoe was about 30 yards astern and coming straight at us, Cindy and I started to sprint. A cry went up from the canoe and the drumbeat quickened; LOOTAAS closed the gap all too quickly. Clearly the modern-day Haida paddlers had inherited the abilities of their ancestors to scare the bejeezus out of hapless mariners on the North Pacific Coast.
We put on a sprint when LOOTAAS drew near, and the crew came charging after us. We were no match for their power and speed.
Halfway up Princess Royal Channel we stopped at Butedale, once a busy cannery set on the hillside of Princess Royal Island. I had stopped here when I first rowed up the Inside Passage seven years earlier. Back then the store at the top of the ramp from the dock was open for business and and even selling ice cream. The store was still standing but Butedale was a ghost town, inhabited by a lone caretaker.
Butedale was going to ruin. A month before we arrived, a caretaker had fallen through some rotten decking and had broken his back.
We were given permission to use one of the houses that had been built for a cannery manager. We found it with the front door unlocked and the lights on. Butedale’s generator was powered by water running down from a lake in a huge black snake of tarred wooden pipe. Even though there was only one resident, the lights, baseboard heaters, and water heaters for the whole village had to be kept on for the generator’s sake. Seeing an abandoned village with all the lights on was strange enough, but not as eerie as the state of the house. It looked as if a family had walked out just that morning. Cups of coffee and bowls of cereal were still on the kitchen table, the closets and dressers were full of clothes, and the kitchen cabinets were stocked. But no one had been here for months and no one was ever coming back.
We took advantage of hot showers but didn’t spend the night in the house. We’d had an invitation to stay with a couple aboard their little trawler; when we got back to the dock, we accepted their offer. The house was just too creepy.
Betty and Tony, our overnight hosts during our stay in Butedale, took a picture of our departure from the deck of their cruising trawler.
Princess Royal Channel led to Grenville Channel, a slender and almost arrow-straight passage 44 nautical miles long and hemmed in by steep-sided ridges from 1,000′ to 2,000′ high. Going with the flow there is essential, and traffic from both ends rides the floods in, arrives at mid-channel at slack, and takes the ebbs out. It took us three days to get through Grenville, anchoring in Lowe Inlet, 14 miles in, and Klewnuggit Inlet, another 11 miles in, and getting up in the middle of the night to take advantage of the tides.
Working with the tides in Grenville Channel required getting up at around 2:00 a.m. and rowing into dawn.
We took a day off at Prince Rupert and resupplied. Refreshed, we left town in the rain and headed for the Alaskan border. Dixon Entrance, at the border between British Columbia and Alaska, was the other exposed stretch of water we were concerned about but it wasn’t as risky as Cape Caution; there were a number of islands and inlets that offered safe havens. After leaving Prince Rupert we spent the night at a dock sheltered in a cove on the south side of Portland Inlet, and the next day had an easy 13-mile row across the border in rolling 4′ swells but otherwise calm conditions. We camped on the east side of 800-yard-wide Tongass Island. This was our first landfall in Alaska, but checking in with customs would have to wait until we reached Ketchikan.
A push-pull tiller requires a different kind of keeper than one for a conventional tiller.
Solo sailors of small open boats have a problem: While we’re sailing we’re stuck minding the helm. Occasionally there’s a need to go forward to adjust the downhaul or centerboard, use both hands to steady the binoculars, change a setting on the GPS, or eat lunch. Some boats can hold a course on their own, with the sails set to provide a neutral helm, but not always, and not on every point of sail. Some boats, like mine, have weather helm when beating and will round up if you let go of the tiller. Heaving-to takes time and brings progress to a halt.
A tiller keeper is a device to hold the tiller and maintain a course while we tend to those other chores. There are many meant for conventional tillers, available both commercially available and as do-it-yourself projects, but there are not so many for the Norwegian-style, push-pull tillers. The best I have seen was the ingenious and elegant design that Eric Hvalsoe had developed for his BANDWAGON, which Tim Yeadon also implemented on his Hvalsoe-designed HAVERCHUCK. Like their boats, my FIRE-DRAKE has a Norwegian tiller to work around a mizzenmast, so I was eager to make a tiller keeper.
Alex zimmerman
The author’s tiller keeper is mounted on a bulkhead and has an elastic band to keep the tiller held tightly against the pin in the block shown here.
Alex Zimmerman
The weight of the tiller is enough to keep it in place in mild conditions; the bungee adds security when the going gets bouncy.
The keeper is a block of hardwood with a recess to hold the tiller from moving laterally. The wooden block I made is about 3-1/2″ wide by 3″ tall by 7/8″ thick, which nicely accommodates my 1″-square tiller arm. In the center of the saddle is a vertical stainless-steel pin. An aluminum strip, screwed and epoxied flush into the underside of the arm, has a number of holes drilled fore and aft of the rudder’s neutral position to allow for a number of positions for the tiller so I can dial in how much rudder angle I need. The pin is a 10-24 stainless-steel machine screw with the head filed to the same diameter as the shaft—just a touch larger than 3/16″—and rounded, set in epoxy about ¼” proud of the surface it sits in. The holes in the tiller’s aluminum strip are 13/64″, to make it easy to drop the tiller arm in place with the pin easily slipping into one of the holes, but not so loose as to be sloppy. The 19 holes are spaced 5/16″ on centers.
Christopher Cuningham
The editor’s system has the same kind of fitting set into the underside of the tiller as the author’s rig, but the block with the pin had to be mounted under the stern sheets.
Christopher Cunningham
A light cord snugged into a V-shaped notch serves the same function as the author’s bungee.
Christopher Cunningham
When not in use, the block, which has a T-shaped cross section, slides out of the way under the stern sheets, supported by a pair of notched supports.
Different tillers would have block, pin, and strip dimensions suited for their size. The pin and strip could be made of bronze or brass. There is a vertical groove at the back of the wooden block for a piece of shock cord that goes over the top of the tiller arm to a jam cleat on the other side. I have mounted the block on the forward side of the aft watertight compartment bulkhead, but it could also be mounted on a suitable thwart.
Most of the time I just drop the tiller onto the appropriate pin and let gravity hold it there. For extra security in a bit of a chop, I pull the shock cord across and cleat it. This tiller keeper is easy to make, easy to install, and it has allowed me to tend to all of those little chores underway. Now that I don’t need to mind the tiller every moment, I am not as tired at the end of a long day of sailing.
Alex Zimmerman is a semi-retired mechanical technologist and former executive. His first boat was an abandoned Chestnut canoe that he fixed up as a teenager and paddled on the waterways of eastern Manitoba and northwestern Ontario. He started his professional career as a maritime engineer in the Canadian Navy, and that triggered his interest in sailing. He didn’t get back into boatbuilding until he moved back to Vancouver Island in the ’90s, where he built a number of sea kayaks that he used to explore the coast. In the early 2000s, he built his first sail-and-oar boat and he completed his latest in June of this year. He says he can stop building boats any time.
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The InReach has input controls built into the device, but a Bluetooth link can connect it to mobile devices, like phones and tablets, to make data entry and messaging much easier.
Last spring, I planned a summer sail-and-oar trip up the Inside Passage of the British Columbia coast, a journey that would take about six or seven weeks. I knew I would be out of mobile-phone range for much of that time. While a satellite communicator was not exactly a requirement my wife set for me before embarking on the trip, it made the trip a much easier sell, because she would be able to track my progress and we could keep in touch.
Hand-held satellite messengers have been in existence since the release of the SPOT in 2007, and while they are relatively common now, not all are created equal. The one I chose is a Delorme InReach SE. The device is about 6″ x 2 1/2″ x 1″, about the size of a mobile phone but twice as thick. It comes with an AC power adapter and micro USB cable for charging, a clip, and a lanyard. It has a 1 3/8″x 1 1/8″ color screen, power and reset buttons, a four-way rocker button, and an SOS button with a lockout slider. On the back are reminders about what the buttons on the front do. The unit has a rating of IPX7, which means it’s waterproof to a depth of 1 meter for 30 minutes.
The InReach has a number of key features that convinced me to buy it rather than other similar devices. In addition to tracking and marking my location on a web-based map, the unit can also send and receive text messages, up to 160 characters, to email addresses and phone numbers you select. If you download the Earthmate app to your smart phone, you can pair the phone to the InReach via Bluetooth and use the phone’s keyboard, which is much less cumbersome than cycling through the alphabet using the unit’s rocker button. There are three editable, pre-set messages for quick messaging. The unit can also post to Facebook and Twitter. To activate the unit, you will need to set up an account and subscription plan, which takes time but is straightforward if you follow the instructions.
When you’re using the InReach to track your progress, it will transmit your location every 10 minutes by default, but the interval for waypoint updates can be customized. On my trip last summer, I set it to ping once an hour and turned the unit off at night to save power. The text-messaging feature worked well, although there was frequently lag time between the sending and receiving of a message.
There is also a marine weather forecast update feature. I didn’t find it very useful for my trip, but that’s a function of where I was, an region where there are few weather stations, and local conditions can vary considerably from the forecast. The update is probably more useful in more populated areas where there are more reporting stations. A caveat when choosing a subscription plan: The two least expensive subscriptions charge a fee for each forecast request, each text you receive (50 cents), or for software updates from the website, or track (10 cents). You can also suspend the plan for a nominal monthly fee if you use the device seasonally.
The rechargeable lithium-ion battery life is claimed to be about 100 hours, but I generally got about 35–40 hours, which included some texting every day, which uses more power than position updates.
The InReach Explorer is a more expensive version of the unit with built-in topographic maps, a digital compass, an altimeter, and an accelerometer. Since I had most of these features in my GPS already, the SE was a better deal for me.
The InReach SE gave my wife the assurances she needed that I was OK and keeping to my plan. She had regular positions marking my progress each day, the comfort of short personal message exchanges with me, and the knowledge that I could signal for a quick rescue if there was serious trouble.
Alex Zimmerman is a semi-retired mechanical technologist and former executive. His first boat was an abandoned Chestnut canoe that he fixed up as a teenager and paddled on the waterways of eastern Manitoba and northwestern Ontario. He started his professional career as a maritime engineer in the Canadian Navy, and that triggered his interest in sailing. He didn’t get back into boatbuilding until he moved back to Vancouver Island in the ’90s, where he built a number of sea kayaks that he used to explore the coast. In the early 2000s, he built his first sail-and-oar boat and he completed his latest in June of this year. He says he can stop building boats any time.
DeLorme lists the InReach SE at $399.99; many online retailers offer it for $299 and less. Subscription plans range from $14.95 to $99.95 per month, less with an annual contract.
Is there a product that might be useful for boatbuilding, cruising or shore-side camping that you’d like us to review? Please email your suggestions.
The light weight of the four-stroke Aqua Bug (shown here) and its two-stroke cousin are both light enough to be side mounted on a canoe without overwhelming its stability.
My 2.5-hp four-stroke Yamaha outboard, the smallest in the Yamaha line, weighs 40 lbs, so I’d never imagined putting it on my lapstrake canoe. The canoe doesn’t have a transom, so I’d need to mount the motor on the side, and hanging 40 lbs out there was out of the question. When Bike Bug, maker of compact gas motors that can be added to bicycles, emailed me about their Aqua Bug two-stroke and four-stroke outboards, I had a chance to see what it would be like to have a power canoe.
Bike Bug claims the Aqua Bugs are the “world’s smallest” and indeed both of them are very easy to carry with one hand. The four-stroke weighs 17 ½ lbs with a tank one-third full and its crankcase filled with oil; the two-stroke weighs just 11 ½ lbs with a half tank of gas.
The four-stroke Aqua Bug
The four-stroke looks like a very skinny outboard. The parts are all attached to a chrome-plated 1-1/8″ pipe, but there’s a normal-looking 7″ three-bladed plastic prop, lower unit, and mounting bracket under the 1.4-hp motor. The two-stroke has an unusual look for an outboard. The motor, rated at 1.2 hp, looks as though it was pinched from a gas-powered weed-whacker, the 1″ aluminum shaft is bent, the lower unit looks like it was made out of an electrical conduit junction, and the prop looks like high-performance surface-piercing propeller sized for blending smoothies. But if that’s what it takes to make an outboard that weighs around 11 lbs, I didn’t mind. I cobbled together a motor mount for my canoe and headed out for trials on Seattle’s Lake Union.
The two-stroke Aqua Bug
Both motors have little fuel pumps to get the flow of gas going, chokes for cold starts, and centrifugal clutches. They both started up quickly, with two or three pulls of the starter cord. The two-stroke’s prop didn’t turn until I revved the motor to engage the clutch. The four-stroke was running too fast at an idle, so I backed the screw on the motor to adjust the low-end RPMs. A zip tie added to hold the cable to the tiller kept it in a position that reduced friction to assure the throttle returned quickly to an idle. Both engines are air cooled, so I could practice starting them and do any tuning without having the lower units in a bucket of water. There are kill switches on both motors, but neither has a deadman function.
The two-stroke (shown here with the propeller guard angled away from the prop for clarity) has a small propeller that comes into its own once the boat gets moving.
During my trials with the canoe I discovered the motors have very different characteristics. The two-stroke’s prop didn’t provide much thrust until the boat got underway. It seemed to need some forward motion before it could apply power. Cranking the throttle up quickly didn’t do much when the canoe was at a standstill, but once it got going, the prop engaged and the speed came on. Occasionally while running the two-stroke at full throttle, I could hear the engine revs pick up and I felt the speed drop slightly. That might have been caused by air traveling down the shaft and getting sucked into the prop. The hesitation would last for a moment and the prop would take hold again.
The propeller for the two-stroke has a diameter of 2-5/8″
With two passengers and me in the canoe, all 200-pounders, half throttle pushed us along at 3.5 knots and full throttle got us up to 4.1 knots. The top-end speed came with lot of noise. The exhaust port is on the top of the motor and less than a yard from my ear, so some sort of hearing protection would have been in order.
Turning with the two-stroke needs to be done gradually. If I turned the tiller 90 degrees quickly, it would have little effect on the canoe’s course. Turning more gingerly keeps water flowing into the prop so it can continue to provide thrust through a turn.
The mount for the two-stroke locks at a variety of settings and won’t pivot if an obstruction is hit. The prop seems quite durable, and I’d hope the clutch would slide to prevent any damage.
The cap for the fuel tank is on the side, so to refuel you have to cock the motor up and turn it to get the opening turned upward. The cap has a retainer so it can dangle from the tank while you refuel.
The four-stroke was quite a different experience. It has a lot of thrust at slow speeds and got the canoe moving quickly even with its 600-lb load. It was important to start the engine without the throttle turned up so that the prop didn’t engage as soon as the engine came to life and send us careening forward. The canoe isn’t very stable, and I had to be careful making turns. With the prop providing thrust underneath the canoe, any steering caused the canoe to roll, banking into the turn. A wider boat wouldn’t have felt so twitchy.
Like the two-stroke, the four-stroke can pivot through 360 degrees, so you can get reverse if your boat allows you reach back far enough to hang on to the tiller. The shaft of the four-stroke has a device that allows it to be run in reverse without tilting up. When run forward the motor will pivot up over obstructions, as most outboards do, but the Aqua Bug was so light that the motor would tilt forward if I throttled back and let go of the tiller. And when I pulled the starter cord, I had to hold the top of the engine with the other hand to keep it in place. To refuel you have to tilt the motor first to keep its reverse lock-down from engaging and then rotate the fuel-tank cap upward.
At full throttle, the four-stroke pushed us along at 4.5 knots. The exhaust port of the four-stroke is also at the top of the motor, but it had a lower pitch and a more tolerable volume. Half throttle produced 3.5 knots. As a point of reference, I kicked up the motor and my son and I took to the paddles. We could peak at 5.1 knots, but the speed we could sustain at an exercise pace was 4.4 knots, 3.5 knots at a relaxed all-day pace. In the long haul the motors were was strong as we were.
Like my Yamaha, the Aqua Bug motors have their little quirks to get used to, but they did the job of pushing my heavily loaded canoe along at a good clip. The two-stroke would serve best if you’re looking for the smallest, lightest motor, and simply intend to get from point A to point B without a lot of stops and starts or tight turns. I’d recommend the four-stroke for its cleaner-burning, quieter-running, and all-purpose function.
Christopher Cunningham is the editor of Small Boats Monthly.
The Aqua Bug outboards are available from Bike Bug. The four-stroke sells for $589; the two-stroke for $389.
Is there a product that might be useful for boatbuilding, cruising or shore-side camping that you’d like us to review? Please email your suggestions.
STILL THINKING is a Redwing 18, and Barry Dusharm’s first power boat.
Barry Dusharm grew up with boats, logging a lot of hours paddling and rowing. The passion for being on the water never left him, and when the obligations of a career and family allowed, he built a 17′ stitch-and-glue light dory and made a circumnavigation of sorts of northern New York State. He rowed south along Lake Champlain, west on the Erie Canal, trucked around Niagara Falls, and carried on rowing the southern shore of Lake Ontario. He descended 100 miles down the St. Lawrence, keeping to that river’s American shore until the Canadian border blocked his way. His wife Leslie did the driving for the half dozen legs of the trip, shuttling him back and forth as he juggled rowing and work.
Barry had gone through some rough patches of water on Lake Ontario. Rowing an open boat in big waves worried him, and he began thinking about a kayak with watertight compartments that would keep him safe in bigger water. He didn’t want to give up rowing, the carrying capacity, and range of his dory, so he created a hybrid, combining the hull of a 21′ stitch-and-glue kayak hull with a cockpit for sliding-seat rowing with decks that created watertight storage compartments and housed foam flotation in both ends. With this new boat he took multi-week trips in the Florida Everglades, Arizona’s Lake Powell, and twice rowed Québec’s Manicouagan Reservoir, a circle of water 40 miles in diameter created by a meteor that smacked Canada 215 million years ago. For less ambitious outings he built a Wee Lassie canoe for himself to explore the waters in and around New York’s Adirondack Park.
When their two daughters went off to college, Barry and Leslie built a new home in New York on the Chaumont River, just 2 miles up from Chaumont Bay on the eastern end of Lake Ontario. With the river and lake so close by, it was natural for Barry to begin thinking about building another boat and about adding a shop to the new home to build the boat in. The boat that came to mind was the Karl Stambaugh’s Redwing 18. In 2004 Barry had read about the boat in a series of how-to-build articles in WoodenBoat magazine, and the following year he had seen the boat and met its designer at The WoodenBoat Show in Mystic, Connecticut. Barry’s boatbuilding experience had given him a glimpse of what was involved in building the Redwing, but he had never driven a powerboat before, let alone owned one.
With the building form on wheels, the hull could be moved to provide better access in Barry’s small garage.
While the Dusharms were making plans to build the new house, Barry happened upon a Redwing listed in a Vermont Craigslist ad. “Call for details,” the ad read. Barry didn’t call, but mentioned the ad to his wife. Rather than engaging in a discussion about the financial burdens of two kids in college and building a new home, Leslie said, “Isn’t that the boat you keep talking about? How much do they want?”
The Redwing 18 tips the scales at around 1,200 lbs.
That weekend Barry drove to Vermont with an empty boat trailer. The Redwing wasn’t really a boat, but the parts for one. The owner had ordered a CNC-cut kit a few years earlier and made a tentative start before abandoning the project. The pile of plywood had been in a barn, out of the weather, and had collected a thick layer of dust and pigeon poop. Barry loaded the plywood, 8 gallons of epoxy resin, 8 quarts of hardener, fillers, cups, and scrapers and headed home.
The Redwing can be built with the wheel and controls on the motor well, but Barry chose to put the helm forward to put his boat in better trim.
The kit went into storage for a year and a half while the Dusharms built their new house. Barry got his new boatshop, a 15′ x 30′ heated addition to the garage, and at last went to work on the boat. He spent two-and-a-half years building his Redwing. He gave it some special touches—homemade ash cleats, a brass bit on the foredeck, and a ship’s wheel he picked up at a flea market and invested a week’s worth of work to restore.
The enclosure for the 9.9-hp outboard keeps the cockpit remarkably quiet.
Barry’s research had led to reports from Redwing owners about steering issues. With Stambaugh’s blessing, Barry trimmed the skegs, made additions to the keel, and moved the steering station forward. The modifications would later prove successful in improving trim, tracking, and steering.
Under the hood, there’s a 9.9-hp outboard. The plans for the Redwing recommend a power plant of 5 to 10 hp.
When the Dusharms launched their Redwing last August, Barry christened it STILL THINKING, the reply he’d give Leslie when she asked if the boat would be the last he’d build. The boat’s admittedly spartan cabin provided a degree of luxury Barry had never had aboard his previous boats—shelter from rain and bugs, a bed, a Porta-Potti—and the enclosure for the outboard is so effective that it’s hard to tell the motor is running. When STILL THINKING is underway, doing about 6 mph, the motor burns only a quart of gas per hour. Her shoal draft gives her access to the thin waters Barry favored in his rowing boats. Best of all, STILL THINKING has plenty of room for two and Leslie is able to join Barry on the water.
The low cabin roof offers an unobstructed over the bow; the cabin has room for a small V-berth, galley, and head.
The Ducharms have explored the Chaumont River and Chaumont Bay, and the St. Lawrence River, and have plans to travel the Erie Canal and visit New York’s Finger Lakes. Barry isn’t the only one who knows one boat inspires the next; Leslie’s also “still thinking,” and wondering how big a boat they can build in their shop.
Have you recently launched a boat? Please email us. We’d like to hear about it and share your story with other Small Boats Monthly readers.
Sawing driftwood for my review of the Silky Bigboy in the February issue struck a chord that has resonated deeply through most of my life. My father used to take me to the beach near our home in Edmonds, Washington, to gather red cedar driftwood for a fence that would eventually surround our 1/3-acre lot. In those days, tugs towing long rafts of logs up and down Puget Sound were common, and logs often escaped and washed ashore. Dad and I would load the ’54 Ford Ranch Wagon with a crosscut saw, a bow saw, a maul, and wedges and head to a beach where there was no shortage of stray red cedar logs. I was too young to do much work other than fetch tools; Dad cut logs to length and split posts, rails, and pickets. When we had enough to fill the car, we loaded up and headed home; the smell of red cedar filled the car and seeped into our clothes.
On a few occasions I’ve harvested trees that had to come down. This western red cedar was threatening to crack the foundation a friend’s home in Seattle. Some of the wood from this tree became floorboards for a Gokstad faering.
When I started building kayaks in the late ’70s, the beach was my best source of the wood I needed: spruce for gunwales, chines, and keelsons, and yellow cedar for deck beams and steam-bent frames. The yellow cedar was much better for bending than any kiln-dried wood from the lumberyard.
When the wood from a salvaged log was going to be used for steam-bent projects, I split the the log to assure the grain ran parallel with the faces of the pieces I needed.
In the ’80s, tugs towing rafts of logs were becoming less common and the pickings weren’t so good, mostly fir and hemlock. I kept an eye out for new logs on the beach that I frequented. They’d usually appear after a storm or a spring tide. One 16′ red cedar log, half a log really, about 4′ across where it had split, washed ashore on a section of beach that was usually swept clean of driftwood. If I were going to salvage any of the cedar I had to get to work. I walked home, put my kayak on a cart, and loaded it with dad’s wedges and splitting maul.
The mountain slopes produce curved trunks in areas prone to avalanches. This Alaskan yellow cedar trunk became curved deck beams for replicas of Aleut and Greenland kayaks.
I paddled to the log, and in a few hours I’d split off several slabs about 8″ thick and 2′ wide from heart to bark. I floated the slabs out one at a time and towed each one along the 1/2 mile of beach to get to the path that led to the street I’d walk to get home. To get a slab up the railroad embankment and over the two sets of tracks I made a rope harness and crawled on all fours like a sled dog, using the rails to pull and push myself forward, always listening for the ringing in the rails, my early warning that a train was on its way.
My old Tote Goat trail scooter helped transport downed crook stock.
I got four slabs home before the tide took the rest of the log. At the time I didn’t know what I was going to do with the cedar, so I stacked it in the back yard to season. I later made a hammer dulcimer and used a thin piece of that cedar for the soundboard; then I sawed the rest into 4′ lengths, hauled them to my cabin in the woods, and made planks for a cold-molded sneakbox.
The slabs of red cedar that I’d salvage from the beach made the last leg of the journey to my mountain shop with the help of the Tote Goat.
The Tote Goat’s motor powered the jury-rigged tablesaw I used to resaw red cedar for planking. A cord wrapped around the throttle and connected to a stick with one end resting on the ground let me control the engine rpms with my foot.
My cabin and shop, built entirely of salvaged lumber, were on the north bank of the Sauk River near the site of Monte Cristo, a long-abandoned mining settlement. During the spring and fall water, the river ran high and undercut banks, dropping trees; avalanches during the winter brought more trees down, so there were dead trees everywhere. High up on the slopes that surrounded my cabin, many yellow cedars that were regularly pushed over by avalanches survived and grew with J-shaped trunks. Those that eventually were uprooted by avalanches provided crooks perfect for deckbeams in traditional skin-on-frame kayaks that I built in my shop. I found one yellow cedar log that had been buried in a landslide for who knows how long, eventually uncovered by a flooding creek. Beneath the rotted sapwood wood was beautiful, bright yellow, deliciously redolent, tight-grained wood.
During the winter there were few interruptions to working on boats. Visitors had to ski or snowmobile along 14 miles of unplowed road to get to my shop.
The hull and deck of the sneakbox were made entirely of red cedar from the log I’d salvaged on the beach. When was gluing layers together I’d get the wood stove going and heat the shop up to around 90 degrees. The well-insulated shop would hold the heat for most of the night and the epoxy would be cured by morning.
I cut the red cedar slabs with a chainsaw mill to rough-sawn 4x4s. To resaw those into 1/8″ planks for cold-molding, I mounted an arbor with a 12″ carbide blade on a 4×12, and fit the beam-made-table-saw to the handlebars and rack of my tote-goat trail bike. With the 5-hp Briggs and Stratton motor powering the cobbled-together table saw, I cut hundreds of planks. It took a couple of months to build the sneakbox, but by mid-winter, with the valley draped in snow, the cedar I’d hauled off the beach had become a boat.
In the middle of my last winter in Monte Cristo, I moved to a cabin on Lopez Island in Washington State’s San Juan Islands. When the sneakbox was ready to leave my mountain shop, I made a sled for it out of old skis and towed it to the road behind an aging snowmobile. Halfway down the 14 miles of unplowed road, the muffler fell off. Fortunately, I had hearing protectors with me and the jet of blue flame shooting across my right shin didn’t set my pants on fire.
I don’t gather as much driftwood and windfall as I used to, but I still keep an eye out for good wood. I occasionally find chunks of old-growth yellow cedar driftwood on the beaches, some with rings nearly invisible to the naked eye—100 per inch—that is perfect for model making. One split from a yellow cedar log that I towed a mile behind my kayak had more than 500 rings; it was from a tree that was standing long before Columbus set sail. Winter storms in the Seattle area tend to bring down lots of honey locust branches, and I gather that for making cleats. I’ll admit that I like getting wood for free, but that’s neither the only nor the greatest reward. Windfalls and driftwood are not only often much better wood than anything I could buy, but they also come with a story and a connection to times and places in my life. And to have the wood delivered to me by the power of wind and water makes it all the more appropriate for building boats.
The peapod might be one of the most easily identifiable, traditional small craft found on the coast of Maine today. Peapods were used as nearshore lobstering boats; a lobsterman could stand on the gunwale and haul a trap by hand without the boat swamping. The shallow draft of these vessels allowed fishermen to work the various shallow nooks and crannies that dot the Maine coast. They were also quite seaworthy in deeper water and were favored by lighthouse keepers to get to and from offshore lighthouses.
Joel White’s 14′ Maine Coast Peapod is a classic take on this timeless design, perfectly suited for both sailing and rowing. His design is intended for recreational boaters, not working fishermen, and has a deeper draft than a traditional workboat for better tracking during sailing. They are sleeker for better speed under oars, a design element that trades away the stability required for hauling traps.
When my wife and I decided that we wanted to build a small boat that our family and friends could use, there was never much of a question as to what type. We were sold on the Maine Coast Peapod by our friend Dale, who owns one built by the Apprenticeshop of Rockland, Maine, during the late ’90s. For years he had graciously let us use his boat almost whenever we wanted, and after spending hours upon hours cruising around Rockland Harbor, both alone and with the boat loaded with friends, we decided that we’d have to build one of our own.
The Maine Coast Peapod is a design for traditional plank-on-frame construction. It’s a good project for someone with moderate carpentry skills interested in learning how to do carvel planking, cotton-caulked seams, copper rivets, and steam-bent frames. The plans I ordered from The WoodenBoat Store are straightforward and easy to follow. No lofting is necessary, as the mold patterns are drawn out to full size. This peapod is symmetrical stem to stern, so the three patterns in the plans are all that are necessary for the six molds. The stem and stern posts are identical, and in the plans their profiles are drawn out full size with the rabbet line, stopwater, and bolt locations identified. The remaining parts such as centerboard trunk, spars, and rudder are diagrammed to scale. A full fastening schedule is also provided to simplify ordering materials.
I set the molds up on a strongback about waist-high for easy access. The stem and stern posts connect to a 1-7/8″ by 2″ keel, and this backbone is then placed on top of the molds and temporarily held on with screws. The molds are drawn to the inside of the frames, so the ribbands are let into notches in the molds. The 1/2″-thick, white-oak frames are steam-bent over the ribbands and fastened to the backbone with bronze ring nails. The frames are spaced 5-1/2″ apart, with the first four frames on each side as half frames connected to the stem and sternpost. The remaining frames are bent full length over the keel from sheer to sheer. Framing required two people, one on each side, bending the frames and zip-tying them in place to the ribbands.
photographs and video by the author
Freshly oiled, the peapod awaits launching. The aft side thwarts provide ample room to put your feet up and lean back while out for a ride.
The plans show the plank widths at the two middle stations, which is a helpful starting point for lining off where the 10 strakes go; I used battens to line off by eye. I spiled each plank using strips of 1/8″ pattern plywood and swinging arcs with a compass. The plans, drawn in 1988, call for butt-blocks to join plank sections, but I find scarfing with today’s epoxies simplifies the planking process and makes joints stronger and less prone to leaks. Each plank, other than the sheer, needed to be backed out (a concave surface planed on the interior side of the plank) to accommodate the curve of the frames. I made the garboard out of mahogany, which was commonly done on other larger boats I’ve worked on, in order to provide some extra strength and durability. The hood ends of the planks need to be steam-bent to take the bend and twist into the stem rabbet, so I clamped the shaped plank to the frames and then wrapped the ends in a trash bag to create a pouch. I then poured in boiling water and after 15 to 20 minutes removed the bag, clamped the plank into place, and let it sit overnight.
The plans call for an oak sheerstrake, but I opted to use mahogany as I thought it would look a little nicer while being just as structurally sound. The planks are initially nailed to the frames with copper rivets, and when planking is finished the roves are set. Peening the rivets over the roves requires two people, one bucking the rivet head, the other peening the clipped rivet end over the rove. While the plans call for the rivets to be peened once the boat is off the molds and upright, I contorted myself around the molds and peened most of the rivets while the hull was still upside down. By leaving the hull in the strongback I could fair the hull more easily after all the nail heads were bunged.
The centerboard trunk is slightly offset so that the board emerges along the edge of the keel. One of the trunk’s bedlogs is fastened to the keel and the other to the port garboard. The trunk is a key structural part of this boat as it is tied into a center thwart, which ties into risers as well as the sheer via steam-bent knees. One of the reasons I used hardwood for the garboard was to provide extra rigidity for fastening the base of the trunk. The plans call for the garboard to be caulked right to the keel without the use of a keelson. In my experience, small boats without keelsons tend to leak along the garboard as they age. Additionally, the mahogany garboard I used wouldn’t swell up against the keel as much as a cedar plank would.
The plans call for a liberal amount of 3M 5200 adhesive along the centerboard trunk, which would make replacing the garboard quite a challenging task. For these reasons I chose to edge-glue the garboard to the keel with epoxy. I then notched the frames into the bedlogs and epoxied the trunk to the backbone and garboard in an effort to prevent leaking as the boat ages. While this technique may seem controversial, a boatbuilding shop I used to work for has had success in this way. I talked with a couple of boatbuilding friends whose shops have started experimenting with edge-gluing hardwood garboards on traditional craft. So far, after one full season, my garboard has held up perfectly.
Friends and family explore the shallows along the tide line. With the centerboard up, the peapod only draws 7″.
The peapod is designed with four thwarts; I connected the aft two thwarts with side sheets. My friend’s peapod was built that way, making it easy to put your feet up while sailing. There are two rowing stations at the forward thwarts, although I suspect the forward oarlock pads are for rowing while standing up facing the bow. Rowing this boat with two people would be quite difficult, and rowing from the forward thwart would be awkward. Although the plans do not call for one, I added a teak sole to keep feet off the planking. The boat is designed to carry a lug rig with a boom, yard, and 12′ mast. The rig is not all that heavy or long and can be easily stepped at the dock.
A challenging yet rewarding aspect of building this peapod was procuring the necessary materials. The planking came from a cedar tree that had recently been struck by lightning. A friend gave me black locust, which I used instead of oak for the keel, stem and stern posts, and teak for the cockpit sole. Most of the hardware, such as the oarlocks, came from various yard sales and antique shops. The rudder hardware was among one of the most difficult pieces to find. The plans call for a V-shaped, custom-cast bronze gudgeon that fits around the sternpost, but I found gudgeons that mount on the face of the sternpost, with a curved bronze rod used in lieu of pintles to secure the rudder.
The wide beam gives the hull good stability, while a simple lug rig makes sailing a breeze.
I applied a workboat finish to my peapod in order to minimize the springtime maintenance needed. The boat’s topsides are painted with Kirby marine enamel, and the bottom with an Interlux semi-ablative paint. The boat’s interior and spars are saturated with a mix of boiled linseed oil, turpentine, and a pinch of pine tar. Over time, the oil turns a beautifully weathered black, hiding dings and scratches that naturally come with use. The mixture is applied easily with a rag, encouraging annual reapplication. Prep time for the peapod in the spring usually only totals around three hours.
Joel White’s peapod is an excellent daysailer and an able tender. It tracks well when towed, is small enough to be tied to a dinghy dock and easily launched and retrieved with a trailer, yet it’s large enough to comfortably fit two or three adults and their gear.
The boat is fun to row, the perfect vessel to explore the coastline around an anchorage. It tracks well yet is easy to maneuver, and a single rower can make a pretty good speed. The double-ended design allows for rowing backward when leaving a beach or getting the boat off a trailer.
While heavier than your average yacht tender, the peapod can be carried by two adults a short way down a beach without too much trouble. We usually set a small anchor if we’re stopping on a protected beach to save ourselves the hassle of carrying the boat any great distance, especially if the rig is in and the boat is loaded with gear; an outhaul anchoring system would be ideal.
With just the halyard and the sheet to manage, the rig makes solo sailing easy.
The peapod performs just as well under sail as under oars; she ghosts along easily in light airs and holds her own in a stiff breeze. The simplicity of the rig makes the vessel very easy to use under sail, even for a novice. It tacks easily, except in the lightest of airs when there’s not enough forward momentum to avoid getting stuck in irons. Then it is easier to tack by wearing ship—jibing around to avoid getting stuck in irons. In higher winds, the peapod does well and stays relatively dry unless there is a lot of chop. In a lot of wind the boat will sometimes become overpowered, which is probably an indication that you shouldn’t be out in such a small boat in the first place. For safety’s sake we added a set of reefpoints to our sail.
There are a few other tweaks to the rig that make things a little easier. For singlehanded sailing the halyard can be led through a small hole in the forward thwart to a small block or fairlead mounted on a frame and then aft to cleat. This allows one to set or douse the sail without having to leave the tiller. The tiller as drawn in the plans is rather long and best suited to sailing singlehanded. With passengers aboard it would be more advantageous to use a shorter tiller with an extension, so that the helmsman can sit farther aft.
We named our peapod BUSTAH, my great-grandfather’s nickname. The boat now sits in the water in front of his cottage in Owls Head, Maine, where we hope that our friends and family can enjoy sailing and rowing it for years to come.
Josh Anderson attended the Apprenticeshop boatbuilding program in Rockland Maine, and has since worked at several boatbuilding and carpentry shops. He and his wife, Sarah, restored a 25′ Friendship Sloop, operated a charter business with it, and spent several years sailing the Maine coast. Josh has a Masters in Maritime Management from Maine Maritime Academy and is now the Lead Boatwright for the Center for Wooden Boats in Seattle, Washington.
When Dale Cottrell started building boats in the 1970s, he was working with fiberglass, not wood. At first he made fiberglass canoes, and then in 1984 he designed and built the Puffin Dinghy. He built a business around the Puffin and ultimately did quite well with it, selling thousands of them at a rate of 300 or more per year. But popping ’glass boats out of molds wasn’t where his heart was. He wanted to build wooden boats, and in 1994 he established Cottrell Boatbuilding in Searsport, Maine. He and his son Seth now build about a dozen small boats a year, rowing boats mostly, but a few for oar and sail. Their Tadpole Tender is a boat Dale designed and built for a customer looking for a boat that could be used to teach his kids to row. Drawn along the lines of a Whitehall, the 10′ Tadpole also proved to be popular as a tender.
photographs by the author
The skeg does a good job keeping the Tadpole on track, eliminating the need to maintain course with the oars. The rope incorporated in the rub rail is one of several options for the gunwale guard.
The Tadpole is built in glued-lap plywood fashion with meranti marine plywood and epoxy. The 10 strakes are lined-off well, and the laps run fair from stem to stern. The hull is painted, making it easier to maintain and less stressful to use than a varnished hull.
courtesy of Cottrell Boatbuilding
The molds for the Tadpole, set up here in the Cottrells’ shop, show the gentle curve of the full bilges that give the hull good load-carrying ability.
Wooden trim, thwarts, floorboards, and transom are of oak, mahogany, or teak. The gunwale can have a number of different treatments: a sheer guard of oak, mahogany, or teak, a canvas and rubber guard, or the traditional treatment on HARPOON, a 1″ rope set in a grooved outwale. The trim provides plenty of eye candy in the plywood construction, but if you’ve got your heart set on a traditionally built boat—copper-clenched cedar on steam-bent oak frames—and want to surround yourself with brightwork, the Cottrells will be happy to oblige.
The Tadpole will easily maintain 3-3/4 knots without much effort at the oars. It tracks well and is very maneuverable.
I met up with Jeff Bowlby to spend some time rowing his Tadpole, HARPOON, on Seattle’s Lake Union. He had brought the boat in the back of his pickup truck, and it was quite easy for the two of us to lift the 90-lb boat and carry it down the launch ramp. The boat is also light enough for two to lift on a roof rack or even for a strong, determined solo rower to lift one end up on the back rack and then to slide it forward. With a beam of 45″ it wouldn’t need extra-long racks to accommodate it.
The contemporary glued-lap-plywood construction keeps the boat light and the interior easier to clean and maintain.
While Jeff parked the truck, I stepped aboard. The Tadpole, delivered with a pair of Shaw & Tenney spoon-blade oars, has two rowing stations equipped with bronze oarlocks. I took the bow position and rowed around while waiting for him to get aboard. With my weight so far forward, the stern rose up quite high, but there was enough fullness in the bow to keep me afloat and stable. When Jeff got settled into the stern sheets, the Tadpole trimmed well and still had plenty of freeboard. With the two of us aboard, the boat had respectable speed for a 10-footer. My GPS logged 3 knots at a relaxed pace, 4 knots at an exercise pace, and 4-1/4 knots when I was pulling as hard as I could.
After rowing around with Jeff, I dropped him off back at the ramp. The plan was to reunite HARPOON with her mothership, a 37′ Hinckley Picnic Boat. Jeff would drive to the marina where he kept that boat, and I’d row nearly 1-1/2 miles down the lake to meet him there. That’s not a daunting distance, but there’s plenty of room there to begin to loathe a rowing boat if it doesn’t get up and go. That wasn’t the case with the Tadpole. Its skeg did its job nicely and the boat tracked well; the hull carried its way without a lot of check between strokes and did a good job of maintaining trim as my weight shifted from catch to finish. The forward edge of the stern sheets served well as a stretcher, being just the right distance from the center thwart for my leg length (I’m 6′ tall) and high enough to catch me at the balls of my size-13 feet. The ergonomics worked out well for me to get a lot of power into the stroke, so I made good speed down the lake. I could have loped along at 3-3/4 knots, but I opted to make a quick run to the rendezvous and maintained 4-1/4 knots at my exercise pace.
The Whitehall form is nicely expressed by the Tadpole, even though it is only 10′ long.
Jeff had told me he’d have his Hinckley out in front of the marina to wait for me, but when I arrived there was no sign of him. He may have overestimated how long it would take me to get to the marina. I went looking for him and circled the marina, spinning around to scoot stern first through some skinny passages and enjoying the quick maneuverability of the Tadpole. We eventually met up just off the entrance to the marina with Jeff idling the Hinckley’s twin diesels. The name on the transom was QUEEQUEG. That explained the name he had given the Tadpole as its tender. (Jeff had been a fan of Moby Dick from a young age.) I rowed up to the stern, and Jeff lowered the falls while I connected the two harnesses to the lifting eyes in HARPOON’s keel and the eyebolts that slip into the oarlock sockets. Rings at the intersection of the three lines of each harness take the hooks from the davits’ falls. QUEEQUEG is quite a handsome boat and HARPOON looked like it belonged at its stern. It just wouldn’t do to have a second-rate tender hanging from those davits. While the Tadpole spends most of its time there when QUEEQUEG is underway, Jeff reports that HARPOON also tows well.
The forward edge of the stern sheets provides a sold foot brace for those with legs long enough to reach it.
As a boat designed to teach kids to row, the Tadpole should perform admirably. The boat is light and easily driven, stable enough to tolerate youthful horseplay, and well mannered whether going straight from point A to point B or following an aimless, meandering path. The Tadpole is a playful boat, so I’d suggest letting the kids play—they’ll figure out how to row in due time. They aren’t likely to have legs long enough to use the stern sheets to brace their feet, so it would be wise to install foot braces that are adjustable to suit each child and keep up with them as they grow. As a parent I was grateful for the times that my kids tired themselves out—a footbrace will quicken their becoming tired and docile. The glued-lap plywood construction is tough, so don’t sweat the scratches and the dings. Introducing kids to boating in boats such as the Tadpole that are pleasing to look at even to an untrained eye is, I think, a good way of fostering a love of boats and an appreciation for traditional forms.
HARPOON was equipped with lifting eyes and harnesses to bring the boat up with davits. The light weight of the Tadpole makes it an easy lift.
The Tadpole will do yeoman’s duty as trainer for budding rowers and as a tender ferrying people and cargo, and it is as attractive as it is utilitarian; it deserves to hang from the davits of an elegant motoryacht.
Christopher Cunningham is the editor of Small Boats Monthly.
Tadpole Tender Particulars
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LOA /10′
Beam/45″
Weight/72 lbs
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Finished boats are available from Cottrell Boatbuilding starting at $8,496 depending upon trim: oak, mahogany, or teak. Floorboards are an available option. The Tadpole can also be built in 12′ and 15′ lengths as well as in traditional plank-on-frame construction. Plans are not available.
Is there a boat you’d like to know more about? Have you built one that you think other Small Boats Monthly readers would enjoy? Please email us!
I moved to Vancouver from Ontario after I graduated from university in 2009. I was drawn to British Columbia by the mountains but immediately fell in love with the coast, taking a keen interest in surfing, open-water swimming, kayaking, and sailing. Among the very first people I met on the West Coast were two sisters, Karen and Lisa Bodie, who shared a love of climbing and hiking, and we became fast friends. Karen had built a stitch-and-glue plywood kayak when she was in high school. The boat was gorgeous, and when we went paddling it was impossible to launch without having at least a few people come up to say how beautiful it was and sometimes take photos of it.
The outdoor activities I wanted to pursue outweighed the time and money I could afford to spend on them, so kayaking took a backseat to ski touring, climbing, and mountaineering. In early 2015, I was finally ready to invest in my own touring kayak, and Karen encouraged me to make my own rather than buy one. She was planning to build a second kayak, a strip-built one this time, and she showed me some pictures. I ordered plans for a strip-built kayak the next day. I had done some woodworking and had built a few small tables and cabinets, nothing fancy, and I was ready to try something more challenging. There’s lots to say about the kayak—the short version is that was I absolutely loved building it—but this story is about a canoe.
Early in March of 2016, I received a wedding invitation from Lisa and her fiancé Mike Conlan. I had made countless rock climbs with Lisa, skied down glacier-flanked volcanoes with Mike, and been on plenty of ski tours with them both. The way they always interacted with each other and their shared love of the outdoors made them the kind of couple you just knew would end up together for the long haul.
At the time I received the invitation, I was just about to start making my next two kayaks (never one to do something halfway, I had plans to build many more boats right after I’d finished my kayak), but as I contemplated what I might do for their wedding gift, it became obvious. I’d give them a canoe! I am not especially fond of canoeing, but they love it, and the type of boat I built next didn’t matter much as long as I could fan the flames of my newfound passion for boatbuilding.
My kayak project had given me many of the skills I needed to build a strip-built canoe and I had until September 24 to finish and deliver the project—it was on. I wanted the canoe to be a wedding-day surprise, so I only told few people about it. At first, my few confidants raised questions: “How long will this take you?” “Will you be able to finish in just six months?” “Won’t this be kind of an expensive wedding gift?” Blah, blah, blah. I had a once-in-a-lifetime chance to make the wedding present of all wedding presents. Yes, it would take a lot of time; yes, I’d have to hustle to finish on time; and yes, it would cost more than I would have probably otherwise spent on a gift to them, but I love making boats, love the pair of them, and there wasn’t a single reason not to go for it.
Dave MacDonald
As the building form came together, it was evident how much the canoe would dominate the tiny workspace. The molds for a strip-built kayak would have to wait until after the wedding.
I bought the plans for their canoe: a Chestnut Prospector 16 from Bear Mountain Boats. High on my list of challenges was keeping the boat a secret—not usually considered a strength of mine. Aside from a small handful of people, everybody else would be kept in the dark, thinking I was working on the two kayaks as I had planned. Luckily, Mike and Lisa live in Calgary and don’t often make it back to Vancouver, but both were very familiar with the first kayak and the fact I’d rented a shop to make more of them. They were always curious about how my boatbuilding was going. I couldn’t count how many times Lisa asked for me to send some pictures of the kayaks. “Ahhh sorry! I forgot to take pictures yesterday,” I’d say. “I’ll get some next time I’m there,” or, “I took some but the shop is too small and the canoe doesn’t really photograph well.” I was quickly running out of excuses, but luckily as the wedding drew near her focus turned to planning the event.
I looked around at a number of different decorative strip-building accent patterns and eventually settled on a diagonally hatched horizontal stripe. I liked the appearance much more than few horizontal stripes of contrasting cedar, and from a woodworking perspective, I looked forward to the challenge, in spite of the extra work it added to my tight timetable.
When I finally got down to building the canoe, I had just as much fun as I did with that first kayak. Assembling the forms, milling the lumber, and watching a boat appear from a pile of rough-sawn lumber was wildly rewarding. I had to schedule the canoe construction around my day job—I’m a structural engineer—and so I spent many late nights and full weekends in my shop. Time was short, but I knew if I kept at it, the project would come together for the wedding.
Dave MacDonald
A radial-arm saw cut a mountain of inlay pieces for the decorative band. Stops on the table made cutting the pieces quick work, but each had to be custom fit in its place on the curved surface of the hull.
The most difficult part of the fabrication was the accent stripe. Using a couple of jigs, I cut a ton of pieces for the different shapes, but each would need to be adjusted and angled to account for the curvature of the boat at their given location. There were over 320 pieces in the strip detail alone, so this definitely took a while. I can’t even remember how many weeks I spent on that particular part. I was running on enthusiasm and caffeinated energy drinks and it’s now all just a blur.
Dave MacDonald
With the zigzag strip detail complete, work on the hull could get going at a fast pace again to finish the canoe in time.
When the strip-planking was finished, the canoe was beautiful, but I knew I had to do something more to make it uniquely Mike’s and Lisa’s. I don’t know a lot of poetry, but I knew of one particular verse that would mean a lot to outdoorsy folks like the two of them. From “The Spell of the Yukon,” by Robert Service (a fellow Canadian): “There’s a land where the mountains are nameless,/ And the rivers all run God knows where….” I decided to put this excerpt on the inside of the hull below the gunwales, surrounded by images that would capture Mike’s and Lisa’s personalities and relationship. The symbols included mountains, a skier, “Love” and “Happiness” in Japanese characters (they’d traveled together to Japan several times), a hiker, hops, and even a pasta maker. Even someone who doesn’t know them can look at this canoe and get a good sense of what kind of people they are. The script and logos are UV-resistant die-cut decals and they’d be covered by the fiberglass and varnish.
Dave MacDonald
The decals that personalized the canoe included a number of images that related to activities—camping, hiking, and skiing—that could have related any outdoorsy couple, but the hops and the pasta maker would make it clear the canoe was for Mike and Lisa.
Karen was living and working in Zurich, and despite the distance, she was very much involved in the project. I emailed her hundreds of photos and consulted with her on many phases of the canoe’s construction. She arrived in Vancouver several weeks before the wedding to help out with the final arrangements, and was finally able to make a hands-on contribution to the canoe: a bear and Polaris, the North Star, carved in the stern deck. I carved a maple leaf in the bow.
Dave MacDonald
The stern deck that Karen made would later inspire the name Lisa and Mike gave the canoe: NORTH STAR.
When I ’glassed my first kayak, it went very well, but it was the most stressful part of the process. Given how much time I’d invested by this point in the process of building the canoe, the consequences of screwing up were high. I kept meaning to wear my exercise monitor during a fiberglassing session, because I’m pretty sure my heart rate was through the roof. I was still new to boatbuilding, but I knew enough to recognize that getting a flawless layer of fiberglass is an art. The second most stressful part was the timeline. I took a week off from work just before the wedding so I could give the canoe my full attention.
The day the last coat of varnish dried, I loaded up the canoe for the 560-mile drive to the wedding at Bow Lake in Alberta, Canada. I hitched a ride with Lisa’s Uncle Rob. His car didn’t have great roof racks—we used a lot of ratchet straps and the canoe seemed secure, but there were some slightly scary gusts of wind as we wound our way through the mountain passes of BC. I did my best to just stay asleep during the drive so I wasn’t too stressed about every minor creak or shift of the precious cargo.
Bow Lake is nestled in the Canadian Rockies at 6,300′, and in late September the weather there is anything but predictable. When Rob and I arrived Saturday morning there had been a fresh sprinkling of very heavy wet snow and it was quite cold—not the most inviting weather for paddling. Most of the wedding guests were out for a day hike. Ernie, my “man on the inside,” helped me arrange our arrival with my all-too conspicuous wedding gift, which we stashed, undetected, in the trees at the lake’s edge.
I could barely contain myself. I had put in so much work to get to this point, and somehow managed to keep one of the biggest secrets I’ve ever kept. Sure, everyone in the wedding party was happy, but I’m sure I was smiling like an idiot.
The wedding service was taking place about 100′ or so up from the lake, and afterward the newly married couple would head to the water with the guests for champagne and photos. In order to deliver the canoe during the celebration afterwards, I recruited Noel, the partner of one of Lisa’s aunts, to help me. Prior to the ceremony I was busy herding folks from the lodge to the wedding site. I was also the master of ceremonies getting the guests where they needed to be, keeping things moving, and playing guitar while the couple walked down the aisle. When the ceremony got under way, I took a seat with Noel at the back. After the vows and the “I do’s,” while the couple was busy taking care of marriage paperwork, Noel and I slipped away. We took off as fast as we could, ran around to where we had stashed the canoe, slipped off our shoes and socks, rolled up our pants, put on our PFDs, and carried the canoe into the lake.
This was the first time the canoe had touched water. After all the planning and effort, I couldn’t believe it was finally about to happen. We hopped in and paddled out quite far into the middle of the lake. I couldn’t stop laughing/smiling. The canoe felt super stable, even though the wind and chop had picked up a bit.
Noel and I sat in the canoe in the middle of the lake, and watched the wedding party make its way down to the water’s edge. In this stunning mountain setting, it was impossible to hide the fact that somebody was enjoying a paddle, but we were out far enough that it was impossible for anyone to see who it was or what they were paddling.
As Mike and Lisa walked toward the lake, they noticed us right away. I was later told they said “How Canadian!!” jokingly adding, “We should try and get them in the background of our wedding photos.” The couple carried on to the beach and at the water’s edge turned away from us to face the wall of “paparazzi” snapping photo after photo. Noel and I had been waiting for the right moment, and this was it. Ernie knew what was about to happen, he was in position to take a photo of us as we paddled up to the beach. Mike and Lisa were focused on the photographers, the photographers were focused on Mike and Lisa, and not one of them noticed us coming ashore.
Ernie Bodie
Noel and I paddled to within a canoe length of the beach before any heads turned our way. It was as though we had dropped out of the sky.
We had managed to keep this a secret up to the last second. We were only a few feet from shore when Noel and I brought the canoe to a stop and everybody finally turned our way. Noel and I popped out; Mike and Lisa were shocked and confused, not so much about the canoe, but about why the hell Noel and I were out paddling during their wedding celebration.
Rich So
When I tossed the paddle to Mike he had no idea that the canoe was a wedding present and didn’t believe it when I told the couple it was theirs.
I tossed my paddle at Mike, vertically, and super hard. He caught it but was now even more back on his heels.
“Congratulations you two! Here’s your boat!”
Mike looked at the canoe again for another couple seconds and replied, “No, it’s not,” as though he believed I had mistakenly thought this was their boat, and was bringing it to them. Noel and I carried the canoe ashore, and set it right next to Mike and Lisa. I’ll never forget the completely blank look on their faces as they looked down at the canoe, just staring at it with eyes like dinner plates.
Mike Edwards
Mike and Lisa couldn’t take their eyes off the canoe and I couldn’t take my eyes off their faces. Their smiles made all the effort I’d put into the canoe worthwhile.
Once they had time to take in all of the decorative elements, they realized there was nobody else this boat could be for. I could hear some of the guests as they came to the same realization: “Oh my, did he make that?” and “What the hell? I just got them a toaster!”
Ken Dittrich
With paddles in hand, it wouldn’t be long until the couple decided to take the canoe out paddling. The wedding reception would have to wait.
In an instant, Mike and Lisa were posing for pictures with the canoe. The weather had broken, and though the day started off with light snow we were seeing beautiful blue skies. Attention turned from photos to the canoe, and it wasn’t long before they were off to the races, carrying their boat to the water.
Ken Dittrich
It was time to go canoeing and wedding finery would have to do as paddling garb.
With the stern afloat and the bow resting on the gentle slope of the gravelly beach, Mike stepped aboard and made his way to the stern seat. Lisa hiked up her white lace wedding dress. Noel Swain, the only member of the wedding party who was wearing waterproof boots, slipped the bow off the shore, pushing Mike and Lisa out into the lake.
Mike Edwards
Lisa and Mike showed their good paddling form as they put the canoe through its paces. They reported that it was quite stable and handled well.
Mike and Lisa are good paddlers and quickly had the canoe up to speed. I liked how it looked in the water and how well it responded to their paddling. I was so happy to see them in the canoe. They were beaming, and it was clear they loved it. I had never doubted that the gift would be worth the time and effort, but seeing how much they were enjoying it confirmed it. We sometimes get opportunities to do something extraordinary for other people, and it’s important to take those chances. I’m glad I did; I feel lucky that I could do something I love for people I love.
Dave MacDonald is a structural engineer in Vancouver, British Columbia, who spends most weekends in the area’s mountains or on the water. The first few boats he built elicited overwhelmingly positive feedback and with passion, enough wood stock, and ideas, this won’t be the last boat we’ll see from him. He plans to continue this as Howe Sound Wooden Boats, named for one of his favorite regular paddling locations.
If you have an interesting story to tell about your adventures with a small wooden boat, please email us a brief outline and a few photos.
Tom Shepard poles a railbird skiff in the shallow waters of the Delaware River basin. The skiff is in the collection of Independence Seaport Museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
A while back, I read a blog post that urged those of us with small boats to explore the shallows and marshes by poling our craft where the water’s too shallow for motors, and the grass and reeds are so tall that you can’t see much more than 20′ through them if you’re sitting down to paddle or row. The post concluded that we should all head to the lumberyard, grab a piece of closet rod, and start poling. If that seems a bit simplistic, it is, but if there are marshes or thin water in your area that you’d like to explore, poling is well worth considering.
Protected shallow waters such as narrow estuaries and wetlands, where grass blocks the wind and breaks up the waves, are good poling country, but you can pole almost any shallow, protected water that is flat and calm with depths from about 8″ to 3′. A pole isn’t very effective in water much deeper than that, and it’s easy to decide when it’s time to row or paddle because you’ll be working frantically to reach bottom, only to travel a yard or two.
Roger Siebert
Near the mouth of Florida’s Tampa Bay, Roger Siebert and his wife Victoria switched from rowing to poling to explore the shallow waters around Shell Key.
Roger Siebert
The Siebert’s boat is a Lillistone-designed Flint; the pole is aluminum and extends from 5′ to 12′ and has a folding duck-web foot on its business end.
I’ve picked up a lot of tips from guides, hunters, and naturalists from the Maurice River in southern New Jersey, the Susquehanna Flats in Maryland, and the Patuxtent River marshes near Washington, D.C. With a pole you will always travel very slowly, at less than a walking pace, leaving the environment relatively undisturbed. You see a lot more wildlife, and it’s a relaxing way to travel.
Boats designed to be poled have some special attributes. In general there is no rocker to the bottom, as upward-curving ends tend to make steering squirrelly. Low freeboard reduces both windage and visual impact, which is useful for hunting. A little outward flare in the topsides adds a touch of secondary stability, but only a touch. The beam on most boats runs 36″ to 44″. Double-ended boats work well moving through grass and reeds; the bottom should be flat and smooth, with no external stringers or battens. Traditional push boats are quite slender and consequently they’re not very stable; poling one of them is a pretty refined skill. These boats are unmanageable without a person or equivalent ballast in the bow. With the boat we call a gun punt or railbird boat in the upper Chesapeake, known as a pirogue in most other places, the pusher stands on a platform mounted at or slightly below the stern gunwale, sort of like a seat or a large breasthook.
One doesn’t need a particular boat to ply thin waters; larger, more stable boats can be poled. Flats boats in Florida are outboard skiffs that reach fishing grounds under power, then are poled once they reach the shallows. Your boat may fall somewhere in between a push boat and a flat boat; poling may be a new way for you to go exploring, take photographs, and go messin’ around in waters you’d previously steered away from.
Though a wooden boat is paired nicely with a wooden pole, I wouldn’t blame anyone for choosing a lightweight fiberglass or carbon-fiber pole. Weight makes a difference—think logger boots versus sneakers. Preferred woods for poles are spruce, red cedar, or sassafras. Of those, spruce has the best strength-to-weight ratio. The Upper Bay Museum in North East, Maryland, has about a dozen very old push poles, all between 2″ and 2-1/4″ in diameter. They are not light but remarkably straight, all about 14′ long and perhaps made from old lifeboat oars. It’s important to choose a pole that’s appropriate for your boat’s length. As for diameter, railbird guides in the Chesapeake Bay area seem to prefer 1 1/2″ for wooden poles.
Lori Burskey Bouchelle
All of these poles in the collection of the Upper Bay Museum of North East, Maryland, are native to the upper Chesapeake, probably not much south of the Sassafras River. The one on the left was used by the Coulter family for over fifty years, starting about 1900, with a converted gun punt. Its design is unique, an Abrams tank of a general-purpose pole, and it is really heavy, perhaps too heavy. The center pole may have been meant for use in to thick grass. At the time it was made the waters where it was used were nearly a lawn, and the only clear water was in the ” ditches,” as the natural channels are called. The pole on the right is a very common general-purpose design, perhaps a bit lightly built but very much like many other examples of its era.
What matters most is what you put on the bottom end of the pole. Poles with pointy ends are good for a hard or rocky bottom. If a pole gets stuck and won’t pull out, don’t hang on to it. A stuck pole can pull you off the boat (as a very capable friend of mine proved), so let go before you lose your balance.
Poles with folding feet have been commercially available for a hundred years to prevent, in theory, a stuck pole, but in the Chesapeake they are considered useless except you’re collecting grass samples. Most pushers simply give the pole a twist to break any suction when they retrieve it. A few will do the twist as they set the pole. You move the boat forward by walking your hands to the dry end of the pole, not by pushing with both hands fixed on the pole and putting your weight into the push.
Christopher Cunningham
The Chippewa of the Lake Superior region harvest wild rice by canoe, using a pole, usually cut from a slender hackmatack, and a foot carved from a Y-shaped crook. A half-lap joint, a peg, and a lashing hold the two pieces together
In most cases, you’d lift the pole over your head and switch it to the other side to change direction. One characteristic of a pirogue is the narrow beam of its sharp stern, which eliminates the need to for the over-the-head maneuver: you can keep the pole on one side and steer both directions from the same side. Push a little left and the boat goes left, a little right and it goes that way. You can also steer by edging the boat like a kayak: Put your weight on your right foot, and the boat goes left, and vice versa.
The Susquehanna Flats—near my home in Havre de Grace at the north end of Chesapeake Bay—are about 5 miles wide and 9 miles long. The flats may look like the Great Lakes, but in most places they’re only 6″ deep at low tide. The silt there is 2′ deep; propellers get mired in it and oars and paddles merely paw at it. Poles don’t mind it at all, and there are lots of waters like the Flats you can have to all yourself if you have a boat you can pole.
Charlie Gerhardt lives in Havre de Grace, Maryland, on the Susqehanna Flats. His interest in wooden boats and classic small craft evolved through disappointment with the characteristics of “market driven” fiberglass designs. He currently serves on the board of the Upper Bay Museum in the nearby town of North East, and restores historic small craft at the Chesapeake Bay Wooden Boat Builders School.
You can share your tricks of the trade with other Small Boats Monthly readers by sending us an email.
The angled arms of the system pivot to allow the clamps to accommodate work up to 6″ thick as well as apply pressure to the faces of the boards being clamped.
It is often necessary to edge-glue multiple boards to get the width necessary for parts such as centerboards, rudders, trunks, transoms, and thwarts. Anyone who’s ever built a wooden boat knows that gluing up these wide panels can be tricky. The WoodRiver 4-Way Clamping System makes this task a breeze by providing clamping power that squeezes the glue joint tight while keeping the boards aligned with each other.
The most common way to edge-glue wide panels is to lay the boards out and sandwiched the ends between straight sticks clamped to keep the boards aligned and flat; then pipe clamps or bar clamps are used to squeeze the glue joints tight. But these clamps tend to cause the panel to bow away from the pipe or bar, and so the clamps need to be placed on alternate sides of the work piece. This is often a messy affair, as there is a pile of clamps needing to be tightened with equal pressure on both faces of the panel to keep it flat, and it has to be blocked up so clamps can slide underneath.
The screw element of the clamp is used on the short notched bar. Some of the pictures of the system on the packing and the drawing in the instructions have the screw side of the clamp engaging the longer notched bar, but only the short bars prevent the 2x2s from interfering with the screw handle.
The WoodRiver 4-Way Clamping System simplifies this process by cutting down the number of clamps necessary, and by applying pressure to the edges and the faces of a glue-up. The device includes two clamping mechanisms and four notched plastic pads. The pads are attached to the ends of a 2×2 (or a halved 2×4) with the screws provided. The V-shaped arms have crossbars at the ends that fit into the pads’ notches and springs on the arms hold them there. In the center of each V is a 6″-long clamping pad, one fixed, the other at the end of the clamp’s screw. When pieces to be glued are set in the clamp, tightening the screw squeezes the glue joints tight and pulls the 2x2s together, flattening the panel between them.
The long notched bars provide for about 12″ of adjustment on the tail end of the 2x2s.
The multiple notches on each pad allow for an adjustment range of 18″, and the system can extend that range by using longer 2x2s. I used two 24″-long pieces cut from a common softwood 2×4. A wrap of packing tape keeps them from getting bonded to the workpiece. The clamping system can accommodate stock between 3/4″ and 6″ in thickness.
I found these clamps relatively easy to use after a couple of practice runs. They take some getting used to, but aren’t any more complicated than using sticks, C-clamps, and bar and pipe clamps. Once I determined which notches to use, I attached the clamping mechanisms to the pads of the 2x2s set on the workbench. I placed the boards, edges coated with glue, on the 2x2s and then slid the top 2x2s into the clamps. I then tightened the handles and that was it. My work piece came out flat with even glue lines, just what I was looking for. I was even able to stand the whole piece against a wall while still in the clamps so I could clean the glue squeeze-out on both sides, which was pretty handy. My pipe and bar clamps tend to add a lot of weight to the work and don’t offer convenient footing to support it on its edge.
The system provides the work with legs to stand on so it can be set out of the way while the glue cures. Unlike bar clamps and pipe clamps, these clamps can’t be accidentally knocked off.
The only knock on these clamps is that they don’t appear to be as durable or as strong as pipe clamps and bar clamps so they shouldn’t be used to eliminate gaps of poor jointing. They’re at their best for straight, flat edges that don’t need to be squeezed tight to make a good joint. The most commonly used adhesive, epoxy, doesn’t require high pressure to create a good bond. Prompt attention is needed to clean up any glue that ends up on the springs to keep the clamps in good working order.
With some practice, the WoodRiver 4-Way Clamping System can save you time on wide glue-ups by simplifying the process. Given the better results they produce, they would be a welcome addition in any shop.
Josh Anderson attended the Apprenticeshop boatbuilding program in Rockland Maine, and has since worked at several boatbuilding and carpentry shops. He and his wife, Sarah, restored a 25′ Friendship Sloop, operated a charter business with it, and spent several years sailing the Maine coast. Josh has a Masters in Maritime Management from Maine Maritime Academy and is now the Lead Boatwright at the Center for Wooden Boats in Seattle, Washington.
Tom Pamperin
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