When you’re pulling up an anchor or a crab pot, you’ll get a better purchase on the line if you get up next to the rail, but putting your weight so far off center in a small boat might bring the gunwale uncomfortably close to the water. The alternative is to sit in the middle of the boat to keep it on an even keel, drag the line over the gunwale, and wear through the paint or varnish.
both photos by the author
The Pocket Puller holds line clear of the gunwale, preserving the finish. The fairlead and jam cleat allow for one-handed operation.
The Pocket Puller is a device for pulling anchors and pots back aboard small boats. It’s made of cast aluminum and fits in a standard 1/2″ rowlock. I’ve only used the Pocket Puller in the rowlocks that I have for rowing, but you could install another socket specifically for the Pocket Puller anywhere on the boat. A nylon sheave on a stainless-steel axle brings the line turn the corner outboard so it’s not scarring the rail or bringing lot of water aboard. Inboard the Pocket Puller has a fairlead and jam cleat that takes line from 1/4″ to 1/2″. A diagonal slot in the side lets you slip a line into the fairlead and keeps it captured there when it’s under tension.
The Pocket Puller is especially handy if you’re repeatedly changing where you’re setting your anchor, whether scouting for good fishing holes or finding good holding ground in an anchorage. You can pull the anchor up and let the jam cleat hold it over the side while you row to a new spot. You don’t have to leave the rowing thwart to tend to the anchor each time.
Although not designed to handle chain, the Pocket Puller works with links no wider than 13/16″.
While the Pocket Puller is meant for cordage, I found it also worked for my anchor chain. It’s 3/16″ chain, with links 13/16″ wide. The outside edges of the wings that guide line and chain into the sheave often caught on the links, so I filed the corners off and now the chain rattles through without a snag; it even holds in the jam cleat and slips through the slot in the side of the Pocket Puller.
The Pocket Puller will bring the line up about 2-1/2″ from the rowlock socket; if you need more clearance, there is an extension arm that provides 8″ of reach, which will help keep pots and anchors from running into the hull as they reach the surface.
Christopher Cunningham is the editor of Small Boats Monthly
During the author’s four-hour row in hot weather, the NewGrip pads prevented the hot spots that would have caused blisters.
Blisters are a rower’s nemesis, and any way to prevent them or reduce their severity and frequency would be welcomed. Lots of rowers try gloves, but seams and creases in the material, and sweat and heat generally make blisters worse. Tape is another option, but it takes time to apply and lasts only for the day.
SBM
The Pro Model is equipped with wrist straps that attach to Velcro patches sewn on the neoprene pads.
Most competitive, open-water, and expedition rowers row with bare hands and work through a phase of blisters to get calluses. But calluses will fade if you stop rowing over the winter, and you may then have to toughen your hands again. I’ve tried many remedies in the past 20 years and settled on Row-Wik tape, a thinly padded tape wrapped around oar grips. The tape has eliminated blisters on my fingers and palms, but has some disadvantages: I sometimes still get blisters on my thumbs when out for weeklong trips, and I can’t move the tape to another set of oars.
SBM
The Pro Model is recommended by NewGrip for rowing: the wrist strap is made of cotton webbing for better comfort against the skin and is said to relieve the strain that causes sore wrists and carpal tunnel syndrome.
After a recent 10-mile row in 85° heat using the Pro Model, I think the NewGrip concept is going in the right direction. NewGrips protect hands with 3/16″ neoprene pads attached across the back of the fingers by elastic straps and around the wrist by detachable, adjustable Velcro straps. On one outing with the NewGrips I started rowing on the morning of a day that would warm up to the 80s. My fingers stayed cool, but I wasn’t used to the Velcro wrist straps. I ‘d put the straps on snug so they wouldn’t rub; they got too hot under the direct sun, and I wasn’t comfortable with the pressure and movement on the top of my wrist from feathering the oars at the end of each pull. I removed the wrist straps and rowed with just the elastics holding the pad to my fingers. (NewGrips come in a version without the wrist straps.)
To see what how the NewGrips worked when wet, I dunked them, expecting I’d have to squeeze water from them when I put them back on, but the neoprene didn’t absorb any water. I shook the water off and could still row with a secure grip.
I hadn’t done a long row in the previous month, and my hands were very soft and callus-free, but with NewGrips, after an hour of rowing when I’d normally feel some hot spots, my hands were in good shape. With temperatures rising to 84°, the black elastic straps across the backs of my fingers heated up, so I pulled my fingers free from the elastic and instead slid only a middle finger under each elastic while all other fingers were on top. This worked, and my palms and fingers were cooler.
At the end of a 10 ½-mile, 4-hour row, my hands were in good shape. It was odd to come in from a long row and not have to inspect my hands for damage. NewGrips may look a little clumsy, but they are functionally elegant and eliminate the threat of blisters. They made me wonder: Why didn’t someone think of this sooner?
NewGrips—without strap, $14.99; with strap $27.99—are available from direct from the manufacturer.
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.
Editor’s note:
I also rowed with NewGrips, both the PowerPads without the straps and the Pro Model with them. As simple as they appear, I was skeptical about how well they’d work, but soon took a liking to them. The benefit they provide was made most clear when I rowed hard for a few miles with a PowerPad on one hand and the other hand bare. The difference was more than just having a bit of firm paddling. On the bare hand I could feel the shear my skin was subjected to as the bones in my fingers pulled toward the bow and the oar handle resisted that motion. The skin in between would get stretched in some places, pinched in others and develop hot spots. With the PowerPad, I couldn’t detect any shear—I could feel the neoprene staying with my skin and keeping it from getting distorted. Like Dale, I didn’t develop any hot spots.
SBM
The finger straps on the Power Pads are sufficient to hold them in place over your palms.
SBM
For pulling, the pad is moved toward the fingertips; for pushing it is placed closer to the wrist.
SBM
You can slip all of your fingers or just some under the strap, whichever is more comfortable.
During the recovery part of the stroke, I keep my wrists straight and my fingers cocked back, pushing the handle sternward with the perimeter of my palm. It’s a very relaxed and loose grip, but the PowerPad didn’t diminish the control I had on the oar. Even when the pads and my hands were wet, the neoprene didn’t absorb water or get slippery. The wrist straps on the Pro Model felt a bit strange, though not uncomfortable, but reminded me not to drop my wrists too much at the release.
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 double-ended waterlines will allow ELLANDELL to coast along easily while being rowed.
After his kids were grown and out of the house, Elliot Arons found himself with lots of free time on his hands. As liberating as that might be, he often found himself “wallowing in front of the TV.” His daughter Emily prodded him to do something more productive and suggested he build another boat. When she was much younger she’d seen him build a Platt Monfort Dacron-skinned canoe, a project that he seemed to enjoy. But the building had turned out to be more engaging than the paddling. He used the canoe a few times on the annual summer trips to Friendship, Maine, but after that it gathered dust in the basement of the family home in the Bronx. What he really wanted was a sailboat.
Elliot Arons
The kit arrived neatly packaged, including custom-fit blocks to keep pieces from shifting during shipping.
Elliot liked the idea of building another boat, and his search for plans led him to Arch Davis, a New Zealand–born boat builder and designer now living in Belfast, just an hour’s drive up the Maine coast from Friendship. Arch’s Penobscot series of Whitehall-like sail-and-oar skiffs caught Elliot’s eye. He ordered one of Arch’s boatbuilding DVDs to see what the project would entail, and soon after watching it he ordered a Penobscot 17 kit.
Elliot Arons
After the side benches are installed there will be seating from stem to stern. Slabs of foam tucked under the side benches will provide flotation.
Arch strives to assure that beginning boatbuilders get off to a good start, and he certainly succeeded with Elliot, who noted: “Arch arranged it all: the delivery of his precut parts, the marine plywood from Florida, the epoxy kit that lasted for the whole construction, the video instructions, and the manual. The way Arch put the box together with the bulkhead pieces, and keel pieces affixed to the box so that nothing would rattle or shift, made me realize this was a very carefully thought-out and executed system.”
Elliot Arons
A Penobscot 17 will tip the scales somewhere between 260 and 300 pounds, making for easy towing on a light trailer.
Elliot went straight to work and turned his garage into his boatshop. The project required plenty of time and effort and occasionally kept him up at night worrying that he might have made some mistakes, but “from the start I was in sheer bliss. I lost weight because I ran up and down the stairs so often, getting tools and getting set up.”
Ellen Blye
The gunter sloop rig sports 132 sq ft of sail. The alternate ketch and schooner rigs carry 118 and 139 sq ft, respectively.
The boat’s glued-lap plywood planking is laid over stringers set in notches in the bulkheads that support the seating and for foam flotation. Elliot chose the gunter sloop rig rather than the balanced-lug schooner and ketch rig options included in the plans. To move the project along he enlisted Arch’s help and hired him to build the spars. In 10 months Elliot had his Penobscot ready for the water, and although his home is less than a half mile from the Hudson River, he trailered the boat to Maine to launch it at Friendship. Christened ELLANDELL, the boat is named after Elliot and his wife Ellen.
Ellen Blye
The gunter sloop rig is the fastest to weather of the three rigs offered in the plans. Shrouds anchored in the forward rowlocks make it possible to keep the jib’s luff taut.
He sails the waters of Maine’s Muscongus Bay, often solo, sometimes with family. He has been getting the boat ready for the summer sailing season and writes: “I needed a hobby and building the boat kept me busy; now I have the upkeep and I’m happy.”
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 made the spars for my Caledonia yawl in 2005, I decided to lighten the largest of them by making them hollow and give the bird’s-mouth method a try. It was a lot of work milling eight staves for the two masts and the yard and the boom for the lug main spar, but I was pleased with the results. They were quite light, most notably the mainmast, which I had to lift high to slip though the foredeck—it was a cinch to step.
It didn’t take me long to notice something unusual about the mainmast when I was sailing. Its halyard wasn’t always where it should be, snug against the mast. It tended to move away, as much as 3″. This puzzled me because it seemed that the halyard was moving, even though I knew it was quite taut. I eventually realized that the halyard was staying as straight as a bowstring, and the mast was bending away from it. At 19′ the mast was the tallest I’d ever made, so I accepted that some flex was meant to be. Still, there were times when I nervously watched the gap between halyard and mast pulse and widen.
I was sailing across Puget Sound with Sharon, a new girlfriend at the time, and we had made a brisk crossing on a broad reach from east to west and had turned around to head back. On the new course I had to haul the sheets in and point higher. We were making very good speed, but the gap between the mast and halyard was wavering between 3″ and 4″. A fast-moving tugboat crossed a few hundred yards ahead of us. Its wake had smoothed a bit by the time it reached us, and the bow climbed over the first wave easily, but after the bow rose to meet the second wave, it fell heavily into the trough. The mast exploded with the report of a shotgun blast and broke in two, about 5′ above the deck. The sail fell overboard and we came to an abrupt stop. Sharon looked at me with her eyes wide. I shrugged and said, “It looks like I have a woodworking project for next weekend.” With the sail aboard and the spiky stump of the mast unstepped, I got out the oars and rowed us home, a distance of about 3 miles.
I did some more reading on bird’s-mouth spars and found one bit of information that I’d missed: When a spar is made hollow, its diameter needs to be increased to give it the same strength as a solid spar. I wasn’t going to make the hole in my foredeck any larger for a new mast, so I made the replacement solid. It’s a lot heavier and a chore to raise and lower, but having a mast that stays where it belongs, snug against the halyard, is a comfort when the big lugsail is drawing hard.
I’d put too much work into the bird’s-mouth mainmast to be happy scrapping the whole thing. I sawed off a 4 -1/2′ section of the upper half, cut away the plugged top, and used it as didgeridoo, a rather poor one; and with a portion of the bottom half of the mast I made a stout, unwavering music stand.
I live in Fort Myers Beach, a small town on Estero Island on the southwest coast of Florida. Estero is a barrier island with a long, shallow-sloping white sand beach facing the Gulf of Mexico on one side and the protected waters of Estero Bay on the other. My wife Courtney and I have a house within a few hundred yards of the beach, and after a major surgery I spent a good deal of time walking there to recuperate. I got to thinking about owning a small boat that I could hand-trolley from home and launch at the beach. Rowing would be good recreation too—like most men my age with a desk job, I need exercise.
I wanted a small rowing boat light enough for me to manage by myself, large enough for the two of us, and wooden—something beautiful and interesting. Courtney, a master of online shopping, found the website for Cottrell Boatbuilding in Searsport, Maine, and there it was, the Chaisson dory.
The Chaisson dory was designed as a tender and originally built in the early 1900s by George L. Chaisson of Swampscott, Massachusetts. It is quite sturdy and has a high load capacity. The 10′ dory has a rounded lapstrake hull with a small flat area on the bottom that’s perfect for beaching. Chaisson made no provisions for sailing; the boat is strictly for rowing.
A little research and a few phone calls to Lynn and Dale Cottrell confirmed that their version of the Chaisson dory met all of my criteria. I placed the order, and six months later the finished boat was shipped to a marina a few blocks from our house.
Doug Eckmann
To keep this boat light for walking it to the beach, the floorboards were made of cedar. Cross cleats for heel bracing were added after a few launches through breaking waves.
As I unpacked the boat from its shipping crate, I told myself not to be disappointed if the quality of work was not perfect, but there was nothing to worry about. The boat was not just perfect; it was a work of art. The workmanship is flawless, including the beautifully painted hull with a navy-blue accented sheerstrake and eight coats of varnish on the mahogany seating, trim, and transom, which bore the name ELIZABETH II. A friend had told me: “Whatever you name the boat, make it a ‘II’ so people will think it’s the tender to your yacht.” As sort of a joke I’d sent an email to Lynn asking if I could have a name painted on the transom, something like Elizabeth II (Courtney’s middle name is Elizabeth). The next day I received an email with a picture of the name painted on the transom.
John Walther
With two aboard, the Chaisson dory is in good trim and has plenty of freeboard. The span between the locks at the forward rowing station is less than that at the amidships station and calls for a second shorter pair of oars.
The Cottrells’ Chaisson dory has a length of 10′2″ and a beam of 4′2″. It has three seating positions: spacious mahogany sternsheets, and thwarts at the center and the bow. Both thwarts are accompanied by oarlocks. The forward rowing position allows better balance when carrying a passenger on the sternsheets. The boat came with one pair of Shaw and Tenney oars the ideal length for the center station. I ordered a second set of oars 6″ shorter to use in the narrower forward rowing position.
The boat has glued lapstrake plywood construction with laminated Douglas-fir stems and a gorgeous mahogany transom. The sturdy thwarts and gunwales are also mahogany. The woodwork is also available in teak or white oak. Dale offers floorboards in mahogany, teak, or oak, but made mine of cedar to keep the boat light. The hull is without frames but stiffened by the thwarts and the sturdy open gunwale. The boat weighs about 90 lbs. I find this is manageable; it’s easy for me to walk it to and from the beach with a lightweight adjustable aluminum launching dolly. The boat’s fastenings and hardware are silicon bronze. We requested bronze handles on the transom to aid handling and beach launching.
Doug Eckmann
The waters on the Gulf coast are not always calm, but the dory can easily manage a bit of surf. Here Courtney holds the boat, waiting for Doug.
On the maiden voyage I started learning some of the extra details that would make the boat easier to handle in the medium surf we often have on Fort Myers Beach. First, I added teak cleats on the floorboards to brace my heels for rowing. When I launched into the waves, the bow would rise to meet the wave crests and I tended to slide off the seat unless I had a way to brace my feet. Second, waves slapping the oars tend to lift them out of the oarlocks, so I replaced the horn oarlocks with round closed oarlocks. Even these tended to jump out of the rowlocks, so I screwed small bronze cleats to the pad support blocks to secure the line tied to the oarlock shaft. The cleats make it easy to secure and to dismount the oars quickly. Launching in the surf, I have to get underway quickly to avoid being broached and rolled by incoming waves. Finally, I found machined aluminum split-shaft collars that I installed to back up the leather oar collars, which were not quite sturdy enough for the surf.
After I had ironed out a few details and mastered my launching technique, rowing off of the beach was really fun. With a mostly rounded bottom, the dory is a bit tender, so getting in and out takes a bit of care, as with a canoe. With the crew seated and weight centered, the boat feels very stable underway, even in moderate waves; I don’t think it would easily capsize. It rides waves like a cork. When I head in, I can catch a wave, surf right up on the beach, and land upright on the flat part of the bottom. The large transom can take on a following sea or breaking surf with little danger of swamping, although I must maintain course by alternately dragging oars to keep the bow pointed straight down the wave face. A small skeg aids tracking/keeping the boat on course.
We don’t use the dory as a tender, so I ordered the boat without the standard canvas rubrails, and had the mahogany gunwales finished bright. I can’t say from experience how it would behave under tow, but with its tucked-up stern, cutaway forefoot, and a bow eye set low, it appears that the dory would tow well.
Courtney Eckmann
John Gardner writes of the Chaisson dory tenders: “In spite of their narrow, flat bottoms, which, incidentally are great for landing on the beach, they are essentially round-hull boats and behave as such, being in their performance on a par with classic yacht tenders by Lawley and Herreshoff, although they are only half as difficult to build.”
The dory is very maneuverable and turns quickly and easily. I estimate solo rowing speed to be about 4 knots with moderate exertion. The boat is light, so it doesn’t carry a lot of momentum between stokes. In calm water, I make about 2 knots with Courtney and our two small dogs on board. I have not had three people on board, but my impression is that it would be a bit overloaded except for short distances in smooth water. With my “crew” aboard, rowing is about as strenuous as walking briskly. I am pleased that rowing turned out to be the good exercise I’d hoped for. After an outing of several hours I can report that rowing pretty much exercises every muscle I could feel—calves, thighs, seat, stomach, chest, shoulders, arms, and especially legs—but without discomfort or lower-back issues.
In shallow Estero Bay on the backshore of Estero Island, this little dory has allowed us to see seabirds roosting on small mangrove islands and bottlenose dolphins. Once we came upon a gathering of West Indian manatees and were charged by a bull manatee Moby-Dick style. He dove under the boat, his massive back just inches below the boat. On another occasion I rowed right into a school of thousands of mullet, leaping in all directions as larger predator fish swooped into the school to attack them. Our Chaisson dory is less intrusive than larger boats, and we get to see things up close. The boat’s small size, easy launching, ready availability, and low maintenance invite using it at the drop of the hat, so we get out on the water frequently. My friends with powerboats don’t seem to get out that often.
The custom-built Chaisson dory was expensive for a 10′ rowing boat, but not pricey for a masterpiece of woodworking that has impressed everyone who has seen it on the beach.
Doug Eckmann grew up in Racine and learned to sail on Wisconsin lakes. He joined a university sailing team in 1969 and later did more sailing on Texas lakes when he moved to Austin. He is a civil-environmental engineer in Fort Myers, Florida.
Particulars
[table]
LOA/10′ 2″
Beam/4′ 2″
Weight/85 lbs
[/table]
Cottrell Boatbuilding offers the Chaisson dory for $5,450 to $6,475 depending on woods used. Floorboards are optional. Lines and offsets for the boat are published in The Dory Book by John Gardner.
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.
Iain Oughtred’s double-ended beach boats are descendants of Shetland Island yoals, workboats used extensively for fishing. While the Shetland Islands have long been politically linked to Scotland, older cultural ties to the Norse led to the development of boats with a reputation for seaworthiness, thanks to their Viking-derived shape and lapstrake construction. While some yoals were equipped with dipping lug sails, the majority were simply rowed. (Marc Chivers, a research student at the Center for Nordic Studies in the Orkney Islands, explores the history of these boats in a blog, The Shetland Boat: History, Folklore and Construction.)
The 18′2″ Arctic Tern is one of a series of Oughtred’s family of double-ended designs for oar and sail. These range from the capacious 19′6″ Caledonia yawl to the compact 15′1″ Whilly Tern. His designs differ from the traditional yoals in that they are intended to sail as much as row and designed for glued-lap plywood construction. The use of modern materials gives the boats several advantages: They are lighter than their traditional counterparts, allowing for easier rowing and transport; without ribs or other structural members, the cockpits feel more open; and the epoxy-and-plywood construction eliminates the problem of leaking caused by the shrinking of wood as it dries, an issue in traditionally built boats.
all photos by or from the collection of the author
The boomkin on this Arctic Tern is not according to Oughtred’s plans, but it is a common feature on his other double-enders with mizzens.
The Arctic Tern is a construction project for a builder with intermediate skills or better. The six strakes make for planks that are narrow enough to go on the molds without too much fuss at the ends. While the plans fall on the well-detailed end of the spectrum and include almost all the information a person would need to construct the boat, Oughtred’s book, Clinker Plywood Boatbuilding Manual, is a useful accompaniment to his plans.
The Arctic Tern is designed to be a camp-cruising vessel capable of being rowed or sailed long distances. It easily has enough space in the open cockpit to accommodate two people, and enclosed flotation compartments in the ends hold gear for a weeklong adventure. For a day sail, the boat will comfortably carry two adults and two children and is easily singlehanded, even under rough conditions.
I can rig and launch the boat by myself in less than 20 minutes. The unstayed masts on the yawl version of the Arctic Tern speed rigging; they’re simply dropped into the maststeps. The top forward corner of the centerboard protrudes at the top of the trunk; the unweighted board is easily lowered and raised. A shock cord attached to the board has a snap-shackle that gets clipped to a stainless-steel pad-eye at the aft end of the centerboard case to keep the board down and allow the board to retract if it hits an obstruction. With the board up, the Arctic Tern floats in about a foot of water. Nosed onto a beach on a falling tide, the boat leans slightly but comes to rest relatively flat, and you can attend to any chores that need to be done. If you wanted to stay aboard while aground, tucking a small fender under each bilge would allow you to sit or sleep in level comfort.
The circular access port was added to ease access to the forward compartment.
The Tern has a surprising number of seating locations for a boat of its size: the aft flotation compartment, the side benches, the amidships thwart, and even the floorboards. This variety makes a long journey much more comfortable and makes it easy to fine-tune trim. Each location provides some back support, as well as legroom and easy access to the sheets and the main’s downhaul. With my homemade cockpit tent, I find it reasonably comfortable to sleep on the floorboards by sliding my legs under the thwart and resting my head aft. This extends the range of places I’ve been able to cruise solo, especially on a multi-day trip where camping on shore is prohibited or not possible, but the boat is too small for additional crew to be comfortable overnight.
The buoyancy compartments under the end decks keep the Arctic Tern floating high, and the masts keep it from turning turtle. Additional flotation secured under the side benches would add stability to the swamped boat when it is righted.
Flotation compartments in the bow and stern are a great safety feature and double as dry storage. In my capsize drills the masts prevent the boat from turning turtle. When the boat is righted, the built-in flotation keeps the open slot at the top of the trunk above water level so the boat can be bailed. I can right the Tern by myself by standing on the centerboard and scrambling into the boat as it rolls back over. Sloshing water in the boat can destabilize it, so you have to crawl aboard and be ready to steady the boat. There’s a lot of bailing that follows rerighting, so a good high-capacity pump or bucket at the ready is required for a quick and effective recovery. (For a video of a capsize trial, click here.)
The flotation compartments have ample storage space for gear, but the oval hatches in the bulkheads, measuring approximately 15″ x 25″, are awkward to use and too small for larger items like sleeping bags or larger dry bags. I’ve installed a round deck plate on top of the forward compartment and plan to install larger rectangular watertight hatches on top of both compartments for even easier access.
The cockpit offers a lot of open, flexible space, and when we’re cruising we travel with a lot of gear kept in numerous small dry bags that we lash along the port side, below the benches and thwart, leaving room on the starboard side of the boat to access sails or set an anchor.
The Arctic Tern is drawn up with one rowing station; with some modifications to the interior layout the boat could be arranged for tandem rowing.
With a beam of 5′4 1/2″, the Tern is comfortable to row at approximately 2 knots, but is also about the largest boat that a man of my size—6′1″, 175 lbs—can row for long distances. The Tern tracks well, providing the gear in the boat is trimmed well and the rudder and centerboard are retracted. I have rowed the Tern with a variety of flat-bladed oars, in lengths from 9′ to 11′, but 10′ seems to be the ideal balance between the ability to make long strokes in flat water and the quick strokes needed to row in rough conditions. Finding a location to store the oars when the boat is under sail can be a challenge on many sail-and-oar boats, including this one. The oars are too long to stow on the cockpit sole or comfortably in the locks and secured to the gunwales. Stowing them leaning partially on the forward flotation compartment while tucked under the thwart on the starboard side keeps them reasonably secure, but also accessible in a pinch. A motor well is indicated in the plans, but I don’t have a need for an outboard and prefer not sacrificing valuable storage space and flotation to accommodate one.
Although the Tern has rowing boats as its forebears, it sails very well. While a stayed gunter sloop rig is one option Oughtred offers in his plans, many builders choose a balanced-lug main with a leg-o’-mutton mizzen. The mizzenmast calls for a split tiller or a push-pull Norwegian-style tiller. The latter can feel unfamiliar if you’re used to the more common sweep tiller, but after a few hours of sailing you’ll get the hang of it.
The 120-sq-ft sloop rig with a high-peaked gaff main and a jib may be the fastest and highest-pointing of the rigs shown in the plans, but I opted for the lug yawl rig with a 94-sq-ft main and a 17-sq-ft mizzen. The yawl rig keeps the center of effort low and reduces the heeling while under sail. The mizzen also serves an important safety role. With the mainsheet released and the mizzen sheeted in tightly, I can easily heave-to. The boat will weathercock and bring the bow pointing into the wind and waves. If the tiller is lashed with the rudder angled out to the side, it acts as a brake, slowing the downwind drift of the boat. I have sat comfortably hove-to for up to a half hour in 20-knot winds; this gives me ample time to consider options, have a snack, or drink, and make good, unhurried decisions. While hove-to it’s also easy to reef or lower the mainsail from the safety of the middle of the cockpit.
The mainsail is shaped by a highly tensioned downhaul near the base of the mast, and with the luff pulled taut, the standing-lugsail points reasonably well, but not as high as the gunter rig might. And although the shape of the sail is better when on the downwind side of the mast than creased over the mast on the upwind side, the boat seems to perform about the same on either tack. The Tern is steady and responsive under most wind conditions, and in a big gust, as long as the main isn’t sheeted too tightly, the boat tends to round up rather than get knocked down. With three rows of reefpoints, the mainsail can be sized to sail comfortably in a wide variety of conditions from light winds to about 20 knots. By the time the third reef is needed, the ability to point and steer well goes down and it’s time for me to head for a safe haven.
I have the mizzen sheet reeved through a stand-up spring block on the rudderhead, as called for in the plans, but the builder of my boat’s sistership deviated, adding a boomkin, a feature incorporated in several other Oughtred designs, for sheeting his mizzen. In light winds both arrangements perform equally well, but when the wind gets over 15 knots, control of both the rudder and mizzen is easier with the boomkin. The Tern rides dry whether under sail or oar; even under bumpy conditions, not much more than a few splashes tend to come aboard.
The author’s Arctic Tern, ROW BIRD (left), and SIGMUND, both built by Andy McConkey, sail out of Portland, Oregon, and cruise the inland waters of the Pacific Northwest.
The Arctic Tern fulfills its role as a daysailer and camp-cruiser with flair. The boat quickly goes from driveway to launch, making a day sail an enjoyable outing with little time spent at the ramp. It also makes the transformation from a capable sailboat into a respectable rowing boat or the reverse, with practice, in about a minute and a half. It has impressive stability and maneuverability in open water, and sails especially well with a heavy load aboard. The ability to pull the Arctic Tern ashore for the night or sleep aboard at anchor enables it to go places other boats can’t follow. If you are in the market for the nautical equivalent of hiking and backpacking, this boat is certainly capable of taking you on adventures near and far.
Bruce Bateau sails and rows traditional boats with a modern twist in Portland, Oregon. His stories and adventures can be found at his web site, Terrapin Tales.
Particulars
[table]
LOA/18′ 2″
Beam/5′ 2″
Weight/240 lbs
[attr style=”font-weight:bold;”]Sail area
Single lug/102 sq ft
Lug yawl/111 sq ft
Gaff sloop/120 sq ft
[/table]
Plans ($306AUS) and kits ($3,970AUS) for the Arctic Tern are available from Oughtred Boats in Australia. Hewes & Company in Blue Hill, Maine, produces many CNC-cut kits, including one for the Arctic Tern. Jordan Boats in the UK also makes kits for Oughtred-designed boats.
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!
In the middle of July last summer I found myself with no responsibilities. I had five days with no plans and no kids to attend to. I packed AANAR, my modified Herreshoff Coquina, with camping gear and drove from my home in the small town Porvoo to my favorite place to launch, the southern point of Emäsalo Island on the Gulf of Finland. Being by the open sea, the wind there is steady and unobstructed, making sailing faster and more pleasant than in the 10-mile-long inlets that flank Emäsalo. I launched AANAR and rigged her for sailing. The original Coquina was a cat-ketch and with rope steering; mine is rigged with single lugsail and tiller steering. The Wizard of Bristol gave her delicate and fast lines, and she is rewarding to sail.
all photographs by the author
AANAR’s cockpit has plenty of room for a solo sailor and cruising gear. The burgundy cushions hanging over the side decks are an innovation I tried, hoping to make seat cushions do double duty as fenders. They were, frankly, more comfortable to sit on before the modification.
After setting sail, it took just a few minutes to get out of the bay and around the sheltering Fagerudden cape. Once I had passed the rugged red granite cliffs and boulder-strewn shoreline of Haxalö Island, I had a broad view to south into the vast Gulf. After the hassles of getting groceries and packing charts, clothes, and camping gear, I was finally by the open sea and AANAR’s cream-colored sail was pulling steadily beneath a patchwork of brilliant white clouds and blue sky. While the forecast did not promise sunshine, it did offer light winds, smooth seas, and good sailing. I am comfortable in AANAR with full sail up to 14 knots wind, and when reefed down have done some crossings in sheltered waters safely with 17 to 20 knots.
This narrow channel leads into the bay by Pirttisaari, a village that has been inhabited from the beginning of 16th century. While fishing is the main occupation for islanders. the island has two artillery stations that are part of Finnish defenses.
The 5-mile crossing east from the southernmost tip of Emäsalo to the Pellinki archipelago is wide open, but with the wind being gentle and on a broad reach, the sailing was easy and peaceful with little waves only gently rocking AANAR. In the tranquil atmosphere I could step away from the rush to get launched and give myself over to the tranquility of the island-fringed waters. The wind simmered down after my crossing, and I continued slowly eastward through more sheltered waters. Scattered clouds blocked the sun and cast patchwork shadows on the sea and surrounding islands. With the 3-mile-wide Pellinki island slipping by to port, I headed for the island of Sandön, its forest a dark green line on the eastern horizon.
There are no noticeable tides in the Gulf of Finland, and the fluctuations in the sea level that come with wind and changes in barometric pressure are gradual and rarely more than 15″. In a sheltered bay AANAR can rest safely while pulled up on the rocks with just a pad under her bow.
When I approached the shallow west beach of one of Sandön’s coves, AANAR was headed for a scattering of rocks breaking the calm surface of the sea, so I dropped the sail and paddled slowly closer. I found a spot where the grass came almost right down to the water, steered the bow into it, and pulled AANAR upon on a gently sloping sandy beach. I found a flat patch of grass the size of my pop-up tent. Angling under cast-iron gray clouds, rays of sun lit a sea surrounded by the dark silhouettes of nearby islands.
After landing on Sandön, I set up camp with a pop-up tent, a kitchen in a box, boat cushions as a divan with a view, and a bottle of wine.
June and early July had been exceptionally cold, and there were only a few other boats in this popular northwest-facing cove lined with old, crooked pine trees growing a few paces up from the water’s edge. A family of barnacle geese with black necks and white masks swam by, occasionally dipping their heads underwater looking for food. The only sound was the lapping of ripples on the stony shore.
I walked along the esker that formed the island’s spine, following a narrow path that zigzagged through the heathland under tall pines. The island is narrow, and I caught glimpses of both shorelines through the colonnade of trees. Most of the islands of the archipelago are of solid granite, but Sandön (Sand Island) is a long, cusped crescent fringed with sand and stretching three-quarters of a mile from north to south. I continued my barefoot stroll along the eastern shoreline on the smooth sandy beach. The clouds made way for the sun, and a warm shaft of light gave the pine trees and cliffs a coppery glow.
While I was camped at the northern tip Sandön, the skies cleared and I had one of the few sunny moments of my trip. In the distance to the south lies the open water of the Gulf of Finland and to the west, just out of view, lies one of the most beautiful sand beaches you can find in all of Finland.
The next day I woke to raindrops drumming gently and steadily on the tent. I was in no hurry to get up and waited for a while as the rain waned to a drizzle. When I shoved off, I paddled standing forward in the boat with one oar to get out of the shallow water and glided over a coffee-brown, rocky bottom. I lowered the centerboard, attached the rudder, and with a few pulls raised the lugsail. AANAR immediately picked up speed, sliding silently away from the shore and leaving nothing but ripples in the calm surface of the water. A man and a woman were walking on the beach near a small catamaran they’d pulled ashore. They waved to me and I waved back. I had noticed them yesterday evening camping a few hundred meters down the shoreline, but hadn’t approached them. This is typical of Finnish nature. We appreciate our country’s vast wild spaces, the thousands of lakes and islands, and respect the privacy they afford us.
Taking a rest and steering with my toes, I sailed away from the small islands at the edge of the Gulf of Finland. On the horizon on the right is Klovharu, the small and remote islet where Tove Jansson and her companion spent their summers.
Some of my clothes were already wet from the rain, and the cold, damp air had gotten into my bones, so instead of sailing farther east I headed back west to a small island owned by the yachting club I belong to. The sauna there would warm me up. I sailed past a three-mile-long broken chain of islets and granite outcroppings at the edge of the Gulf of Finland. One of the islets is Klovharu, nothing more than a knoll of bare rock rising from the open sea. On this remote island artist, cartoonist, and creator of Moomins, Tove Jansson and her companion Tuulikki Pietilä spent summers for nearly 30 years. (Moomins are hippopotamus-like children’s-book characters whose popularity spread from Finland to all of Scandinavia, and the UK, Japan, and even the former USSR.) There are no trees on the island, only bare granite, rocks, and a small one-room cabin with a chimney in one corner. Tove and Tuulikki had a wooden rowboat with a small outboard, and fished for food whenever the wind allowed. When it was blowing hard they could not get off the island, but Klovharu was their refuge and their inspiration. They fell in love with the open sea, the abundant sunlight, and the storms that swept past their island from time to time.
As AANAR was gliding slowly in the calm reflecting sea, I was tempted to head for some of the small outer islands near Klovharu, but being surrounded by the open sea, there is always some swell, making landing tricky, especially when I’m on my own. I sailed instead to Äggskär, which has a harbor sheltered by two surrounding islands.
There is plenty of space in the boat for one man and camping gear. The dark grey box is for food and the transparent one is the kitchen containing a camp stove. Clothes are packed in watertight bags; sleeping bag and mat fit under the small foredeck.
Äggskär is a pine-forested island the size of few football fields; it sits at the center of a tight archipelago of five other islands. The bay between Äggskär and Långholmen to the east is littered with boulders; low slabs of rusty-colored granite bedrock rise from Äggskär’s eastern shoreline. After landing at the pier I grabbed my kitchen box and some food and walked to a firepit near the rocky shore. I cooked hotdogs over an open fire and brewed a strong latte with a moka pot. I usually take a refreshing dip in the sea whenever there is an opportunity, but I passed this time, still feeling chilled from sitting in the boat during the cool morning.
From Äggskär to Furuskär, the island owned by my yacht club, it was going to be 8 miles tacking upwind, so soon after lunch I left and raised sail. The wind was very light but gradually increased as I passed by the southernmost tip of Emäsalo Island. The sun was getting low, and I still had some tacking to do before I would reach Furuskär. When I arrived I was ready for the sauna. A private island with a sauna might sound like something fancy, but the sauna, typical of those in the area, is a very modest log building measuring only 9’ by 7’ with a tiny dressing room on other side. Inside the sauna there is a wood-burning stove and benches on one wall. The steel stove, streaked with rust, has a water tank attached to it, supplying hot water for washing. There are hundreds of thousands of these summer-cottage saunas along the coastline around the many numerous lakes of Finland. It is estimated that in all of Finland there are two million saunas.
I got the fire going and heated the sauna up to 175 degrees (80°C), and relaxed on the upper bench. I slowly soaked up the heat and gradually started throwing more and more water over the hot hissing stones, and a cloud of hot vapor gently curled down from the ceiling, making the humid air feel a whole lot hotter. The sauna was close by the shoreline, just a short walk down to sea for a refreshing swim. The combination of hot sauna and cooling effect of the water gave my body a rush and an instant feeling of deep relaxation and comfort. It was not so effective as it is during the winter, but good enough.
Warmed up and with dry clothes, I launched the next day and sailed farther west in a steady wind of 10 knots. I was going upwind and hiked out to keep AANAR going fast with a moderate heel. It is in conditions like these that I enjoy sailing the Coquina most. With my one hand on the helm and the other on the hard-pulling sheet, AANAR was briskly climbing up and down the gently sloping waves with water splashing hard against the lapstrake hull. The lugsail had a perfect full form and was driving us powerfully, and I had just enough weight on the rail to keep her from heeling too much.
Kaunissaari means “Beautiful Island,” but much of its shoreline can be quite menacing where waves break on bare rocks and cliffs.
My destination for the night was Kaunissaari, a mile-long island some 5 or 6 miles to the west. With this moderate wind it would only take an hour and a half to get there, so I took a tack to the southeast and into the sheltered village bay of Pirttisaari, a former fishing village. The bay is protected from all directions, and has small piers, boathouses, and wooden villas with red, white, and yellow façades all around its shoreline. I strolled along a narrow path through the well-maintained gardens with rose bushes, colorful flower benches, and neatly mowed lawns stretching all the way to the shoreline. After passing a half a dozen villas, I continued deeper into the island; the narrow path turned into a wider sandy trail, where the alder and pine trees were taller and shading the narrow winding road.
I returned to AANAR, cast off from the dock, and raised sail again. The wind had died, so I found myself doing little more than drifting as I tried to get out of the bay and through the narrow channel. With a few painfully slow tacks I managed to struggle out of the channel. There was still a swell running from the wind earlier in the day, and AANAR was rolling in the waves with little speed, the sail and spars sagging and swinging from side to side. I could have taken the sail down and pulled out oars, but I decided to wait. In half an hour the wind picked up again, and I reached Kaunissaari after a couple of hours. I sailed in between the harbor’s twin curved breakwaters of mounded boulders. The 200-yard-long natural bay behind the breakwaters was crowded with boats and surrounded by alder trees hanging over the water. I made a smooth landing in one of the free spots on the dock with sail still up.
While all of the other boaters visiting Kaunissaari were stuck in the shadowed harbor, I had the best view all to myself just a short walk away.
A young couple with kids in a boat tied up next to me had come for the night in a classic Danish Coronet, a fiberglass day-cruiser motorboat with a small cabin. The kids were wondering where I sleep. I showed them my tent and then packed the camping gear into a bag and walked a few hundred yards along the south shore. I found a meadow of hay and flowers just 20 yards from the sea with more than enough room for my tent and an unobstructed view into the light blue vast Gulf of Finland. As the fading sun bathed the rocks and cliffs with amber light, I had a swim in the cool and clear water. I toweled dry and relished a cup of port wine sitting on the still-warm bare stone. I soon turned in for the night and fell asleep listening to the swell breaking into the rocky shore.
Rays of sun warming up the tent woke me up, so I packed my gear, and had breakfast and coffee on the pier. I took a 2-mile walk along the path going around the island. On the northern, more sheltered side of the island the dense spruce forest pushed up tight against the shore. The path was in deep shade and the only sunlight I could see was shining on the islands across the water to the north. I rounded the western part of the island and turned south, where serene meadows were surrounded with crooked alder trees and rugged cliffs that had been worn smooth by the last ice age. I saw a few tents and campsites, but they were well hidden behind the rocky knolls, bushes, and trees, so this part of the island, while popular, did not feel crowded.
This was the first clear day of the week, and as I set sail my eyes were overwhelmed by the brilliant light and the bright blue sky. The wind was nothing more than a gentle puff, the sea calm and reflecting, so I was able to take the outer route back to the southern tip of Emäsalo. AANAR was slipping gently eastward in a broad reach, making 3 knots. I tucked the tiller extension into a slot between the bench and the hull and left it locked there. Sitting in the middle of the boat facing the stern, I could steer by shifting my weigh slightly from one hip to the other. I sailed literally by the seat of my pants for half an hour.
On my last day out I stopped for a lunch in the quiet lee of Onas island. A small natural harbor there is protected by a row of boulders.
Halfway home I turned north along the east shore of Onas Island and landed behind a natural breakwater of rocks. I was less than 3 miles from Emäsalo, and, in no hurry to end this trip, I would have a leisurely lunch before heading home. Twenty meters up a gentle slope from the beach there was a fire pit surrounded with rough-hewn wooden benches. Instead of fire I used my camp stove, and while waiting for a potful of potatoes to cook, I admired the bright mahogany sheerstrake and shining white curving hull of AANAR resting peacefully, tethered to the breakwater. To my right were white and yellow flowers rising between the rocks of a rugged shore and small alder trees with branches curving over the distant blue line of the horizon. My mind was clear and my spirit lifted by the serene views and the sight of a small boat so full of character. I was already planning a next venture, and would bring my kids to share in all this coast and this boat have to offer.
Mats Vuorenjuuri is the father of three and an entrepreneur, making a living in graphic design, photography, and freelance writing. He has sailed his whole life and has restored wooden sailboats and motorboats. He currently owns a small open plywood motorboat, a traditional Finnish lapstrake racing rowing boat with sliding seats, and the Coquina.
Herreshoff’s Coquina
In the winter of 1889 N.G. Herreshoff designed Coquina for himself. He had been sailing small boats all his life and was at the prime of his creativity, so surely this was going to be an exceptional boat. The original Coquina had cat-ketch rig and rope steering. Our Coquina, AANAR, was built in Finland in 2000 for a farm owner who was a passionate sailor. In 2010 he turned 70 and was ready to pass it on, and by that time had forgotten the name of the builder. AANAR was built of locally harvested pine with lapstrake construction and was rigged with a single standing lugsail and equipped with tiller steering. The lugsail is very fast to set up, and simple to control. The mast and yards fit into the boat while trailering. AANAR sails well to windward, but being light and relatively narrow she is lively and requires hiking out in anything but light winds. Herreshoff carried some ballast in his Coquina, but he also had two rigs, the larger being 183 sq ft, which he thought was too much for ordinary sailing.
Our Coquina’s hull is as Herreshoff designed it, but the rig is a single lugsail. Without the usual mizzen in the way, we can use a tiller rather than the rope steering system that Herreshoff used. The Coquina is lively and fast and for the first two years we owned her we used her mainly for daysailing and taking part in RAID Finland. It was only later that we found AANAR well suited for camp-cruising.
Off the wind the Coquina is remarkably fast for her size. She has a fine entry, the distinctive Herreshoff reverse curve on her forward waterline, and a subtle form that lets her slide effortlessly through water. While the boat is not designed to plane, AANAR does occasionally exceed her hull speed, with the help of waves, and reach 6 to 7 knots. Sailing straight to downwind can be a bit challenging, the big single sail pulling on one side and waves rolling the boat. The addition of a boom vang made sailing downwind and on a broad reach much more comfortable and efficient.
With her narrow hull, curving sheerline, and low freeboard in the aft section, she looks more like a racehorse than a working one. She is surprisingly seaworthy, though, and we have made some crossings safely with winds around 20 knots. We have one reef in the sail, but when reefed down her performance upwind is decreased significantly.
She has ample space for gear and two people, but is a bit crowded with three people on board. I find AANAR is sensitive to weight, performing best when lightly loaded. Once you get her moving, the Coquina rows well, keeping a steady track, but she is a bit heavy for rowing longer distances.
For safety, I have installed four 15-gallon (55-liter) flotation bags underneath the aft deck, side benches, and forward bench. For navigation we have a fixed compass on the centerboard case, and charts in watertight shield bag. Camping gear, tent, sleeping pads, and bags fit under the decks. Clothes packed in dry bags get lashed in the middle of the boat for additional flotation. Food and kitchen utensils are stored in plastic boxes that are easy to hoist ashore when camping.
—MV
[table]
LOA/16′8″
Beam/61″
Weight with rig/450 lbs
Sail area/120 sq ft
[attr style=”font-weight:bold;”]Draft
Board up/8″
board down/36″
[/table]
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.
I have been using sprit rigs for decades and currently have one for my Good Little Skiff and two of them for my Delaware ducker. Of late, sprit rigs seem to have become less popular for small boats than the lug, which is more easily reefed. But there is a lot to be said for a sprit rig, whether boomed or boomless. If set up the way fishermen and hunters once had them, they are ideal for trailerable boats. The sail is laced to the mast and can be dropped into the step, a sheet reeved, and off you go. My sprit rigs live in long, loose, and slippery bags of light fabric. To unpack a bag, I untie it, flick the rig vertical, and pull the bag down; I’m ready to step the mast with everything attached to it. To put the rig away, I lift up the foot and pull the bag on over it, then work it along the bundled sail and spars.
Ben Fuller
For transport, a bag sewn of light, slippery cloth keeps the bundled sprit rig compact and not prone to getting snagged.
The key to working with a sail, sprit, and mast—and boom if you have one—is to have it all in a bundle. To create this you need a brail line. As Pete Culler showed us in his book Skiffs and Schooners, a light, slippery line is fixed to the throat grommet, then run to a small brass thimble sewn to the leech and run back to another thimble on the opposite side of the throat, and then down the mast. I use a clove hitch to tie the brail in, a grommet punched to the leech, and a small block or ring at throat. The distance from the peak to the grommet is the same as that from the peak to the throat. If you have a boom, you need a little block of wood on the bottom with a bee hole in it, set at a distance from the boom jaws that’s equal to the length of the sail luff. For a boomed spritsail the brail is run through the bee hole on the boom, not a grommet on the leech, and gathers up both boom and sprit.
Ben Fuller
A small block tied to the throat sends the brail down along the mast. The sail here is reefed and brailed. Note the throat pennant takes a hitch around the mast before it heads up to be tied to the masthead.
I tie the tail end of the brail to the tack grommet, leaving enough slack in it to let the sail set properly. To furl the rig, haul on the part of the brail that lies alongside the mast, leaving its end tied to the tack. When it has bundled the rig, I clove-hitch the brail onto the tack thumb cleat, which has a thumb just long enough to drop the hitch onto it. I then have enough slack brail to run up the mast and to make a lashing around the bundled sail and spars to keep everything together.
The other key to managing the sprit rig I learned from Joe Liener, and was done by the Delaware ducker and sneakbox sailors: using a peak pennant. This is a light line tied on to the grommet at the peak of the sail and run down the sprit to a rolling hitch or to a small wooden cleat. It keeps the grommet in place on the sprit even when there is no tension on the snotter or indeed if the sprit is out of the snotter completely when doing a nice, tight roll of the sail around the sprit. When you next raise the sail, the peak is ready to go. The peak pennant is long enough so that if you have to scandalize the sail (remove the sprit and fold the sail from throat to clew), you can pop the sprit out of the snotter and pull the sprit down far enough to grab the pennant and not have the peak slip off the sprit and flap out of reach.
The major objection that many have to the sprit rig is that it is hard to reef and that when it is reefed, it doesn’t set right. This can be fixed. Some people use multiple thumb cleats or relatively sticky line to lower the snotter on the mast so that the sprit can continue to bisect the peak, as it must for the sail to set right, when the sail is lowered. Sliding the snotter down the mast probably worked well in the days of manila, but today’s synthetic lines are slipperier. Since I don’t want to have an extra thumb cleat on my mast, I use a snotter pennant, a light line that has a loop to slip over the snotter’s lone thumb cleat, and a tail end that is tied to the snotter’s wrap around the mast.
Ben Fuller
A pennant for the throat takes the place of a halyard and requires the rig to be lowered to reef the sail.
Lowering the sprit can create a problem on some boats if the butt of the sprit hits the deck or gunwales. This is easily solved by using the peak pennant. The grommet normally rests on the shoulders of the sprit, but if the grommet is large enough, it can be turned to a right angle to the sprit and can be slid past the shoulder. The peak grommet needs to be big enough so it can be slid a foot or two down the sprit. Then you can run the sprit up past the peak far enough so that its butt doesn’t hit the deck. The peak pennant runs up to the sprit shoulder and is clove-hitched there. If the grommet is too small to slip past the sprit’s shoulder, you can loop the pennant around the sprit, thread it through the peak grommet, and then tie it off on the sprit’s shoulder.
I only reef the spritsail on my skiff about 10% of the time or less, so to keep the rig simple, I don’t use a halyard. A throat pennant ties the sail to the masthead. It’s another bit of light line, this one somewhat longer than the depth of the reef.
If I need to reef, I’ll brail the sail, unstep the mast, and drop the whole rig in the boat. This has lots of advantages. Instead of standing up and bouncing around, I am nice and stable, just lying a-hull; I may even have a cup of coffee from my Thermos. I untie the throat pennant, pull slack in the luff, and tie the luff tack cringle to the sail’s tack. To reduce the number of lines, my tack lashing is an extension of my luff lace line that is clove-hitched to the throat, then spiraled down the mast through the luff grommets. It is clove-hitched to the tack, then looped around the mast under the tack thumb cleat, then clove-hitched again to the tack. The tail end has enough extra so I can use it to lash the throat reef cringle to the throat so I don’t need an extra line. I then pull on the throat pennant to tension the luff and clove-hitch it to the masthead.
Having dealt with the luff, I shift the snotter down but don’t hook the sprit back in yet. I hook the snotter pennant over the snotter thumb cleat and half-hitch it to the snotter loop on the mast. If you frequently reef, the snotter pennant can be permanently lashed to the snotter, measured to the correct length, and a loop tied in to hook over the thumb cleat. (If you leave this in place, you have an extra line where you need it when you lash the bundle together for transport.) Then, after you’ve lowered the snotter, if needed, slide the peak grommet down the sprit and tie the peak pennant to the sprit shoulder. Hook the sprit’s bottom on to the snotter and set the snotter just tight enough so the sprit doesn’t come loose. Tie in the reefpoints. Restep the mast. I set up my rig so that I just relead the sheet into the reefing clew, leaving a bit of slack at the end of the gathered foot of the sail which hangs down a little, but you can use a clew line or pennant to lash the reefing clew to the sail’s clew so you don’t need to shift the sheet. Tighten the snotter, cast off the brail, and go sailing.
Ben Fuller
Pennants for the peak, throat and snotter allow the spritsail to be reefed and hold a good shape.
My skiff’s sprit sail is about 75 sq ft, as is one of my ducker rigs. I don’t race these boats, so I don’t need lots of parts to the mainsheet; I can give the boat a bit of luff if I can’t pull hard enough to haul the sheet in. For the skiff, I make the mainsheet off on one quarter knee, then just run it through the clew grommet, and back to a turning block on the other quarter knee. I have a half pin protruding down from a hole in the sternsheets set up so I can take a turn around it and use a slippery hitch to make it fast (something I learned as the doryman’s hitch). Having the sheet run through a grommet rather than a clew block creates a bit of friction that makes it easier to hold. For the ducker, there is a block lashed to the boom with a sheet that comes up from a becket block (I use a modern ratchet block) that is snap-shackled to a pad-eye fastened to the plank keel.
Boats that I have rigged with lugs are easier to reef, but there are more pieces to the rig package and masts are relatively longer. The sprit’s simplicity is compelling for boats that are frequently launched and recovered, and rarely reefed. And walking down to your boat, boots on, oars and rig on one shoulder, bag with lunch and foulweather gear in the other hand takes you back a century or so to a simpler time.
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.
Brailing Spritsails
Sidebar photos, SBM
A boomless spritsail is brailed with a grommet or ring on the leech.
With the spritsail brailed, the sheet is half-hitched around the lower end of the bundle to keep it snug against the mast.
For a spritsail with a boom, the brail is threaded under the boom.
A plastic fairlead keeps the brail in place.
The brail gathers up the boom, sprit, and sail without having to adjust either the sprit or boom.
A sprit boom is self-vanging so it can’t be pulled up by a brail unless the forward end is lowered and secured near the tack.
A line though the tack and around the mast with a loop tied in it holds the boom in position for brailing.
The brail for the sprit boom runs through a wooden block with a beehole.
With the boom brought down even with the foot of the sail, it is ready for brailing. The sprit’s snotter has been eased to lower the peak to make the sail easier to brail.
After the boom and sprit are repositioned they can be brought up tight against the mast.
Harbor Furl
A harbor furl makes a bundle tighter and neater than that of a brailed sail. Slip the sprit from the snotter and hold it parallel to the mast keeping the peak held high. Fold the clew over the sprit and roll the sail up until it is snug against the mast. You can use the snotter to tie it there.
—Ed.
You can share your tricks of the trade with other Small Boats Monthly readers by sending us an email.
While sanding is easily the most pedestrian task in building a boat, rounding edges is probably next in line. It’s a job that has to be done to give paint and varnish a fighting chance to protect the wood they’re applied to and to give the boat a benign, skin-friendly touch. Sanding edges will do the job, but raises a lot of dust and doesn’t automatically produce uniform results. A router equipped with a corner-rounding bit will work too, but routers are noisy and because they cut in just one direction they often work against the grain.
My Stanley No. 28 is still working but looking a little the worse after 37 years in workshops both indoors and outdoors.
Many years ago I bought a Stanley No. 28, a bar of steel with question-mark ends and elliptical holes that round corners to a 1/16″ and a 1/8″ radius. There was also a No. 29 that cut 1/4″ and 3/8″ edges. These tools are no longer made by Stanley, but you can find them for sale on the Web as vintage or antique tools, which, at my age, stings a bit because I bought mine new.
The new incarnations of the Stanley tools by Veritas do excellent work and are a pleasure to use.
Veritas Tools of Canada has made very similar versions of the tools. They’re the same length (5 3/4″) and cut the same radii as the Stanley 28 and 29. The openings are larger than those of the Stanley tools, making a wider throat that requires a bit more care and attention to avoid raising a sliver. The tools are simple to use and can cut either pushed or pulled to suit the run of the grain, though I prefer to switch the work around so I can pull the tool. You can see the wood as it meets the cutting edge, and you’ll be able to tell if the grain has turned against you and stop before you raise a big sliver. You can further minimize that risk by starting with the next smaller size cutter. Veritas includes a sharpening system: a special sanding block set up with the four radii for the different cutting grooves and the large curve on the other side. Silicon carbide 600-grit waterproof sandpaper wrapped round the block hones the metal.
The Veritas sharpening block has all five radii for honing the cutting surfaces. The tools’ black finish gets removed by the 600-grit sandpaper wrapped around the block, leaving polished steel.
These tools stop cutting when the corner is cut to the designated radius, so you get uniform results, and they have a very short contact area so they will work curved edges. They will also cut across grain, though you’ll want to start with the 1/16″ cutter and work your way up to the radius you need, pulling into the workpiece to keep from splitting its corners off, and do a little fine sanding to smooth the surface. They’re a pleasure to use and easy to keep handy in a pocket.
The Radi-Plane is limited to a single radius and working straight edges.
The Radi-Plane, originally made by the L.A. Mathers Company and now reproduced by Rockler and Shopsmith, is a more complex tool. It has a hardwood body, a brass right-angled sole, and two 1/4″-thick carbide-tipped cutting blades. The front blade is set slightly shallower to make a first cut and leave the finishing work to the back blade. Set-screws accessed through the top of the plane adjust the blade depth, and a pair of set-screws on either side of each blade lock it in position. While the blades hold a good edge and should, in theory, cut oak as well as they do mahogany, the Radi-Plane feels like it’s skating on the harder wood. It cuts a radius bit over 1/16″, which can be a good match for working the edges of risers, inwales, and outwales. You have to do the work before such pieces are installed: The 7″-long sole of the Radi-Plane doesn’t do well with even gentle curves. The cut is so shallow that it doesn’t take much to put the work out of the blade’s reach. The Radi-Plane is of more use for furniture making than for boatbuilding.
The blades for the Lee Valley beading tool can be easily filed to a corner-rounding profile. The tool produces coarse dust instead of shavings.
Following my article on a homemade profile scraper, one reader noted a commercially made tool by Lee Valley that also cuts beads. The tool will also round a corner to a 1/16″ or 1/8″ radius with the blades available. You can work other radii by filing a plain blade end or a blank blade. The tool cuts by scraping, rather than by cutting, and can be an advantage on wavy grain. But the tool is small, just 5″ long, and designed to be held with the fingertips, and the blades are only about 1/32″ thick, so its calling is light work.
A bit of steel pipe can be made into a corner rounder that works like the Stanley and Veritas tools.
If you’d like to make your own corner rounder, a piece of steel tubing can do the trick. I used some chrome-plated tubing that was kicking around in my metal scrap bin. It has a diameter of 1″—about the same as the curve at the end of the Veritas tool—and a wall thickness of a thin 1/16″—a bit shy of the Veritas. I started cutting the groove across the pipe with a bench grinder and then refined it with a rat-tail file. The sides of the groove need to be flared out to form a 90° angle when the groove is viewed from the end, otherwise they’ll gouge the work, and its ends need to be beveled to create the cutting edges. If you just file straight across, the tool won’t cut. Veritas uses a cutting angle of 15°. Hone the edges inside and out with 600-grit sandpaper wrapped around dowels to match the diameter of the groove and the inside of the pipe.
Christopher Cunningham is the editor of Small Boats Monthly.
When Sean’s friend Robert saw the lines for the little double ender, he said: “We have to build that!” And together they did.
Sean Russell of Comox, British Columbia, has been writing books—the Charles Hayden historical naval fiction novels—and designing boats, lots of them, for years. He started drawing lines by hand and then worked with CAD programs—first Hulls, then Prolines, and finally Delftship. He set out to do his own design of every type of rowing and small sailing boat, and to date he has amassed a catalog of several hundred designs.
Sean’s drawings for SWEET PEA
Sean liked the look of the Beach Pea—a 13′ peapod designed by Doug Hylan for glued-lapstrake plywood construction—and decided to draw up a peapod of his own. Inspired too by Baby Boat, a 6′11″ double-ender made from a single sheet of plywood, Sean designed his peapod to be a diminutive 8′ 1-1/2″ by 45″, sized for kids to row. He drew the waterplane as large as possible to give the boat good carrying capacity, and made the bottom rather flat to keep the initial stability high, an important consideration for a boat without a transom to help steady it.
The molds were cut from computer-generated patterns; once they were set up on the strongback the strips went on perfectly fair.
Sean showed his drawings to his friend Robert Hale, an avid builder and restorer of wooden boats. Robert’s reaction was enthusiastic: “We have to build that!” The two were soon in Robert’s shop building SWEET PEA, the first of Sean’s designs to come to life, his first work of non-fiction you might say. SWEET PEA would be strip-built, but neither of them had any experience with the method, so the learning curve was steep. They sawed strips from red cedar planks and milled them with bead-and-cove edges. The strips set parallel to the sheer got them off to an easy start, but as they progressed along the stems and toward the turn of the bilge, the boat’s short length and wide beam proved a difficult form to work with.
Long shop-made sanding boards like the one resting on the hull played an important role in getting the strip-planking faired before sheathing it with fiberglass.
Applying strips in a chevron pattern at the stern got them around most challenging curves, and a large diamond of strips parallel to the keel finished the planking. “I would not recommend this as a first-time project,” Sean warned, “It was quite a challenge.”
Robert (left) and the author take a break after finishing the planking. The bends on such a short, chubby boat were fairly extreme, especially around the stern, which was blunter than the bow. Laying the strips at a chevron-like angle was the only way to get them to take the curve.
The hull was sheathed inside and out with 6-oz fiberglass cloth set in epoxy. Douglas-fir was used for the inwales, outwales, sheer guards, and seats, and oak for oarlock pads with blocks of cherry as bases. The seats, glued up with strips of fir, are admittedly “quite elaborate” and strong, but the three of them weigh 15 lbs, a quarter of the boat’s 60-lb overall weight.
Tucked in van, SWEET PEA is ready to launch. The keel and skeg give the hull good tracking ability while under way.
Sean has carried and launched the boat solo, and while the weight is manageable, the size is a bit awkward for one; with two people, carrying is a breeze. While SWEET PEA could easily be transported on a roof rack, Sean just loads her in the back of his van.
The only things SWEET PEA has in common with a peapod are the two pointy ends. Her name is a reference to a character in the old Popeye cartoons.
With a pair of 7′ straight-bladed oars SWEET PEA “rows beautifully, doesn’t hobbyhorse, tracks perfectly, and takes no effort to make her go.” The boat carries two adults with ease and fares well in waves up to 2′ and big powerboat wakes. When Sean and his wife go sailing in their bigger boat, SWEET PEA rides on the mother ship’s deck, and gets launched and retrieved with the aid of a halyard.
While Sean designed SWEET PEA as a boat for kids, it turned out the boat was quite capable of serving grown-up requirements, and he hasn’t yet given any kids a shot at sea trials. They’ll have to wait their turn.
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.
I trust Joshua Slocum’s Sailing Alone Around the World needs no introduction here. I have three copies of it: the paperback volume I read in seventh grade, my father’s 1950 hardback, and a 1905 edition I received as a gift from my friend Paul Thomas. Every time I pick up that oldest book, I think of the hands that opened the cover over a century ago to sign it.
A 1905 edition
Slocum signed this book 9 years after completing his circumnavigation. Ill at ease at his home on Martha’s Vineyard, he spent much of his time sailing the East Coast aboard the aging SPRAY and occasionally selling copies of his book. At the time he signed this book in May of 1907, he was in Washington, D.C., and had a meeting with President Theodore Roosevelt at the White House.
Yours very truly
Joshua Slocum
Onboard the Spray
Washington D.C.
May 19th 1907
Susan Slocum Dyer is a writer and teacher living in Metlakatla, Alaska.
Last month Slocum’s great-great-granddaughter, Susan Slocum Dyer, spoke at Seattle’s Center for Wooden Boats and brought with her stories about the world’s first solo circumnavigator and some keepsakes that had been passed down to her. Susan’s mother was born a Slocum, the granddaughter of Benjamin Aymar Slocum, the second son of Joshua and his first wife, Virginia Albertina Walker. When Susan was eight years old, great-grandfather Benjamin told her that she was the great-great-granddaughter of “the greatest sailor who ever lived.” Young Susan asked what had become of him, and Benjamin told her he was lost at sea and probably drowned. “He was the greatest sailor who ever lived,” she replied, “and he drowned?! I’m never going near the water.”
Before making his circumnavigation of the globe from 1895 to 1898, Joshua and Virginia—“the love of his life,” Benjamin often said—spent much of their life aboard ships under his command. Susan had with her a handwritten page listing children born to them. On one side of the page were the children that are recorded in the historical record—Victor, Benjamin, Jessie, and James—but on the other were the names of three more children: twins Frederic and Edith, and Helena. None of them survived infancy. They died at sea and, but for the piece of paper Susan had, would have been forgotten. I found an extensive genealogy of the Slocum family online, and those three names are indeed missing from that record. Susan noted that when Helena died, Virginia couldn’t stand to bury another child at sea, so Joshua embalmed her in brandy so she could be put to rest ashore. That story had survived in a letter Virginia wrote to her mother in 1879, but the infant’s name wasn’t mentioned. Susan brought Helena’s name to light.
NORTHERN LIGHT was one of the ships under Joshua’s command. Susan brought with her the ceremonial flag flown by the vessel, an enormous flag of dark blue with white stars. Susan had studied it carefully and found repairs done in many different patterns of stitching, an indication of how many people had cared for the flag. One of the people attending the talk asked if there was any significance to the stars and to their arrangement. Susan suggested that there was a connection between the stars and the man Joshua was accused of murdering. While sailing AQUIDNECK, a ship he commanded prior to NORTHERN LIGHT, Slocum had to repel an attack by pirates. He shot and killed one of them. He was tried and acquitted. Susan was coy about the connection between the shooting and the stars, and knew more about the case than she was going to reveal to us, saying only, “Believe me, I have evidence.”
This is the flag that was flown from NORTHERN LIGHT while it was under Slocum’s command. (The light blue area is created by a projector aimed at the screen behind the flag.)
She also brought a small oilcan that Joshua had used aboard the SPRAY. Her mother had given it to her as a gift at a time in Susan’s life that she had evidently been stuck and in need of a little help to get running smoothly again. To see things that belonged to Joshua Slocum, and to hear stories about him that were known only to his family, was quite moving.
If you haven’t read Sailing Alone Around the World, do yourself a favor and get a copy. It belongs in your bookshelf.
I had to take the Forward-Facing Rowing System apart to make a change before I fit it to my Whitehall, and in the process of removing the 8 stainless-steel nuts and bolts, I found that seven of the nuts wouldn’t budge, and the only way to remove them was to twist until the bolts sheared. I may have twisted an odd bolt or two off in the past and chalked it up to corrosion, but to have seven out of eight new bolts go was odd. (In defense of the Forward-Facing Rowing System, the change I made was unique—the bolts don’t normally need to be removed.) I thought the ends of the bolts might have been damaged, but some of the bolts that sheared had several threads extending out of the nut and they looked like they were in good condition. I didn’t try a shot of WD-40—there wasn’t any sign of corrosion.
Eight stainless-steel 1/4 x 20 bolts, seven nuts seized up by galling
I took a look on the web and discovered the phenomenon is called “galling”—“thread galling” when it happens with nuts and bolts. Galling is also called “cold welding” and occurs when susceptible metals undergo a lot of pressure and friction. Nuts and bolts can literally be welded together. Galling can be prevented by giving the threads should get some lubrication before nuts and bolts are joined. I had a very old tube of anti-seize goo in my shop—I had’t used any in years—and to my surprise the label said “anti-galling.”
I bought a new set of bolts and nuts and gave them a smear of anti-galling goo before I installed them on the rig. In the future I’ll used the goo more regularly to save a few bucks on ruined fastenings.
After I’d bought the replacement nuts and bolts, I was on my way out of the hardware store with a handful of stainless steel just as another customer who was about to leave came up behind me. I waited a moment and held the door open for him. He went through without saying thank you or even putting a hand on the door. He passed by me less than a foot away but didn’t even look at me. Now that’s what I call galling.
"Sweet lines” is often the first thing out of the mouth of classic-boat aficionados having a first look at an Abaco dinghy. It’s no wonder legend has it that this traditional Bahamian workboat had a role in inspiring Capt. Nat Herreshoff’s famous 12 1/2 daysailer. Dinghy owners call them little jewels and will lavish hundreds of hours and many thousands of dollars on full restorations.
During the mid-20th century, yachtsmen began gravitating to the Sea of Abaco in the Bahamas. Lying between the Abaco Cays—Green Turtle, Great Guana, Scotland, Man-O-War, and Elbow—to the east and Great Abaco Island to the west, the Sea makes a sheltered cruising ground. Visitors found friendly islanders with accents like Cornish fishermen, clear blue water rife with reef fish, and good breezes. They also found a vibrant wooden boat building industry on Man-O-War Cay and in Hope Town on Elbow Cay. The yachtsmen and expats proved a ready market for local workboats to be used as daysailers and racers.
Nobody knows for sure when the first Abaco dinghy was built, or who built it, but the type has been around as a small fishing boat since the late 1800s. Dinghies are traditionally either 12′ or 14′ overall, with a 5′ beam and a 2′ draft. During the middle decades of the 20th century Abaco boatbuilders like Maurice Albury on Man-O-War Cay and Winer Malone at Hope Town launched hundreds of dinghies for fishing, daysailing, and racing. Some builders had government contracts to turn out dinghies to supply the Bahamian fishing fleet.
An Abaco dinghy carries a catboat rig on an unstayed mast. The large three-sided sail (about 200 sq ft) has a nearly straight leech and a long, loose foot with a deep roach. The sail’s large headboard, known locally has a “banana board,” can be adjusted to tension the leech for different wind conditions. Sails were traditionally cotton, but today they are Dacron or Oceanus sailcloth. Hope Town–built boats are fully open; many Man-O-War boats have the bow decked over to just aft of the mast partners. The dinghies usually have a notch in the transom for a sculling oar.
With their carvel plank-on-frame construction, full keels, and wineglass transoms, Abaco dinghies are more like little ships or scaled-down versions of the bigger Abaco fishing smacks than actual dinghies for harbor transport or towing behind yachts. Like bigger Bahamian smacks and sloops, Abaco dinghies are built without plans from the keel up by what local builders often refer to as “mother’s wit.” Boatwrights work from a traditional formula. The beam is half the keel length. The transom measures three-fourths of the beam. Mast height is twice the length of the keel. Abaco dinghies have subtly curved stems; they’re raked on Man-O-War boats and nearly plumb on Hope Town boats. Abaco dinghies have a graceful sheer, low freeboard, and keels with moderate drag. The greatest beam is slightly forward of amidships.
To begin construction, builders lay a keel and attach a stem, a sternpost, and a transom. Then they construct a mold or use one handed down over generations for the center rising-frame. Many builders add a forward frame and a stern frame, too. These three frames are connected by ribbands to the stem and transom. Once the ribbands outline the shape of the new hull, the rest of the frames can be hand-cut to fit before the hull is planked.
photographs by Jay Fleming, jayflemingphotography.com
DANDY’s owner Dave Pahl hefts a bit of the locally grown corkwood that provides crooked timbers for sawn frames.
Planks are 3/8″ to 7/16″ thick. Builders use natural crooks shaped with hand tools for frames. These frames are 1″ wide with varying depth and are set on 12″ to 15″ centers. Traditionally, builders used local mahogany they called madeira or madera (Portuguese and Spanish for timber) for framing crooks, but in more recent years they have used corkwood. Planking, gunwales, and decking are either cypress or Caribbean pine. To season the lumber, boatwrights soak it in the harbor for six months. In the past, builders used iron boat nails and brass screws. Restorations use bronze. Getting the planks to make the sharp twist running aft into the wineglass stern is not for the novice builder. Similarly, shaping the garboards and the planks at the sharp turn of the bilge requires advanced boatbuilding skills.
A few decades ago the demand for dinghies fell sharply. Abaco fishermen had turned to speedy fiberglass runabouts, and easily available wood began to disappear. Few orders came to the builders and aging boats began disappearing, but fortunately, Hope Town cherishes its strong maritime and sailing tradition and booms as a mecca for cruising yachts. Here, with the support of the active Hope Town Sailing Club, local lovers of traditional Bahamian small craft have been reviving the fleet of dinghies. In the U.S., boatbuilding programs like The Apprenticeshop in Maine began teaching a new generation of boatwrights how to build and sail the Abaco dinghy.
These days, people go to great lengths to get an Abaco dinghy. After searching for years for a dinghy of their own, Dave and Carol Pahl, “snowbirds” with a winter home in Hope Town, rescued one from a Hobie Cat dealer in New York. Following a couple of years of stripping and refastening it in the U.S., the Pahls shipped their boat to Hope Town at considerable expense. They finished the restoration and launched the 14′ DANDY this winter.
Sculling is common in the Bahamas and the Abaco skiffs often have sculling notches in the transom instead of oarlocks or tholes on the gunwales. The notches are set to port and the sculling is done left handed, freeing the right hand for other tasks.
I had a chance to sail DANDY one blustery February morning in Hope Town Harbour when Dave said, “Go have fun.” With the wind veering through 50 degrees and ranging from flat calm to 18-knot puffs, I had great conditions for getting to know DANDY. Leaving the dock in virtually no breeze, I sat on the floorboards and waited to see if this vessel would move. To my delight her big, deep-bellied sail filled with wind I could barely feel, and we slipped out into the harbor on a dead run.
Howard Chapelle notes “The Bahama sail is always made long on the foot and not excessively lofty. This, with the heavy roach at the foot, brings the center of effort low by modern standards for a triangular sail.”
As soon as we found clear air, the wind suddenly blew 12–15 knots. DANDY charged forward with noticeable acceleration. We took a gust as I was putting her on a close reach and the boat heeled over abruptly. With DANDY’s long boom, there’s a lot of sheet to manage, and I was slow at trimming. The end of the boom and the clew of the sail dragged in the water before I could trim in or adjust my weight to windward. As I got things under control, I reminded myself that DANDY’s round bilges and relatively narrow beam made her tender. In these blustery conditions, having a second person in the boat as ballast and a sheet tender would definitely have been an asset.
How she screamed along on a reach! With small adjustments to the tiller, I let DANDY run a swift and easy slalom between the yachts in the mooring field. Hardening up onto a beat, I found that DANDY pointed like a typical 100-year-old workboat design. She didn’t like to go closer than 45 degrees to the wind. But even with dramatic shifts in the direction and intensity of the breeze, she held a pretty consistent 25 degrees of heel as long as I was quick to trim the sheet with the puffs and lulls. If I was the least bit slow to ease the sheet, DANDY could dip her lee rail and ship water. In these conditions with just one person aboard, she had a notable weather helm.
“Unstayed masts were sometimes looked upon as a safety factor, for it was thought that the bending of lofty masts spilled the wind out of the sails to some extent in a knockdown. In the Bahamas, the unstayed masts are thought to permit carrying sail longer, before reduction becomes necessary….” Howard Chapelle
I was exhilarated but busy . More than a few cruisers came topside on their boats to watch. Crews on motoryachts and runabouts stopped to look and take pictures as this sailing anachronism worked her magic. But I was too busy in the blustery conditions to bask in the glory. Her boom was only about a foot above the gunwale. The sail blocked my vision to leeward unless I lay with my shoulders against the windward rail so I could peep under the sail. Once again I wished that I had a shipmate, this time to act as a lookout.
I had heard that Abaco dinghies are hard to tack, but in the calm water of Hope Town Harbour, DANDY had no problem. With her full keel, she just required a firm shove on the tiller to bring her around. She did not come around fast, though. The sheet, hanging beneath the boom, tended to catch on the back of my head. With the big sail and unstayed rig, jibing has to be carefully controlled to be safe.
Growing bolder, I sailed out into the Sea of Abaco to see how DANDY would do in a hearty wind and choppy waves. She loved beating into the froth and was remarkably dry. In a beam sea she had an easy roll as long as I sheeted the boom in far enough to keep it from tripping in the waves. Clearly, DANDY’s type had been built to fish and travel in these conditions—but tacking her into this chop was no easy matter. Unless I fell off on a screaming reach and roll-tacked her like a modern racing dinghy, DANDY wanted to stall.
Ghosting back to the dock, I was still throbbing with adrenalin. While she would be an easy daysailer for a couple in winds less than 8 knots, in blustery conditions she was a thrill ride, and to sail her safely I needed to be on top of my game.
Abaco dinghies have long had a reputation for being good sailers in the strong tradewinds of the Bahamas.
With DANDY added to the fleet, Hope Town now has 14 Abaco dinghies sailing and racing. More restorations and new boats are in the offing. During my visit, I found a trio of folks under a harbor-side tent stripping paint from an old dinghy in preparation for a full restoration. Internet threads highlight a resurgence of interest in the type, too, among both modelers and amateur builders.
Local builders don’t use plans but lines drawings, offsets, and construction details are available from The Apprenticeshop. Construction is challenging, so if you want one of the Abaco boatwrights or the Apprenticeshop to make you a new dinghy, keep this in mind: Sweetness comes at a price.
Randy Peffer is a frequent contributor to WoodenBoat, the captain of the research schooner SARAH ABBOT and a relentless racer and gunkholer in all manner of small craft from canoes to catboats.
Particulars
[table]
Length/12′ 3.25″
Beam/4′ 9.5″
Draft/1′ 4″
Sail area/93.5 sq ft
[/table]
(Dimensions above and the lines drawings below are from the plans offered by The Apprenticeshop. They represent an Abaco dinghy built by Maurice Albury on Man-O-War Cay in 1952, and measured by D.W. Dillion in 1985.)
For a new Bahamian-built dinghy (likely to be somewhere north of $20,000) contact:
The Apprenticeshop in Rockland, Maine offers plans for $35 and can build an Abaco dinghy for around $10,000 to $25,000, depending on material selection and size—anywhere from 12′ to 20′. Address inquiries to Kevin Carney, Lead Instructor.
Howard Chapelle includes a description and drawings of what he calls a Bahama dinghy in American Small Sailing Craft. The 14′ 5 1/2″ boat was built at Hope Town in 1898.
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!
The Duckling 17 is a robust, elegant, and fast pulling boat. Its predecessor, the Duckling 14, was designed and built in 2007 by Sam Devlin to meet a client’s need for yacht tender that he could use for sliding-seat rowing for exercise, and fixed-thwart rowing with a passenger seated aft. Years later Sam created the Duckling 17 with an overall length of 17′ 3-5/8″ and a beam of 3′ 5-3/4″. One might think that stretching a boat from a previous, shorter version is a relatively simple, straightforward process, but without attention to the altered proportions of the hull and aesthetic tweaking to create a visually pleasing and performance-driven boat, you might wind up with a longer, awkward-looking, if not ugly duckling.
Dale McKinnon
For a durable and non-slip finish Devlin often uses spray-on truck-bed liner on the interior and sometimes exterior. The drop-in rowing rig is by Piantedosi; the oars by Dreher.
While it is obvious there is a connection between the two boats, Sam doesn’t remember how direct the lineage is. He kept referring back to his nearly 40 years of experience with his Oarling design to inform the refinement of this new hull design. It’s somewhat of a cross between a wherry and dory: The bottom is wherry-like, but above the waterline the Duckling 17 has the characteristic widening of a multichine dory. Unlike the Oarling, the new Duckling “didn’t need to be such a cargo carrier as the Oarling, so I kept the freeboard down and I widened the beam a little bit,” Sam said. He wanted to create a boat “that carries weight a little bit more efficiently between strokes than the Oarling, and with a longer waterline it would.” The new design keeps the boat in the recreational singles category for races, and sets a course toward a fast tandem pulling boat. He thinks this design would be an excellent double at 21′, and I’d have to agree.
When he’s designing a fast pulling boat, Sam balances the needs of a beginner with those of rowers with intermediate or advanced skills. It can be a difficult balancing act to create a boat that works for a broad range of abilities. Sam thinks he has pushed Duckling 17’s skill requirement to the intermediate level, but I think its stability would diminish beginners’ initial apprehensions and they’d do well in it. The Duckling 17’s stability was, in fact, the first thing I noticed about it. When I moved from dock to boat and transferred my weight with one foot close to the gunwale rather than centerline, the Duckling 17 yielded and tipped slightly, unlike the Oarling which would have had a startling tilt. The Duckling 17 is very stable; this would be especially welcomed when getting in or out of it from a fishing boat or yacht, particularly if the Duckling 17 is equipped with riggers extending well beyond the gunwales.
The high stability suggested to me that the boat might be sluggish in a hard, driving start on flat water. Generally, faster boats sacrifice stability for speed, but in six hard pulls I had reached a GPS-measured 5.7 knots. With a waterline length of 15′ 7-1/8″, the Duckling 17’s theoretical hull speed is 5.3 knots. I settled down to a little over 5 knots at about 22 strokes per minute. The oar puddles were noticeably farther apart than those the blades make when I’m rowing my Oarling.
Dale McKinnon
Sam likes to come ashore stern first because it’s easier to walk out of the boat over the transom. Although he shifts his weight forward to lift the stern on to the beach as he makes his approach, the landing can still put a lot of strain on the skeg. Extending the skeg around the transom gives it additional strength.
The Duckling 17 tracks well, making it easy to stay on course even in the 10-knot breeze I had during my trials. Leaving a straight wake behind means you can get to a destination sooner with less of an expenditure of energy. When I’m rowing with the wind on the beam, I’ve been in the habit of frequently checking a mark over the transom to maintain my heading, but the Duckling has very little tendency to weathercock and didn’t require me to keep a close watch. There was very little curdled water flowing at an angle off the stern, a good sign that the Duckling 17 was maintaining a true course without making much leeway.
Although sliding-seat rowing can generally drive a long boat faster through relatively calm water or a 12″ chop, it presents challenges in rough seas. Rowing the Duckling 17 on a fixed thwart, while I didn’t have the opportunity to do so, would be less of a challenge simply because the thwart is lower in the boat than the sliding seat. This allows more clearance for the oars over your legs at the recovery and offers a lower center of gravity, making the boat more stable.
Sam Devlin
The author, at 5′ 6″ and 130 lbs, has plenty of clearance between the oars and her legs to make the recovery of the stroke being crowded.
Dale McKinnon
Sam, around 6′ and 200 lbs, doesn’t have as much freeboard or as much clearance for the oar handles. Elevating the locks would provide an easier recovery.
Devlin is the master of stitch-and-glue boat design and construction. The Duckling 17 hull is built from six long panels of 9mm marine-grade plywood, each scarfed together in three pieces. The panels are wired together side by side and to five temporary molds and the 3/4″ plywood transom. Epoxy fillets and fiberglass tape on the seams create strong joints and straightforward construction for the beginning boatbuilder. The hull is reinforced by the flotation/seat compartment amidships, mahogany gunwales, transom knees, and breasthook. The compartment under the seat is filled with expanding foam, making the Duckling 17 unsinkable even in the event of a swamping.
I’m 5′6″ and 130 lbs, so I choose not to struggle with cartopping any of my boats—I use a trailer—but the Duckling 17, at 95 lbs, could be cartopped by someone with a bit more height and strength, or with help from a friend. Launching from a small trailer is a breeze.
Dale McKinnon
The uncluttered interior and well-filleted joints make the interior easy to clean.
On the Duckling 17 that I rowed, the interior surfaces and gunwales are finished with a spray-on truck-bed liner. For my purposes—long cruises, muddy boots, beach sand and gravel—this is a perfect durable nonskid finish, but marine-grade one-part polyurethane will also make an adequately durable finish for the home builder.
Although Devlin envisioned the Duckling 17 as a performance rowing craft, not as a load-carrying boat, I’d consider adding battens on the sides during construction to provide a place to attach plastic or metal pad-eyes. With bungee cords and dry bags you’d have secure load-carrying capacity for fast touring coastal waters like the Salish Sea or Penobscot Bay. The Duckling 17 has a designed working displacement of up to 346 lbs, so there is plenty of capacity for weekend camping gear. I’d add a Venturi auto-bailer to take care of any water that might get shipped in rough seas.
Sam Devlin
The long waterline, full-length keel strip, and skeg give the Duckling strong tracking; little effort is required to maintain course.
After 15 years of putting my trust in Devlin’s dories, I am seriously considering building the Duckling 17 for my own travels. The thought of arriving comfortably at a destination 20 miles away half an hour sooner is quite appealing. I have no hesitation in recommending the Duckling 17 as a boat for fast and light touring, as well as recreational and open-water rowing. The challenge of pushing up to hull speed and beyond will hold the attention of intermediate open-water rowers and advanced racers as a training craft. And for the rowing aesthetes out there, a cushion in the stern for a passenger will evoke the refinement and grace of Whitehalls on the Charles River a century ago.
While there is little I’d change about the Duckling 17, I would give the design a different name. This graceful boat is not a duckling but a cygnet.
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.
Several years ago I stood high on a scouting rock next to the Rogue River looking over the rapid that would, from that day forward, run through my daydreams and nightmares. The Rogue flowed gently around the corner after the constricted and chaotic Mule Creek Canyon and fanned out at this deceivingly beautiful point where autumn’s splashes of red and burnt orange were dabbed among dark green trees lining the steep banks. The water pooled above the rapid was peaceful and serene until it dropped over the entry point and tumbled hard and fast through a complicated maze of boulders the size of trucks, jagged rocks that rip open rubber rafts, and narrow chutes that break boats. It was Blossom Bar, a Class-IV rapid just beyond the halfway point on the 36-mile Wild and Scenic section of the Rogue in southwestern Oregon. It has been flipping rafts, smashing drift boats, sinking kayaks, and terrorizing boaters for decades. Blossom Bar was once so strewn with boulders that boats had to be portaged across it, but Glenn Wooldridge, an early river runner on the Rogue, dynamited a passage in the 1950s (see video: Blossom Bar Blasting). While Blossom can now be run, it has claimed several lives in recent years.
When I stood on that rock for the first time, I was surrounded by a crew of experienced river runners, watching as the group right before us struggled to hoist an 18′ rubber raft off the Picket Fence, a line of jagged rocks it had hit when it missed the first turn to the right. While they hauled on an elaborate rigging of ropes and pulleys, one crew member sat off to the side, alone, with his head in his hands, and his arm in a makeshift splint—a casualty of a river mishap that had occurred just prior to our arrival. My freshly varnished hand-built mahogany-plywood drift boat barely had a scratch on it, and I was as worried about what the rapid might do to it as much as what it might do to me. I’d been told so many times that rapid and the whole lower Rogue is no place for a boat made of wood that I’d started to believe it.
I made it through the rapid that first time without a scratch, but that was a thousand river miles and several thousand rapids ago. I’ve been on many of the rivers in Oregon, chasing fish, and running rapids in my wooden drift boat, and each river has a distinct personality. Some are fussy, some are sophisticated; others are fickle, elegant, classy, and even sacred. But the Rogue is a breed apart. It’s the river where Zane Grey did his best writing, where John Wayne and Katherine Hepburn, Merrill Streep and Kevin Bacon made movies; it’s a river where famous athletes and dignitaries have fished. And it’s a river that doesn’t suffer fools lightly. The Rogue is rowdy. Rough and rugged, it represents the American West when it was wild. The Rogue brings out the best in me as a river runner, a fisherman, and an outdoorsman. I’ve run the lower Rogue in every season of the year, in a wide variety of weather conditions, always with the same wood boat and mostly with the same river crew.
Greg Hatten
The calm of Kelsey Canyon creates a nice opportunity to get lost in the steep mossy walls, the deep green of the towering trees, and the emerging colors of fall on the hills looming over the river.
Last fall was different. Almost everything I knew about the river changed in 2015 because of an historic low water level. River levels all over the West were at all-time lows because of the lack of rain and snow. None of us had ever seen the Rogue so low. All summer we had watched the levels continue to drop, and as our early October permit date approached, we debated whether we should run it at all.
A few days before our scheduled put-in, I spent a couple of days and cold nights high in the Cascade Mountain range exploring Crater Lake National Park, very close to where the Rogue River gets its start. I was amazed at how the deep dark blue of the lake could upstage such a beautiful cloudless October Oregon sky. Just a few miles from the rim of Crater Lake, on the north flank of Mount Mazama at Boundary Spring, life begins for the Rogue River. Unlike many Northwest rivers that start out as a quiet trickle from glacier melt, the Rogue bursts out of the ground with all the power and drama it’s known for downriver. It surges from the ground almost as if someone turned on a fire hydrant and left it gushing. The cold, clear water races down the western side of the divide, carving a path through a series of chutes and sharp drops as it runs under and over moss-covered trees that have fallen all around the narrow passages of the river.
There was no evidence at the river’s source that the drought in the West had any effect on the personality or the pulse of the rough and tumble Rogue. But as I drove down from the heights of the mountains and along the river, it was clear from the waterlines on the shore and the exposed rocks in the river that this year’s flow was well below average. Some of the tributaries that normally feed into the Rogue were practically dry and the snowmelt was long gone, leaving the river much rockier and rougher than usual.
While I was in Crater Lake Park and disconnected from cell phones and emails, word went out that a drift boat was jammed in the middle of the narrow slot canyon known as Mule Creek Canyon and the Wild and Scenic Rogue was closed by the Bureau of Land Management until the boat could be removed. Our trip was off. My heart sank when I read the notice and saw the pictures my friends had circulated of the boat wedged tight in the canyon channel unable to fit through the narrow passage. The bow was caught on one side of the canyon wall and the transom on the other, while the water kept the boat pinned on its edge. No one had been seriously injured, but the boat was a mess. Moments after I read the notice word came through that the current had broken the boat, folded it, and flushed it downriver. Our trip was back on.
We headed to the rustic riverside Galice Lodge with our rigs, boats, and supplies ready for a week of river running. I was coming from Crater Lake and was the first to arrive in the early afternoon. I headed to a great little riffle just downriver from the Lodge; three fish later, I trudged back up the steep bluff to connect with the river friends I hadn’t seen since this same time last year.
All of us, including Scott, our trip leader and one of the best oarsmen on the planet, were anxious about the low water level. Even Debbie, the owner of the lodge and “Goddess Divine of the Rogue,” advised against going. She has been on the river all her life and had never seen it so low. She stopped renting her river rafts several weeks prior because her gear was getting torn up by inexperienced boaters in low water and sharp rocks. We talked about it and decided to launch anyway.
We pulled out early the next morning for the short drive to the Graves Creek put-in at the upstream end of the 36-mile Wild and Scenic section. We shoved off from the boat launch into a pool of calm water, and in a mere 200 yards we reached the chaos at the top of the Class-III Graves Creek Rapid. The low water was immediately evident as the bottom of my boat bumped boulders in the middle of the rapid where I had never before touched a rock. Running the river at this level would be a huge challenge requiring vigilance and skill, particularly in the back-to-back Class IVs: Mule Creek Canyon and Blossom Bar. They were two days away, but already on my mind.
Just a couple miles from the put-in at Graves, there is a waterfall with a drop so vertical and violent you can hear the deep thunder of crashing water on rocks for a quarter mile upriver before you can see the cloud of mist that hangs above it. It’s Rainie Falls, classified as an “unrunnable” Class VI, the highest designation for degree of difficulty on North American rivers. On river right there is a narrow rocky lining chute that makes it possible to avoid the falls if you are willing to wrangle your boat through a more gradual elevation change in the form of something that resembles a ragged stone staircase for King Kong with water running down it.
Greg Hatten
To get around the unrunnable Rainie Falls, we lined our boats in the skinny side channel known by many names, the only printable one being Fish Ladder. It required all hands and a couple of hours to get ten boats through the narrow rocky chute.
We pushed and pulled and squeezed and coaxed the rafts down that rocky narrow flight of stairs one by one and only lost control of one raft. It happened on the last narrow section at the bottom; the raft got stuck and with water starting to pour over the sides, we released the rope and let it go rather than let it sink. Two rowers quickly jumped in an empty boat, chased the runaway down river and pulled it to shore.
When it was time for my wood boat to run the gauntlet, I tied my 100′ rope to the transom, gave it a little nudge, paid out some line, and watched the river current take it 20 yards down to the lip of the first stair step where it got hung up by low water. It teetered for a few moments with the bow hanging precariously over the 5′ drop until the water built up behind it and sent it over the edge in a nosedive. I held my breath hoping there was enough water to break the fall. There was water, powerful water, and it grabbed my boat and shot it forward. I did my best to hold onto the rope but it screamed through my gloved hands and left me with painful rope burns. My boat bumped the bottom several times and slowed down before it reached the next stair step and I repeated the process four or five times until the last narrow pinch. The pinch was too narrow for the rafts and I knew it by looking at it that it would be too narrow for my boat.
The water surged as it forced its way through the slot and it grabbed my boat and almost pulled me off my feet. I let out line and as the boat did it’s best to fit through the opening, I heard the awful sound of wood scraping the canyon wall as the rocks on the right side carved a scratch down the entire length of my boat. Since I’d built the boat and would have to repair the damage, it was like hearing the scratching of fingernails along an eight foot chalkboard: excruciating. Lining a group of boats around Rainie Falls in normal flow usually takes us 30 to 45 minutes. Low water conditions turned it into a two-hour struggle.
Greg Hatten
The view of the sunset up river from our camp below Tyee Rapid was stunning as the shadows crept up the mountains and dusk overtook the day.
We camped at the bottom of a Class-IV rapid called Tyee. It has a spacious area of gravel, sand, and brown grass, with plenty of room for the boats and a huge level area for our campsite. The weather was unseasonably warm, and we took advantage of it that night. Not one of the 10 of us set up a tent. We all preferred sleeping in the open air with the stars overhead. I threw down my cot and bedroll next to my boat and soon fell asleep
Scott Vollstedt
The narrow opening on the right side of Slim Pickens left no margin for error as it was just a little wider than the boat. To run it in a wood boat at low water levels required plenty of nerve.
Our second day on the Wild and Scenic section was filled with tricky Class II rapids, starting first thing in the morning with Wildcat, and then Slim Pickens, Black Bar, Dulog, and Quiz Show. They were all sharper and more technically demanding than usual and we were constantly scanning the water for ragged rocks just below the surface. Everything was harder. The low water had turned the Class IIs into Class IIIs, and the Class IIIs into Class IVs.
Scott Vollstedt
Black Bar Rapid is a Class III and normally, only the top of this rock in the middle is exposed. At low water, it becomes a big obstacle that must be missed.
After an exhausting day of rowing we pulled into Battle Bar Camp, the site of a bloody skirmish between the U.S. Army and the Rogue River tribes over 150 years ago. The campsite is one of our favorites with plenty of room for tents and cots. I hauled my gear 100′ up a narrow winding trail to a small flat area on the edge of the bluff with a commanding view of the valley downriver, the steep tree-covered hills of the opposite shore, and our row of colorful boats pulled up in a neat line at the river’s edge.
Greg Hatten
One of the best sights on any river trip are the colorful boats pulled into camp each night after a hard day of rowing. Our campsite at Battle on the second night of the trip provided a bird’s-eye view of the boats and camp from the bluff above the river.
These boats mean the world to the men who row them. Each of us has found a craft that suits the way we row and the way we travel on the river, and while no boat or setup is the same, the connection we have with them is very much the same. We all have stories of close calls and near misses, and it’s always the boat that pulled us out, avoiding scrapes and averting disaster. Time after time, the boats deliver us from tight spots. We love our boats. Mine is a McKenzie-style drift boat. Nothing on the river is quite as pretty to my eye, and nothing I have ever rowed is quite as responsive. I built the boat and have shaped, sanded, and varnished every square inch of wood on it. I’ve rowed it for thousands of hours and hundreds of miles and know what it is capable of. I’ve repaired holes, replaced frames, resanded, revarnished, and refurbished most every part of it. My connection with it runs deep. When I am rowing the boat in sync with the river, everything feels effortless, time stands still, and I am part of the river. The boat moves nimbly with just a flick of my oars and the paths through the rapids come easy.
Scott Halpert
One of the best parts about running the Rogue in autumn is the vibrant color along the hills lining the river. In between rapids, stretches of calm water like this one just above the Battle Bar camp site provided good opportunities for fishing.
After a campfire dinner down by the river, we talked about our running order, the meeting time above the rapid, and the effect the low water level might have. I took my river book out of my boat to review my river notes from previous years. The first page I turned to had a note from a few years back when the water was low, and in big bold red permanent marker I had written, “NEVER run this river below 1,100 CFS.” When we launched at Graves the level had been 950 cubic feet per second.
In the morning I sat up on my cot, still wrapped in the warmth of the bedroll and blankets, and admired the vivid colors on the hill across the river. The yellows and reds of fall were even brighter with the morning dew. I was eager to take on the day’s challenges but anxious about the risk the rapids ahead posed to everyone on the team. When we gathered on the beach for coffee, Scott reviewed the running order and ideal time to run Mule Creek and Blossom Bar.
After breakfast we broke camp, stowed gear, and pushed off one at a time. In just a few miles of rowing and fishing we reached our staging point at Rogue River Ranch. We pulled up on the long sandy beach for final equipment checks and to make sure our boats were “rigged to flip,” river-talk for having rods and loose gear stowed, dry bags tied down, and spare oars made accessible. We launched and then rowed the slow approach to the slot canyon.
The river current starts moving quicker as the elevation drops, and finally we saw the two boulders that mark the entrance. We call them Jaws. They stand like sentinels, three stories high. Once we passed them we really started to fly. Low water made the descent into the canyon steeper and faster than I’ve ever seen it. The walls felt tight, too close for comfort. I shot through the first section, and in several places the tips of my oars touched both sides of the canyon.
The line through Mule Creek is constantly shifting as the current rushes through the chute and bounces off the walls. To avoid crashing into the wall, you have to read the current and the waves bouncing off the boulders to anticipate what effect they will have on the boat. It’s critical to keep the nose of the boat pointing at the wall or boulder you expect to smash into so you can pull back away from it. Midway through the run, at one of the fastest points on the whole river, I misread the current and got thrown against the right wall. The rocks could have sideswiped the entire length of the hull, but just before impact I extended my right oar to protect the boat. The oar took the brunt of the damage and the loud scraping sound of wood on rock echoed off both walls.
I was fast approaching the narrow point in the canyon where all that raging water gets squeezed through an opening only little wider than our boats. It was where the metal drift boat had been wedged a week earlier. I took a deep breath. There was no margin for error or hesitation; I read the current, lined up the bow, had just enough room to give one hard forward row with both oars before tucking them in, and shot right through the skinny opening clearing both sides with just inches to spare.
Coffee Pot is the last of the nasty obstacles in the canyon. It’s a boiling, angry ogre of an eddy that lurks in the canyon. It’s about the size of a living room with a narrow opening and a narrower exit. Once your boat enters the eddy, the strong current sweeps everything counterclockwise and you can only exit when a rotation takes the boat close enough to the exit for a quick stroke of the oars to break through the current and slip though the opening. I’ve taken as many as five rotations before getting out of that eddy.
As I approached it, I was still moving fast in tight quarters, and I lined up the boat as best I could with my bow pointing slightly left of center. I gave a quick thrust on the oars to stick my bow inside the swirl. The current grabbed hold and pulled the rest of my boat onto the dance floor, and just as the stern had cleared the entrance and the whole boat was in the eddy, I gave the left oar a hard pull and spun the boat so the transom was lined up with the exit then gave both oars a deep pull and shot backward through the exit in the cleanest and quickest exit I’ve ever made in the Coffee Pot. I was through and I was pleased. My heart raced.
We all made it safely through Mule Creek, but there was no time to celebrate. Blossom was right around the corner. We pulled in at the steep rocks above the rapid, tied our boats off, and scrambled up the scout rock for the view of Blossom Bar to make sure there were no obstructions that might block our path or alter our line. It was one of first times in years there wasn’t an overturned raft, a metal frame, a busted-up drift boat, or a half-submerged kayak to maneuver around. After crawling back down the slippery rocks to the boats, we arranged ourselves in the same running order as in Mule Creek and floated single file to the top of the rapid in what seemed like slow motion.
As I pulled into the soft water of Purgatory Eddy just a few yards before the first pour-over of Blossom, I did one final visual check of the boat and then eased back into the current. Just before dropping over the entry point, I saw a sharp rock right in the middle of the pour-over that I had never seen before. I gave a quick corrective pull on the oars and missed it by inches. The strong current tried to pull me down to the four sharp, pointed boulders that rise up out of the water and form the barrier known as the Picket Fence, but I broke through the lateral wave and swung my boat across the current to the right so I could hook the boat around a rock we call the Horn and slip down the chute known as the Beaver Slide. At this point we are moving our boats laterally through an opening that always feels like it’s a size too small for our boats. To do it right, the bow must come very close to the pour-over that tumbles into the Picket Fence; this move requires steady nerves and a few strong pulls on the oars.
Scott Vollstedt
This holding eddy just below the Picket Fence on Blossom Bar is where we position ourselves as the first line of safety in case of emergency for rowers that come after us. This photograph, taken in 2013, shows the river at normal water levels. In 2015, the water was several feet lower and the passage through Blossom all the more dangerous.
At normal water flows, I’d be so close to the left rock when entering the Beaver Slide that I’d have to raise my oar up out of the water and drop it on the other side of the rock to make the quick pivot. But with the water so low, the move I’d made 100 times before didn’t work. The rock was too tall for me to get my oar up and over, and there was a moment of panic as I had to improvise my entry and pivot down the slide with my right the oar, the only one I could use. As soon as I passed by the boulder and I could use both oars, I made the pivot and dug the oars deep in the water to break left out of the current. I made a series of zigzag moves through a dramatic rock garden filled with large and small rocks with names like Volkswagen and Clam Shell. I felt like a pinball going through the gauntlet of moss-covered rocks, swirling eddies, and boulders.
Greg Hatten
The Class-III Devils Staircase was one of the few rapids we found a little easier in low water; it was a slip-and-slide run of moderate waves. I pulled into the peaceful eddy on river left to watch the rafts come through after me.
When we were all safely through the Class IVs, we had a traditional toast in the calm pool at the bottom of the rapid we call Whiskey Eddie and then we ran Devil’s Staircase, the last of the Class IIIs. From this point in the adventure, we normally turn our focus to fishing, but the low water wouldn’t let us get too comfortable. In a tricky Class II called Tacoma, one of my friends wedged an oar between two submerged rocks and had to let it go. The mishap almost sank his raft, and he was lucky to only lose some fishing gear and the oar. It could have been much worse.
Greg Hatten
Our last night on the river was a rocky camp site but a good one. My folding cot kept me elevated just enough so I hovered just above the rocks and slept comfortably in my old-school wool blankets and cowboy bedroll.
At our last camp we dined on fresh steelhead cooked over an open flame, cold wine, warm whiskey, and recalled the heroics of the boats, the nerves of the oarsmen, and the skills of the fishermen. Our release from the stress of rowing so many difficult rapids in such low water turned the evening into a celebration, and there were times we laughed so hard we cried. Night came to the Rogue, and we slept under a covering of stars.
Greg Hatten is an outdoor writer, a consultant for active-consumer products, and a licensed Oregon Outfitter and Guide who hosts outdoor river adventures in a hand-crafted wooden drift boat pursuing steelhead on the fly.
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.
An old plastic cutting board and a stainless-steel screw make a quick, easily removed, and adjustable collar.
A few years ago I wanted to add collars to a pair of oars but didn’t want to remove the existing leathers to sew on strips of latigo. The leathers had been soaking up tallow for several years; I didn’t think I’d have much luck gluing anything to them. I also wanted collars that I could easily reposition or remove. High-density polyethylene (HDPE) seemed like a good material for the job. It’s easily worked and durable, and I happened to have a big piece of it in the kitchen: a 1/2″-thick cutting board.
Careful drilling of the pilot hole is required to recess the screw head. The gap in the collar assures that it can be drawn up tight.
The oars had a diameter of 2″ at the leathers; a 2″ holesaw cut through the 1/2″ HDPE. I didn’t have a 3″ holesaw to create a 1/2″ wide ring, so I used a bandsaw to cut around the hole. Before I split the ring, I drilled a pilot hole and countersink for a 1-1/4″ stainless-steel square-drive flathead wood screw. To get the countersink deep enough to bury the screw head, I aimed the pilot drill to follow a tangent that came about 1/8″ from the inside hole. I then cut through the ring at a point where the unthreaded screw shank would be on the countersink side, the threads on the other. I had to saw about 1/4″ from the threaded side for the screw to squeeze the collar tight on the leathers. My quick and cheap collars wound up working beautifully and have lasted for years.
I recently decided to add collars to another set of oars, and while the HDPE collars are easy to make, there wasn’t much left of the cutting board, so I thought about doing something in wood. A ring wouldn’t work because of wood’s tendency to split along short grain. Reasoning that the oar doesn’t require a full collar to keep it from sliding out through the lock, I thought I’d try adding something smaller to the leathers.
I did the lashing the same way I’d do a simple whipping on the end of a line: making an elongated loop over the thumb button, making tight turns around button and oar, and using the protruding end of the loop to pull the tail end under the tight band of turns. I put a flame to the trimmed ends and smeared the melted nylon flat.
I cut pieces of hardwood—locust—1-3/4″ long and 1-1/4″ wide, and gave them an inside curve to fit the oar leather and an outside curve to create a crescent-shaped cross section. A quick test showed that the end that makes contact with the rowlock needs to be rounded. Lashings recessed in a wide groove hold them to the oars.
I roughed out the inside and outside curve on the bandsaw and cleaned up the inside curve with a 2″ sanding drum, the outside on a disk sander. A small rasp cut the recess for the lashings.
The thumb buttons, as I call them, worked just as well as collars. Because they can be rotated to the top of the oar and then passed between the horns of the lock, I added second button, to create a different gearing. With a little practice I was able to change gearing in between strokes without a break in the rhythm. Changing gears on the fly worked so well I added a third button, resulting in a range of gearing similar to what I have with the long collarless leathers I use for rowing on tholepins.
I lined the thumb buttons up with the bottom/trailing edge of the oar blade so spoon-bladed oars can lie directly next to one another, loom to loom, when the blades are cupped one inside the other. Without the splay created by a full collar, a pair of oars makes a more compact bundle for carrying and stowing.
Christopher Cunningham is the editor of Small Boats Monthly.
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The carbon-fiber ferrule weighs just 9 3/4 ounces.
Most of my boats are outfitted for rowing, and while I always have a pair of oars aboard, they’re often in the way when I’m sailing, motoring, or at anchor. Duckworks offers a solution: carbon-fiber ferrules to make sectional oars, which are much easier to stow when they’re not being used.
The ferrules are cylindrical and work best on oars with cylindrical or minimally tapered looms. All of the oars that I’ve made have tapered looms and carry an oval cross-section through much of their length, so they were not good candidates for the ferrules, but I was given an old pair of commercially made 10′ oars that were. They’re Sitka spruce, made by the Lister Brothers in Vancouver, British Columbia. With a bit of trepidation—I’d seen a pair of Lister Brothers oars for sale on an antiques website, priced at $1,500—I put those oars in my chop saw.
If you want the sections to be equal in length and both fit in the smallest possible space, don’t cut your oars in half—you’ll wind up with one section 3-1/2″ longer than the other. To make the sections of equal length, find the midpoint of the oars, and make the cut 1-3/4″ to the handle side of that mark. Then put the longer male side of the ferrule on the handle section and the female side on the blade section. (That puts the mating surfaces of the ferrule farther away from the oarlock where they’re subject to less strain.)
The 14″-long ferrules will add 7″ to the overall length of the sectioned oar. The additional length made my 10′ oars a better fit for the boats I’d be using them for, but if you want your oars to remain the same length, cut the oars as noted above and then trim 3 1/2″ from each end.
If your oars have a diameter less than 45 mm, you’ll have to add some thickness. The Duckworks website has a note from one customer who used wraps of fiberglass and epoxy to fill the gap. The looms of my oars have a diameter a bit larger than the 49mm outside diameter of the ferrule and needed to be trimmed to fit inside diameter of 45 mm, or 1 25/32″. I needed to reduce the diameter of the looms to take the ferrules. To do that I made a cradle to the hold the oar sections on my tablesaw: With the blade of my tablesaw at 45° I cut a groove along the face of a 2 x 4. I then set the fence of my tablesaw 3 1/2″ from the far edge of the blade (the length that gets inserted into the ferrule halves). With the blade lowered, I clamped the 2×4 across the table and, with the saw running, cranked the blade up through the bottom of the 2×4 until it cut into the groove.
Repeatedly sliding the loom across the tablesaw blade trimmed it down to size. I got less tearout at the shoulder by making the first cut with the end butted up against the fence and making a full rotation of the loom.
With an oar section resting in the groove, I raised the blade in small increments, cutting just the end of the loom until I got a tight fit in the ferrule. With the blade set to cut just enough wood away, I butted the loom against the fence, rotated the loom to cut the shoulder, then slid the loom back and forth across the blade rotating a few degrees at a time.
Testing the fit in the ferrules and a light touch with a fine-toothed rasp finished the trimming.
You should do a dry fit before gluing the ferrules in place. If the button for the ferrule’s latch doesn’t pop up through the hole, you might need to trim a bit off the loom that fits the female half of the ferrule. Don’t take a rattail file to the button’s hole to enlarge it; you don’t want to give that a loose fit.
When you’re ready to assemble the pieces, paint epoxy on the ferrules and the sawn ends and newly trimmed surfaces the oars. Be stingy with the epoxy when coating the female side of the ferrule: A thin film on the inside surface of the ferrule is all that’s required; any excess will just get pushed ahead of the end of the loom and need to be completely removed. Clean up any epoxy that will cause problems joining the oar sections later. Set the oar sections with the ferrules up while the epoxy is curing to avoid any drips fouling the joint. After the epoxy cures, you’ll be ready to row. An easy way to assemble the sectional oar it to rest each half on the gunwale—to take the weight—and slide the ferrule ends together in the middle of the boat.
I’ll be able to stow the oars tucked along the sheerstrake or against the uprights supporting the side benches. Note that the oar sections are of equal length, but the connections with the ferrules (and the hidden cut ends of the loom) are staggered.
The sectional oars performed just as well as they did before being sawn in two. The ferrule is tight and takes the strain without any movement or complaining. With the halves of the oars each at 5′ 3-1/2″, I had lots of places to stow them on the boats they are meant for.
A word of caution: The earliest sectional paddles I used, both in fiberglass and in carbon fiber, had the same type of ferrule and over the course of several years of use and wear they tended to loosen up. Newer kayak-paddle ferrules solved the problem with joints that used compression to hold the two paddle halves together and take up any slack that might develop over time. The Duckworks oar ferrules are substantially larger and have a much broader area of contact between the two halves, so I suspect they’ll be very slow to wear and loosen. I’ll use one-piece oars when I intend to do a lot of rowing, but I’d still carry the sectionals for backups. Saved for use when a one-piece oar breaks or goes missing, the motor conks out, or the wind won’t fill the sails, the sectional oars will have a good tight fit for many, many years. Best of all, while they’re waiting to save the day, they can be tucked somewhere out of the way.
Christopher Cunningham is the editor of Small Boats Monthly.
The plant-based ingredients make up over 50% of EcoPoxy content, far higher, according to the manufacturer, than other epoxies moving away from petroleum-based materials.
I’ve been building cedar-strip rowboats and canoes in British Columbia for more than 15 years. They are light, strong, and made of local woods: red and yellow cedar, fir, and maple. Until I discovered EcoPoxy about four years ago, the least appealing aspect of my work was the toxicity and odor of the petrochemical epoxy I’d been using.
EcoPoxy has replaced some of the normal petroleum-based compounds with plant-derived ingredients and is priced to compete with premium boatbuilding petro-epoxies. It is less toxic than other epoxies I’ve used in the past; it is 100 percent solids, has low VOCs (volatile organic compounds), and has very little odor. I use EcoPoxy Clear. Its hardener is listed as a long-term irritant, so I still take the normal epoxy handling precautions and use safety glasses, gloves, and long sleeves. I can order it online in up to 30-liter kits, and it gets mailed to my door, normally in four days. When I ordered epoxies from other manufacturers, it would have to be categorized as toxic and shipping was more costly.
What I first noticed about EcoPoxy is the almost complete absence of odor. The hardener has the slightest whiff of ammonia, and the resin is virtually odorless. The resin and hardener are mixed in a 2:1 ratio and are, according to the manufacturer, safe to use without a respirator as long as there is some airflow in the shop. Both the resin and hardener are water-clear and stay that way when mixed together. EcoPoxy has low viscosity, so fiberglass cloth wets out easily and completely. I use EcoPoxy thickened with fine sawdust (to keep it from flowing out of joints) as an adhesive for all the gunwales, decks and fittings, and, when thickened further, to make structural fillets. Finally, I use EcoPoxy as a sealer on any raw wood and under both waterborne linear polyurethane and polyurethane varnishes.
My first project with EcoPoxy was a Fine, a sleek, 18′ sliding-seat rowboat. When applying the fiberglass sheathing, I mixed the EcoPoxy in 3-oz batches and had plenty of time to squeegee the product through the cloth. The whole boat stayed workable until the sheathing task was done. Even though it was February, and the shop was cool, the EcoPoxy in the ’glass cured to the point where I could start attaching the skeg and keel the next day. I saw no sign of blush and the fill coats went on smoothly. While the EcoPoxy Clear I use doesn’t form blush, the manufacturer cautions that blush may form when using their fast or medium hardener and must be sponged off with warm water before any coats of epoxy or other finishes are applied.
The Fine has riggers to allow the use of long oars. I constructed the riggers from maple and EcoPoxy and even used EcoPoxy to glue the stainless-steel oarlocks posts in place. Normally held to metal outriggers with a nut tightened on threaded bottom end, the Fine’s posts are set in holes in the wood and held entirely by epoxy, without a nut. All of this has held up for over four years, with no delamination or failures—even on the highly loaded riggers.
To build this Cosine wherry, the author used EcoPoxy as an adhesive, a sealant, and to wet out fiberglass cloth.
I’ve used EcoPoxy to build about over a dozen of the rowboats and canoes I’ve sold. I have used EcoPoxy in three boatbuilding classes, where the ease of use, lower toxicity, and lower odor are important benefits for my students. I keep the resin and hardener warm in the winter, and EcoPoxy works for me in 50-degree shop temperatures. In the summer when it’s 80 degrees in the shop, the pot life is never too short and the cure time is never too fast.
I have a lot of confidence in EcoPoxy. Next to the wood, it is the most important component of my boats, and I like the fact that it incorporates plant-based ingredients that come from renewable sources, a lot like the cedar, fir, and maple I use to build my boats.
Update: Ecopoxy is no longer producing the clear product that I used for my boats, and the substitute they offered (Biopoxy 36) didn’t cure clear or was too viscous or had extremely long cure times. I have had to change to an Entropy Resins bio-based product, which has been great. RC, September 2022
Rick Crook and Pat Beninger live in Pender Harbour on the Sunshine Coast of Canada’s British Columbia. Rick has been building cedar-strip canoes and rowboats for 15 years and doing business as Oyster Bay Boats. He offers Wee Lassie canoes, Cosine wherries, Handliner rowboats, and the Fine, a sliding-seat rowboat. His boats are built with locally sourced red and yellow cedar, fir, and maple, and they have found their way to customers from Vancouver Island to Ontario.
EcoPoxy Clear is manufactured by Ecopoxy in Morris, Manitoba, Canada, and available direct from the manufacturer or from retailers. The two-part kit is priced at $37.50 for 750ml, $57.75 for 1.5L, $84.85 for 3L, and $150.75 for 6L (US dollars, ordered from Aircraft Spruce).
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.
“That boat is so damned beautiful, it’s making the rest of us look bad.”
Mark Ramsby of Portland, Oregon, wanted a bigger boat. He had built a cedar-strip canoe and had used it for several years, but at 66 he was finding it more difficult to sit in its confines of long stretches of time. After he had retired he thought about building a boat with enough room and stability for him to move about and to take on less-sheltered waters: the lower Columbia River, Puget Sound, Hood Canal, and the San Juan Islands to the north in Washington State.
CNC-cut tabs, slots and notches assured a fair and symmetrical hull.
Mark looked at a wide variety of designs for powerboats and sailboats. While he was interested in boats up to 30′, his home workshop in his two-car garage set the limit at 20′. He opted for a powerboat to travel without the limitations often posed by sail, and briefly considered a boat with sleeping arrangements for overnight trips with his wife, Meg. To keep the boat simple, affordable, and versatile, he decided that shore-side accommodations—camping on the beach or renting a room—were the better option.
Harry Bryan’s 18′ Handy Billy caught his eye, and he went so far as to buy the plans and loft the lines. The 5′ beam began to look too small, the projected 900-lb weight too heavy, and the potential for leaks in the batten-seam construction too great. He abandoned the project and went back to his search.
After Mark finished building the boat, he got it prepped for a professional painter to apply the finish.
Mark had seen PT Watercraft’s 18′5″ PT Skiff in Port Townsend, Washington. With a weight of 385 lbs (without motor), this center-console runabout was much lighter than the Handy Billy, wider at 6′2″, and, with its plywood and fiberglass construction, wasn’t going to leak after drying out while sitting on a trailer in his garage. Mark wanted the experience of building from plans, but the PT skiff was available only as a kit. After considering the building time—2,000 hours for the Handy Billy versus 400 hours for the PT skiff—the kit became the obvious choice. “That was the difference between building it over a couple of years and building over the winter. Since I was 66 at the time and wanted to use this boat, I wrote the check and placed my order.”
Anticipating he’d varnish the outwales, Mark glued them using small square pads of plywood to minimize the damage the temporary screws would do.
The CAD-designed kit parts are CNC-cut from BS 1088 okoume plywood with tabs and slots, puzzle joints, scribed markings, and alignment notches to assure everything gets assembled with great precision. Mark made a number of modifications to his PT Skiff—swapping out plywood parts meant to be painted with solid wood that he could varnish, for example—to produce a boat that he “wanted to look at for a long time.”
Mark replaced the kit’s plywood seat tops with solid sapele, cut them slightly oversize for a visually appealing overhang and wrapped the tops and bottoms with 4-oz ‘glass. The middle seat also has reinforcing gussets port and starboard where passengers are likely to step aboard.
On September 2 last year Mark and a friend launched in MOJO on the Willamette River. Less than 4 miles downriver Mark crossed the stern of a tug pushing a barge into a dock. MOJO, running light without her ballast tanks filled, got tossed around in the prop wash. Mark filled the tanks in mid-river, adding 320 lbs of ballast beneath the cockpit sole, and crossed the prop-wash again, this time with confidence-inspiring stability.
The forward bulkhead extends up behind the coaming, providing a comfortable backrest.
Meg joined Mark the following day for a 20-mile trip on the Willamette, and the following week the couple began the exploration that he’d been daydreaming about. They trailered north into Washington and toured Washington’s Hood Canal, and then launched again at Port Townsend to show the boat off at the Wooden Boat Festival.
The instrumentation mark added to his PT Skiff includes tachometer, voltmeter and depth sounder with through-hull transducer. In the open space beneath the console he has an onboard 120-volt charger for charging the 55A/H AGM battery under middle seat.
Mark and MOJO made the most of the remaining mild autumn weather and explored more of the Willamette River both upriver and down, and ventured farther north to Multnomah Channel and the Columbia River. He reports that for MOJO running at 10–15 knots is “a lovely speed, not too much twitchiness, just a calm and mannered cruise.” On one of his outings he and a friend stopped at a riverside café. When they returned to MOJO, someone from the café asked if they were heading out soon, adding: “That boat is so damned beautiful, it’s making the rest of us look bad.”
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.
Harris Bucklin, a Small Boats Monthly subscriber, sent me this note after he had read our review of the iBall back-up camera in the January 2016 issue: “You gave me a great idea for using my GoPro with my cell phone.” If you have one of those little waterproof action cameras and a wireless connection to connect it to a smartphone, using it as a back-up camera is indeed a great idea.
Christopher Cunningham
A wide-angle mirror and a jointed suction-cup mount worked on the tailgate of my truck and the rear window of my SUV.
Prior to using the iBall I had cobbled together a wide-angle rearview mirror from an auto-parts store and an articulated, suction-cup camera mount. It worked pretty well and didn’t cost much to make.
Christopher Cunningham
With the same mount I used for my mirror I could put my GoPro over the trailer ball.
Following Harris’s lead, I removed the mirror from the cup mount and put the GoPro on in it instead. (That’s what it was originally intended for.) My smartphone has the GoPro app installed and its display screen serves as the camera’s wireless remote monitor.
Christopher Cunningham
My smartphone with its Bluetooth connection to the GoPro serves as the monitor.
The GoPro has a very wide-angle lens and with the camera mounted over the trailer ball I can see the trailer tongue approaching from about 15′ out and guide the ball back until it is directly under the trailer hitch. There are a few things about the GoPro that took some getting used to. The images can’t be flipped left for right, so having the phone on my dashboard doesn’t give me the image I’m used to seeing in the rearview mirror. Holding the phone behind me and looking over my shoulder keeps me from working at cross-purposes. The wide-angle view seems to make the trailer tongue speed up as it gets closer, so a slow approach over the last foot or two is best. There’s also a delay in the image that appears on the phone’s screen, so to keep the tongue from denting my license plate (yet again) I stop every inch or so and let the image catch up.
If you already have a GoPro, the phone app, and a mount, you can set yourself up with a trailer-hitch camera in a couple of minutes and then head out and use the camera to record your boating activities. If you don’t have the GoPro rig, a mirror system like the one I came up with or the iBall are less pricy ways to get hitched quickly without help.
Zach, my sailing buddy/guru, had been shopping online for a sailboat for a co-worker when out of the blue, he sent me this instant messaging note: “Matt, I really think you should own this boat.” When I clicked the Craigslist link he sent, I saw a small red boat that was for sale near Boston. It was like nothing I’d ever seen before. It was a pram with a few long wooden ribs and some kind of fabric hull, and could be folded in a matter of moments for storage and portability. It had been used as a tender with a Johnson 1.5-hp Seahorse outboard, but when Zach explained that the boat, called a Fliptail 7, could be rigged as a sailboat, I realized immediately he was right, it was perfect for me. I wrote back, “Must have! Damn you.” The last thing I needed was another sailboat. I already had a 14′ one-design sailboat, and I was building a 15 ½′ sailing dinghy in my tiny East Village basement in Manhattan. But the lure of having a folding sailboat was inescapable.
Matthew McGregor-Mento
The folded Fliptail, together with its sailing rig make a compact bundle that’s not too much trouble to store. A small set of wheels eases walking the boat to the launch site.
I have always had a love for things that fold. I have three folding kayaks and two folding bikes. I designed and built two folding surfboards: a folding long board and a soft short board that fits in an airline carry-on bag. My dining room table is actually a portable picnic table that folds down into a neat little rectangle I can store in a clothes closet. My affinity for folding things comes from living in a cramped Manhattan apartment and my fascination for the engineering that goes into an elegant folding design. I did some research on the Fliptail at the Wooden Widget website, and was really impressed by the videos of it sailing and the ease and speed of folding it. After I watched the video of a Fliptail being quickly folded and driven away by a folding bike that had stowed aboard the boat moments before, I knew I had to have one.
If you live in a big city like me, you probably have no car and no room to store a sailboat. In Manhattan, yacht clubs are, of course, expensive, and marinas charge an arm and a leg to store a boat ashore, even more to rent a slip, and the handful of moorings that are available have a wait list that can be years long. I can store the Fliptail in my basement (it would even fit in a closet), wheel it to the riverside on a kayak dolly, and assemble the boat, completely ready to sail, in about 10 minutes. It means that I can go sailing on a whim if I have a couple hours free. I don’t have to make special plans with my wife and block out a half day to go sailing.
Benjy Benjamin
The chines and gunwales meet the stem at an angle and require small triangles of wood to accommodate the hinges.
The first thing you notice when you meet a Fliptail face to face is that it folds smaller (7′2″ x 24″ x 10″) and faster than you would imagine. If you’ve ever folded a portable baby crib, it has that same kind of magic-trick feel. The boat’s laminated keel, chines, and gunwales are all hinged together and fan out to support a PVC-reinforced polyester fabric skin. To unfold the boat you release a small Velcro strap and spread the sides out; the hinged floorboards flop down into place.
Benjy Benjamin
Sliding bolts keeps the uprights lined up over the cross beams and small notches in the chines keep the crossbeams where they belong.
Once extended, the sides are locked into place with four supports between the gunwales and the chines. There’s nothing complex about the supports, and it takes just a few seconds to secure each of them. Another four beams pivot out from the keel to the chines. Once they are square to the keel, you just position the vertical supports to meet them and secure each with a barrel bolt. To fold the frame back up you unlock the barrel bolts and release the supports. The floorboards fold up, and when you lift them by their handles the whole boat just folds up neatly, ready to be carried away.
Benjy Benjamin
The narrow transom stern is built solidly and has enough width at the top to take on a small outboard motor.
Robin “Benjy” Benjamin, the Wooden Widget designer, made the Fliptail to be a very pleasantly stable boat under sail. It has a lively feel in a breeze, and while you might heel a little, its broad beam, carried almost from end to end, assures that it’s unlikely you’ll capsize unless you really screw something up. I’ve added a jib just for fun, and even with the extra sail area, the Fliptail shows no signs of getting close to turning turtle. The boat sails as you’d expect of a short, beamy pram, but despite its unusual construction, it points to windward fairly well. Because the boat is so light, it rides right over the chop and boat wakes. It has handled everything I’ve encountered sailing the busy wake-ruffled Manhattan waterways.
Matthew McGregor-Mento
In an urban environment that’s not conducive to having a small boat on a trailer to go with it a compact folder offers access to the water.
I have also been pleasantly surprised by how well the Fliptail rows, though I have to confess I’ve had no experience rowing beyond the rowboats on The Lake in Central Park. I once sailed into the mouth of New York’s infamous Hell Gate, a narrow tidal strait in the middle of the East River, and had to take to the oars to fight the current. With a fair amount of effort, I skirted the shore, working upstream, until I rounded a bend and broke into quieter waters. I’ve also rowed the boat pleasantly for long stretches on the upper Harlem River.
Matthew McGregor-Mento
The single leeboard stays on the same side of the hull for both port and starboard tacks. When the board is on the upwind side, a lacing hook fastened horizontally to the chine engages a pad eye on the centerboard to keep the board from getting pried away from the hell.
On the Wooden Widget site it says, “You can’t buy cool. You have to build it.” I was lucky enough to buy one of their boats, but that’s pretty rare. If you want your own Fliptail, it’s available as a set of plans. And although I didn’t build my Fliptail, I did retrofit it for sailing. Benjy graciously sent me the boat plans, which included the step-by-step instructions and many helpful photos for adding the sailing rig. The instructions were easy to follow (as were the instructions for the build), and I was able to adapt readily available Optimist sailing dinghy parts for the rig.
Benjy specs a sail for the Fliptail that can be built from a kit ordered from Sailrite or by cutting down an Optimist sail. He advised the kit sail performs better than the modified sail. I ordered my kit from Sailrite and had it sewn up by UK Sailmakers on City Island in the Bronx. Despite the sail’s small size, I asked for reefpoints, thinking I might someday cruise with the boat and safely sail in slightly stronger breezes.
Matthew McGregor-Mento
As short as the Fliptail 7 may be, it has room for two, even two adults.
I did make a few modifications to the sail rig. The plans call for a mast made by lengthening an Optimist mast by 9.5cm, but I added a 40cm extender tube, available from an Optimist parts supplier, so I can tack without having to duck low under the boom. The taller rig sacrifices some stability, but the Fliptail is beamy and I’ve been pleased with how well it resists heeling. Instead of using a tiller, I rigged rope steering to gain a bit more room in the cockpit. This really isn’t necessary, but I discovered an unintended perk: I can make the boat self-steering using clam cleats I’ve fastened to each gunwale. Despite Benjy’s prudent recommendation to the contrary, I rigged the mainsheet with a blocks and a cam cleat. The mainsheet is meant to be a single line, held by hand for safety’s sake, but I like being able to set the sail to take care of itself and free up a hand. In a very light breeze it’s fun to make the boat sail itself completely hands-free and just sit back and enjoy the ride. I fastened the block to the keel with a quick-release pin (Zach’s brilliant idea) that allows it to be quickly set up when launching and removed to allow the boat to fold properly.
The Fliptail makes it possible for me to use public transportation for my sailing trips and launch from places farther than I can walk. I can launch near one bus stop or rail terminal and land near another; I’m not limited to out-and-back voyages. For a recent trip I departed from the 20th Street launch—really just a pile of sand and rocks around an old dilapidated wooden drain that’s completely underwater at a spring high tide—and after sailing, rowing, and mostly ghosting along on the current for 12.5 miles, I landed at 215th Street, packed up the Fliptail, and took the subway home.
I’d highly recommend a Fliptail to any sailor who wants a very compact tender or who lives in a house or an apartment with no room to keep a boat. The boat’s ease of storage and portability make having a boat a new possibility for many, and its quick assembly time offers little impediment to getting afloat. My Fliptail 7 is 7′2″ long. There are two other versions: the even smaller Fliptail 6 at 6′2″, and the comparatively roomy Fliptail 9 at 9′ even. At 33, 39, and 50 lbs, respectively, they’re all light enough to put on a regular roof rack—that’s if you happen to lack the good fortune to live on Manhattan and are forced to own a car.
Matthew McGregor-Mento lives in Manhattan with his wife Emma, his 18-month-old daughter Kirra, and 3 cats. He leads a creative technology group at a worldwide advertising agency. He bought his first small boat, a Snark Sea Skimmer, in the 80s for $50 at a garage sale and, sadly, sailed it only once. He didn’t sail again until 2013 when he rescued and rehabilitated a derelict Force 5 sailing dinghy that he found among discarded construction materials at a recycling warehouse. He’s currently designing a backpackable sailboat and has a Mirror Dinghy waiting for him in a shed in Australia where he’ll be living in 2020 if all goes to plan.
Particulars
[table]
Length/ 7’2″ (218cm)
Beam/40″ (102cm)
Height/17″ (44cm)
Weight/39 lbs (18 kilos)
Capacity/Approx 440 lbs (200 kilos)
Power/3.3 hp (max)
Sail area/25 sq ft (2.5 sq meters)
[/table]
Plans for the Fliptail 7 (£30 or about $42 USD) and other folding and lightweight boats are available from Wooden Widget.
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!
Was it time for another boat? In the 1980s, it was a 16′ sailing dinghy that awakened my wife Barbara and me to the beach-cruising pleasures of the San Juan Islands in Washington’s Puget Sound. In the ’90s, it was a 19′ lug-rigged double-ender for oar, sail, and outboard that extended cruising to Desolation Sound. Then came a 20′ catamaran, sporting a wing mast with square-topped mainsail, that got us inside a comfortable cabin while offering exciting sailing in moderate conditions. But as years went by, sitting out in the weather and hauling sheets took its toll. Sailing was exciting when the wind was up, but boring in light summer winds. Why bother with sailing if we could motor at 10 knots? Was it time for a gasser?
And so it was, and we decided upon the Eco 5 Power Cat by Bernd Kohler in France. Its narrow hulls, wave-piercing bows, space-age profile, and three-tone color scheme really made it a looker. At 5.5 meters, it was about the same size and accommodation as our 6-meter sailing cat, and still trailerable behind our compact SUV. The twin 5-hp outboards specified in the plans were to drive the EcoCat at an economical 10 knots and spin it around in circles. Having them mounted on the transoms should eliminate weed pickup, as well as the between-hull wave buildup working against a centrally mounted outboard. I ordered plans, and the digital files came quickly via email.
The plywood-on-frame EcoCat is simply built, using chines sprung around widely spaced bulkheads. I opened the DXF files on an older Mac Cube still running Drawing Board CAD from Ashlar Vellum. With CAD, I made some design changes for a bit more cabin headroom, bigger windows, storage lockers forward, and extended cockpit sides complementing the cabin profile.
Ron Mueller
The Eco Cat rests comfortably on the cobbles between tides. There’s room aboard for an inflatable kayak when a dinghy is required if the Cat’s at anchor.
Once I had the design tuned to suit our needs, I nested parts for economical use of plywood sheets, created a tool path for the ShopBot CNC router I’d used for our rowing-shell kit business, and quickly cut out the parts from 6mm plywood. It sounds complicated, but it’s actually similar to laying out parts by hand—but with parts cut far more accurately, with beautiful, fair, and smooth curves everywhere. I milled clear Sitka spruce to dimension, scarfed it to full lengths, rounded edges, and precoated everything with epoxy. This self-made “kit” made for very fast building.
The building jig had only one temporary form; all other forms were bulkheads that remained with the hulls. The hulls were built upside down, planked, and even finish-coated with graphite-infused epoxy—later I’d paint above the waterline. The 6mm planking was patterned on the hull, as the actual faired shape may be a bit different from a CAD plate expansion, then glued in place and trimmed. The hull and side-panel sections were joined with butt blocks that added stiffness in way of the temporary bulkhead. After I flipped the hulls upright and aligned them, I fit the deck—scarfed 12mm plywood. The cabin sides and top were built up with two layers of 4mm ply. It took just four months for me to complete the construction of the hulls and cabin.
The partially finished boat looked great, and I decided to spend the big money for a two-part paint sprayed on by a professional, thinking it would be done quickly. Wrong. It was another six weeks before the boat was back for outfitting. The plans showed a windscreen here, a galley there, a steering wheel, and twin outboards—but no details. It was just another challenge to work through.
Ron Mueller
The two small outboards were a good fit for the twin hulls, but didn’t provide adequate power.
Remote steering and motor controls for twin outboards is very routine for a monohull, but not for tiny twin 5-hp outboards on a catamaran! Time to improvise. A tiller bar, supported on nylon bushings, was hidden in the cross beam with a mechanical steering cable connected to the dash-mounted steering wheel. What a challenge it was just to have twin motors on a little catamaran.
Another professional I hired designed an excellent canvas dodger, back panel, and semi-rigid windscreen that really complemented the design. Barbara and I could now cruise, completely protected from wind and rain, sitting in comfortable captain’s chairs. The 6′ x 8′ cockpit is our living room at anchor, doubling the EcoCat’s enclosed space. A Yeti cooler, good for five days, stays in the cockpit as a table or extra seat. An Origo two-burner alcohol stove eliminated complicated propane systems. We use a lightweight 32-amp-hour starting battery, not for the pull-cord-start outboards, but for powering LED lighting and an iPad for music and charts with the Navionics app. We only need the instruments powered up while we’re under way, so the outboards’ 6-amp charging outlets supply power directly to the instruments and charge the battery at the same time. No shore power is needed. Simple systems for a simple boat—its name, JUST ENUF, serves the cat well!
Ron Mueller
The Cat’s shallow draft and twin hulls open up options for anchoring in shallow coves. If the bottom is even and not too rocky, grounding out during a midnight low tide isn’t a problem.
During the boat’s first season we took a two-week cruise to British Columbia’s Broughton Islands. The cruise covered hundreds of miles, and we alternated between being the only boat in a secluded cove and being surrounded by the warm hospitality of wilderness float marinas. A comfortable 80-mile range and top speed of 10 knots allowed us to do plenty of exploring without concern for time or fuel. The EcoCat is comfortable in sea conditions of 2′ short, steep chop and can confidently deal with far rougher conditions.
Ron Mueller
Having the lines of the Eco Cat in CAD files simplifies making alterations like raising the cabin roof to provide standing headroom.
This 8′-wide catamaran offers the stability and seakeeping of a far larger boat. There’s never a problem grabbing for a hot pan when another boat, zipping by to look at JUST ENUF, leaves its wake for us. There is plenty of room with a hanging locker and two cuddies for each person. Sleeping bags with integrated mattresses make a very comfortable double. When bags are folded over during the day, the large padded bridge deck area is very comfortable for sitting, cooking, and just hanging out. The starboard hull has a cushioned canoe seat atop the porta-potti. Just forward is hull storage for an inflatable kayak or two folding bikes and other bulky gear. The port hull has standing headroom at the sink and sit-down room for meal preparation with a flip-down table for dining.
Ron Mueller
A single 20-hp outboard can outperform twin 5-hp outboards. Just behind the motor’s shaft you can see one of the extensions added to the hulls to improve the trim with the greater motor weight. The custom-made canopy doubles the Cat’s sheltered space.
The twin 5-hp outboards proved to be not enough power. They had no top-speed potential, pull-cord starting, and were noisy, especially with the steering linkage rattling between them. Worse, the tiny props had so little bite that docking maneuvers were a constant challenge. A repower with a single Yamaha 20-hp outboard yielded a 10-knot cruising speed, 15-knot top speed, and the same fuel economy as the twin 5s: 1 gallon per hour at any speed. Electric start, 6-amp charging capability, and a lightweight battery competed the package. A 1′ extension added to the stern of each hull helped offset the additional weight of the larger motor and its under-deck 12-gallon fuel tank. Docking was no longer embarrassing, and we could now talk while running 10 knots. The rougher the water got, the faster and smoother we would go. Life was good.
Christopher Cunningham
A hatch in the foredeck provides access to the bow for anchoring.
But as most of the weight was still aft with either engine arrangement, the EcoCat still squatted underway. One day, Mike Snook—experienced with super-large, high-speed Australian catamarans—suggested transom wedges and end plates as the cure. A 1″ x 4″ wedge was added like a trim tab to the each stern with skeg-like end plates added in line with the sides of the hull to contain the flow. The cat’s tracking was better, even with the previous centerline skegs removed. Trim was now level with clean entry and a very smooth exit. After a prop change, we had the same top speed with cruise speed reduced by 400 rpm for a noticeably quieter boat.
Outboards are designed to mount behind a transom with only the prop exposed below the hull. When centrally mounted on a catamaran, all of the lower unit below the bridge deck is exposed to bow wave convergence with lots of unwanted spray and, perhaps, added drag. We had tried several ideas on previous sailing catamaran but solved the problem on the EcoCat with a hull-mounted streamlined fairing that lets the motor think it’s on a transom.
Christopher Cunningham
The EcoCat is quite at home in the broad reaches of Puget Sound that lie in the shadow of Mount Baker.
The 10-knot cruise speed for our typical three-day, 50-mile round-trips lets us enjoy island life and not lose one day getting somewhere and another getting back. That’s the advantage of a gasser. It’s all about the destination, hanging out, enjoying a nice hike, being in a special place, especially for my wife Barbara and me. My solo trips continue to range farther and wider in all weather conditions.
Could a gasser be my only boat? I still enjoy sailing in other small boats at a rendezvous or big sailboats with friends. I’m on the water most days, year-round, rowing my wherries or open-water shell. The EcoCat takes me comfortably, in safety, to far-off destinations that I would not choose to get to under oars or sail. I’m going to keep my EcoCat!
Ron Mueller continues to design and build small boats and still rows most days in Bellingham, Washington. He started whitewater kayaking in the late ’60s, sailing in mid ’80s, and rowing in the ’90s when he founded Wayland Marine. Ron designed and built the Merry Wherry kits and was the Northwest dealer for Alden Ocean Shells and Echo Rowing until retiring in 2010.
Eco Cat Particulars
[table]
LOA/ 18′ (5.50m)
Beam/8′ 2.4″ (2.50m)
Draft/8.7″ (0.22m)
Weight/606 lbs (275 kg)
Capacity/1350 lbs (620 kg)
Power/15–20 hp
Construction/Approx. 400 hours
[/table]
Plans for the EcoCat, with a digital manual and 16 pages of drawings as BMP or DFX files, come from Bernd Kohler at K-designs. A kit is also 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!
If there’s one thing I’ve learned about the rowing on the Lower Columbia River, it is to go with the flow. Winters there tend to be gray, windy, cold, and wet, but when I heard that a ridge of high pressure was approaching the Pacific Northwest bringing uncommonly clear skies and mild winds at the end of first week of February, it was an opportunity I didn’t want to let pass. I’d get to row in sunshine and soft winds among the overwintering migratory birds at the Lewis and Clark National Wildlife Refuge.
The refuge consists of 20 small islands strung along 27 miles of the Columbia River and surrounded by marshes that are sometimes inundated by high tides. This reedy landscape is a winter home to 50,000 scaups, thousands more Canadian, cackling, and snow geese, trumpeter swans, pintails, teals, buffleheads, hooded and common mergansers, ruddy ducks, horned grebes, scoters, northern harriers, and peregrine falcons. For eons, countless birds have fed, rested, and nested in the refuge and along the Oregon mainland shores among the ubiquitous bald eagles and ospreys. Here the Corps of Discovery—wrote William Clark on November 26, 1805—found “Great numbers of Swan Geese Brant Ducks and Gulls in this great bend which is Crouded with low Islands covered with weeds grass &c. and overflowed every flood tide….”
For several days the weather forecast consistently called for a three- to four-day window of big sun and slow wind. Intent on catching this rare winter weather window, I put the trip together quickly. I always keep much of my gear packed in ready-to-go dry bags, so I needed only to freeze gallon jugs of water for the cooler and shop for food. I updated my smartphone with tide tables for various locations and links to real-time wind reports from the Megler-Astoria Bridge.
I trailered MAC, my 17′3″ light rowing dory, south on the interstate from my home in Bellingham, Washington, and reached the riverside marina in Cathlamet late Friday afternoon. I wanted to row across the Cathlamet Channel before dark and dock at Island’s End Farm on the downstream point of Puget Island. I’d met the farm’s owners, Carol and George, in 2010 on the last day of my row down the Columbia from Portland, Oregon. In the morning I’d make the crossing to Tenasillahe Island—less than a half a mile, but across the shipping lanes—and decide then whether to veer south into Clifton Channel or head north parallel the shipping channel to Red Slough and Welch Island.
all photographs by the authror
Cathlamet is not on the shipping channel so I didn’t have to be alert for traffic as I crossed to Puget Island. As long as I paid attention to the current I could dawdle, drifting, and take photos of the scaups as they circle and fly upstream.
After getting MAC off the trailer and loaded with my gear, I rowed out of the marina and turned south on Elochoman Slough. A short 300-yard pull brought me to the Columbia River. At the buoy marking the slough’s entrance I realized that I was drifting quickly downstream and that I needed to angle 30° upstream to ferry directly across Cathlamet Channel in the ebb-strengthened current. Three-quarters of the way across the channel I was startled by a sound that seemed to be a sudden, loud waterfall. I turned quickly to see hundreds of scaups rushing into the air. Even though I was 100 yards away, my approach made them take flight. They quickly strung out and flew a wide circle around me 40′ over the water, and the muted rush of their wingbeats grew faint as they headed upstream.
I rowed looking for an opening through the small, muddy marsh islets between Little Island and Ryan Island to find my way into Birnie Slough. The dense reed canary grass and stunted red osier shrubbery blocked my view, but I finally saw a narrow watery opening. In 15 minutes I had rowed to the downstream end of Birnie Slough and there saw George and Carol walking the aluminum ramp to their dock to greet me. After joining them at their home for a Dungeness crab dinner, I headed to bed in their spare bedroom at 8 p.m. and slept soundly in the quietness of the riverside farm.
At 5 a.m. the guttural barking of sea lions in the shipping channel woke me. I knew a big smelt run was in progress, and it meant a feast for them and for the birds. Out the window, I saw a few stars above an opaque blanket of ground fog spread across the farm’s fields. It meant I wouldn’t risk crossing the shipping lanes at sunrise and could get a few more hours of sleep. I groped for my glasses in the dark, turned on my smartphone, and checked the weather forecast and the conditions at the Megler-Astoria Bridge. The wind prediction had changed overnight from just 7–12 mph easterly, to 25 mph easterly, straight down the throat of the Columbia; it was already blowing a steady 15 mph at the bridge. The flood tide working against the river flow and the strong easterly would make for rough rowing. There’d be a lot of whitecaps, and rowing along the Washington side of Tenasillahe Island would be unpleasant. At least the forecast for brilliant sun still held, and temperature would rise to an unseasonably warm 60°F. The morning’s low tide would create bit of a lee among the low-lying islands downriver, but the midafternoon high could eliminate rowing for half the day in the broader fetches among the islands. I was willing to test any fetch, but I’d do it by degrees.
Poised to head out around the sand spit at the downstream end of Puget Island, I started the day’s rowing, as I always do when leaving land, by focusing on my surroundings, boat trim, the plan for the day and the fit of my derriere on the seat.
I ate breakfast and after I’d reorganized my gear in MAC, George came down to see me off. He pointed to a bulk carrier heading upriver toward us around the great bend and suggested I wait until it passed before I went out into the channel. I rowed around the sand spit on the downstream end of Puget Island and waited as the ship’s wake spread toward me. I casually rowed about 50′ farther out into the channel to get a better view of any traffic upstream and saw a tugboat less than a mile away coming around the corner of the Island headed in my direction. I moved back toward shore to await its passage and wake. With the shipping lanes clear, I pulled across the channel to the one-third-mile-long pile dike that guards the southern tip of Tenasillahe Island. Five seals and a sea lion followed about 30′ behind me. The long-whiskered sea lion left the chase halfway across the channel while the seals’ sleek heads would slip under to follow MAC and pop back up, quickly turning looking from side to side before resuming their focus on me.
There are about 20 hunting cabins on floats permanently moored in several of the narrow sloughs between islands of the wildlife refuge. In the channel between Woody and Horseshoe Islands about ten or twelve cabins are strung like a necklace on the downstream end of Woody Island. At high tide these cabins are fully exposed to the wind. Beyond these cabins in the refuge looms Jim Crow Hill on the Washington side of the river.
I had felt cheated by the short notice of the change in the weather, and hesitant about taking a route up Clifton Channel, but I was met there with only a mild chop. As the sun burned away the clouds, I rowed along the Oregon shoreline and watched birds dabbling in the shallows of Tenasillahe a quarter mile off. My original plan was to row the serpentine route from the shipping channel along Steamboat Reach into Red Slough and past Welch Island, then weave downstream through their braided sloughs in what little protection the islands offered. But what I saw beyond Clifton Channel made me realize I’d find little lee among the islands. After the first mile, the downstream shoreline of Tenasillahe and all of Welch Island were just long lines of reeds and marsh grasses with no trees or high ground. I let go of my oars and opened Google Earth on my phone. As I ran the cursor over all the islands, I could see their average elevation was only 7′ above mean sea level. The day’s noontime high tide would be close to 10′. As I approached the downstream end of Tenasillahe it was obvious to me that camping anywhere in the refuge, even if it were allowed, would be difficult because the high tide in the wee hours of the morning would saturate any “dry” land and lift me out of any lee I might have had at low tide and expose me to the wind. I pulled easily downstream in Clifton Channel as the sun rose higher in the blue southern sky; I looked for birds, sometimes swinging MAC to travel stern-first to ease the strain on my neck from looking over my shoulder.
Without fail, every flock of scaups I came near went aloft when MAC was within 50 yards, and I again heard the sound of a waterfall as they lifted, feet furiously slapping against water to get airborne. If I were to row into the refuge I would disturb every diver, dabbler, and honker resting among the reedy islands. Being close to the birds brought me moments of quiet joy, but I couldn’t help but feel apologetic for disturbing them as they circled off to safety and protection. Losing myself in the meditative motion of rowing and listening to the sounds of the birds, the water on hull, and the wind through reeds, I left in my wake a glistening diamond-speckled path leading toward the sun. Being out on the water was my raison d’être and dissolved all of my disappointments.
An hour later, I reached the quiet lee of Aldrich Point, and the sun’s warmth filled the day and water smoothed as the tide reached high slack. The river current combined with beginning ebb and scooted me along; the thick ruby-stemmed red-osier dogwood along waters’ edge slipped quickly by. As I approached the curved channel called Devil’s Elbow, I heard a low, grumbling sound like river gravel grinding on the bottom of a shallow fast-moving stream. It was the sound of bird caucus, maybe 500 or 600 grumbling scaups about a quarter mile away. I let my oars trail and listened, turning my head side to side to gather the sound. Five minutes later I heard the unending conversations and occasional honks of snow geese hidden behind thick reeds and cattails. I held very still; MAC drifted slowly. We passed an area of sparser scrub, and some of the geese saw us through the gaps in the grass. About ten arose in indignation, honking their alarm in flight away from the danger of my little dory.
The mirror attached to the bill of my cap has caused a lot of funny remarks. Many people do not understand how I use it and I’ve even told a few gullible people that it is a GPS display so I know where I’m going. Here in Cathlamet Bay, the Washington shore seen on the horizon is 8 miles away.
Rapt with listening and seeing, I had no particular thoughts. I would occasionally remember to take my bearings and look in the bicycle mirror I had clipped to the brim of my cap. At more than one inattentive moment I had to take a quick, hard pull on an oar to avoid hitting a deadhead or getting swept into a strainer, a large, submerged tree trunk lying parallel to the water’s surface with its limbs skyward.
Much of the forested bank along the shoreline was in shadows, but I had the warmth of sun on my back. On this midwinter day, long shadows angled away from the southwestern sky and the sunlight caught a group of leaf-bare alders leaning over the water, their limbs and trunks stunningly radiant.
I needed to find a suitable camping spot either in my boat or on shore, so I pulled for the little community of Knappa, thinking I’d find a dock or relatively flat piece of land where I could put my tent or bivy sack. Out of curiosity I turned on my GPS to check my speed over ground, and with easy effort at the oars I was flying along at 5 knots. The ebbing tide was still fairly high, so I cut through the grass and reeds of a very narrow gap to Knappa Slough that would soon be impassible. I saw no public dock, and in a few minutes I was past the settlement and again surrounded by estuarine grass, reeds, and scrub that blocked my view except for the ribbon of water ahead and behind. I was quickly around the southeastern elbow of Karlson Island.
The bridge over the slough to Svensen Island doesn’t get much traffic. There are only four homesteads on the 1 ¾-mile-long island and two of them are abandoned. I saw only one person walk over the bridge while I was there.
As I rowed into the 50-yard-wide slough inside of Svensen Island, I saw a small community of floating shacks and houseboats clustered along the mainland on either side of a low concrete bridge spanning the slough. As I drifted into this very small village on the water, mallards flew directly over me in an arc toward the island. A black-and-white Australian shepherd carefully walked the length of a log float supporting a cottage no more than 20′ square with door and screen door propped open on a covered and sagging porch that served as dock. An aged, fiberglass runabout, looking about as tired as the house, was parked there. The dog seemed friendly enough, and I called out “Hello pup!” I could hear the noise of a TV in the house, and as I angled closer saw a man with a beer in hand peering out at me. I began to make out the sounds of a football game and remembered it was Superbowl Sunday. The man called out, “Nice boat!” and I replied, “Thanks! Who’s winning?” He said, “It’s only the first few minutes, and the Broncos are ahead ten-zip.” I said, “That’s a surprise, who wouldda thought?” “Yeah,” he replied, “They’ve got the defense thing down.”
The house on Svensen Slough and the powerboat tied to it had seen better days, but I couldn’t help but envy the man who lived here as I imagined him sitting on the porch here, watching summer sunsets, beer in hand with his dog resting beside him.
I asked if there was a dock or haulout where I could put my tent for the night, and he said, “No, there’s no ramp near here” and turned to go back to the game. I pulled on the oars, but he came quickly back outside, pointed downstream, and yelled, “Hey, the docks at the end of the slough belong to the Petersons. They won’t mind if you tie up there.” I waved, shouted “Thank you,” and turned to see a brand-new dock paralleling the shoreline with a new, as-yet-unoccupied, two-story home on it. I rowed MAC around the dock to tie her in the lee of a smaller houseboat. After securing the dory, I stretched out on the dock to rest my back and checked the wind forecast on my phone. It would blow even more tomorrow, but the wind would continue to come from the east. Here in the slough, there was only a whisper of a breeze; I listened to the geese and ducks on the island and watched a peregrine falcon soaring in a wide circle overhead. This was not the trip I had expected, but it was turning out to be better than I could have imagined.
My little 28-quart cooler is essential for my rowing travels. It’s chilled by two plastic gallon bottles of filtered water that I’ve frozen in the freezer at home. A reflective fabric cover I made to fit over the cooler adds insulation, and helps keep eggs, butter and meats at 40-45°F for four to five days. The cooler serves as a backrest when I want to stretch out while I’m on my rowing seat
I had plenty of room to put up my tent on the square wooden float, and after getting settled for a night’s stay, I bundled up as the air temperature dropped into the 40s. The sun, brilliant throughout the day, settled in the west, softening into a glow of orange, then red; I watched its last reflections on the water and listened to the music of ducks.
The two abandoned houses on Svensen Island are now is home to birds and whatever critters live on the island.
In the morning the dock was wet with heavy dew, and the inside of my tent was dripping with condensation. I tried to start up my stove, and although my Bic lighter sparked, it produced no flame. I tucked it into my armpit, and a few minutes later I had the stove roaring under my mug and in another 10 minutes, a good, oatmeal-sausage breakfast.
I set my wet tent and gear bags on the dock to dry and moved them every 10 minutes to follow a spot of sunlight coming through trees. About 9 a.m., an aluminum skiff with decoys piled on top of a bundle of reeds and camouflage netting slowly maneuvered to the dock just upstream from me. Two Labrador retrievers jumped to the dock, followed by their owner in camo waders and jacket. I spent half an hour talking to Cody Mathers, a pro fishing and hunting guide coming in from a “duck” morning. His wet, happy black Labs bumped against my legs looking for a scratch and rub. When Jody left to put the dogs in his pickup to head to Astoria, I returned to slowly packing and stowing my gear in MAC. At 11 a.m. I was on the water and pulling out of Svensen Slough toward Cathlamet Bay.
MAC immediately swung abeam to the 20-knot easterly wind blowing across the open bay. I needed to make my way downwind around Settler Point to find muted wind in the lee of the point, but it was a bit of a haul, short-stroking through 3’ chop to get to less bumpy water. I was only a couple of miles from the mouth of the John Day River where I’d end my trip. Looking over the stern as I rowed, I could see the tree-covered ridges of Washington across the watery landscape of reeds that was Seal, Green, Russian, and Marsh islands. I decided to let MAC simply drift. The wind would push us sideways to Lois Island, which sits directly across from the entrance to the John Day River. From there it would be a short half-mile pull to the ramp to haul out and head home. I looked out across the reeds and cattails toward Miller Sands, 5 miles away on the far side of the Columbia River. The chart showed there was land between me and Miller Sands—Grassy Island and McGregor Island—but I didn’t see any, only water and reeds. I let go of the oars, laid back on a dry bag, and watched and listened. MAC’s drifting startled more ducks now and then, and after an hour or so rocking side-to-side under the sun, I dozed off.
The reed growing on the western islands in the refuge is purple loosestrife, the tall, darker reed growing with the cattails and reed canary grass. It’s an invasive species that is crowding out native plants and threatening to degrade the habitat for overwintering and resident waterfowl. Efforts to control it are continual, particularly in Cathlamet Bay.
I was rudely awakened by gnats as MAC drew near Lois Island, and I took to the oars. In 20 minutes I reached the launch ramp. While I waited for my friend Jessica to come to drive me back to Cathlamet, I unloaded MAC, stacked my bags, and made a sandwich and tea.
The absence of Grassy Island and McGregor Island stayed with me. The 20 reedy islands in the Lewis and Clark Wildlife Refuge are so transformed by tides that there were some that I wouldn’t see unless I returned to row the meandering sloughs at a different turn of the tide. I’d bring MAC back, keep a keen eye on the weather, and row again with the flow and the fetch.
Dale McKinnon began rowing in 2002 at the age of 57 and in 2004 rowed solo from Ketchikan, Alaska, to Bellingham, Washington. In 2005 she rowed from Ketchikan to Juneau. The Salish Sea of Washington and British Columbia is her playground. She lives in Bellingham near her grandkids, with her partner, Berns, and chocolate Lab, Thea, and builds the light dories like MAC for other rowers.
Dale describes the building and outfitting of her boat, an Oarling designed by Sam Devlin, at the end of her previous article about rowing the Columbia River.
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.
To row with power you need to have your feet firmly braced against something solid enough to take your full weight. In some traditional boats you can get by with the internal structure. Sawn frames across the bottom usually have enough height to offer a good purchase and sometimes you can get most of your foot on a side frame. Even something smaller can be useful. My cross-planked skiff has a short keelson (just the skeg is fastened to it) that gives me a spot to brace with one heel. It works for short distances; for longer rows I have a short brace for both feet that bears on the keelson and the chines.
Ben Fuller
This flat-bottomed skiff has a footboard fit around the risers and resting against a frame.
A better arrangement is in a friend’s Good Little Skiff. His brace rests on the chines and seat risers and provides full foot support. He often rows all day long on many of his trips. If your boat doesn’t have some interior structure that you can use, it’s well worth installing an arrangement for bracing your feet.
SBM
The heel holes in this Chamberlain gunning dory’s floorboards have an extra cleat to keep the corners of the cutouts from splitting.
A pair of heel holes is a very simple option for boat with floorboards. The holes are best set up to span two boards; holes that are cut through only part of each board can be reinforced by a single cleat underneath the hole. If your boat is rowed by people with different leg lengths, you can have several pairs of holes. If you feel the need for a broader surface to push against, you can add heel-brace blocks. They’re small pieces of wood fastened on top of the floorboards. Their sides and aft ends are rounded down to minimize intrusion, and shaped like oval or Gothic arches they can be quite elegant.
SBM
Heel blocks, contoured to minimize snags and trips, can give a heel hole a broader area of contact.
Delaware watermen liked to keep their weight low in the boat, so the cleats that joined the floorboards were on top, and the floor flats, as they called them, rested on the slender steam-bent frames. One of the cleats served as a heel brace. The boxes they used for seats could be moved to adjust for leg length. A similar cleat secured to floorboards (or directly to the bottom if there are no floorboards) is a common and easily installed brace.
A stretcher is a bar running across the boat and supporting the feet higher up. Crossbars that make a narrow contact with just the instep or ball of the foot, like heel braces, work well for rowing a few miles around a harbor or a modest poke up a creek, but your feet will be grateful for a full foot brace if you race or want to cover serious miles. (Early Thames gig rowers did row all day with a plain stretcher but wore their footplates—sturdy boots.) Thames wherries have cross-boat foot plates that span the whole foot vertically, and the width of the boat horizontally. With them you can move your feet to the center or out to the sides to change position.
Ben Fuller
QUEEN BEE, a pulling boat built around 1900 and now in the Mystic Seaport Museum collection, has square stretchers that drop into notched cleats screwed to the floorboards
SBM
Stern sheets can provide an easy way to add a stretcher. Simple L-shaped blocks hold an easily removable hardwood bar.
If others row your boat, adjustable stretchers are useful. Most traditional boats had no more than three options and two may be all you need. Thames skiffs had stringers running between frames and cleats fastened to them at different positions. More common is a couple of notched pieces secured nearer the boat bottom to support a low crossbar for your heels or instep. The bar is removable, but the pieces supporting it are not and can get in the way.
SBM
This full footboard is in a late 19th-century wherry built in Shrewsbury, England. Four slats offer three positions to adjust for leg length.
For modern glued-lap plywood boats, notched supports can be glued to the sides. These work especially well on boats with side buoyancy compartments. Their vertical surfaces are well suited for mounting the plates. A round cross bar can support a foot-sized plate with its bottom edge is resting on the floorboards. The plate is cut to a length to provide a comfortable angle; it pivots to the different angle at each position. The supports work best if there is not much taper to the sides of the boat where they’re attached, or if there is not much fore-and-aft range to the adjustment required. A support an inch or so thick can accommodate the stretcher bar over a short fore-and-aft span without being too intrusive.
SBM
The side benches in this plywood boat have parallel sides so the supports for the stretcher can be long and serve two closely-spaced rowing stations. The holes in the port-side support are notched for removing the dowel.
Another type of adjustable brace is anchored to the floorboards. It usually has a flat base and a foot plate set at a comfortable angle. These work best where bolts can go through gaps between floorboards. With the bolts set in a crosspiece beneath the floorboards, the brace gets clamped down with wing nuts. I made a set of these for my dory. They give my feet full support and are easily removed.
Ben Fuller
The footbrace in the author’s dory is adjustable and removable by means of bolts that slip between floorboards to a sliding crosspiece.
On RANTAN, my oar-and-sail boat, I have adjustable foot braces attached to tracks used for the stretchers in modern sliding-seat racing boats. I cut slots in the floorboards and fastened little plates under them so the tracks would lie flush with the top surface.
Ben Fuller
The heel brace in the author’s Dias Harrier, RANTAN, is fixed to a single racing-shell stretcher track set in the floorboards. The fine adjustment it offers may not be needed by most rowers.
What could be called a trapeze brace doesn’t require making any modifications to the boat. It is a length of line with its ends tied to the rowing thwart. The lines could also come back to clam cleats under the rowing thwart. You can brace your feet directly against the loop or tie a fender into the line as a more comfortable footrest. Another version of the trapeze brace is made of webbing or other low stretch line threaded through slots or holes in a wooden bar. Buckles or knots can provide adjustability and make it readily removable.
SBM
Two straps and a simple footboard with four slots for the webbing make a trapeze stretcher.
There are lots of options from heel supports for occasional rowing to full foot braces for racing or full days of rowing. They all make a significant difference over going without.
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.
You can share your tricks of the trade with other Small Boats Monthly readers by sending us an email.
The original mechanism that inspired Gig Harbor’s Forward-Facing Rowing System and the design for this New York Whitehall both date back to the late 1800s.
Forward-facing rowing systems are nothing new. You’ll find many old patents for devices that use gears or pivots and connecting rods to get rowers to see where they’re going. The Forward-Facing Rowing system from Gig Harbor Boat Works (GHBW) was inspired by a mechanism from the late 1800s and was redesigned to be manufactured in welded stainless steel. Each unit weighs just under 7 lbs, including the base that is bolted to the gunwale. The upper part of the mechanism pivots on the base to allow the vertical motion of the oar blade in and out of the water. The spoon-bladed spruce oar is in two pieces—a 30″ handle and a 72″ blade section—each bolted to a cradle that pivots on a 1/2″ bronze pin. A connecting rod joins the cradles and transfers the swing of the handle to the blade.
The pivots under each oar cradle have self-lubricating silicon bronze pins and HDPE washers for smooth, corrosion-free action.
I mounted the system on my 14′ New York Whitehall. It took less than two hours to figure out the placement (it just fit in between the oarlock pads of the middle and aft stations), make curved oak pads, and attach the bases and pads to the gunwales. The articulated oars can be removed by pulling the hairclip cotter pins and the 3/8″-diameter pivot rods, but the rig can stay fixed to the boat for trailering. The blades can swing aft and into the boat.
It doesn’t take any time at all to get used to rowing straight with the forward-facing oars. Everything else—turning, stopping, and backing—is a different matter. My rowing instincts have been ingrained for over a half century and are the opposite of what’s required. While doing the opposite is an easy concept to grasp, it’s surprisingly difficult to put into action. Almost every time I’d make a guess about the stroke I needed to do for turning or backing, I’d be wrong. You can’t feather the oars with the rig, so that element of the stroke doesn’t add to the confusion. It helped to think how I’d make the stroke in the water with just my hand, but getting to the point where I could make the right stroke without thinking would just take time, just as it did when I was getting used to a Norwegian push-pull tiller. I should mention that the initial awkwardness wasn’t frustrating; it was actually entertaining, like a brainteaser. And while I thought I’d feel hampered by non-feathering oars, it didn’t bother me at all.
At the catch, pulling the handles through the first 10° of the stroke will move the blades through twice that angle.
At the end of the stroke the blades move though an arc nearly equal to that of the handles. A long stroke finishes with the blades pulling in toward the boat; a shorter stroke won’t give up much forward propulsion.
Forward-facing rowing has quite a different feeling. With standard rowing, you move your upper body weight toward the bow as you’re pulling, and if we take the oars out of the equation, there’s an equal and opposite reaction pushing the boat back. During the recovery, you swing aft, pulling the boat forward. The shifting of your weight takes some of the forward momentum provided by oars during the drive and puts that energy into the boat during the recovery. In racing shells, where the crew weight far exceeds that of the boat, the speed peaks during the recovery when the oars are out of the water—the crew may seem to be sliding aft, but they are actually pulling the boat forward. In heavier rowing boats, the swings in your weight tend to even out the speed of the boat.
In forward-facing rowing, you lean aft during the drive phase of the stroke, pushing the boat forward in tandem with the oars. During the recovery, the boat gets pulled back as you reach toward the catch. The shifts in your weight increase the fluctuations in the boat’s speed.
During the drive I felt like the boat was slipping out from under me. The catch—coming when the boat’s momentum has been bled off by drag and by my weight shifting toward the bow—feels quite heavy. Each stroke feels like the first few strokes of regular rowing taken from a standing start. I could make the catch feel lighter when I rowed keeping my torso upright.
When the blades are aligned with each other the handles are not quite at their farthest reach.
The geometry of the device may also play a role in how the catch feels. The handle of the oar and the blade do not mirror each other. When the blades are perpendicular to the boat’s centerline, the handles are forward at 50° to the centerline; when the handles are square to the boat, the blades are at 135°. In a full stroke, the handles move through 70° (25° to 95°) and the blades move through 100° (40° to 140°). The GHBW web site notes: “Oar blade speed is increased because the oar cradles are asymmetric; the blade travels 15% faster than a traditional oar with the same handle speed.” That “gearing” isn’t uniform throughout the stroke. When I moved the handle through its range 10° increments from catch to release, the blade moved 23°, 19°, 25°, 23°, 12°, 10°, and 8°. The geometry of the pivots and connecting rod put a longer sweep and thus a higher load on the first half of the stroke.
When the handles are aligned with each other, the blades are near their farthest reach aft.
To focus on the physics and the geometry is to miss the point of forward-facing rowing: the view over the bow. Seeing things as they approach is much more interesting than seeing things as they grow distant. I enjoyed poking around the marinas and shipyards that line the waterways near home. The rowing rig worked smoothly and quietly, and I gradually stop thinking about it and just enjoy the scenery.
Using the Forward-Facing Rowing System in tandem with someone rowing with regular oars was unexpectedly fun and effective.
The most fun I had with the rig came as a surprise. My son, Nate, took up the forward-facing oars and I rowed in the Whitehall’s forward station. Rowing face-to-face we could converse easily, and by mirroring each other we could synchronize or stroke. Our shifts in weight cancelled each other and the boat stayed in trim. We made great speed and had eyes looking forward and back. I’ve done some long crossings rowing in tandem with normal oars, and after a while conversation gets abandoned because it’s hard to hear one another and you can’t see the person you’re with. Nate and I chattered the whole time we were rowing facing each other.
While I’ve always been devoted to the art and craft of conventional of rowing and will remain so, the forward-facing rowing rig opened up some very appealing possibilities.
Christopher Cunningham is the editor of Small Boats Monthly.
both photos by the author
Plans ($306AUS) and kits ($3,970AUS) for the 
