Andy Saunders’ Ranger 15, after two-and-a-half years in the making, sits pretty at the far side of the learning curve.
In 2011, at the age of 64, Andy Saunders went to his first wooden boat festival. It was held at Goolwa, South Australia, near the mouth of the River Murray. At the festival, Bob, an old friend, proudly showed him a stitch-and-glue canoe he had made at a workshop put on by Duck Flat Wooden Boats. “Andy, have a look at what I built in 10 days!” On the way home, Andy thought: If Bob could build a canoe, so can I! Undeterred by his lack of experience, the difficulty of procuring materials, the cost of the project, and not knowing where or how he would use a canoe, he bought plans for a Prospector Ranger 15, a 15′ wood-strip canoe by Bear Mountain Boats.
Only one of the lumberyards he contacted was willing to mill the 17′-long western red-cedar ¾″×¼″ bead-and-cove strips he needed, and only after he had gone to pick up his order did he learn that the yard had never milled strips like this before. They could only get the thickness down to 5/16″. The canoe would be heavier for the extra wood, but on the bright side, the yard gave him all of their short practice strips—almost enough for another smaller boat.
The bead-and-cove cedar strips kept the seams tight around the turn of the bilge.
Andy had his share of challenges to overcome. The instructions called for molds to be cut from plywood, but the plywood he’d bought warped after being cut; he started over with ½″ MDF. His first attempt at laminating the stems fell apart when the epoxy failed to set in the chill of the fall weather; for subsequent gluing tasks he employed a heater. But he made slow but steady progress, and could fit and glue two or three strips per side each day. He took a suggestion from a friend and mixed resin, hardener, and filler in a zip-lock plastic sandwich bag. With a bit of a corner cut off, he could squeeze thickened Bote-Cote epoxy into the wood-strip coves just as one would ice a cake.
After Andy applied fiberglass and epoxy to the hull, the canoe sat idle until he brought in friends to help with the finishing touches.
Within a few months he had sanded, faired, and ’glassed the hull with West System epoxy, but then his project sat idle for a year and a half. Andy ultimately called upon friends at Duck Flat Wooden Boats to help him finish the canoe. The canoe surged toward completion. Hoop-pine gunwales went on, gaboon plywood decks and bulkheads were installed, and a rosewood thwart and Shaw & Tenney seats took their places. Andy also purchased cherry paddles from Shaw & Tenney. In November 2014, about two-and-a-half years after starting the project, he launched his canoe.
The Ranger 15 is modeled on a classic Canadian frontier canoe and is designed to carry several months’ worth of provisions. Without a heavy load aboard, it floats virtually on top of the water and easily catches the wind. Worried about paddling on nearby lakes where the wind was strong and unpredictable, he waited weeks for a windless day to launch in a local man-made seawater lake.
He took the canoe out for a paddle, but in a few hundred yards the wind sprang up and became so strong he could not get back to his launch point. With no option left he had to scramble up the rocky embankment struggling with the canoe, leaving scratches on the bottom, but for the short time he was on the water, the Ranger showed it had stability and traveled straight and fast. He also saw that it would do much better with two paddlers. Andy repaired the canoe, leaving no evidence of the damage, and when he showed the canoe at a recent wooden boat festival, it attracted a lot of attention and compliments. Andy is looking forward to exploring some of the many swamps up and down the River Murray where the wind won’t be such an issue, and where he can appreciate the tranquility and wildlife with too much concern about any damage to his pride and joy. He knows the canoe will make a great bird-watching and fishing boat and be very safe, in the right conditions, to take his young granddaughters out on adventures.
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.
Within the pages of Eric McKee’s Working Boats of Great Britain there are drawings of a 24′ Thames skiff attributed to W.A.B. Hobbs* at Henley-on-Thames in the very early part of the 20th century. Thames skiffs were an evolution of the wherries used to transport cargoes and passengers up, down and across the Thames for many years before bridges and other forms of transport put them out of business. Although the vast majority of skiffs have been used for leisure purposes, they are worthy of inclusion in McKee’s book as so many of them have earned a living by being hired out.
Retired fire-fighter Lawrence Shillingford decided he wanted to build a version of the Hobbs skiff when he enrolled in the nine-month course at the Boat Building Academy in Lyme Regis, UK, in 2014. The workshop space there was limited so the design was scaled down to 21′ with a CAD program by tutor Mike Broome. The process was by no means simple, primarily because the boat already had very little freeboard. “It was just a question of tweaking it a bit,” Mike said “In essence it’s the same as the Hobbs boat but with more freeboard and a tiny bit more beam.”
Photographs and video by the author
Built in a shop with limited space available, ROSINA MAY is 3′ shorter than the century-old skiff that inspired her builder.
Although Lawrence had planned to retain the Hobbs boat’s two rowing positions, he realized during the lofting that the forward position would be too cramped and that the beam there would be too narrow. He found a drawing of a 21′ skiff with a single rowing position and decided to adopt its interior layout.
Although there is no such thing as a standard Thames skiff, there are, as Lawrence puts it, “certain ways of doing things.” So, to find out more about skiff-building traditions and practices, he visited two Thames boatbuilding companies: Henwoood and Dean, and Richmond Bridge Boathouses where skiff builder Mark Edwards allowed him to walk around his workshop with a camera and measuring tape.
The building process began by setting up a temporary structure on the workshop floor to which the keel—laminated from two full lengths of oak with a slight amount of rocker—was temporarily fixed. The stem—with the inner part laminated for strength and the outer part solid for aesthetics—and the sternpost were then added. Epoxy was used in all glued joints.
The shapes of the 1″-thick transom and the nine building molds were determined during the lofting process, and the planned position of the top of each plank was also marked on the edges of each of them. Any inaccuracies in the planking lines of a clinker boat will soon be betrayed by the human eye, so after the transom and molds were fixed to the centerline and shored up to the ceiling, a batten was run between each set of planking marks to check the fairness and a few minor adjustments were made.
On each side of the boat there are six ⅜″-thick khaya planks and at the sheer there is a ¾″ thick saxboard, rabbeted so that its inner face is flush with that of the top plank. Lawrence worked from the bottom up, fitting the garboard plank first, a time-consuming process as it was rabbeted into the keel. The academy had obtained khaya, a type of mahogany native to Africa, long enough to do all the planks in one piece, although an entirely forgivable human error resulted in one plank having to be remade with a scarf joint in it. The plank laps were coated with varnish before they were fastened with copper rivets.
Lawrence remained faithful to the traditional Thames skiff system of discontinuous frames. The ⅝″-thick oak futtocks are closely fitted to the inside of the planking and have half joints where necessary. None of the futtocks are taken as far inboard as the centerline. Those in the ends of the boat nearly do and each of them is adjacent to a corresponding floor; amidships, the futtocks and floors are at different stations. Started at the bow, Lawrence riveted the futtocks and floors to the planking and removed the molds as he worked his way aft.
The locks are incorporated into the saxboards and have easily replaced bearing surfaces.
The saxboards were made from especially wide timber so that the fore and aft supports for the oarlocks are an integral part of them. Extended futtocks provide strength across the grain of the saxboards. Each oarlock consists of two vertical tholes and a horizontal sill, all oak and held in place by brass strips so they can be easily removed for repair or replacement.
It was a relatively straightforward process to fit the remaining parts of the boat, including the ½″ x ¾″ khaya rubbing strake; the oak breast hook and stern lodging knees; the stretcher with its three positions to fit rowers of different sizes; the oak and khaya rudder and its yoke; and the khaya thwarts and their oak knees. Time restrictions prevented Lawrence from including two details from the Hobbs drawing: He made slatted bottom boards instead of gratings, and the backrest for the cox’s seat is of oak and khaya rather than framed woven cane.
Another academy student who spent a great deal of time working on Lawrence’s skiff was Brooke Ricketts from Maryland. Brooke’s brother-in-law had felled an oak tree not far from Lyme Regis, and it was from this that the transom, rudder, yoke and seat back were made.
The boat was coated with Deks Olje—three coats of D1 saturating wood oil, applied wet-on-wet, followed by D2 high gloss oil finish—a combination that Lawrence believes will require less maintenance than varnish.
On the academy’s Launch Day in December 2014, Lawrence’s skiff was christened ROSINA MAY, in honor of his mother, and few months later I met with him in Weymouth—about 25 miles east of Lyme Regis—and launched ROSINA MAY from her trailer into the sheltered harbor. Although she felt slightly tippy when I climbed aboard—perhaps not surprising as a narrow waterline beam is an inherent part of the traditional skiff design—as soon as I was seated and rowing it was clear that she is comfortably stable.
It had looked to me as if the distance aft from the rowing thwart to the oarlocks might be too small, but I soon realized that it was just right. Lawrence told me that McKee’s book provided this and other such ergonomic dimensions and that he also had occasional doubts about them during lofting and construction, but centuries of skiff design were clearly proved to be of value.
Each of the students had been obliged to make an oar as part of the course—as well as a hollow plane for working the concave side of its spoon blade—and ROSINA MAY’s oars were made by Lawrence and Brooke. They are to the academy’s standard design but Lawrence and I agreed that oars with blades a couple of inches longer would be better suited to his skiff.
While seating of a sort is provided in the stern, the passenger who’ll be doing the steering sits farther forward to maintain proper trim.
It had been a long time since I had rowed while another person steered. Initially when Lawrence pulled on one of the yoke lines I thought we had been somehow pushed off course by wind or waves and that I should correct it. The reality, however, is that the very long keel gives the boat tremendous directional stability and it needs little help from the oarsman or coxswain to hold its course. Conversely this also makes her hard to turn, so a companion at the rudder is a welcome addition for rowing along a meandering river.
The Thames waterman’s stroke, the traditional form of rowing for a skiff of this type, is described in the Sept/Oct issue of WoodenBoat.
ROSINA MAY is quite heavily built. Lawrence realized she would be when he visited Mark Edwards’s yard but by then he was committed to slightly larger scantlings in some parts of the boat. However, Lawrence is happy that she is strong and, although he isn’t sure of her exact weight, on the launch ramp it was surprisingly easy for the two of us to pull her back up on a trailer with its tires only just touching the water and without using its winch.
Lawrence is contemplating a couple of modifications to the cox’s thwart and back rest to create more leg room. He would, after all, like to have a forward rowing position and so he is thinking of fitting small outriggers—removable for aesthetic and practical reasons—to get the oarlocks far enough outboard.
While Weymouth is geographically the most convenient place for Lawrence to trailer ROSINA MAY from his nearby home, he is looking for a suitable base for her on the River Thames, a wider piece of water where she would be able to mingle with a variety of other elegant rowing boats, and so clearly her natural habitat.
*According to Tony Hobbs, a member of the Hobbs boatbuilding dynasty who was appointed Royal Waterman to Her Majesty the Queen in 1981, he is W.A.B. Hobbs and the book’s reference should have been to W.A. Hobbs, his grandfather. However, the boat shouldn’t have been attributed to W.A. Hobbs. Tony is certain that the boat McKee measured in 1976 was built by Wally Downing in 1906. Downing’s name is inscribed, as is the boatbuilders’ custom, on the underside of the stretcher. At the time, Downing was working for E.T. Ashley of Pangbourne-on-Thames. Ashley’s business and the skiff were later acquired by Hobbs so when McKee measured the boat, she was then owned by Hobbs, hence the confusion, presumably. The boat is now in the Racing and River Boat Museum at Pangbourne.—NS
Nigel Sharp is a lifelong sailor and a freelance marine writer and photographer. He spent 35 years in managerial roles in the boat building and repair industry and has logged thousands of miles in boats big and small, from dinghies to schooners.
Particulars
[table]
LOA/21′
Beam/43″
Freeboard/10″
Draft/5½″
Weight/ approx. 220 lbs
[/table]
For a lines drawing and a table of offsets, email Mike Broome at the Boat Building Academy. Constructional details largely followed those of the 24′ Hobbs skiff depicted in Working Boats of Britain: Their shape and purpose by Eric McKee.
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What was left of the boat rotting in the brambles on the north shore of Clear Lake in Western Washington was once a very fast boat under oars. Back in the 1930s John Thomas “could row it across the lake, fill up two gallon jugs with spring water and row halfway back on one cigarette.” When John Sack, Thomas’s nephew, took over the lakeside family cabin in the 1960s, the boat had been sitting at the base of the largest pine tree on the property, unused for a decade.
In 1983 John asked me to build new boat to replace the one his uncle had thought of so highly. Rot had taken a heavy toll and although most of the sheerstrake was gone there was enough boat there to measure it and to show how it was put together. My search for the origins of the boat led to the lines of a lapstrake Whitehall Livery Boat in Maynard Bray’s Mystic Seaport Museum Watercraft. The shape, dimensions and many of the construction details—shortcuts for an easy, quick build—were a nearly perfect match. Bray writes: “…in spite of the quick and dirty way she is built, there is nothing at all second rate about her shape; she is one of the nicest modeled puling boats in the entire collection.” I ordered the plans and set to work.
Photos and video by the author except where noted
“There is nothing second rate about her shape; she is one of the nicest modeled pulling boats in the entire collection.”
The livery boat is 13′6 ⅝″ long with a beam of 3′7 ½″. It has seven strakes and steam-bent oak ribs on 5 ½″ centers, clench-nailed at the plank laps and riveted at the gunwale. The last two frames at either end take very tight turns at the keel, so supple bending stock is a must.
The keel and the keel batten (as they’re labeled on the plans) run nearly straight from stem to sternpost. There is no deadwood forming a skeg as on some Whitehalls, so the garboards, rather than turn upward to the transom, follow the keel and batten and twist to vertical at the sternpost, much they would in a double-ender.
The plans note that the boat has a one-piece stem. I’d be surprised if that were indeed the case. The aft end of the garboard and broad strakes run past the sternpost and are capped with a small triangular false sternpost, fastened after the planks are trimmed flush. The forward end of the garboard in the relic I saw has an odd jog around the outer stem (a detail that isn’t clear in the plans or the photograph in Bray’s book) that suggests the use of a false stem.
Lightly built, the livery boat makes rowing a pleasure.
The plans indicated that the garboards were run past the keel batten and then planed flat to accept the keel in the same manner that a dory’s garboards are planed flush with the bottom and protected by a false bottom. With rabbets and the time they take to shape eliminated from the stern and keel assembly, it seems unlikely that the stem would be of one piece and rabbeted to accept the hood ends of the planks. I built John’s boat with a two-piece stem.
Bray notes: “…what appears to be the keel is in reality only a chafing strip to protect the garboards from damage. Thus built, the garboard seam is hidden and cannot be caulked later.” To avoid problems with the seam between the keel and the garboard, I widened the keel batten, and the garboards overlap it much like any other plank lap for most of their length. With the oak keelson resting mostly on the oak batten for much of its length, it has a more solid footing than it would on the feathered edges of soft cedar planking. The 3M 5200 I used in the seams has kept the laps at the keel and the rest of the hull tight and leak-free for 31 years.
The boat is, as you might expect of a fast pulling boat, a bit tender. I can stand in it with confidence, but stepping upright from one thwart to another gets a bit twitchy. The stability picks up quite quickly so it doesn’t twitch far, but I prefer getting aboard or moving about with my hands on the gunwales. Seated, of course, the boat is comfortably stable. When I sit at the side of the center thwart, my 200 lbs bring the sheerstrake to the water’s surface.
The frames in very ends of the boat take some very tight turns. Better trim could be achieved with a passenger aboard by making the stern bench longer and adding a backrest to put the additional weight farther forward.
There are two rowing stations but a boat this size doesn’t gain anything by having two people at the oars—more power won’t make it go appreciably faster. One station is for rowing alone and the other for rowing with a passenger in the stern. The volume of the stern sections is carried quite high, so it’s best to have the heavier occupant at the oars. With John in the stern sheets and his daughter Mary at the oars, the boat settled down by the stern. Had they changed positions the boat would have trimmed well. The thwarts are set just 5 ½″ below the sheer, so the oarlocks are set in pads that add another 2″ of height for more clearance for rowing.
The plans call for thwart knees sawn from straight-grained ¾″ stock, certainly the simplest solution to bracing the hull, but I opted for bent knees for a less clunky appearance and adequate strength for the boat’s purpose. Simple blocks of wood secured to the center floorboard provide foot bracing adequate for casual rowing.
The hull’s very fine waterlines aft and ample drag keep it tracking arrow straight. If I were to build the boat again I might move the thwarts 6″ or 8″ to have the stern settle not quite so deep. For now, any cargo, like John Thomas’s gallon jugs of spring water, would serve the trim best when set in the bow.
The short waterline length makes the livery boat easy to maneuver. Changing course while underway takes few strong pulls on side, and at a standstill I could spin the boat through 360 degrees in 10 strokes, pulling one oar and backing the other.
For Mary Sack, John’s daughter, and her two brothers, rowing has been one of the pleasures visiting the family cabin on Clear Lake.
With a lazy pull at the oars I could poke along at a GPS-measured 3.5 knots and go almost as fast backing. A little more effort took me up past 4 knots. I peaked at 4 ¾ knots, about what I’d expect for a waterline length of just under 13′. Not being a smoker I didn’t try to see if I could get across the lake and halfway back on a single cigarette. At speed the wake’s transverse waves are small; there is no gurgling coming from the stern as the boat eases the displaced water back together. The boat carries well between strokes. The hull is light enough that when I swing my upper body aft during the recovery, the boat surges ahead.
Mary Sack
At a relaxed pace the livery boat is easily driven. Here, pushed hard, it does around 4¾ knots.
John, a devotee of racing shells, equipped the boat with folding bronze outriggers that increased the span between the locks by 13″. The arrangement worked well enough with his 9′3″ racing sculls, although the boat won’t go any faster; rather than increase the speed, the longer oars just lower the rowing cadence and for some, that’s a more pleasant way to row. The outriggers have sockets for the original rowlocks so the boat could still be rowed as designed, on the gunwales, with the 7′3″ spoon-blade oars I built for the boat. The shorter oars offer the higher cadence I prefer and more clearance over the legs for the stroke’s release and recovery. The clearance for the stroke was good for flat water I’ve had on the lake whenever I’ve rowed John’s boat, but there’s enough freeboard and enough clearance for the oars to take on the kind of chop a small lake is likely to generate when the wind comes up.
This boat is not a workhorse. Only 15½″ deep amidships (13¾″ measured inside), it hasn’t an abundance of freeboard for rough water or carrying heavy loads. Bray surmised that the design was for a boat that “might have been kept by a lakeside summer hotel for use by its guests.” The boat I built for John, like the boat his uncle took such pride in, was ideally suited to his lakeside cabin.
The plans from Mystic Seaport are on three sheets: lines drawings, a table of offsets, and construction details. If you’re unfamiliar with traditional lapstrake construction there are good books to guide you through the process—Walter Simmons’ Lapstrake Boatbuilding and Greg Rössel’s Building Small Boats, to name just two. Some of the “quick and dirty” details of the livery boat’s construction can actually fare quite well with today’s modern adhesive sealants, eliminate some fussy and time-consuming tasks, and get you on the water faster.
Christopher Cunningham is the editor of Small Boats Monthly.
A gray sky, and a river the color of silver: the morning is above all dreary. Enormous barges and small freighters disturb the calm of the Escaut River estuary. Tugboats come and go, some toward a liner ready to depart, others toward busy wharves in the harbor. Two leave the right bank at downtown Anvers, and are snatched up by the tide’s flood and carried upstream. On board, we are pleased this voyage we’ve imagined for a decade is now underway.
For my companion—Jean-Marie Huron—the exhilaration is short-lived: his kayak, VAILIMA, insists on veering to the right. I had many occasions to try mine, SILVERADO, but Jean-Marie didn’t board for the first time until the day before departure. The prospect of constantly adjusting his course for three weeks was more than depressing.
The route we intended to complete was Antwerp in northern Belgium to Pontoise on the outskirts of Paris via the rivers and canals. It had been completed 1876 by the writer Robert Louis Stevenson and his friend Walter Simpson. The future author of Treasure Island was then 27 years old and had reached a crossroads in his life. Although he wished to make his living as a writer, he acceded to his father’s insistence that he work as a lawyer in London. To escape this destiny, the young Scotsman saw only one way forward: to publish a book and hope that its success would be enough to sway his father.
He followed suit with what was a flourishing genre of the time: river adventure. The initial destination the two companions chose was Grez-sur-Loing, near Fontainebleau, where they could meet up with young impressionist painters—a merry group that included Fanny Van de Grift, a woman the writer had encountered some months earlier and for whom he had fallen head over heels.
Two aspects of An Inland Voyage, the book that Stevenson published about the voyage, touched me immediately: first, the course, which I found wonderful and even exotic despite its geographic proximity to my home in Bordeaux; and, second, its vagabond spirit, which struck me as reawakening an ethic of leaving much to chance, a dance with luck, relying on unplanned encounters and unfolding episodes.
As we paddled away from Antwerp, two workers in fluorescent orange vests hailed us from a high bank above the Escaut River: “Where are you going?” I would have responded, “Pontoise,” but Jean-Marie was more convincing: “Paris!” “Ah, Paris!” came the reply from above, “It’s beautiful, right? Like Antwerp, the capital of Belgium!” Welcome to Flanders—where Flemish northern pride takes precedence over allegiance to Brussels in the south. We spent most of the day paddling in the busy Escaut and enjoyed the turn in the quiet river Rupel. Our plan was to stop in the city of Boom as our predecessors did. But as we found no place to disembark, we decided to try the lovely village standing on the other bank. Amusingly, our kayaks were housed for the night in a boatyard that specializes in high-speed motorboats.
All photographs by Jean-Marie Huron
Getting back to the water, as here in Verberie, France, was often challenging.
The second day started with an exhausting portage around the lock at Zemst. To clear that 27′ rise, we had to haul, pull, and push, grabbing alder branches and tufts of thorny weeds in our bare hands; then, to put in again, go under the astonished eyes of wizened fishermen lined up above—all this backbreaking work only to learn, a few minutes later, that the guardians of this fortress would have opened their gates, if we had only dared to ask them.
The welcome at the Royal Sport Nautique of Brussels, Belgium, was an enthusiastic one.
We landed at a float in front of the Royal Sport Nautique of Brussels, where a dozen club members awaited us. We had hardly disembarked before our kayaks were hauled out of the water, carried across the club’s graveled courtyard, placed on gentle cradles, washed, rinsed in fresh water, polished with soft cloths, photographed in front of the vine-covered façade, and, at last, sheltered in the vast boat shed among the club’s shells and skiffs.
Showers, dinner, and beds were all so rapidly organized that I could not help thinking of our predecessors and how their evening at Royal Sport Nautique degenerated. At first overjoyed by the good fortune of being celebrated by their Belgian hosts, they ended up being irritated by their obsessive attention. Were we to have an onslaught of questions about French rowing or kayaks, clubs, and champions, its waterways, its competitions? Would dinner turn into a nightmare?
As it happened we were only slightly interesting to the young athletes who stopped at the bar after their arduous training. Jean-Marie and I hadn’t been 20 years old for at least 20 years, so we talked with the elders, their trainers and managers. We spoke of the voyage, of the evolution of the Flemish language, of the intractable Belgian government. Of the Vilvorde, also, the industrial center whose riverbank we had traveled along just before our arrival. “The traumatic closure of the Renault factory in 1997 was a blow,” explained Marc Legein, the quiet, friendly president of the rowing program. The fallow industry has opened the way to gentrification and enticed oarsmen with water less toxic and air less nasty.
At Abbaye de l’Aulne, Belgium, the canal of the Sambre is served by very small locks.
We did not escape, however, our hosts’ curiosity about our kayaks. The idea to make these specialized boats for the project came from the documentary filmmaker Florent the La Tullaye, with whom I was originally intending to do the voyage. But it was only when I encountered Jean-Baptiste Bossuet, and discovered his boatyard, that making the boats became essential to the project. The man comes across as a little surly, but he is direct and honest when giving his opinion, full of passion when it comes to describing the art of building a performance sailboat. Though solidly anchored in a tradition founded six generations earlier, Jean-Baptiste is no less open to innovation. “Those who came before me were always searching for the most effective techniques of their times,” he insists. “I was raised that way.” On my visit to the boatyard, situated at the entrance to the Bay of Arcachon on France’s southern Atlantic coast, I was taken with this wooden shed full of tools, shavings, and all sorts of sounds from saws, mallets, surfacing machines, radio and even the ducks that Jean-Baptiste raises. For my objective—the kayaks—all that remained was to convince the guardian of this temple. His response was tepid. There was a bit of suspense, but finally, we reached agreement: “Let’s go!”
After several attempts to stow gear on VAILIMA’s deck and in her two watertight compartments, Jean-Marie found the right combination. With a little less weight forward, his kayak tracked as well as mine. We slipped away late that morning, and it was nearly noon when we reached Brussels. The waterway was constrained by two high quays allowing no access to the city. We had to content ourselves with waves of dirty water reflecting off the graffiti-covered walls until we reached the first lock. We called the lockmasters: they would open for us but asked if we would go aboard the SAINT JEAN BOSCO, a barge that was behind us. The lock could not take all three boats, and the mariner was in a hurry. Doubly raised by the passage through the lock and by the height of the barge, we could finally see the Belgian capital.
The barge SAINT JEAN BOSCO got an early-morning start heading for Seneffe, Belgium, with a load Chinese silicone.
Our host asked: “Why not stay aboard until the next lock, or even farther if you like, until the inclined lock at Ronquières?” We didn’t hesitate long. The prospect of climbing 68 meters of slope aboard SAINT JEAN BOSCO, itself hauled in an imposing moving tank mounted on 600 wheels, was too tempting to resist.
The afternoon was sunny. We passed Anderlecht, a suburb in the countryside. From time to time, a small town, a group of windmills, or a factory came in view of the canal. Aboard the barge we came to know Valerie Rigole—daughter, granddaughter, great-granddaughter, and sister of Belgian mariners—and her husband, Matthieu, from Bordeaux. “When our daughter Lana was born,” Valerie recalled, “we were working at a campground. We enjoyed the work, but it was demanding and incompatible with the time we wanted to spend with our child. So we decided to get licensed as river captains.”
Aboard SILVERADO, Donatien waited for gates to open in the impressive lock at Marchienne, Belgium.
A lock approached. Matthieu bounded forward to prepare the mooring lines. I was taken with this quickness, which didn’t match my preconception of canal transport. “My family laughs at me,” Matthieu says, “They often say, ‘You are hyperactive and you live at 10 kilometers per hour.’ Aboard SAINT JEAN BOSCO there is always something to keep me busy, things to learn, I am always calculating and keeping myself informed.”
In the evening, a large plate of carbonara was the payoff for kilometers covered…without paddling. In the saloon, with its clean white partitions and its modern settee, Lana watched a Disney film on the flat-screen TV. We were far from Stevenson’s depictions of working life on the canals, but soon, as I was reading my hosts a passage from An Inland Voyage that evokes the peaceful life of mariners, Valerie exclaimed: “It’s exactly that! It’s in the photos of my grandmother, with the clothes drying on the line, the little mutt dogs, the flowers, the draft horses.”
A gentle breeze on the canal from Brussels to Charleroi provided an opportunity for SILVERADO (here) and VAILIMA to set sail and race.
The next day SAINT JEAN BOSCO was moored in front of the bucolic Central Canal, and we parted. We set out in the beautiful glow of a late-summer day, and wound through river bends amid pastoral and level countryside until we came to a long stretch lined by reeds and framed by wooded hills. A slight breeze was at our backs—an ideal time for sailing. I slipped the mast into its sleeve and set the battened sail up. The race was on. VAILIMA and SILVERADO, named after places Stevenson had visited, vied for the lead. Gaining from the slightest puff, playing the eddies to the utmost, SILVERADO edged ahead and but for the treachery of a bank ahead and the insidious backwash of fast-moving barge, my victory would have been certain.
Coming up on the Viesville lock I furled the sail round the mast, slipped its gray cloth cover over it, and put it in its place on deck. We “knocked at the door” of the lock, but it was shut tight for the night. We turned back and chose a copse of birches for our first bivouac.
For centuries Charleroi thrived on coal, glass, and steel. The factories survived World War II but the industry fell into decline in the years that followed. Rusting and idle, the factories are eerily quiet.
Ahead lay the ghostly industrial complex of Charleroi, the Sambre canal system, and the French border at Jeumont. Stevenson and his friend, put off by the number of locks, the frequent delays caused by river traffic, and the incessant rain since their departure, decided to take a train from Brussels toward Maubeuge, but we kept on paddling.
Most of the heavy industry in Charleroi appeared to be closed. The banks of the Sambre River made a ghostly picnic.
We arrived at the village of Pont-sur-Sambre, presenting, as Stevenson put it, “a most dubious sample of civilization.” We were dirty and tired. Jean-Marie had fallen first thing in the morning and had suffered a bruise. Our equipment was scarcely better. A bit of the brass stem band on VAILIMA had broken during a tight turn at a lock, and one of our portage carts was broken. Eight days out, we needed a break. We had, fortunately, been in touch with Michel Detrait, the mayor of Pont-sur-Sambre. We phoned him in the morning, and upon our arrival, his family–if not the whole village–was waiting for us, ready to help. At the grand brick house of Myriam and Michel Detrait, the dinner—a fondue of organic beef accompanied by chips and a cheesecake— was the beginning of our recuperation.
We were a very different team–shaved, showered, laundered, and restored by sleep–when we left the next afternoon. The day was made for boating. Under a blue sky I paddled in silence, following the track left by VAILIMA in water covered with yellow pollen.
The closure, in 2006, of the canal bridge at Vadencourt made it impossible to go all the way to Paris, avoiding the Central Canal, as the canal from Sambre to Oise has become a cul-de-sac. We went by truck from Étreux to Chauny and there rejoined the Oise. The absence of rain, while a welcome contrast to the incessant showers our predecessors suffered through, prevented us from launching at Vadencourt as there was not enough water in the river there for navigation. Downstream we confronted barriers of branches and rubbish, quagmires held by obstinate cattle, but soon enjoyed a string of the most sinuous and wild river bends we had seen since Anvers. An avid trout fisherman, Jean-Marie delighted in the outbreak of flies and the frequent strikes off his bow. For my part, I enjoyed the river scallops in the shallows, the escort by pair of green sandpipers, the bullet trajectory of martin-fishers, and a heron’s first try at flight.
The light was declining, the mist was gathering, and it was time to find a refuge. Ahead we saw above the alders and willows the pointed towers of a small Renaissance chateau. After arriving at the chateau du Plessis-Brion, the caretakers, Loic and Laetitia Marquet, put us up in their cottage. That evening we discussed stags, wild boars, and fox terriers while sipping a fine whisky.
The morning mist had not yet lifted when we started off. At the confluence of the Saint-Quentin and Aisne canal, the Oise becomes a river again. Barges passed us at full speed seemingly without seeing us, and industrial equipment and silos lined the banks. We passed Compiegne, then arrived two days later, in a drizzle, at Creil. At a bend of the river above Villers-Saint-Paul, we encountered Jean-Baptiste Fléret and Étienne Pillier, training in their rowing skiff. With their white outfits and their youth, they wouldn’t be out of place on a rowing team at Oxford in Stevenson’s time. Following their directions, we put in at the Étoile Nautique de l’Oise where they promised a secure place for our kayaks.
Situated on an island in the middle of Creil, the once splendid club seemed to be collapsing with the city, a victim of lost industry. That didn’t diminish at all the beautiful camaraderie of the oarsmen who gathered around us and admired our kayaks just as the oarsman at the Royal in Brussels had done. We were even saluted by some drunkards sprawled with their dogs under the willows on the opposite bank. After the oarsmen helped get our boats settled, the boat warden, a beekeeper, and several others complimented our kayaks on their great speed and their lustrous varnished mahogany. We soon found ourselves in a McDonald’s in a commercial zone with the two handsome oarsmen we had encountered on the water.
Near the village of Sassegnies, France, the Sambre meanders through farmlands and forests. The lock here was closed and we had to portage around it.
The next day, our 17th day, would be the last. All night, among the weights, the dumbbells, and other implements of sports torture scattered around the workout room of the Étoile, I tried in vain to sleep. One question, among them all, persisted: Where would we stop? At Pontoise? That seemed improbable given the distance yet to go. At Auvers-sur-Oise? The idea appealed to me for the connection with Grez-sur-Loing, which was Stevenson’s initial destination—and the one he and Simpson finally attained after abandoning their kayaks at Pontoise.
We woke up early determined to go as far as we could. It was around noon when we reached the lock at Boran-sur-Oise. But despite our insistence, the gatekeeper would not accept to let us in and no mariner would give us the lift we needed. We took it as fate, as it was clear that we had no energy left to haul our kayaks onshore and that the good luck that had followed us during our entire trip had run out.
We had a look at the small village of Boran-sur-Oise. Except for a strange abandoned nautical stadium from the 1950s at its entrance and a kebab restaurant in one of its few streets, it appeared to have remained the same since the 19th century. With its ever-present line fishermen, its willows, and its bell tower, we decided, with a glass of champagne, that it was not a bad place to end our humble voyage in the wake of young Robert Louis Stevenson.
As a journalist and a writer, Donatien Garnier was part of the Argos Collective, a group of French photographers, writers, and cartoonists dedicated to documentary journalism. After 10 years of focusing on seafarers, climate refugees, and travel, he turned his attention to literary projects. He is the author of “Le Recueil d’Écueils” (The Collection of Rocks), a combination of poetry and fanciful cartography, and of “Fluxus “ a volume of poetry published in the form of a scroll. He is currently working on a ballet adaptation of his documentary work about seafarers.
VAILIMA and SILVERADO
A Thousand Miles in the Rob Roy Canoe, published in 1866, inspired Robert Louis Stevenson a decade later to have built a pair of Rob Roy decked, double-paddle canoes and take his own trip on Europe’s rivers and canals. SILVERADO and VAILIMA continued the tradition nearly a century and a half later.
In An Inland Voyage, Stevenson wrote little about the boats. Only that one was built with “a strong heart and English oak” and the other of cedar. ARETHUSE and CIGARETTE were decked canoes, probably resembling the ROB ROY of John McGregor, the British pioneer of light-boat adventuring, used with double-bladed paddles. Jean-Baptiste Bossuet designed two kayaks in the spirit of ROB ROY, capable for sea or river, equipped with a removable sailing rig and flotation chambers, built as light and strong as possible but stable enough to let the photographer do his work. Jean-Baptiste designed a hull with sharp ends, sweet lines, and his signature, a plumb stem and sternpost. The kayaks measure 14′ 5¼″(4.4 m) long and 24¾″ (0.63 m) wide. The skin is 5mm mahogany plywood glued and copper-nailed to the red cedar structure, protected by fiberglass, epoxy, and varnish. A brass band protects the keel, and lengths of clear pine reinforce the sheerline.—DG
If you have an interesting story to tell about your travels in a small wooden boat, please email us a brief outline and a few photos.
Having the monkey’s fist and its heaving line tied together instead of all in one piece frees both to do other jobs.
When I’m camp-cruising, I carry gear that is simple and multifunctional. My heaving line and a monkey’s fist come in handy for a variety of situations. They’re traditionally parts of the same line, but having them separate makes both more versatile.
The separate monkey’s fist makes it possible to use other lines for heaving and to get lines over high branches when setting up camp. The line, 60′ length of ⅜″ laid poly, gets used for everything from tying the boat up at the dock, to setting my sea anchor, warping out of a crowded marina, anchoring, and setting up camp. Tied to the monkey’s fist, its light weight makes throws longer and keeps it afloat for easy retrieval.
The monkey’s fist is relatively easy to tie, taking only about 5 to 10 minutes. It is a series of wraps perpendicular to each other. The monkey’s fist here is tied with a length of manila around a round fishing cork with two ¾-oz fishing leads I’d inserted into it. The lead adds weight for better throwing without losing buoyancy. Golf balls also add some heft and aren’t so dense that a poly monkey’s fist won’t stay afloat with one at the core.
It’s easiest to insert the core after the second series of wraps begins. After the third series of wraps all of the slack is worked out from the bitter end and through the turns. The tail is usually spliced into the integral heaving line at the other end, but a short loop is what I use. The two ends of the line can be tied or spliced together to form the loop, but a quick-and-dirty finish is to cut one end flush and tuck the other in alongside it. Superglue keeps them in place. I finished the one shown here with a quick half-hitch braid around the loop.
When I need to toss a line, I tie it to the monkey’s fist with a clove hitch. There are a couple of different techniques for setting up to throw, but I prefer to coil the line (starting by tucking the tail end between two fingers so I can hang on to it when I’m throwing) into my non-throwing hand and then carefully transfer three or four coils of the line into my throwing hand with the monkey’s fist hanging about even with the bottom of the coils. It is important to coil the line properly. I coil both laid and braided clockwise into my left hand, adding a slight twist with the thumb and forefinger of my right hand to keep the coils loose and even.
I can consistently throw the line and monkey’s fist 50′ to 70′ with good accuracy. I try to get the monkey’s fist well past the target and slightly to one side to avoid hitting the receiver. With a little practice you can get fairly accurate with your throw.
Having a heaving line and monkey’s fist at the ready may just make a critical difference one day in an emergency, but in the meantime it can spare you the embarrassment of throwing a line only to have it land in a heap far short of its target.
A native Floridian, Thomas Head grew up working on his father’s home-built stone crab boat in the small coastal town of Inglis. He has 19 years of service in the U.S. Navy. His account of racing in the Everglades Challenge appeared in our November 2014 issue.
SBM photos
While a monkey’s fist can be tied by starting the wraps around your fingers, a simple jig makes the process faster and easier to master, especially with soft line like the braided nylon. The jig here is for a golf-ball core and ¼” line. The 7/16” dowels—just large enough to provide clearance for the third set of wraps—are set outside of the perimeter of a 1⅞” circle for a loose fit around the 1.68” ball. The finished monkey’s fists are, from left to right: sisal, finished with a spliced loop; poly, with the tail whipped to the heaving line; and braided nylon. Only the poly monkey’s fist floats.
The ¼” line covers the golf ball with wraps made up of five coils, here starting and ending at the striped dowel.
The second set of wraps is made around the first and the golf ball goes in halfway through this step. Note that the second wrap starts by crossing the gap between the first wraps. This is less obvious when tying without the jig.
At the end of the second set of wraps, the line goes directly into the gap under the first set.
The top view showing the start of the last set of wraps.
When every side of the knot shows 5 wraps, it’s ready to come off the jig.
With the last set of wraps complete, the jig can be slipped out. Chase the slack out in a couple of steps. Cinching the line up too quickly will bunch up the wraps.
You can share your tricks of the trade with other Small Boats Monthly readers by sending us an email.
The leather is stiff enough to push water forcefully and supple enough to keep from marring the boat’s finish.
Once upon a time the boat sharps on the Delaware River were sailing 15 footers with sail areas running to 400 sq ft. No self-bailers, no buoyancy tanks, no crash boats. When they capsized they had to right the boat, swim it to the bank, and bail. Bailers had to float and not damage the lightly built hikers, tuckups, and duckers. Wood and leather did the trick.
Joe Liener, who was running the wooden boat shop at the Philadelphia Naval Yard before he retired, taught me about duckers and about their bailers. A wood-backed leather scoop bailer gets into corners, doesn’t damage light framing, and can be plucked out of the water when you lose your grip. You can bail faster than a pump and, shaped right like any fine tool, the bailer is a pleasure to use. The handle is turned so you have a nice round fat part in your palm and it is angled just right so you can hook your thumb over the wooden back.
Ben Fuller
The lathe-turned handle is set into the bailer’s back at 85° for a more comfortable grip.
Making it is pretty easy The back ought to be a good 1″ thick and shaped like the stern of a catboat: a bit of flat on the bottom with some tumblehome at the top to help stiffen and support the leather. Cut out the back, then position and bore the handle hole. Angle the bit about 10 degrees. Make a pattern to mark out the leather; a thin plywood template will give you a solid edge to guide your cut. To do the handle, you’ll need a lathe. Before modern glues, the handles were cut where they went into the hole and wedged like an axe head. You can use a straight-sided handle but it’s just not as nice in the hand and you’d need to cut a mortise instead of boring a hole. The leather should be the heaviest you can find. Copper tacks fasten it to the back.
Scoop bailing is easier if you don’t have floorboards or can take up a section. The Delaware builders used to make removable floorboards, called floor flats, in three sections. Two ran either side of the centerboard or daggerboard trunk and one was aft, leaving a frame bay clear side to side just aft of amidships. These were held together by cleats on the underside and had turn-buttons to keep them in place in capsize. Old drawings show a two-handed bailer with a leather scoop bigger than mine but the one hander is all you need to deal with rain and spray that gets aboard.
Ben Fuller
Even after 40 years of use, the author’s bailer has lots of life in it. Unlike a cut-off plastic bottle, it won’t slide around after it has been tucked away.
I’ve had my bailer as long as I’ve had my ducker, a few years short of 40. I’ve releathered it and repaired the handle after using it to bang some blocks of ice out of the winter dory. It also works well for clearing snow. When rainy days put a few inches in the bottom, using the bailer is kind of fun. A hundred scoops with the right hand, another hundred with the left, seeing if I can bail fast enough to get a second scoop in the air before the first one hits the water. It’s my warming exercise before rowing.
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.
SBM photographs
The parts of the bailer, ready for assembly. Note the saw kerf in the peg end of the handle. The dark lines on the handle are made with a piece of wire wrapped halfway around the handle while it is spinning on the lathe. Friction chars the wood.
The hole for the handle is drilled at 85°. Careful repeated saw cuts get the flange of to sit flush against the back.
A wedge locks the handle securely in place. The wedge is as thick as the kerf is wide at its narrow end and about three times as thick at the other end. After driving the wedge home, saw the peg off flush. If you’re using an unyielding hardwood like maple for the bailer’s back, flare the hole with a rat-tail file to allow the handle’s peg end room to spread and lock.
Pilot holes drilled in the leather and bailer back will allow you to hammer 3/4″ copper tacks in without having them buckle or hook around in the wood.
An occasional application of tallow will protect and preserve the leather.
The bailer will hold about 3 cups of water, but will “throw” almost twice that.
Bailing as if it matters can move about 25 gallons per minute.
More interested in using the bailer than making it? Rodger Swanson, whose trailer review appears in this issue, offers them among his line of rowing accessories.
You can share your tricks of the trade with other Small Boats Monthly readers by sending us an email.
T-nuts slide in slotted aluminum box beams for a wide range of adjustments.
I have a small-boat business with an emphasis on tradition-based rowboats and rowing accessories and I usually do the fitting-out of hardware at my shop, often requiring that I pick up the a customer’s boat and return it when the work is completed. Recently, I’ve also been offering custom rowing craft intended for recreational use or racing. These boats range from 15′ to 20′, but they are lightly built and must be handled—and transported—with care. I learned early on that most damage to boat hulls is caused by improper transport, launching, retrieval and/or storage. Damage on the water occurs only up to 10 percent of the time. To avoid any problems in transporting boats, a proper trailer was in order.
Rather than reinvent the wheel, I chose to survey the transport choices my compatriots were making. At races and boat shows the most well-cared-for boats were transported on Trailex Trailers, with the SUT-350-S the apparent favorite.
The Trailex Company, located in Canfield, Ohio, has been offering well-designed and well-constructed aluminum small-boat trailers since 1966. They have national distribution, an excellent reputation for product quality and durability, and excellent customer service. Their SUT-350-S is just one of a score of small-boat trailers. It is 18′6″ long, 4′6″ wide, and weighs 155 lbs. I have two: one is equipped with a jack, winch and spare tire bracket options, and one isn’t, but will soon have those accessories. The 350-S is designed to accommodate boats up to 22′ in length with a maximum weight of 350 lbs. The lightly sprung leaf-spring suspension softens the jolts of bumpy roads.
Rodger Swanson
Designed to be sold as kits, Trailex trailer frames are bolted together, not welded. The light springs protect small boats from rough roads.
I’m now into my third year of 350-S ownership and continue to be totally pleased. The trailers allow me to transport my own boats and customers’ boats with perfect confidence. They are easily loaded, balance well and behave predictably and smoothly on the on the highway. The combination of light weight and good balance allows for safe and effective solo loading and unloading—particularly important for me as I work alone most of the time.
Tire pressure is critical: they are designed for 25 psi; any more will cause excessive bounce when on the road. The trailer frame is intended to be close to parallel to the road surface so avoid canting it with a hitch that is too high or too low. Trailex trailers have a low profile, you may have difficulty seeing your rig in your rear view mirrors. I have a pennant on a 4′ fiberglass shaft affixed to the transom of my own boats. This shows up well in the rearview, helpful in maintaining safe distance on the road and in backing up to launch sites.
In my line of work I can’t afford to have boats take a beating on the road. With the 350-S to back me up, life is good!
Rodger Swanson has been in the business of traditional rowing for 40 years. He specializes in hard-to-find accessories for fixed-thwart and sliding-set rowing, including the bailer featured in this issue. His “flagship” product is tallow, a traditional oar-leather and oarlock lubricant; he is currently the only remaining marine tallow producer in North America.
The SUT-350-S sells for $1,146 and is shipped as a kit or available from the Trailex factory for an additional $100.
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.
At full power, DOCKHOUSE QUEEN scoots along at 7 knots.
Terry Everman grew up in a Columbia River tugboat family, and after a 30-year career in the shipbuilding industry, he built a tug for himself. It wasn’t big, like the tugs that he’d seen as a boy, but it was the biggest tug he could build in a one-car garage. He had gathered experience building other small wooden boats: 8′ MiniMax hydroplane, Phil Bolger’s Cartopper, Warren Jordan’s Baby Tender (a cradle boat), Mac McCarthy’s Wee Lassie, and a traditional Melonseed skiff.
Genie Cary
The curved stern was difficult to construct but has the right look for a tug.
The mini-tug started with measuring the garage that would be Terry’s workshop. A length of 16′ would leave him some room to get around the ends, and the 7′4″ beam left just 1″ of clearance on either side to get through the garage door. He began working up the design on a basic computer program. His friend Harry Schoenauer lent a hand fine-tuning the design before building began.
Terry Everman
The rolling building platform and the roll-over frame were sized to get through the garage with only 2″ to spare.
After a year devoted to designing the tug, the first project was to build an 8′ x 16′ rolling platform so the hull could be moved outside when it came time to roll it upright. Shaped panels of marine-grade plywood—½″ on the bottom, two layers of ¼″ below the side rail, and ¼″ for the bulwarks and house— gave the tug its shape. The rounded stern was essential for the classic look but a challenge to build. Thickened epoxy fillets strengthened the joints, and sheathing of 7-oz fiberglass cloth with epoxy reinforced and protected the hull. Empty spaces below the deck were filled with a poured-in foam mix for flotation. When the hull was finished, Terry and friends pulled it outside and rolled it over, and then pushed it back into the garage. The tug’s house was built in a separate garage and later set on the hull.
Terry Everman
The spaces between frames below deck were filled with poured foam for flotation.
Back in the garage, the tug was given its power plant, a brushless electric motor (72V, 350A) from Electric Motorsport. Powered by six 12-volt deep-cell marine batteries, the motor would produce the equivalent of 31 hp. A 14 pitch x 10″ propeller is driven through a 2:1 double V-belt reduction. The keel added to the V hull to protect the shaft and prop brought the tug’s draft to 24″.
Terry Everman
The electric motor sits above the drive shaft and is connected to it with a 2:1 double V-belt reduction drive.
Terry built DOCKHOUSE QUEEN in south Florida and completed construction in two years. He and his wife Sandy then towed the tug to their homeport in Cathlamet, Washington. The cross-country trip drew lots of compliments: people enjoyed the unique cartoon character of the boat. DOCKHOUSE QUEEN performs as Terry expected for a vessel with a sheer plan shaped like a watermelon and a one-ton displacement. At a minimal effort of 30 amps, she makes 4 knots. Top speed with a 150-amp draw is 7 knots. At a casual cruising speed of 3 to 4 knots, the batteries will provide power for several hours. “A quick charging session,” says Terry, “and she is good to go. No fueling fumes, messy bilges, or fuel-dock credit cards.” Terry entered DOCKHOUSE QUEEN in Cathlamet’s yearly Wooden Boat Festival, and she was awarded First in Class.
Afterword
Terry Everman passed away unexpectedly just two months after this issue was published, and now DOCKHOUSE QUEEN is in need of new owners. Please email me if you’re interested. Christopher Cunningham, Editor
In the comments below, Ed was interested in hearing more about the rolling platform. Terry replied with photos and details:
“I built the platform on casters mainly to move the structure from side to side because of the limited space. I even rolled it out, turned the boat around and rolled it back in for better access to the bow or stern. After the roll over, I supported the boat cradles on furniture dollies and rolled in back in the garage for finishing still with the ability to move side to side. The platform was dismantled. The option to move the boat around in the single car garage was a life saver and I was very pleased with the method.”
The platform frame
The platform with decking in place
Platform at the start of construction
After roll-over, the hull and frame rest on dollies.
Rolled back into the garage on dollies, the boat is a tight fit in the workspace.
I was sitting in the cabin of the Escargot canal cruiser BONZO, a boat my son, Nate, and his friend Bobby Calnan built the summer after they’d graduated from high school. It was a winter evening—cold and dark outside—but I had a fire going in the woodstove and a few candles lit. I heard a knocking on the hull and opened the door to find a woman peering over the transom. “Hi,” she said, “I just wanted to say how much I love your boat.” I invited her to come aboard and she climbed over the transom, a bit awkwardly because she was wearing a long skirt and fashionable leather boots with high heels. I couldn’t fault her for her attire because she’d just gotten off the bus on her way home from work. BONZO was on the trailer, high and dry in my driveway.
Photographs and video by the author
After spending a quiet and cozy night with BONZO aground on a gravel bar, Nate tidies the forward sleeping quarters while his sister, Alison, does the dishes. The rising tide floated BONZO for the downstream home stretch on the Snohomish River.
As a wooden boat, the Escargot is an unlikely charmer. It has a hull like a shoebox, only two curves to speak of, and is entirely bereft of brightwork and brass. Nonetheless, it has an ineluctable appeal inside and out. The cabin with its arched roof and stovepipe has the look of a gypsy wagon and the lure of running away from it all, in comfort. My father said of it: “The moment I step aboard, I’ve arrived.”
The cabin and the forward berths are separated by small bays for the head (left) and the wood stove (right).
The Escargot, like many of the small boats designed by the late Phil Thiel, is meant to foster the ideals of what the French called a flaneur. Charles Baudelaire described the flaneur as the “passionate spectator” for whom “it is an immense joy…to be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the center of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world.” The Escargot steers us in that direction. As a “flaneur afloat” Phil aimed to “savor the shore-side pleasures at the ideal rate of speed—slowly. The faster you go through the environment the less you can enjoy it. At slower speeds the world around you reveals itself on a smaller, more human scale.”
Let’s get the Escargot afloat. Phil intended her for “use limited to sheltered inland waterways.” The canals he frequently traveled in France were his inspiration, and similar narrow waters free of wind and waves are where the Escargot performs most admirably. The barge-like hull is an 18′ 6″ by 6′ rectangle. The flat bottom meets the bow transom 6″ above the waterline and the stern transom just even with it. The cabin is 11′6″ long and divided into three sections: a cabin with a galley and a dinette/berth, twin berths partially tucked under the foredeck, and a 2′ bay in between for the head and a hanging locker. The foredeck and the cockpit are both about 3-1/2′ long.
In thin water it’s time to kick up the motor, stow the oars and haul the Escargot on foot.
Phil calculated the weight of the bare boat at 750 lbs; displacing 2,000 lbs, the Escargot will draw only 6″. Nate and I have pulled BONZO across shallows scarcely more than ankle deep. As you’d expect, the barge-like hull has exceptional stability. I have yet to ask passengers to shift their weight to trim the boat.
The Escargot is not a petite boat but its shallow draft gets it into some small waterways. Standing in a forward hatch, Nate explores a backwater frequented by beavers but not by boats.
We don’t have canals in the Puget Sound area, but there are a number of narrow sloughs where the rivers take their sweet time crossing the flatlands between the foothills and the Sound. Here the Escargot is quite at home: the water slips quietly under the bow and curdles up astern.
We’ve taken BONZO out on the local lakes and on the wide salt water of Puget Sound, and have had a few run-ins with wind and waves. In a bit of chop the bow transom will begin shaving the tops off the waves, and in anything much over 12″ high it will throw up some spray. The cockpit is far from the fuss and protected by the cabin, so it’s a good refuge for the helmsman. With only a 2.5-hp for power, BONZO carries enough momentum to keep moving forward through the waves we get in the lakes we frequent.
The kick-up rudder coaxes the Escargot through turns; steering with the outboard makes her much more maneuverable in tight quarters. While underway in a crosswind there’s enough steerage with the rudder to hold a course, but when idle, the bow will slip downwind. I’ve thought that a slot in one of the rub strips would make it easy to slip a daggerboard alongside the foredeck; it would resist the downwind drift of the bow and give the hull a point to pivot around.
Phil had originally designed the first two versions of the Escargot to be driven by a pair of SeaCycle pedal drives: “This pied-à-l’eau approach was, and remains the ideal. However, the pedal-drive unit I proposed using was not suitable for slow speeds and heavy loads.” SeaCycle’s drives are designed for light, easily driven catamaran the company makes, the largest of their boats being only 14′10″, 175 lbs, and capable of 12.8 mph. The pitch of SeaCycle propellers is not well suited to a boat the size, weight, and speed of the Escargot and couldn’t be pedaled at a comfortable cadence. (There are some Escargots in Germany that use pedal drives, but they’ve been outfitted with custom-made props.) The Escargot plans available now call for a 2- to 5-hp outboard. BONZO is powered by a 2.5-hp, four-stroke outboard that’ll get us up to about 4.5 knots.
The cockpit of SHAMBALA is built according to the plans. Builder Bryan Lowe omitted the hinged hatch over the companionway on the aft end of the cabin roof, but kept the one over the smaller passageway forward. Bryan steers SHAMBALA with his outboard. BONZO was ultimately outfitted and steered with the rudder drawn in the plans.
There are a few modifications we’ve made to the design. Our first experience with the design was aboard Bryan Lowe’s SHAMBALA, and we followed his lead and added 6″ to the height of the cabin sides. It’s a bit more complex than working with the standard 48″ width of plywood sheets and adds to the windage, but the extra headroom is a better fit for tall passengers. Bryan’s cockpit, built to the plans, felt a bit confined, so we lengthened BONZO’s by 12″. The easiest way to do that was to add the length to the flat part of the bottom to shift the aft third of the hull out past the cabin wall. We have more elbowroom for starting the motor and sharing the space with passengers.
The catwalk added to the cabin roof proved to be a popular perch aboard BONZO. The bow often allows stepping ashore with dry feet, though in this case, with very muddy boots.
Nate wanted a catwalk on the roof to use as a runway that he and his friends could use for diving on summer outings. It turned out to be a very pleasant place to sit with a commanding view, and it saved Nate and Bobby from making the hatches over the companionways.
Christened, launched, but not quite finished, BONZO experiments with oar power. With the cabin obscuring vision between oarsmen, synchronizing was difficult.
We added oarlocks at both ends of the boat and hatches on the foredeck to create footwells for the bow oarsmen. Rowing was a nod toward a human-power ideal we share with Phil, but ultimately it proved impractical for covering long distances. Even if we could get four oarsmen, the bow rowers couldn’t see the oars of the stern rowers and couldn’t row in synch with them. The hatches turned out to be useful for stargazing from the forward berths.
With the roof an extra 6″ higher, the main cabin has plenty of headroom and an open, airy feel.
The galley Phil designed for the main cabin has a built-in sink and a recess for a stove to starboard. Nate didn’t anticipate needing a permanent galley and opted to put seats on both sides so he could have a fourth berth. Large plexiglass windows in all of the cabin compartments let in plenty of light, provide expansive views, and, when open, a cooling breeze. The hanging locker was converted to make a space for a small homemade wood stove.
The number of modifications we made isn’t an indication that the design lacking in any way, but that it is easily adaptable to suit the needs of the builder. With so many straight lines and right angles, it’s very easy to shift things around for personal preference.
The Escargot is initially assembled upside down. Uprights on the transoms and bulkheads extend to a baseline to align them. After they are secured to the sides and the bottom, the extra length is sawn away.
The plans are exceptionally well detailed, covering every element of construction from the cutting schedule for the 23 sheets of plywood to the drain slots on the window molding. There won’t be much head scratching in the building, even for novice woodworkers. The instructions specify marine-grade plywood. We used marine-grade fir plywood for BONZO. It used to be pretty good stuff, but I’d steer clear of it now. Mahogany BS 1088 plywood costs more but has fewer defects, is easier to work with, and lasts longer.
Materials for BONZO cost about $4,000 in 2009. We didn’t keep a log of hours, but Nate and Bobby poked along through the summer and put on a big push, working nearly full-time in September to get her ready to launch before cold, wet weather set in.
Nate and his friends often take summer weekend cruises in BONZO. For myself there are two times each year when I especially like to be aboard: to celebrate my birthday and to do my taxes. It is (with apologies to Charles Dickens) the place to be in the best of times and in the worst of times.
Christopher Cunningham is the editor of Small boats Monthly.
Escargot Particulars
LOA: 18′ 6″
Beam: 6′
Draft: 6″
Bare Hull: 750 lbs
Recommended outboard engine: 2–5 hp
Print and digital plans, at $75, are available from the WoodenBoat Store.
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Sam Devlin’s Candlefish 13 began with a client’s detailed request for the design of an outboard skiff suitable for the lakes of Alaska’s Far North. It had to be light enough to lift up over the cab of a one-ton pickup truck towing a fifth-wheel trailer, narrow and short enough to fit on the roof rack, and as stable and as spacious as it can be within the restrictions on length, beam, and weight. Sam drew up plans to his customer’s specs and in the process imagined how he might adapt the design the boat for his own use: “a couple of weeks of moose hunting on a far northern lake with my friends Sven and Ollie.” To that end, the Candlefish 13 he’d build for himself would be able to carry three successful hunters and a half ton of moose meat, and still have about a foot of freeboard. When I took Sam’s Candlefish out on the waters of South Puget Sound on a sunny morning, it wasn’t brimming with camo and a carcass, but I wasn’t the least bit disappointed.
Sam took his inspiration for this little workboat from the pangas he admired on his frequent visits to Mexico. These remarkably seaworthy skiffs had generous freeboard to fight back the chop that came up with the afternoon winds and were narrow for greater efficiency and speed under the power of modest outboards. The Candlefish 13 is diminutive version of the panga with a length of 13′ 4″, a beam of 4′ 11″, and a bare-hull weight of 165 lbs.
All Devlin boats are built stitch-and-glue, a method Sam pioneered back in the late 1970s and ’80s. The thwarts, benches, and bulkheads reinforce the hull and leave the interior free of structural clutter. There’s no shortage of firm unobstructed footing. The cockpit sole is fairly flat, so to keep any water that gathers there from splashing underfoot it’s covered with removable honeycomb rubber mats.
all photographs by the author
The large compartment amidships keeps the cargo clear of the cockpit and its weight positioned for proper trim.
There is a watertight compartment just forward of amidships. Inside there’s room for tackle boxes, a two-piece boathook, a pair of aluminum breakdown oars, and a 6.5-gallon fuel tank. The tank puts the weight of the fuel, about 40 lbs when full, nearly amidships to help keep the boat in trim. The latch that levers the large gasketed hatch cover down tight and has a hole for a padlock to secure the compartment’s contents.
The cockpit is easy to sluice down with a hose. The forward footwell drains aft through an enclosed tube set in the amidships cargo compartment and into the cockpit and then out through two drains in the transom.
The forepeak has an open compartment for more gear and a deck recessed below the sheer and the bulkhead. Scuppers in the corners drain water overboard, so a muddy anchor, chain, and rode can be deposited there and sluiced down with a bucket of water without making a mess of the cockpit.
Spray-on truck-bed liner provides a thick, tough coating with a bit of texture for a non-slip finish.
The center compartment and side benches offer plenty of comfortable seating for the crew whether they’re enjoying the view or gnawing on fresh moose meat. A stout, bright-finished thwart puts the helmsman within easy reach of the outboard tiller, and its slick finish makes it an easy slide side-to-side to adjust trim or switch hands on the tiller. Ample transom knees provide a sturdy base for downriggers.
The bottom has a keel running aft from the stem and ending about a foot shy of the transom. At the aft half of the hull there are bilge keels at the sides, protected, like the keel, by stainless-steel half ovals. Two wedges, each about 10″ wide, serve as fixed trim tabs and keep the boat from hobbyhorsing with a light load aboard.
Sam uses spray-on truck bed liner for interior finish of many of his open boats. It looks good, is tough as nails, and provides good traction without wearing through your britches or elbows. He has used it on the exterior of this particular Candlefish too, an experiment that has been running for three years now. The texture likely adds some drag that knocks a bit off top end speed, but Sam hasn’t found that perceptible enough to change the finish to something smoother. I found very few signs of wear in the finish, even on the bottom. There was a scuff forward, a few small nicks on the corner at the bottom of the transom, but nothing that had come close to penetrating through to bare wood.
A deep gouge might be the only thing to convince someone that the boat is made out of wood. Sam is passionate about wood—“It’s God’s way of keeping me working every day”—but he’s practical about it. In a workboat it’s primarily a structural material, and he’s going to protect it with a durable, low-maintenance finish. I don’t punish my boats with hard use, so I’d opt for a slick exterior. Sam does flawless work with smooth, glossy, Awlgrip finishes, and I’ve often had to restrain myself from offering the dubious compliment of comparing it to production fiberglass and gelcoat. If you build your own Candlefish, you’d be at liberty to gussy it up with more brightwork, but the boat has an appeal that’s more than skin deep. Sam has an artist’s sensibility (his watercolor paintings can attest to that), and he designs boats with the form as the eye candy.
While the original design had to meet the customer’s request for a cartoppable boat, Sam has never been a fan of cartopping: “It’s hard on the boat, hard on the operator, and a miserable way to go.” I’d agree. My 85-lb decked tandem canoe is at the limit of what I can manage to get on and off my roof racks by myself. A trailer is a better way to transport the Candlefish with a great savings in time every time you launch: Your gear can stay aboard and the outboard can remain attached.
Sam’s Candlefish, the one you see here, serves as a utility skiff for his 37′ converted salmon troller JOSEPHINE. The skiff’s padded gunwale guard protects the mother ship when coming alongside, and its narrow bottom and bow eye, placed well down on the stem, contribute to its good manners under tow. When Sam and his wife are cruising Alaskan waters and JOSEPHINE’s at anchor, often in the company of two other couples aboard their own motor cruisers, he uses the Candlefish to shuttle gear and people: “I can carry all six of us and the dog in a hot minute.”
With the Candlefish’s 20-hp outboard at full throttle, Sam Devlin skims smoothly along at over 20 knots.
With a 20-hp Yamaha four-stroke outboard powering the Candlefish, she gets up and a plane with one person aboard in about 4.5 seconds and then with the throttle wide open flies along at 20½ knots. With two of us aboard, the Candlefish 13 topped out at just over 17 knots. She tracks well at all speeds and banks quickly and powerfully into turns: I quickly learned to use a soft touch on the tiller. A slight angling of the tiller sets the inside chine down, and the Candlefish carves smartly around.
The Candlefish maintains a level trim and good visibility at low speeds thanks to the centrally located cargo compartment and the fixed thwart that keeps the helmsman well forward of the tiller. The bow rises only briefly as she climbs up on a plane, and the skiff levels right out again.
Empty, the Candlefish 13 draws just 4 ½”. Throw in half ton of cargo and crew and it will draw about 9,” leaving plenty of freeboard.
The bottom is 36″ wide at the transom and not much wider amidships, so with just me and a light load of essential cargo in the center compartment, the Candlefish is a bit tender but she has plenty of flare and stiffens up as she heels. Settled deeper in the water with a heavier load, that moose for instance, she’d care much less where I planted myself.
Sam offers plans and patterns on paper and in digital format. He estimates the cost of materials for a do-it-yourselfer at around $850 and the time to build at 200 to 250 hours. Kits and finished boats are produced by Devlin Designing Boatbuilders upon request. They’ll use British Standard 1088 Marine Grade Plywood, 9mm (3⁄8″) for the hull and 18mm (3⁄8″) for the bulkheads. The exterior is sheathed with Dynel fabric and epoxy. The lumber that goes into the gunwales, seat edges, keels, breasthook and knees is either Port Orford cedar purpleheart or Honduras mahogany (plantation grown in Fiji).
The Candlefish 13 is a trim little skiff that packs a lot of potential into her short length. Lively running light and with the load-carrying capacity of a half-ton pickup truck, she’d be no stranger to work or play.
Christopher Cunningham is the editor of Small Boats.
For 15 years the Everglades Challenge has pitted paddlers, rowers, and sailors against a variety of sea conditions on a 300-mile journey from Tampa Bay to Key Largo. The rules of the race require that every vessel be launched by hand from the beach. The 2015 EC brought some approximately 107 canoes, kayaks and small sailboats of every description to the starting line at Fort DeSoto Park near Tampa Bay, Florida. It would be my fifth Everglades Challenge and my first with Wally Werderich, a 42-year-old Chicagoan with a respectable ultra-distance racing résumé.
My first EC, in 2003, was a trial by fire. In that five-day journey my partner and I battled through navigational errors, leaking spray skirts, headwinds, waves, sleep deprivation, and hallucinations. In 2006 I teamed up with veteran WaterTriber Marty Sullivan and we picked a plywood triple kayak to race in. We spent two months building the kayak and one month training in it. The race went perfectly, and Marty and I finished in a time of three days and six hours, a Class 1 (Expedition canoes and kayaks) record that has yet to be broken. In 2009 and 2013 I raced with other partners in the triple, CONDOR by name, and again finished first in the division.
On Friday, March 6, Wally and I spent the morning at my house in Orlando making some modifications to his kayak seat and trying to fit all of our gear in my car. We loaded CONDOR, picked up my girlfriend Stacey, our shore contact, and arrived at Fort Desoto Park just in time for the mid-afternoon roll-call of racers. We all go by aliases. Back in 2001, when I needed to pick my WaterTribe name, my young daughter was a fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer so I came up with RiverSlayer. Wally chose Los Humungos.
During the pre-race meeting, WaterTribe Chief, Steve Isaac, went over the protocols. The EC requires more safety gear than any other organization I’ve raced with. For electronics alone, Tribers have to have a GPS, EPIRB, SPOT satellite messenger, cell phone, and VHF radio.
Stacey Roberts
Over 100 kayaks, canoes, and sailboats lined up on the beach for the 2015 Everglades Challenge. The Sunshine Skyway Bridge in the distance spans the entrance to Tampa Bay.
Over 100 kayaks, canoes, and sailboats lined up on the beach for Everglades Challenge. The Sunshine Skyway Bridge in the distance spans the entrance to Tampa Bay.
Following the meeting Wally and I transported CONDOR to the starting line. The full length of the beach was filled by boats, more than half of them sailboats. The forecast was for 15–20-mph winds out of the northeast. Back at the hotel Wally and I put bananas, cookies, beef jerky, Snickers, protein bars, Cheez-its, fruit cups, and PB&J sandwiches in ziplock bags—small amounts that we could eat throughout the race. Around 10 p.m. we had finished and headed for bed.
The hotel alarm clock went off at 5 a.m. and we quickly mixed up our powder drinks and took our remaining gear to the Jeep. After a quick stop for breakfast, we headed for Fort Desoto. It was still dark when we arrived, but the beach was awash with headlamp-wearing racers making final preparations.
Stacey Roberts
In the predawn light before the start at Fort Desoto Beach, Wally and Rod pack CONDOR with supplies and gear.
In the last hour Wally and I were able to fit all of our needed gear into CONDOR and Wally, donning a mask, cape, and tights like a Mexican Luchador wrestler, transformed himself into the great Los Humungos. I am all for having fun at the start; the suffering will come later.
At 7 a.m. there was no horn or gun signaling the start. Everyone just started pushing and pulling our boats to the water. The tide was low, and we had to haul across a sandbar offshore. With Wally seated forward and me aft, we were soon in deeper water and paddling away. Despite being in a kayak, Wally and I were both using lightweight canoe paddles—they’re less fatiguing than kayak paddles. I put the rudder down so Wally could steer, but in the rush to get under way, his seat had slid back and he couldn’t reach the rudder pedals. As a canoeist I don’t trust rudders: many kayakers get knocked out of races with various rudder malfunctions. I have plenty of experience steering CONDOR without a rudder, and we continued without any problems.
We expected rough conditions at the entrance to Tampa Bay, and about 2 miles into the challenge the wind and waves picked up. Soon we were surfing on 3–4′ waves. I was sure some of the less experienced Tribers would be having problems.
Stacey Roberts
The race was still on as CONDOR passed under the bridge to Santa Maria Island.
Soon we were in much calmer waters and going under a bridge linking the mainland to Anna Maria Island. As we approached a second bridge I spotted Stacey, right where she’d always been on previous races, calling out to wish us luck. I told her we would call her from Checkpoint 1 at Cape Haze Marina, and we continued southward.
Tom Ray
With the wind blowing out of the east, the sheetless two-meter sail provided little help. For Wally, still sporting his Los Humungos attire, and Rod lightweight canoe paddles are the best choice for the long haul in the kayak.
About 15 minutes later a sheriff’s boat sped past us heading north toward the channel. Five minutes later a Coast Guard boat followed. Some of the Tribers must have been having a rough go of it, but Wally and I were making good progress; trailing a couple of the leading kayaks, but I expected them to slow down after the first day and then we could reel them in.
We were going under a bridge near Sarasota Bay when another racer’s shore contact standing above us called out that the Coast Guard had declared a weather hold and we were supposed to head to shore. Wally got Stacey on his cell phone; she told him there were multiple rescues in the shipping channel and the Coast Guard had ordered all racers to shore. This seemed rather ludicrous since we were surrounded by pleasure boaters and recreational kayakers enjoying a calm sunny day on the water. None of the lead kayaks had stopped, so we told Stacey that we’d continue to Checkpoint 1 and call her in a few hours.
We passed a few other WaterTribers. Some knew nothing of the Coast Guard order and others had new tidbits of information. Several hours later Stacey gave us the bad news: After rescuing a dozen WaterTribers in distress, the Coast Guard canceled the race and requested that racers proceed to Cape Haze Marina and make arrangements to be picked up. I told Stacey we would camp there before deciding what to do. I felt bad for Wally. He’d paid the entry fee, took time off from work, and traveled to Florida, only to have the race canceled.
Wally Werderich
Bill Whale, Tribe name “Whale,” with a reef zipped in his sail and paddle in hand makes tracks in his outrigger-equipped decked sailing canoe.
We pulled into Cape Haze Marina about 8:30 p.m. After changing into some dry clothes, I spotted Bill Whale (tribe name, appropriately, Whale). He had just arrived in his sailing canoe and had met up with Bob, a friend who lived nearby. Bob drove us to a restaurant and over dinner Bill, Wally, and I decided to continue to Key Largo. Bill was planning to take the Wilderness Waterway through the Everglades. It adds about 30 miles to the trip, but winds through some spectacular scenery. This was my first chance to paddle through the entire waterway.
Bob dropped us off at the marina with directions to his house, 2 miles south along the canal. Thirty minutes later we spotted him by his dock. I would have been happy to camp in his backyard, but Bob had several guest bedrooms available. After a shower I quickly fell asleep in a comfortable bed.
We were up at 6 a.m. Bob advised us that the winds would be gusting from the east and suggested that we paddle out into the Gulf through Gasparilla Pass to avoid the wind and waves of Charlotte Harbor. We took his advice and headed into the Gulf of Mexico before turning south. The tree-lined shore blocked most of the wind, and we had good paddling conditions. As we passed North Captiva Island, Bill was under full sail and Wally and I had to paddle hard to stay with him.
Wally Werderich
Many stretches of water between the mainland and barrier islands were busy with boat traffic and offered no places to camp.
We turned east on a small channel leading to Sanibel Island. The inside route was crowded with motorboats, and we had to stop abruptly to keep from being run over by two speeding jet boats going at least 50 mph. We crossed paths with several Tribers in sailboats tacking back and forth as they neared the Sanibel Island bridge. One told us to watch out for the law: It seems another WaterTribe sailboat was stopped for “excessive tacking” by a police patrol boat and told to turn around.
Wally and I crossed under the Sanibel causeway while Bill went west to find higher clearance for his mast. We caught up with each other south of Sanibel Island. The sun was setting as we paddled by Estero Island. Bill suggested that we stealth-camp on Lovers Key, and two hours later we pulled our boats up there on a beautiful white sand beach. Lovers Key is a state park for day use only, but it’s the only undeveloped land in the area. As we set up our tents I noticed ATV tracks and hoped park rangers did not make nighttime inspections of the island. We were soon all inside our tents and asleep. We hadn’t been racing, but paddling 50 miles in a day is still tiring.
We were up and paddling by 6 a.m. Bill took advantage of the east wind and gradually sailed ahead of us. Wally and I paddled hard for about three hours and covered over 15 miles. We caught up with Bill as we approached Gordons Pass south of Naples. He suggested that we take a break at the park inside the pass. There was a lot of boat traffic, and a big catamaran sailboat suddenly turned in our direction. Wally and I sprinted out of the way; Bill had to turn around to keep from getting hit. When we finally made it to the park, Bill was still steamed about the near collision. We were all ready for the peace and tranquility of the Everglades.
Wally Werderich
CONDOR awaits its crew during a restaurant stop at Marco Island.
After a 30-minute break we continued along the inside route to Marco Island and boat traffic dwindled as we paddled through Rookery Bay. By 3 p.m. we had reached Marco Island. Wally and I talked Bill into stopping at a restaurant.
An hour later we were back on the water and paddling for the little town of Goodland, the last bit of civilization before we entered the Ten Thousand Islands. Our plan was to paddle through the archipelago and turn east to find an island suitable for camping. As darkness fell we ran into several WaterTribe sailboaters who asked if they could follow us. Wally and Bill looked at the charts and decided that Gullivan Key, about 5 miles away, would be a good choice. Wally and I led the convoy, and when we arrived at Gullivan the tide was out and we could not get close to the beach. We tried White Horse Key 30 minutes farther on and found ourselves in the same situation. Bill, Wally, and I were pretty tired and decided to drag our boats through the 2″ water to get to the beach. We tied the boats up on the beach and quickly set up our tents above the high-tide mark. About 1 a.m. I woke to waves crashing on the beach. I could see our boats in the moonlight; they were still tied up, but I wondered how high the tide would get.
None of us had slept well with the waves so close, but the good news was that we had plenty of water to launch off the beach. Today’s goal was Chokoloskee, the gateway to the Everglades. We cut through the Ten Thousand Islands and at 1:30 p.m. pulled into the ranger station on the north side of Chokoloskee Bay.
It was the hottest day so far, and we quickly headed for the store for some cold drinks, then to the ranger’s office for camping permits. Our first camp was 20 miles away and the next 36 miles after that. The ranger checking us in questioned us our ambitious plans—most paddlers in the Everglades travel no more than 10 miles a day—when another ranger recognized us as WaterTribers and said, “These guys know what they’re doing.”
Chokoloskee Island was 3 miles away. The Havana Café there, known for great Cuban sandwiches, would close at 3 p.m. and it was now about 2. Wally and I went into race mode. The tide was up so we paddled straight across the bay and we arrived in plenty of time. We ordered sandwiches for ourselves and one for Bill. There were a half dozen other WaterTribers on the island, and with strong winds forecast for the next few days, most were ending their trip. I thought we’d be able to make it to Key Largo. We’d camp two nights in the Everglades, arrive in Flamingo on Thursday afternoon, make an early crossing of Florida Bay on Friday, and reach Key Largo that evening.
Wally Werderich
There is a reason that the WaterTribe awards a gator tooth to racers who traverse entire Everglades Wilderness Waterway.
Bill, Wally, and I filled all of our water jugs for the Wilderness Waterway trip. I noticed that the tap water had a brownish tint and decided to buy a gallon jug of distilled water in the convenience store. I knew the owner of the store from previous races and asked him about the “brown” water. He said it was fine but that he would call his cousin, the Mayor of Chokoloskee to check on it. It pays to have access to the Choko power structure.
We left Chokoloskee about 5 p.m. and paddled into the Everglades. The Wilderness Waterway was marked by numbered poles and had park service campsites along the route. Shortly after nightfall, about 20 miles from Chokoloskee, we stopped on Possum Key at the camp known as Darwin’s Place. Arthur Leslie Darwin, the “Hermit of Possum Key,” moved here in 1945, built a one-room cinder-block house, raised rabbits, and cultivated bananas on 10 acres of land. He cooked using a gas stove and collected rainwater in a cistern. In 1957 Possum Key became part of the Everglades National Park, but Darwin was allowed to stay. He passed away in 1977 at the age of 112.
Wally Werderich
A pair of osprey keep watch over the Everglades woods.
The mosquitoes were in full attack mode, so we quickly set up our tents. As I drifted off to sleep with their constant humming outside my tent, I wondered how Darwin survived here.
We were in our boats by 7 a.m. and paddled through miles of bays and connecting rivers with the whole unspoiled area to ourselves. Green mangrove islands were all around us and egrets, herons, ibises, and osprey were everywhere. I noticed the distinctive boils that manatees make in the water. When one erupted near us, splashing CONDOR, Wally let out a squeal. After that we often joked about the “killer” manatees.
Wally Werderich
Soon after Bill, Rod, and Wally arrived at the Harney River Chickee, darkness fell and the bugs descended upon them.
Just before dark we reached the Harney River chickee, one of several freestanding wooden platforms in the Everglades that provide toilet facilities and tent sites. Bill heated up some water for our freeze-dried meals. We hoped that away from land the bugs would not bother us. But as darkness fell over us so did the no-see-ums, and I abandoned my wish to sleep under the open sky without a tent.
Wally Werderich
Bil Whale, with his mast down and outriggers stowed, leads the way through a passage choked with mangroves.
At daybreak we paddled the Harney River toward Oyster Bay. WaterTribers often struggle getting through narrow waterways here—The Nightmare and Broad Creek—but we hit the creeks at high tide and in the daylight and could pick our way through and around the overgrown foliage. At night and with mosquitoes buzzing, it would have been a lot tougher.
To reach Flamingo we had a lot of open bays to cross. The wind was howling out of the east, and Wally and I paddled hard across each windy and wavy bay, then waited for Bill to catch up before repeating the process. About 2 p.m. we arrived at the canal to Coot Bay. We were about 8 miles from Flamingo. The convenience store there would close at 5:30 p.m. When Bill caught up, we told him we would paddle ahead to get sandwiches and cold drinks. Wally and I again went into race mode. We worked hard paddling across Coot Bay in the wind and 2′ waves. Finally sheltered in Buttonwood Creek, we kept up a good pace over the last 5 miles to Flamingo. We made it to the store a few minutes before 5 p.m. I drank about a quart of cold chocolate milk over the next half hour. Bill came in about 40 minutes behind us, and we had cold drinks and a sandwich waiting for him.
Our plan was to leave Flamingo at about 5 a.m. for the 33-mile crossing of Florida Bay. The wind on the bay was currently out of the east at 15 to 20 knots; Friday’s forecast was for 20 to 25 knots. We needed to leave now. Bill was having some issues with his hands and decided to end his trip at Flamingo.
Shortly after 8 p.m., Wally and I said goodbye to Bill and headed east. We were leaving on a high tide and could cut across the open water and save some time. Much of the first half of Florida Bay is across shallow water, and you must follow the route marked by the occasional marker pole or you’ll run aground. Wally was closely watching his GPS route and giving me constant steering directions. We crossed through the Dump Keys and then made it through the passage that crosses the sandbar known as the Crocodile Dragover. As we entered deeper water, the waves increased to 2 to 3 feet under a forceful wind. Our progress was agonizingly slow. Wally and I had to paddle our hardest just to make 2 miles per hour. Every few hours we would take a brief break in the lee of an island.
About 4 a.m. Wally and I could see the lights of Key Largo, but I desperately needed caffeine to keep me awake. Wally split an energy shot with me and that was enough to make it to daylight. We aimed for the cell-phone tower at the Bay Cove Motel that marks what would have been the finish line for the Everglades Challenge. At 8:30 a.m. two tired paddlers made it to Key Largo. Even though the EC had been canceled and every racer who started would be officially listed as DNF—Did Not Finish— Wally and I did what we set out to do: We finished.
Rod Price is an Orlando-based ultra-distance paddling racer. In 2009 he and partner Ardie Olson won the canoe division of world’s longest canoe race—the Yukon 1000. He is the only racer to have completed North America’s six longest paddling competitions including: the Ultimate Florida Challenge (1200 miles), the Yukon River Quest (444 miles), the Missouri River 340, the Everglades Challenge (300 miles) and the Texas Water Safari (260 miles). At the age of 55, he continues to race. He is the author of Racing to the Yukon and Racing Around Florida, both available on his website.
The Chesapeake Triple
In 2005, Chesapeake Light Craft was looking for a team to race one of their boats in the 2006 Everglades Challenge (EC). Marty Sullivan and I were selected and given the option of picking any of the CLC boats to compete in. Since we were both paddlers, we opted for the Chesapeake Triple, a 21’ by 30” kayak.
Early in November of 2005, Marty and I received our kit, a box of panels precision cut by a CNC (computer numerical control) router from okoume (plantation-grown) marine-grade plywood. This was my first boatbuilding project and we worked on the boat steadily for two months in Marty’s garage. With detailed step-by-step instructions accompanied by a video, the kayak took shape quickly. The stitch-and-glue construction with epoxy and fiberglass produced a strong and light structure. After lots of sanding, epoxy-work and varnishing, CONDOR was ready for the water. We launched it January 2006 on Lake Virginia in central Florida. We had two months for training with CONDOR before the EC.
The Chesapeake Triple kayak provides a great mix of speed and stability. For the multi-day Everglades Challenge races, the middle cockpit is ideal for storing gear. The triple is so stable that I have built my seat up six inches to put me in the best position for using my preferred canoe paddle when racing. Since building CONDOR in 2005 I have paddled thousands of miles in rivers, lakes, bays and oceans. I have used the kayak in two 3-day Florida adventure races, four 300-mile Everglades Challenges, one 90-mile North Carolina Challenge and one 64-mile Okumefest Challenge on the Chesapeake Bay. —RP
If you have an interesting story to tell about your travels in a small wooden boat, please email us a brief outline and a few photos.
The varnish is wiped on in “panels.” Here Don is applying varnish to planks bordered by the thwart frame, transom, and stern seat compartment.
I had just finished again sanding out the wiggly, wavy, saggy results of my latest brushed varnish attempt on my wherry interior. I’d bought yet another quart of expensive marine spar varnish and was discouraged that I could expect most of it to wind up in the shop vacuum. In the dusty reaches of my memory I recalled an article by a furniture maker describing his efficient wipe-on varnishing technique. Not having that magazine readily at hand, I used this new-fangled thing called the Internet and found a posting about using a pad-wiping technique with thinned varnish. I did a cursory scan of the instructions, tried my hand at it, and much to my surprise, it worked! It wasn’t perfect but a major improvement over my brushed attempts. I’ve since refined the method to better apply it to the odd shapes of a boat, and present it here for others to experiment with and further refine. This treatise is for building up final smooth coats over epoxy or base coats of varnish. There are faster ways to build base coats that will fill wood grain.
Materials:
Marine spar varnish (I use Interlux Schooner.)
Brushing thinner (Interlux 333 thinner or this close approximation of it: 25% naphtha and 75% kerosene)
Small foam brushes
Paper towels (untextured or blue shop towels from hardware or auto parts stores)
Cotton T-shirt material (don’t use the kind with ribbed texture.)
Paper or plastic bowls (that are compatible with thinner)
Disposable plastic mixing containers with graduation marks
Stirring sticks
Fine 3M Scotch-Brite finishing pads (#7445, white in color)
Tack cloth
Paint filter funnels
Disposable gloves
Sand your base (epoxy or varnish) with at least 220-grit sandpaper—320 is less likely to cut through base coats. Wipe the dust away with a rag wet with thinner. Pour some varnish through a screened funnel into a mixing container, note or mark the volume, and add brushing thinner to double the volume for a 50/50 mix.
SBM
On his worktable Don has thinners, disposable gloves, blue paper shop towels, squares of cotton cloth, paper bowls, and varnish.
Crumple a couple of paper towels, and smooth a third over one side of the wad. Place the smooth side of the wad on a roughly 10″ square of T-shirt cotton and gather the edges around the wad to create a handle. Smooth out wrinkles on the working face. Make two of these pads.
Set out three bowls. Pour a bit of thinned varnish into a “do” bowl and straight thinner into an “undo” bowl. A depth of ¼″ to 3/8″ is plenty. Leave the third bowl empty.
Wipe down several square feet of the area to be varnished with the tack cloth. Place one of the T-shirt pads into the “do” bowl and let it soak up a supply of thinned varnish. Press the pad into the empty bowl to squeeze out excess. The face of the pad should have an even, wet look without drips or thick glossy areas. Start at one end of a “panel”—a thwart, plank, whatever that is bordered by edges of some kind—and wipe smoothly in a straight line along the grain, leaving behind a thin but glossy film of varnish. Avoid lifting the pad from the surface by making turns at the ends of short strokes. For long areas, strokes all go the same direction. Overlap the strokes slightly for a consistent wet edge. As the varnish load is depleted, usually within a few strokes, reload and press out the excess as before.
SBM
While applying varnish to the panel over the forward compartment, Don missed a dime-sized patch of sanded varnish. Rather than go back over the area on this pass, he’d get it covered with the next coat.
Holidays? Not to worry, you’ll get them in subsequent coats. DO NOT, under penalty of endless frustration, go back into wet areas to correct them.
Before the varnish in the panel has time to begin flashing off its solvent, use a nearly dry foam brush to tip out the irregularities that occur at the ends of strokes or where you come up against obstructions. Start at the obstruction and very lightly tip back into the smooth area, lifting the brush off the surface as you go. You can also correct still-wet drips or sags with the foam brush. Use a wetter foam brush to get into corners or other areas the pad can’t reach, then blend back into pad-applied areas with the drier brush.
If the foam brush fails to fix errors of excess varnish while things are still wet, grab your undo pad, dip it into the thinner bowl, press it moist, and wipe down the whole panel. Recoat immediately.
Continue with adjacent panels. The goal is to keep a wet edge. The undo pad can refresh a wet edge that is at a panel perimeter such as a plank lap.
With masking tape protecting the painted hull, Don can move with the speed necessary to wipe on the thinned varnish.
When you’ve finished with the first coat, allow it to dry to the point the surface of the earliest coated area does not feel sticky to touch. That may be only an additional half hour or so depending on how long the whole job has taken. You may notice streaks or areas that are not as glossy. Don’t fret; these tend to decrease with subsequent coats. Some folks have seen a reduction in streaks by increasing the varnish in the thinned ratio.
Use a light touch with a 3M white scrubber to dislodge bugs and lint nits. If the scrubber drags, the varnish isn’t quite dry enough. Wipe with a tack rag in preparation for the next coat.
Make up a new varnish pad and repeat as above. You should be able to get at least three coats on in a day, roughly the same as one coat of brushed varnish. The next day you can continue without sanding unless there are drips, runs, or errors you want to correct. Eight to a dozen coats over two to three days will build up a nice depth of finish. Overall, wiped-on varnish will achieve good results with much less sanding labor. It takes practice and even though I don’t get perfect results, the boat will look pretty nice when I step back from my work. An annual light wet-sanding with 320-grit and three or so coats of wiping varnish should get you through a season depending on local conditions. Wiping-on varnish also works well for scratch repairs.
Don Aupperle apparently inherited his fascination with boats from his father, and has cobbled together many, beginning with an Eastern Idaho canal sailing raft made of borrowed fence posts and advancing through wood-and-canvas kayaks to several plywood sailboats, graduating only recently to current stitch-and-glue technology. A Seattle resident, his day job is product design. Or is really it maintaining his 39′ cruising sailboat?
Editor’s note:
I used Don’s method to apply new varnish to the exterior of a lapstrake Whitehall I built in 1983. The boat had been well cared for, but it was showing signs of age. The existing varnish was in good shape and I chose not to go to bare wood to smooth the surfaces. I used odorless mineral spirits for a solvent—it was what I had on hand—and started out with a 50/50 mix with West Marine Admiral’s varnish. Wiping varnish on was much faster than brushing, and the thinned varnish as it came from the pad was much less likely to sag or drip than straight brushed-on varnish. I had recently refinished a dory with brushed varnish and the fresh coat would often look fine before I left it to dry, but an hour later sags appeared. The wiping varnish goes on much thinner and dries much faster, so sags were an infrequent occurrence. It also greatly reduced the time during which dust and bugs could get caught on the surface. When I did get sags, they’d be dry and sandable the next day. Sags of brushed-on varnish never seemed to cure; they could stay gummy for days if not weeks. I applied three coats of wiping varnish per day for three days. I was getting matte streaks and increased the amount of varnish in the mix. That and better lighting greatly reduced the problem. I was pleased with the results, easily the best varnish job I’ve ever done.
You can share your tricks of the trade with other Small Boats Monthly readers by sending us an email.
The Premium RailLight comes with a variety of attachment options.
RailLights may look like the post lights sometimes used to illuminate garden paths, but these solar-powered LED lights are designed for boating. They can provide for general illumination in a cockpit tent, cabin, or shore-side camp, and can, for some boats, serve as all-around white lights for navigation.*
SBM
A piece of oak with a large tapered hole for the mast and a 1″ hole for the Premium RailLight serves as a way to use it as an all-around light.
Constructed of marine-grade stainless steel, the lights are topped with a solar panel and light sensor epoxied in place. A small switch protected by a waterproof rubber boot, is tucked beneath, allowing the user to turn the lights on and off manually or to choose an automatic setting that activates them in the dark and shuts them off when daylight arrives. The units run on rechargeable batteries that, according to the manufacturer, will last for three to four hundred charges and up to three years. I appreciate that the RailLights are designed for batteries to be replaceable by the user, a feature significantly extending the potential life of the product.
SBM
The Mini RailLight has hardware for attaching it to a stanchion or rail. The wooden base is homemade.
I tested both models: the 14″ tall RailLight Premium, with four LEDs, and the 11″ tall RailLight Mini, with two LEDs. The Premium has a more pronounced glow than the Mini but both were easily visible from about 2,000′ away, even in the perpetual twilight of an urban environment. The Mini with its smooth frosted surface and uniform light is better suited for task lighting. The Premium’s ribbed globe produced a dappled light, making it better for general area illumination. Neither was so bright that they significantly diminished my night vision.
The lights are water resistant, and after being subjected to several showers, there was no change in their performance. They charge up in daylight, even under cloudy conditions. In direct sunlight a two-hour charge , the best opportunity I could get this time of year, produced about one hour of light. Charging during partly cloudy days in late March produced 4 to 6 hours of light. The manufacturer notes both lights can produce “up to 8 hours of light on a full charge.” On the summer solstice here in Portland, Oregon, 8 hours and 20 minutes separate sunset from sunrise, so the RailLights may not be able to fill in as anchor lights. The Premium flashes as an alert when it is low on power. Given the simple, sturdy construction and basic solar technology, the potential for problems with these lights seems low.
SBM
Simple homemade wooden bases adapt the RailLights to tabletop or thwart-top use.
Each Raillight comes with mounting gear that can either clamp to a rail or be screwed into a flat surface. For small boats, a homemade mounting system will probably be most effective.
No matter how many batteries I have tucked away, I always worry that I’ll run out and regret how many have to go into the trash when they run through their charge. If you’re a worrywart like me, a RailLight in your quiver will allow you to focus on your adventure, not your gear.
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.
The RailLight Mini retails for $29.99 and the Premium for $39.99. Both are available from numerous retailers and direct from Davis Instruments.
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.
A fire with flames rising through the coil will heat water more effectively than a bed of coals.
This ShowerCoil system is fantastic! With a fully stoked fire and a bit of practice, I could heat 4 gallons of water in just over 11 minutes and take a pleasant, warm, and long-lasting shower.
The heart of the system is an aluminum-alloy coil that heats water as it flows through the coil from an elevated bag supplying cold water. Water drains from the bag through heat-resistant silicone tubing, and a hollow braided-wire sheath protects the tubing where it joins the coil and the heat of the fire is most intense.
SBM
The heart of the thermostat is a bimetallic coil that operates a valve gate.
The hot-water tube filling the lower water bag has a small thermostat that regulates the temperature of the water by adjusting its rate of flow into one of the water bags.
SBM
The supply bag needs to be elevated about 3’ to provide the coil and thermostat with an adequate flow of water. Here it is suspended from a tripod of oars.
The two 15-liter (4-gallon) roll-top water bags are quite durable and versatile: their clear fronts and black backs make them well suited for solar-heating water; interchangeable fittings allow them to be used as general-purpose water bags; sealable roll-down tops with buckles allow them to serve as dry bags; and when equipped with the valves on the short hoses, they work as compression bags for packing bulky soft goods.
SBM
When the ShowerCoil is used with a camp stove the sheathing over the tubes needs to be supported. The supplied Y-stand (lower right) was too short for this stove, so a twig filled in for it.
A fully stoked campfire with flames rising through the coil is required to get water nice and hot. My first fire was mostly coals, which produced just a lukewarm shower. You can also use a camp stove to heat the coil: A steel heat deflector distributes the flame around the coil, and a prop supports the sheath over the tubing. My stove heated the water in just under 10 minutes. In camps where I could make a fire, I’d prefer to do the heating with wood and save on stove fuel.
Spring Courtright
The water bags also serve as drybags and solar water heaters.
A full water bag weighs about 36 lbs, challenging for me to manage and too heavy for me to hang up high on a tree branch. The instruction manual that comes with the kit has directions for easily lifting a full bag of heated water using ropes and carabiners, but I just used the bag half to three-quarters full.
Spring Courtright
A ratcheted clamp on the silicone tubing regulates the flow to the shower head.
One of the nicest features is the pinch valve on the shower-head hose which adjusts the levels of flow so the shower can be a luxurious rush of warm water or a prolonged sprinkling. With the valve wide open for wetting down, closed for soaping up, and opened again for rinsing, I had plenty of warm water to bathe and wash and rinse my long hair. The long hose on the showerhead makes it easy to direct the spray where it’s needed and make the best use of the water.
A hot shower is something that’s easy to take for granted at home, but it’s a great luxury in the wilderness. The ShowerCoil is a truly great outdoor shower setup.
Spring Courtright has been sea kayaking for over 15 years, leading and assisting day trips and multi-day trips in Washington and British Columbia. She has taught sea kayaking, stand-up paddleboarding, canoeing, backpacking, through the Olympic Outdoor Center, Outward Bound, Naturalists at Large, YMCA Earth Service Corps and Colorado Mountain College.
The ShowerCoil system is available from BoundaryTEC for $99.95.
Editor’s note:
I gathered some data on my own trials with the ShowerCoil. In an ambient temperature of 61°F a small fire of woodshop scraps burning under the ShowerCoil heated a full bag of water from 58° to 100° in 12 mintues with the thermostat set one click down from high. I switched bags and ran the heated water through again with the thermostat set on high. That brought it up to 120°. Hot! I added some cold water to the bag and brought the temperature down to a good level for bathing, around 105° to 110°. The full bag of heated water provided a 5 ½ minute shower with the valve wide open.
I also used the ShowerCoil with a single-burner propane cannister stove rated at 10,000 BTU. The stove didn’t provide as much heat as the wood fire and the rate of flow was much slower: After 12 mintues the lower bag was half full of water at 98°. I was impressed that the thermostat was doing its job well, dramatically reducing the rate of flow to suit the cooler fire. The heat transfer of the coil may have been made less effective by the layer of creoste that had built up after several wood-fire trials. Water flowing through the coil keeps its surface relatively cool resulting in the tarry buildup. Removing the creosote with oven cleaner, as recommended in the instructions, would improve heat transfer. To retain heat in the hot water bag I put a piece of foam padding under it to insulate it from the ground. It would be a good idea to insulate the bag further by putting a coat or a blanket over it.
I set one half-full bag, clear side up, out in the sun. In 2 ¼ hours it warmed 58° water up to 82°, not bad considering the low angle of the March sun over just the last half of the afternoon.
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.
With winds gusting above 25 knots on the Willamette River, three school staffers pushed the boat hard. The cockpit-controlled adjustable jackstay proved handy.
Wind & Oar Boat School is a Portland, Oregon, nonprofit that teaches boatbuilding not only for its own sake, but also to give meaning to math, science, design, and practical problem solving. As part of a workplace readiness program in the summer of 2013, students were tasked with building François Vivier’s Ebihen 16. With a long bowsprit, plumb stem, and workboat carrying capacity, the Ebihen 16 has the look of traditional English Channel fishing boats of northern Brittany and Normandy.
The women in the class showed great attention to detail and were cutting terrific gains by the time they got to the sheer plank. The inner/outer stem construction avoids having to cut rabbets. The outer stem is laminated with 1/8” fir.
MA CHERIE was built for Norm Eder, a Portland resident, avid boater, and one of the school’s board members. He wanted a boat big enough to take grandchildren out sailing in comfort and yet small enough to fit in his garage. The hull measures 16′ on deck and has high topsides keep the crew dry, accommodations for an outboard motor, a steel centerboard, water ballast tanks, and built-in foam flotation. The roomy cockpit has three storage areas to keep miscellaneous gear out from underfoot. Vivier has drawn several sail plans for the Ebihen; Norm opted for the gunter sloop rig.
The top frame of the ballast tanks is being glued in either side of the centerboard trunk. Getting the tanks watertight along the outboard wall proved challenging, but thickened epoxy was a good friend. The two compartments next to the motor well will be filled with foam for flotation.
The construction was complex for such a small boat and provided lots of learning opportunities for the student builders. The plywood parts were cut on the school’s CNC machine, and each plank was cut in three pieces with puzzle joints in between and reinforced with fiberglass when assembled. Students finished planking the hull, rolled it upright, and went on to install the motorwell, flotation compartments, and ballast tanks.
The bowsprit bitt is off center so that the tip of the bowsprit ends up on center. Flotation foam fills the entire compartment forward of the bitt.
Edensaw Woods supplied Sitka spruce for the spars. One piece was 6″ x 10″ x 26′, too big to be milled at the school, so students hoisted it on their shoulders and walked it three blocks down the street to have it planed and resawn at a commercial woodworking shop. After making the spars, there was enough spruce left over to use for the decking. Strips of dark zebra wood provided contrast for the blond spruce.
Discussion about the seat layout revolved around making the center thwart removable, or installing benches in place of it. Ultimately, the students decided to go with the designed fixed center thwart, even though there was no intention of rowing the boat. Vivier shows thole pins in the design, however.
Bronze hardware and wooden blocks came from the Wooden Boat Chandlery of Port Townsend, Washington. For custom-made bronze hardware— mast partner, traveler, and both bowsprit brackets—and a galvanized steel centerboard, the school enlisted Portland’s Silver Eagle Manufacturing.
Ready for sailing trials, MA CHERIE shows off her custom-made bronze hardware. Note that the shrouds for these early trials are made taut with tension knots.
Launched on the Willamette River, MA CHERIE carried five adults and performed well. A 6-hp Suzuki outboard provides auxiliary power. Three Wind & Oar staffers conducted sea trials in November with winds blowing over 25 knots, and even in rough water MA CHERIE was solid, comfortable, and dry under all points of sail. Even with the ballast tanks empty, the leeward rail stayed reassuringly high above the water. Half filling the ballast tanks put the boat on even more solid footing.
During sea trials in strong wind, the bowsprit bowed under the strain, an issue later fixed by adding whisker stays.
Owner Norm Eder reports that MA CHERIE is a delight to sail and easy to sail singlehanded. He can get the boat on and off the trailer by himself, and has developed his system for rigging and getting underway quickly. The Wind & Oar Boat School would build another Ebihen 16 only by special request because of the complexity of the build, but for a competent home boatbuilder, the project is certainly within reach, and the rewards on the water merit the effort.
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.
In 1913, shortly before the start of WWI, England’s Boat Racing Association (BRA), a small club of sailing enthusiasts, called for a design to comply with the following requirements: length 12′, beam 4′8″, and a single 100-sq-ft sail with no battens; she should be a capable rowing boat as well as a good sailing craft, suitable as a tender for larger yachts. The winning design was submitted by an amateur designer named George Cockshott (1875–1952). Eight of the first BRA 12-footers, as they were then known, were built by the Shepherd’s Boat Yard in Bowness on Lake Windermere in northwest England at a cost of £25 each. Several members of the West Kirby Sailing Club near Liverpool ordered BRA 12s and with typical English humor named them after the Royal Navy battleships of the time: DREADNOUGHT, THUNDERER, BELLEROPHON, and SUPERB.
Collection of the Author
The scene of racing in the 1950s on a lake near the city of Haarlem in the Netherlands is very much the same as it is now.
The design’s popularity spread rapidly. In 1914, eight boats presented themselves at the start of a race in Karachi, then in India. Belgium and Holland adopted the BRA 12s with great enthusiasm. Development of the class in England was curtailed during the war, but in the neutral Netherlands the class flourished and toward the end of WWI there were some 140 of the little boats sailing there.
After the war, voices in England called for an “improved” BRA 12, and the well-known naval architect Morgan Giles came up with a design promised to be faster, more seaworthy, and easier to row. Belgium and the Netherlands by then had the largest fleets of BRA 12s on the water, and they fiercely opposed the adoption of a new design that would make theirs obsolete. The International Yacht Racing Union (IYRU) was called in to arbitrate the situation. While the IYRU approved of the new design, the Low Countries prevailed, and in 1919 at the IYRU meeting the original Cockshott design was officially adopted as a new International class: the International 12-Foot Dinghy.
Roger Smith
While the 12′ dinghies are built for racing under sail, they’re outfitted with oarlocks and rowing thwarts to fulfill the class requirement that “each boat shall be built, equipped and finished complete in every respect and so as to be fit for use as a useful yacht’s centerboard dinghy.”
The class is a one-design, meaning that every boat must be identical and have a valid measurement certificate. With their close tolerances, these dinghies were not meant to be built by amateurs, but over the years many have been home-built. Certification required “each boat to be carefully built in strict accordance with the drawings and this specification, and the greatest care must be taken to ensure that all boats are as nearly alike as possible in every respect. Minor deviations from standard may be permitted, at the discretion of the Council of the Association.” The class specifications list the dimensions and material of every part of the boat: the centerboard must be 1/4″ soft steel plate; the steam-bent frames would be of American elm, ½″ thick by 5/8″ wide, spaced 7″ on center; spars were to be solid spruce, although the gaff could be of bamboo; and the 12 strakes are 5/16″ clear straight-grained fir—though later oak and mahogany were allowed as well. Fastenings were screws, bolts, and clench nails and copper, brass, or yellow metal throughout. The hulls might leak when first launched for the season, but after they were fully immersed for a day or so they’d be tight and dry. These dinghies were no lightweights. The 2012 building rules for the Dutch measurement certificate stipulates that the “dry” weight of the bare hull must be a minimum of 229 lbs (104 kg). A new top-of-the-line, race-ready wooden 12-footer built in Europe today can cost as much as €25,000 (about $30,000 US). A good used one can set you back $6,000 to $14,500.
International yards such as Abeking & Rasmussen and de Vries Lentsch built many 12’ dinghies in the 1920s and ’30s, and many of these are still sailing today. The Italian Riva family, famed for their classic speedboats, are also a well-known builders of these boats. Two years ago in England, Stephen Beresford of the Good Wood Boat Company launched a new dinghy with sail number GBR 50.
David Stephenson
On Ullswater, a lake in NW England, Richard Fielden and Stephen Berrisford sail in Force-7 winds on the maiden voyage of dinghy GBR50. She’s one of the few 12-Foot dinghies with reef points.
The dinghy was adopted as the singlehanded boat for the 1920 Olympics in Antwerp. The Dutch took the gold and silver medals—a predictable result, since the only boats entered were the two Dutch ones. The 1924 Paris Olympics saw a French design as the singlehander, but in 1928 at the Amsterdam games the 12 was again chosen as the solo class. Twenty countries competed and this time the Dutch were outclassed: Sweden took the gold, Norway the silver, and Finland the bronze.
The status of the 12-footer as an International class was terminated in 1964, and its popularity declined after that. Despite that, many countries maintained active 12′-dinghy class associations, and upgraded the class rules to suit their sailors’ demands and circumstances. The conservative Dutch changed their rules to improve safety and ease of boat handling: They allowed self-bailers, boom vangs, transom drain holes, and insisted on flotation bags. In Italy, the Associazone Italiana Classe Dinghy 12′ was far more progressive, allowing aluminum masts and booms, pop-up rudders, plywood construction, and, horror of horrors, fiberglass hulls. The Netherlands, Italy and Japan are the current hotbeds for the class, and there are small fleets in Germany, Slovenia, Switzerland, Japan, Lithuania, France, and Turkey. In recent years new boats have been built in Canada, Argentina, the Far East, and the US.
Wietske van Soest
After jibing in a very strong wind, the bow can dig in but experienced sailors have no trouble maintaining control.
Sailing the 12 does not require great athletic abilities. Anyone can enjoy these boats, whether for relaxation or competition. In light weather the boat is a great singlehander; racing regulations allow a maximum crew of two. The standing lug rig requires the crew to move the yard to the leeward side of the mast with each tack. This is accomplished with tripping lines run port and starboard from the throat. The yard is slightly curved to facilitate this movement, but it still takes a bit of practice. Timing is the key: At the moment that the boat moves through the eye of the wind the yard will slide across with little effort. Sailing in a blow can be hair-raising, particularly on a run with the wind dead astern. With the mast only a few inches aft of the bow, the boat often tries to become a submarine but moving the crew well aft can allow a following wave to flood over the transom. Balance is the key and under ideal conditions one can nearly get the boat on a plane. Jibing in a stiff breeze is practically impossible, and many a racing sailor will tack through a 270-degree turn at a downwind mark. While a reef would be advisable under those conditions not all 12s have them.
Roger Smith
Five dinghies come about in the 100th anniversary race at West Kirby. The woman skippering the Dutch entry #688 is 81-year-old Tonnie Surendonk.
In 2008 an international yearly competition began, aptly named the Cockshott Trophy, and in 2009 the Cockshott family donated a silver challenge cup—first won by George Cockshott in 1902—to be awarded to the overall winner on points each year. Turkey, Italy, and the Netherlands hosted events counting toward points in the years 2010 and 2011 when there were 137 and 178 competitors, respectively; understandably, not all started in all the races. Holland dropped out of hosting the competition, as that country only allowed wooden-hulled boats whereas fiberglass hulls were allowed by the others. In 2012 France, Germany, and Slovenia joined in hosting trophy-point races, with a total of 16 countries represented.
Roger Smith
On the 100th anniversary of the first race of International 12-Foot Dinghies two Dutch crews race on England’s River Dee near West Kirby in 2013.
In 2013 and 2014 the Royal Loosdrecht Watersport Club hosted the centennial celebrations of the International 12-Foot Dinghy in the Netherlands, with an astonishing total of 187 boats entered, including four brand-new boats. The granddaughter of George Cockshott, Jane Rowe, and her husband Ernest came over from England to take part in the celebrations. Both the Italian and Dutch Post Offices issued special stamps commemorating the centennial. The Associazone Italiana Classe Dinghy 12′ issued a magnificent book: Il Dinghy 12′ Classico Italiano. The Dutch association published their own impressive book, Twaalfvoetsjol: 100 Jaar Klasse (Twelve-Foot Dinghy: 100 Years a Class).
When George Cockshott submitted his drawings to the Boat Racing Association in 1913, it is doubtful he envisioned that a hundred years later the little 12-footer would have a registration in Italy of well over 2,300, that in the Netherlands sail numbers for the wooden 12s have reached nearly 900, and that his granddaughter and 10 countries would be represented at the centennial celebrations of his design.
Evert Moes was born in the Netherlands in 1934 and in his teens campaigned his 12-ft International, H391, PIGLET. After emigrating to Canada in 1960 he became involved in wooden boat building. His latest project was the building of a 9′ 9″ Nutshell Pram from scratch with a modified lug rig similar to the International 12-footer. In summer he sails the waters of the British Columbia’s Gulf Islands.
Norway’s Færder snekker constitute a small racing class that hails from outside of Tjøme in the country’s Vestfold region, 55 nautical miles south of Oslo. The two-part name reflects the dual lineage of piloting and fishing that historically defined the island of Hvasser, where the Færder snekker fleet was born and still thrives. The boats are named in part after the Færder Lighthouse, which lies 4 nautical miles southeast of Hvasser. The lighthouse marks the southwestern entrance to Oslofjord, the narrow route north to Oslo. Snekke (the singular form of snekker) refers to the hull shape of the older and smaller sail- and oar-powered working boats used for hunting and fishing along the southern Norwegian coast through the turn of the century.
Both piloting and fishing along the Norwegian coast demanded high levels of seamanship. The drive to be the first to market with a fresh catch or the first out to a passing vessel awaiting a pilot naturally gave rise to a strong spirit of competition among the local population, whose livelihood depended on these trades. Racing workboats for sport was a natural extension of this impulse and informal regattas became a summer pastime in the second half of the 19th century. The Færder Seilforening (Færder Sailing Club) of Hvasser was formally founded in 1897, with an inaugural regatta that year on Midsummer’s Day—the Scandinavian summer holiday marking the summer solstice. Midsummer marks the kickoff for the regatta season to this day, and races are scheduled every other week through September.
In the early days of the Færder Seilforening, there was a clear class distinction between the pilots and the fishermen who came together to race in summer. The club officers were aways pilots while the fishermen were ordinary members. Initially, the regatta boats were workboats moonlighting as a racing fleet on Sundays. Most of the local population was either participating or standing watch on the docks as spectators. In black-and-white photographs from the period, children, fisherwomen and pilots’ wives alike are elegantly turned out in their Sunday best along the waterfront, some with pilots’ binoculars around their necks.
Eli Ulriksen
The main is a spritsail with an unusual shape: Its “peak” is lower than its throat. The line running from the top of the mast to the top of the sprit serves to flatten or increase the depth of the upper part of the mainsail, thus improving sail trim and safety in varying wind conditions.
The racing fleet had evolved from heavily framed lapstrake workboats to carvel-planked hulls by 1910. The Færder snekker, though inspired by drift-net herring boats and mackerel fishing snekker, were purpose-built exclusively for racing beginning around 1923. Two boatbuilders in particular, Hans Jansen and Alf Andreassen, were responsible for developing and refining the design that came to be known as the Færder snekke. Jansen built six for the racing fleet throughout a career that began in 1897. Andreassen began his apprenticeship in 1913, and would go on to turn out an impressive 17 Færder snekker throughout the 1930s and ’40s. The boats’ design and construction naturally evolved toward a consistent form during this period despite the fact that the class design rules were somewhat nebulous. Slight variations in specifications are still evident across the fleet today, in large part because two-thirds of the current racing fleet was built well before plans were drawn up. The difference in length and depth between the oldest boats can be as much as 4″ (10cm).
Of the 31 boats regularly sailing in the Færder Seilforening at present, ten were built in the 1940s, four in the 1930s, and four in the 1950s. Most of these have been meticulously restored by their owners. New-builds today follow lines and construction plans that were drawn up in 1978 from four of the oldest and best-maintained examples in existence at the time. Four newly built boats and a number of restored ones have joined the fleet since the Færder Seilforening 100th anniversary celebration in 1997. The oldest currently sailing, FS 9, was built in 1937 and still races regularly. Boats are assigned consecutive numbers as they joined the racing fleet and early numbers are occasionally reassigned if old boats are lost. The most recently launched this past summer proudly carries FS 44 on her sail. It is not certain exactly how many of the boats have been built since the 1920s, but the number is certainly higher than 44: In the early days of the club only members of the racing fleet were given numbers. The only break in racing during more than a century of club history came during WWII. During the war, owners hauled the boats and removed every scrap of lead (including external keels) from every boat in the fleet. The ballast was then buried ashore to keep the sought-after material from being seized by the occupying Germans. After the war ended, ballast and keels were exhumed and reattached, and racing resumed.
Evelyn Ansel
The hiking straps visible at the edge of the side benches are a recent addition to the interior arrangements.
Færder snekker are long-keeled, open double-enders with an overall length of 20′8″ (6.3m), and with a substantial draft of 3′1″ (0.95m). The classic design includes no bulkheads or flotation,which is something a prospective builder or owner might consider. Pairs of steam-bent ash or pine frames are placed between oak sawn frames, cutting down on weight, time, and the number of natural crooks required. The hull is carvel planked in pine, and the deck is pine or spruce. A thwart and mast partners are situated forward in the cockpit, side benches amidships, and a small thwart or U-shaped sternsheets aft. There are no accommodations for rowing or an outboard and the only auxiliary power is, and always has been, nothing more than two paddles—these boats are not intended for work. In spite of the lack of auxiliary power, some determined regatta entrants regularly sail from homeports three to five hours away to participate in the bimonthly summer races. The hulls are generally painted white or finished bright, and the interiors often feature a deep forest green that is known as “Færder green” in Norwegian hardware stores.
Eli Ulriksen
Racing off Hvasser in a fresh breeze. Hiking straps play a key role in modern racing.
Today’s Færder snekker are sprit rigged like their fishing forebears, but their hulls are much deeper. New builds feature a 1.090-lb (500-kilo) external lead keel, while boats built prior to 1980 carry the same weight split between internal and external ballast. The mainsail ranges from 118 to 124 sq ft (11 to 11.5 m2), and the jib is not to exceed 70 sq ft (6.5 m2) according to regatta regulations. The main’s “peak” is lower than the throat, giving the rig a profile that seems a little unusual to me, a kid raised in New England.* The sprit features a sheave at the top for easy setting without having to lower the pole, and a line running from the top of the mast to the top of the sprit allows for greater control in trim adjustment. The racing sails generally don’t have reefpoints, but some boats carry a separate set of storm sails when cruising. The boats are happiest in 15 to 20 knots of wind, and are fairly quick in stays.
Eli Ulriksen
Wide side decks allow Færder snekker to sail comfortably with the lee rail submerged.
Side decks allow for sailing in relative comfort with the lee rail well under. Eli and Ulf Ulriksen, former owners of FS 9, have noted that “she is reasonably stable and will carry a heavily built man standing on the extreme edge of the side deck hanging onto the shrouds, without capsizing or causing water to flood over the lee coaming.” Even so, when racing in gusty or fluky conditions, it is important to have quick-thinking and agile live ballast aboard. Prior to 1970 it was considered highly unsportsmanlike sit on the coaming and positively unthinkable to hike out while racing but hiking straps in every boat in the modern fleet are testament to the evolution of prevailing tactics and thinking. It is possible to singlehand the boats, but the regatta regulation crew of three is ideal. With a beam of 6′3″ (1.9 m), the boats will carry four adults comfortably, though perhaps a bit sedately, in lighter air.
Evelyn Ansel
Most of the boats have a bronze or brass pole ring that slides up and down the sprit. The ring has two welded eyes: one to attach to the peak of the sail and the other to attach to an outhaul that runs through a sheave in the peak of the sprit. The leather chafing gear at the upper end of the sprit protects it from the pole ring.
Though the Færder snekker are much beloved within the Norwegian sailing community, they are not widely known abroad. I first encountered a lone Færder snekke at a maritime festival in Oslo in the summer of 2014. It stood out among the several hundred boats there for reasons that were initially difficult pin down. Over the course of the weekend, I kept returning to the dock where she was tied up, wondering what it was about this little double-ender that kept catching my eye. There was an enormous amount of variation in boat types represented at the show, from Viking ships to Nordlandsbåt from the north and Oselvar from the west to steel tugs, motorsnekker, and Redningskoites, but she was the only one of her kind. She was small and open, but did not fit in with the similarly scaled, rough, and hardy oiled workboats from the north. On the other hand, the boat had shadows of an appealing older working aesthetic that didn’t fit in with the larger, yachty Meter boats or varnished cruisers either. It was an intriguing combination and proved sweet to watch under sail during the festival regattas and parades.
On the final day of the festival, I was fortunate enough to be introduced to Sissel and Ivar Karlsen, the current owners of the Færder snekker—FS 9, VESLA—after they received the festival award for Best Traditional Restoration of a Historic Vessel. The Karlsens had sailed 77 nautical miles from their homeport to attend the festival and, in keeping with tradition, carried only two paddles for auxiliary power. Ivar and Sissel grew grew up on two different islands neighboring Hvasser, and both harbor a powerful and well-deserved sense of pride and ownership not only toward their VESLA but also toward the entire fleet of Færder snekker. Though the boats are no racehorses, competition among them is lively, and they inspire enormous loyalty in owners like the Karlsens and the Ulriksens: Many own and race the boats for decades at a time. I saw this genuine dedication to the type in every person I met who had ties to the Færder-snekke tradition and fleet. They say that interest in the Færder snekker has only increased since the club’s 100th anniversary in 1997, and club members are hopeful about the future for the boats.
Evelyn Ansel grew up in Mystic, Connecticut, and has chased small boats from Venice to Stockholm and beyond. When not on the water, she spends most of her time in museums and conservation labs. Her article, “The Snekke: Norway’s timeless motor launch,” appears in the March/April 2015 issue of WoodenBoat.
*John Leather’s book, Spritsails and Lugsails, shows a type of Danish fishing boat, kaperboats, that had spritsails with the peaks set lower than the throats. —Ed.
Færder Snekke Particulars
[table]
Length/20′8″
Beam/6′3″
Draft/3′1″
[attr style=”font-weight:bold;”]Sail Area
Main/118 to 124 sq ft
Jib/70 sq ft, max.
[/table]
Drawings: Gert Morgenstierne circa 1978, courtesy of the Færder Sailing Club, Tore Marthinsen
For more information or to procure plans, see the Færder Sailing Club website. The site is in Norwegian, but you can open an English version with Google Translate.
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After having built and used kayaks steadily for 21 years, I had begun to think about a different type of vessel to use for cruising and camping on local and familiar waterways close to my home in Portland, Oregon. I had done numerous overnighters with my kayaks, and had always camped on shore. Sandy beaches, a wealth of uninhabited islands, and abundant access to land made camping easy, but a vessel to sleep in seemed like a further step toward ease, and the idea of sleeping on the water had an irresistible appeal.
After deciding to build a “floating campsite,” I had to find a suitable design—a stable, small, platform that would be very simple to build. It had to be a historic design, something a little off the beaten path, with a workboat background. Years of studying old Arctic kayaks had molded my sensibilities and taste.
I came upon the garvey box while flipping through Howard Chapelle’s American Small Sailing Craft. It was built near Tuckerton, a small town on the south end of New Jersey’s Barnegat Bay. The garvey box served the same purpose as the better-known sneakboxes of the area, but was easier to build. I started building in January, and launched in mid-March 2014.
I had very little experience sailing or even rowing, but I worked out the kinks and learned the ropes, and began to plan an overnight for ZEPHYR’s third voyage. I would launch at the south end of Vancouver Lake and make my way to Lake River, which drains into the Columbia 11 miles farther north. I expected this would give me one night on Lake River, and plenty of options to progress the next day.
All photographs by the author
Loaded and ready to go, ZEPHYR awaits her oarsman at the south end of Vancouver Lake. The island, 1-1/3 miles away, is barely visible through the fog to the left.
On April 7, I set out in fog so thick that I could barely see the island in the middle of the lake. I started out under oars, but when I reached the island, the fog had broken, and a touch of a favorable south wind picked up. I unbrailed the spritsail and made a meandering run to some inundated willows at the north end of the lake, and stopped for lunch in bright sunlight.
The wind failed as I entered Lake River, so I brailed the rig and went on under oars. Lake River is a pretty stream lined with trees and pastures. It is about 250′ wide, and its western shore is mostly floodplains and pasture, some lined with ash and cottonwood, some bordered by flood dikes. Gentle bluffs to the east are wooded with oak, ash, and fir, and hide the populated rolling plains of Vancouver above. Beneath the bluffs a heavily trafficked rail line lies within a half mile from the river, and in some places the tracks are just 75′ away.
A shady cul-de-sac off of Lake River provided an ideal resting spot. Lake River is plenty sleepy, but this cove oozed silent primeval slumber.
Toward midafternoon I ducked into a hidden harbor on the western shore. It meandered a little ways through a dense wood of ash and cottonwood that created a shade-giving canopy over the water. I had a snack and rested a bit; the only noise was the distant honking of geese, and two raccoon kits chasing each other up and down trees. It would have been an ideal anchorage for the night, but it was too early in the day to stop.
A very pleasant and peaceful moment on Lake River, with just enough wind to move me along, and slow enough to allow my mind to wander.
I nosed ZEPHYR back out into Lake River; the south wind picked up again and teased me along at a dreamy pace. I was nearly asleep at the helm when a huge and cacophonous flock of Canada geese suddenly took off from a field just astern of me, clearly startled by something. They rose into the sky, and the surface of the river below them erupted as if hit by a downpour of oversized hail. I was quite pleased to be out of range of their bombs.
Not 15 minutes later, the pastoral waters erupted again. A bull California sea lion gave a poor carp a violent thrashing just 30 feet off my port bow. The sea lion slapped the pallid carcass back and forth, bent on eviscerating it; I was lucky not to get splattered.
Her anchor set in fine mud, ZEPHYR is readied for her first night out. The freight train in the background up on the berm did not bode well for a good night’s rest.
When the sun was getting low, I sought a haven for the night. A few creeks drained down the slopes of the steep eastern shore into Lake River. The first creek I came upon had a lovely ash-canopied cove, but it was quite close to the railway. I could see on my charts that another cove farther downstream might be more promising. I rowed another few minutes and turned into the meandering creek, and came to a stop some 20′ in, just as the sprit snagged a low branch.
I brailed the sail and unstepped the rig, chucked my 10-lb Navy anchor overboard, and let out the chain and some 10′ of rope. (I’d found the anchor in the Columbia River 15 years ago while kayaking, and knew someday I’d have a boat for it.) I stepped a short dummy mast forward, secured a stick at the aft end of the cockpit, and then draped the simple canvas pup tent I’d made over the uprights. Toggles accessible from inside and out of the cockpit secured the tent around the coaming. My rowing “thwart,” a simple box full of tools and camping gear, went to the port side—reoriented fore-and-aft—to serve as my dining table and lantern stand.
With the rowing seat serving as a nightstand I was ready to turn in for the night.
I had brought cans of soup, a few baguettes, and some tins of sardines, but I was too tired to fire up my alcohol stove, so I had the soup cold—right out of the can. I uncorked a bottle of red wine, poured to the rim of my enamel coffee mug, and reached for my book, William Least Heat-Moon’s River Horse: Across America by Boat. The light was good and bright in my raw-canvas tent, even for dusk reading, but soon I lit the candle lantern, if only for ambience. Before I knew it, the sun had set, so I dragged my sleeping bag out from under the foredeck and laid it out, foot forward. I took one last peek out the back of the tent at the yellow and orange twilight mirrored on Lake River and framed by the leafless ash branches of my snug harbor. As the sky faded I fell asleep, using my life jacket as a pillow. The last sounds I heard before nodding off were distant geese and the faint lapping of ripples caused by fish jumping or beavers swimming nearby.
My quiet bliss didn’t last too long, as I soon found that being 100 yards away from the railroad tracks isn’t much more quiet than being 100′ from them. How irrational the startled nighttime mind can be, thinking the train is bearing right down on one’s very anchorage! This terror must have happened at least five times throughout the night.
I woke around 8 a.m. to bright daylight, and had a leisurely breakfast in bed while reading more River-Horse. I soon turned attention to my own adventure, so I set to converting ZEPHYR from a bedroom back into a vessel. Called to shore by nature, I realized that I hadn’t set foot on land since 10 a.m. the previous day: I had spent 23 hours within ZEPHYR’s 33″ x 72″ cockpit and had never felt the least bit confined. All comforts I required were close at hand, and the gently rockered floor, unencumbered by fixed thwarts or clunky framing, was exactly the camping platform I had hoped for. The only thing it required was for me to place it in the loveliest settings I could find!
With water glassy and the rig brailed, I rowed up Lake River, passing an abandoned half-sunk vessel.
When I emerged from my harbor, the river was still and smooth as glass. There was no wind, so a-rowing I went. At Ridgefield, 8 miles downstream from Vancouver Lake, I assessed my situation. There was little promise of wind. A mile north of Ridgefield I could turn south on the Bachelor Island Slough and enter the Columbia across from Sauvie Island with the choice of heading north or south as wind and current might favor. Or I could continue north another 2 ½ miles on Lake River and enter the Columbia on the north end of Bachelor Island, across from Warrior Rock lighthouse near Sauvie Island’s northernmost point.
The speck of white on the distant shore is Warrior Rock Lighthouse on Sauvie Island. To get there I’d soon be rowing across the Columbia River.
I chose to strike out for Warrior Rock. The Columbia was glass-smooth. The current was running, but presented no challenge to reaching the lighthouse under oars, as it was slightly downriver. I came ashore on a sandy beach in a nice, protected cove just north of the lighthouse.
Warrior Rock Lighthouse stands just across a horseshoe cove from the beach where I landed ZEPHYR. The basalt dike below the light house made a perfect picnic spot.
The 28′-tall lighthouse was built in 1930. The upper half is an elegant octagonal shape, while the lower half is an elongated concrete hexagon, shaped and oriented to cut the water like a ship when the Columbia floods. It sits prominently on Warrior Rock, a former site of native canoe burials. I sat down at the base of the lighthouse and downed a can of soup and a crust of bread. A west wind alighted on the river beyond the lee of Sauvie Island’s tree-lined shore. Eager to take advantage of it, I returned to ZEPHYR and rowed her off the beach. With the westerly, I could reach up the Columbia toward Portland or a half-mile downriver, around the northern end of Sauvie Island, into Multnomah Channel at the town of St. Helens. I chose to sail north.
At the tip of Sauvie Island, I tacked and close-reached south, up Multnomah Channel, dodging old pilings and lines from the many fishermen in aluminum skiffs anchored in the channel. The west wind held up nicely, and I made good progress upriver. I passed the entrance to Scappoose Bay, which breaks away from the channel towards the west about 1¼ miles from the Columbia. This bay is about 2 miles long, though it continues on in several secluded meandering creeks that I’ve yet to explore. A night in the bay somewhere was a fine possibility, though it was too early to stop.
As I approached Louse Island, tucked into the long neck of Sauvie Island, just across from Scappoose Bay, I decided to head for a favorite stream hidden behind Louse Island: Cunningham Slough. Meandering some 4 miles into Sauvie, the slough measures only 2.1 miles straight-line from its mouth to Cunningham Lake. A night in this narrow mud-banked and ash-lined slough would be truly peaceful. I’d never been all the way up to the lake at its end.
ZEPHYR’s shallow draft allowed her to explore water too thin for most boats.
The water was high, making it an opportune time to travel the full length of the slough, but about a mile up I grew tired of rowing: The wind in the 90′-wide slough was nonexistent. I dropped anchor to rest, read, and if need be, nap. Later that afternoon, I woke up groggy yet anxious about deciding where to proceed next. Up-slough would have been easy and comfortable, and, practically speaking, resulted in at least two more nights out. I was prepared for such a commitment, but at the time making “progress”—under sail, if possible—weighed more heavily, and I rowed back toward Multnomah Channel.
Clouds had washed over the blue sky, and the west wind had picked up considerably. When I reached the channel, I stowed the oars and unbrailed the spritsail, and made a reach to the south. The wind curled around and over the tall cottonwoods on the weather shore, and I endured severe blows from astern. My boom leapt and galloped several times in the chaotic gusts. At times the winds felt very favorable to forward progress, and yet I was frequently backwinded to a stop. Sailing up a narrow channel with a tree-lined shore is fraught with surprise and disappointment.
I passed the last of the trees along the weather shore and came to an area that gave way to low meadows. The sailing should have been steadier here, but instead the wind died completely. Taking to the oars, I found that the ebb had strengthened, and my work began in earnest. Along this stretch of Multnomah Channel, one shore is lined with rip-rap, and the other was sheer banks of mud tangled with logjams: there weren’t any inlets for refuge for at least 2 ½ more miles. A south wind sprang up, giving me more to work against, and I could see that black sodden clouds over Portland were headed my way. I could’ve easily backed out under sail to Scappoose Bay or Cunningham Slough for the night, but the urge to go forward persisted, and I raced against the threat of a heavy rain to the mouth of the Gilbert River.
I pulled hard to get ZEPHYR into shelter, weighing every other minute whether or not I should sacrifice some ground made by taking time to don a raincoat. Every inch seemed to matter, so I kept on in shirtsleeves. My goal for the evening’s anchorage was a floating moorage dock just at the mouth of the Gilbert River.
With parts of me chilled, and others hot with exertion, I reached the mouth of the Gilbert River and made my painter fast to the dock. ZEPHYR streamed down-current and downwind from the end of the platform. The very moment I had the tent out and half set up, the clouds let loose. There is something dismal about tenting in the rain, but this time it felt like a narrowly won victory. My tent, made of untreated canvas, was untested in any rain, let alone a downpour, but it performed superbly. The cotton fibers swelled and blocked the hammering rain and took each heavy drop with a low solid pat instead of the urgent high-pitched pit-pit-pit that dainty synthetics make.
I slipped into my sleeping bag and ate a quick meal of cold soup. The pat-pat-pat lulled me to sleep quickly. It wasn’t to be a night of good sleep, however. First, either the wind reversed or the tide turned (or perhaps both), and ZEPHYR bumped against the dock. After this gentle yet awakening jolt, I realized my sleeping bag was soaked. Damn the canvas! I scrambled out into the dark with a flashlight and perched on the wet foredeck, undid the painter, and sculled over to a snag I’d seen earlier. After tying up to it, I climbed back into the cockpit and I noticed that my water bag had come open—all the water in the boat had come from this, and not the rain. Relieved that I hadn’t used the wrong material for the tent, I slept the rest of the night in quiet, damp victory.
The next morning brought dry and sunny weather, and several options to choose from: up-channel and up the Willamette 27 miles to Willamette Park in Portland; up the Gilbert River 4 miles into the heart of Sauvie Island; up Crane Slough to Crane Lake; or back down channel to Scappoose Bay, the Lewis River, or either north or south on the Columbia. I chose none of these, and instead decided to call it quits.
Writing now in the middle of winter, I should have kept going. I could have gone to Portland, met my family for lunch, and then headed back down the Willamette River to Kelly Point, where it meets the Columbia. From there, the course might be east for Cascade Locks or The Dalles, or perhaps north and west, which would carry me down the Columbia toward the ocean, perhaps to Astoria. But this was nothing grand—just a two-night test run. I hauled out at the Gilbert River boat ramp and called home. My wife soon arrived, and I hoisted ZEPHYR on the top of the car.
The last 48 hours had been magical, and I marveled that I had only spent about 15 minutes of it with my feet on terra firma. I came away with a list of things to add to the boat and to my gear, and a hunger for more voyages.
The only fundamental change I made to the design, aside from some fidgeting and simplification of the deck, was to shorten it from 12′5¼″ to 11′10¾″ so as to come under Oregon’s 12′ registration rule. Chapelle’s drawing notes that the boat “steers with an oar,” and indeed the boat does so nicely. The sculling notch in the raised transom not only served for steering, but also allowed me to learn sculling. Eventually, I did make an easily removed and stowed rudder for ZEPHYR, which I have found to be most handy while running in moderate winds.
ZEPHYR, over-loaded yet managing fine on her launch day at Vancouver Lake, March 15th, 2014. The helmsman is making room in the cockpit for another adult and two kids, but his weight is too far aft. The kids were soon sent forward to lie on the foredeck.
Despite the small size of this boat, I could walk around on it quite comfortably, and I could even stand on the rails at any point or quarter and the sheerline wouldn’t submerge. This was quite the novelty for me, being used to kayaks. The broad, gently rockered flat bottom is perfect for sleeping on. The cockpit is very generously sized, 33″ x 72″, and the daggerboard trunk is forward of this, leaving the space quite open and unencumbered.
Two sticks, two hooks, and seven toggle-snaps are all it takes to set up ZEPHYR’s canvas tent. Wooden toggles keep the door closed.
I was to have 20 more voyages in ZEPHYR that summer—only two more overnighters, though. Friends and family have joined me for day trips, and ZEPHYR ably carried as many as three adults and two kids (lying on the foredeck) at one time. The best times out were with my son, Max, scoping for blackberries along the shore —and we still laugh about keeping “fingers out of the snotter.” This boat has proven to be exactly what I was looking for, and it promises many more voyages in and around the Columbia River.—HG
If you have an interesting story to tell about your travels in a small wooden boat, please email us a brief outline and a few photos.
I have never been ambitious enough to master a vast array of knots. There are plenty of books filled with detailed instructions and photos for scores of complicated hitches and bends, but in practice, there are only a few simple knots that I use regularly aboard my boats. Quick-release tension knots, which can be drawn very tight and released instantly even when under load, are an extremely useful part of my repertoire.
SBM
The common trucker’s hitch (shown loosely tied for clarity) has a slip-knot loop and two half hitches holding the tension.
The tension knots I use are variations of the standard trucker’s hitch, which is used to secure loads on trucks or roof racks. Begin by forming a loop in the standing part of a line—a figure 8 on a bight works well. The trucker’s hitch often uses a slip knot that can be undone when it’s no longer needed, but for boat rigging, a permanent yet easily untied loop is better because for a line that has a single purpose you’ll want the loop to remain in the same place.
SBM
A figure-8 on a bight forms an inline loop for repeated use.
SBM
Pulling the bitter end will create a lot of tension, with the loop of the slip knot and the anchor point (here, a screw eye at right). Pinching the working end of the line where it wraps around the slip knot will hold the tension as the knot is being completed.
Next, take the working end of the line around an anchor point and bring it back to the loop. Pulling back on the working end after passing it through the loop creates a mechanical advantage that allows the line to be drawn very tight.
SBM
The tensioning knot is finished off with a slipped half hitch, snugged up with a pull into the figure-8 loop.
When you have the line as taut as you want it, pinch the working end of the line tightly where it wraps around the loop. With your other hand finish the knot with a slipped half hitch—a single half hitch with a bight rather than the tail of the line pulled through. Snug the hitch up by pulling the bight directly back toward the loop. If you pull in any other direction, you will lose some of the tension in the line.
SBM
The finished quick-release tension knot with a figure-8 on a bight and a slipped half hitch
This quick-release finish is especially useful on a small boat when you often have to act quickly, with one hand, or with cold fingers. The slipped half hitch can be released, even under extreme tension, simply by tugging the tail end of the line, which pulls the bight back through.
Tom Pamperin
Three quick-release tension knots secure the mast and boom.
Variations on this system can be used to join two separate lines or the ends of a single line to create a very reliable high-tension attachment point. The downhaul for my balance lug rig is tied with a quick-release tension knot; the absence of blocks and fittings keeps things cheap and quiet, and tension is easy to achieve and adjust. I also use a tension knot as the parrel for the boom of my lugsail, allowing me to adjust the fore-and-aft position of the boom. A line tied off with a tension knot secures the mast in the partner, taking the place of a conventional mast gate.
SBM
You can guard against the slipped half hitch from shaking out by slipping a second bight into the first and pulling it tight. A pull on the bitter end will still release the hitch.
Tension knots tied with short lengths of line attached to the boat’s hanging knees hold the oars tightly under the side decks, where they’re out of the way but ready for instant access when needed. The ridge line I use to hang a tarp for a boat tent for sleeping aboard runs from the rudderhead around the mast, then back to a loop to finish with a tension knot. I also use quick-release tension knots on the lines holding the edges of the tarp to the side decks. For securing loose gear or bags, tension knots are often a better solution than bungee cords, which can’t be custom fit and can be difficult to secure under tension. In spite of their plastic-coated hooks, they can mar varnish and dent soft wood.
There are lots of other jobs aboard the boat and in camp that can be performed well with a bit of line, and almost nothing that can’t be secured and easily released with simple quick-release tension knots. Use the money you save on blocks and fittings to extend your cruising season instead.
Note: The slip-knot loop of the trucker’s does come in handy when you use a line for a variety of purposes. The slip knot is easily undone with a tug on the line, but there is a a right way and a wrong way to tie it.
SBM
The wrong way to tie the slip knot for a trucker’s hitch. The bight must not be on the standing side (left here) of the loop. When trucker’s hitch is tensioned, the bight will shrink back into the loop.
SBM
The proper way to tie the slip knot is with the loop on the standing part of the line and the bight on the working side. Tied this way, the it will not collapse under tension in the trucker’s hitch.
You can share your tricks of the trade with other Small Boats Monthly readers by sending us an email.
Mosquitoes, gnats and flies can be a real nuisance when camping in coastal areas. Nemo has developed a versatile shelter called the Bugout that combines the protection of a waterproof tarp with a generously sized screened enclosure. I had a chance to test it in an area where the mosquitoes are notoriously bad—the Florida Everglades.
The Bugout is very well made and combines a bug enclosure with a rain tarp/sunshade. A tarp is always handy to have in camp for shelter from sun and rain, and if the bugs aren’t biting the netting can be rolled up, secured with loop-and-toggle fittings, and stowed out of the way. When it gets buggy, the netting can be released, staked down, and zippered shut, creating a bug-proof enclosure. The netting also helps as a wind and rain break, and it is treated with a durable water repellent (DWR) so it sheds water, making packing up easier.
Photographs by the author
The Bugout with the screen walls rolled up. The trim sewn to the edge of the tarp roof curls upward to form gutters that direct rain to the low corners.
The Bugout comes in two sizes: the 9′x9′ that I tried, and a 12′x12′. Both have 6′ headroom, and the 9′x9′ weighs about 5 pounds. The smaller shelter has room for setting up a table and chairs so on a buggy shore you don’t have to be tent-bound, swathed in a head net or slathered with DEET. The reinforced tie-downs and beefy grommets are really tough and should hold up very well with regular use. The zippered corner entries provide quick entry and minimize the number of bugs that get in with you. Another very useful feature is that the Bugout works flawlessly with my hammock. The three sliders on each zipper allow the Bugout to be set up over the hammock as a rain fly and add a bug-proof porch to my setup. No more letting hundreds of mosquitoes into my hammock before I can jump in and zip it up!
Setup is quick and easy, provided there are trees or other uprights to string it to. It’s a little more difficult without trees, but you can use paddles, oars, spars, or Nemo’s optional tarp poles and some additional stakes and cords. The Bugout includes a set of stakes for anchoring the netting, but they won’t hold in sand. For loose ground you’ll need sandbags as weights or sticks buried as deadmen.
Here in South Florida, the mosquitoes can make an outing downright miserable. With the Bugout set up over my campsite I could enjoy being outdoors rather curse and swat at the bugs that would have otherwise swarmed around me while I was cooking breakfast and trying to make that early morning cup of coffee.
Rain fly, sunshade, windbreaker, dew preventer, and bug net—the Nemo Bugout is truly multifunctional and has made a great addition to my kit. If your next camp-cruising adventure is somewhere hot, wet and buggy, the Bugout is a must-have.
A native Floridian, Thomas Head grew up working on his father’s home-built stone crab boat in the small coastal town of Inglis. He has 19 years of service in the U.S. Navy. His account of racing in the Everglades Challenge appeared in our November 2014 issue.
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Protecting your eyes is one of the first rules of working with machinery. Tools that operate at high speeds—table saws, routers, drill presses, sanders, etc.—throw particles far enough and fast enough to cause serious injuries to your eyes. They can also create a lot of dust that may be only an irritant to your eyes but harmful to your lungs. When I’m working with power tools I wear a dust mask and safety glasses, but the two don’t work well together. A lot of warm, moist air flows up from the mask and fogs the safety glasses. I can’t work safely or accurately with my vision obscured, so I have to stop and wipe the fog away. I occasionally catch myself peeping under the safety glasses—a dangerous practice.
Safety glasses are fairly effective in blocking particles propelled directly at the eyes, but I’ve had bits of wood ricochet off my cheeks into my eyes. Routers can unleash a torrent of wood dust that swirls around safety glasses and into my eyes. Afterwards I dab mud out of the corners of my eyes.
DeWalt’s Concealer looks like ski goggles rather than safety glasses. The soft rubber seal provides a comfortable fit on my face. I haven’t yet taken a good whack to my face while wearing the Concealer, but the soft, cushioned frame is easily going to be much less painful than rigid safety glasses have been when that has happened to me in the past. The strap keeps the Concealer in place—it won’t slip down a sweaty nose—and doesn’t interfere with the pads of my hearing-protection earmuffs.
Dog-leg slots on the top and bottom of the goggles provide ventilation without giving a particles a direct path to the eyes. The wrap-around lens doesn’t restrict vision at all: The perimeter of the goggles is at the limits of my peripheral vision.
photos by the author
I need reading glasses for close work so I modified a pair to fit inside the Concealer goggles.
I wear reading glasses for close work and have to wear goggles over them but the glasses frame makes contact with the lens of the goggles and makes the fit loose over my cheeks. One pair of aviator-style reading glasses had one temple broken off, so I snapped the other temple off and bent the bridge a bit to match the curve of the Concealer’s lens. They’re now a perfect fit and a semi-permanent fixture in the goggles.
The Concealer caries the mark “Z87+,” indicating the lens meets U.S. government occupational standards for impact resistance, both high-mass (a pointed 1.1-lb projectile dropped 50”) and high-velocity (a ¼” steel ball traveling at 102 miles per hour) impacts without fracture.
I’ve had some surgery on my eyes in the past year, and I’m now much more aware that I can’t take my vision for granted. It’s a relief now to be able to protect my eyes consistently without being in a constant fight against fog.
Christopher Cunningham is the editor of Small Boats Monthly.
The Concealer by DeWalt sells for around $10 at numerous online and retail outlets.
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.
Shari Rutz and her granddaughter take a maiden voyage on the Ompompanoosuc River near Norwich, Vermont.
A bit of keeping up with the Joneses led Lorenz Rutz to build PEARL, a 12′ Wee Rob canoe designed by Iain Oughtred. His wife Shari enjoyed kayaking but struggled with her 60-lb plastic kayak. Lorenz would help her load the boat on their truck’s canopy roof rack, but she would return with it slid in on the truck bed. Shari paddles with a petite woman who arrived at one of their outings with a new 30-lb composite kayak. When Lorenz heard about that, “the gauntlet was down” and he started looking for a winter project: a small paddle craft that was “light, small, and classy.”
Lorenz Rutz
The second strake goes on with the aid of dozens of fixed plywood clamps and wedges.
With light weight a priority, Lorenz found himself looking at undecked double-paddle canoes. In Oughtred’s Clinker Plywood Boatbuilding Manual he found listed among the designs the Wee Rob, a double-paddle canoe in the tradition of John MacGregor’s Rob Roy canoes. The Wee Robs he saw pictured on the web appealed to him and he ordered plans from The WoodenBoat Store.
The Wee Rob requires only two sheets of 4mm marine plywood and a few bits of lumber. Lorenz, on good terms with the folks at his local lumberyard, was allowed to sift through stacks of SPF (spruce-pine-fir) dimensional stock. Much of this grade of lumber is Canadian-grown spruce, and there are occasionally pieces with close, straight grain and nearly free of knots. “For the cost—cheap—I could well afford to rip out the best bits and save the knotty stuff for other uses.”
Lorenz Rutz
Spruce structural members keep the canoe’s weight to a minimum.
The plans include a set of full-sized templates for the molds and stems, so Lorenz could skip lofting. He found Oughtred’s book a valuable companion to the instructions included with the plans. To assure that he didn’t make mistakes on the good plywood, he used cheap 3mm plywood to create patterns for the planks. At the finishing stage of construction, all of the wood was sealed with a coat of epoxy prior to varnish and paint.
Charlotte Rutz
The Wee Rob plans include a decked version but Lorenz (left) was looking for a light pond boat, and decking would have added significant weight, so he built PEARL as an open boat.
Lorenz Rutz
A bit of custom outfitting—footbraces and a padded backrest—give the canoe a kayak-like fit and feel. Foam pipe insulation protects the varnished gunwales and offers comfortable arm rests.
PEARL was launched last summer on a beaver pond near the Rutzes’ home in Strafford, Vermont. As kayakers, they found the absence of decks took some getting used to. To get a more secure and familiar fit, Lorenz added foot braces, a molded seat, and a broad, padded backrest. “Once these were in place the boat felt much better to us.” While they’ll continue to use their kayaks for exposed waterways, the canoe is well suited to tranquil exploration of the many ponds nearby. At 30 lbs it is much easier for Shari to manage by herself, and she reports that PEARL turns heads wherever she takes to the water.
Have you recently launched a boat? Please email us. We’d like to hear about it and share it with other Small Boats Monthly readers.
Addendum: Lorenz provided us with some photographs of his well appointed shop. In response to the comment below by reader Mark Steffens, two photographs are posted here.
The MerryMac catboat tends to make the blood hum with a sense of adventure and challenge. Its owners claim that it has always been so since the first of about 200 MerryMacs sprouted wings on the banks of New Hampshire’s Great Bay back in the early 1950s. And MerryMac lovers will tell you that the sense of adventure and challenge are rooted in both the boat itself and her designer/builder Ned “Mac” McIntosh.
I first met the boat and the man 16 years ago while sailing a little cutter in the lee of Great Guana Cay, Abaco, Bahamas. I was half-lost in a sailor’s daydream, running before a warm, 12-knot southerly when a blue, hard-chined catboat came surfing up behind me and surged past on a plane.
“You wanna race, Cap?” called her skipper, a senior citizen in a long-billed cap, denim shirt and double-patched, paint-stained khakis.
For the next hour McIntosh led me on a spritely chase that had us charging among the moored and anchored cruising boats in the settlement harbor. Back then he was a mere 82 years old. Now he’s 98, and he and his MerryMac are still actively sailing in the waters off his winter base, a simple cottage called Termite Terrace that he shares with his wife Terry on Guana Cay.
Nate Piper
The simple rig is well suited to first-time sailors.
The origins of this swift little cat-rigged sharpie started in New Hampshire in the barn/boatshop of the farmhouse that McIntosh has called home since his birth there. During World War II he was in Panama building and repairing wooden boats for the U.S. government and later did a stint as captain on a fishing boat working between the Galapagos and Puerto Rico. Once back in New England, he began building cruising yachts with his older brother Bud on the banks of the Piscataqua River.
During his years in Panama, McIntosh had made friends with boatbuilder and designer Clark Mills, the creator of the Optimist pram. In Panama the two men built their own small sloops to race after work. It was the simplicity of those boats and the fun of the evening competition that came to mind when McIntosh conceived a boat for dinghy adventuring and racing in Great Bay.
Terry Picard
With its 90-sq-ft sail the MerryMac can make way in a whisper of a breeze.
“I launched the first MerryMac on Thanksgiving day,” he recalls. “It was 1953. I was 37 years old and had been building boats and sailing them for 27 of them. When you sail many different boats, you become quite a critic. You know what works and what doesn’t, not only performance-wise, but other issues as well. Is it easy to build? Is it strong? Is it versatile? Is it fast? Is it fun? Can I repair it easily? Can I sell enough to make a living? What do folks want in a boat? What can they afford? What’s the best shallow-water design?”
He says that in the early 1950s family life was returning to normal following WW II. “People weren’t rich, but they sure had a lot more money to spend than they had had for the previous 25 years, and they wanted fun family activities. Sailing seemed a smart choice here in the seacoast of New Hampshire. I was happy with the performance of MerryMac number 1 and was encouraged when my friend Phil wanted me to build number 2 so we could race.”
The two-boat fleet gained momentum when a friend’s cocktail party generated orders for six more MerryMacs. Soon there were more and more orders, and “McIntosh Custom Boats” was born. By 1955 MerryMac sailors had formed the Great Bay Yacht Club, and held races every Sunday. Meetings at each other’s homes provided the sailing instruction and social atmosphere for the growing membership. The club became a place where sailors could not only race but also pack a picnic lunch, load the family in their MerryMacs, and explore the wooded coves and islands of Great Bay.
Nate Piper
Mahogany stringers set under the plywood frames stiffen the bottom panels.
With the MerryMac McIntosh gave the New Hampshire sailing community a basic sailboat at a price of $449. For safety he designed his boat with a broad beam, high topsides and decks. For ease of building his mind turned to a hard-chined, shallow-V, sharpie hull with no skeg. To keep the boat simple to sail, light, and inexpensive, he decided on a single triangular sail and plywood construction.
The MerryMac, simple enough for beginners but with enough performance thrills for dinghy racers, caught on with local sailors and by the mid-1960s McIntosh had built 200 copies. He also made the mold for a fiberglass version that was locally produced in small numbers. Planked and decked with thin plywood, the wooden MerryMacs were intended to have a limited life span. But after 50 years many of the boats built in the 1950s and 60s are still sailing and racing in New Hampshire’s Great Bay and far beyond. Maine is home to many and the West Coast has its share. One boat has been preserved in the Woodman Institute Museum in Dover, New Hampshire.
The Merry Mac is 13′6″ long and has a 5′ beam and a 6″ draft. McIntosh designed the boat to be built with ¼″ plywood for the sides, deck, floorboards, and bottom. He used 5/8″ marine fir plywood for sawn frames and transom. The keel and chines are mahogany. The stem is oak. Like most dinghies, the Merry Mac is assembled upside down on a building form then rolled upright for finishing. The first 50 masts were wood; subsequent masts have been aluminum.
“The genius and simplicity of this boat just blows me away,” say Nate Piper of New Hampshire’s Piper Boatworks. “It has fewer moving parts than a Sunfish, but is safer, carries more people, and is fast.”
Piper built his own MerryMac in the spring of 2014, and his enthusiasm for the design prompted his boatshop to acquire the exclusive rights to build new MerryMacs in both wood and fiberglass. Two of the things he loves about the boat are the rudder that can kick up for easy beaching and a roller-reefing boom that makes fast reefing easy from anywhere in the cockpit. Another thing that excites Piper about this boat is its carrying capacity. Four adults can stretch out on the floorboards with ease.
“What’s the point of building a boat that you can’t sleep in?” asks McIntosh with a twinkle in his eyes. He’s quick to point out that when his daughter was a child, she and her parents camp-cruised their Merry Mac down the west coast of Florida for weeks.
Having watched McIntosh and his wife Terry sail their Merry Mac with safety and aplomb in stiff winter trade winds at Guana Cay, I can testify to the boat’s ability to stand up to heavy air and choppy seas. Appropriately reefed for such conditions, the MerryMac can blast to windward in a blow without excessive pounding or a heavy weather helm. She digs in her leeward chine and screams on a reach. Off the wind before a following sea, she planes with ease when her crew shifts their weight aft.
Nate Piper
While the MerryMac can be a lively racer in a brisk breeze, in milder conditions it’s well suited to family outings.
Until recently I was less certain of the MerryMac’s ability in light air so I was glad for breezes in the 2- to 7-knot range when I joined Nate Piper and McIntosh for a sail in Piper’s MerryMac on Great Bay. With so little wind at the launch ramp that I could see the mirror image of the boat reflected without a ripple on the water, the cat-rigged sharpie gained way as soon as we dropped the centerboard and hoisted the sail. While McIntosh spun stories about cruising the Caribbean in his Atkin cutter more than a half century ago, the MerryMac worked her way offshore steadily in air that seemed no more than a whisper. But when I put the helm down, she tacked in her own length.
We found a stronger breeze in the middle of the bay so I tried some jibes. Once again the catboat responded with alacrity and grace, but no drama. Controlling the sheet and the boom during the jibes was as easy as I’ve ever experienced in decades of sailing small boats. When the wind finally died on us altogether, a few strokes from a paddle set us on course to ghost back to the launching ramp. It was during this ghosting that I noticed a wooden pad on the port side of the transom.
“You can put an outboard on this?” I asked.
“I have a little electric one on my boat and a battery I charge with a solar panel,” said McIntosh. He flashed me that twinkle in his eye again. It was the look of a man who had designed, built and outfitted his vessel for every possibility.
Suddenly, I began picturing days of camp-cruising and sailing around Great Bay in this nimble little cat with my wife and sons. Then again maybe I would get a MerryMac of my own and head for the waters off Great Guana Cay for a little match racing with a legend called “Mac.”
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.
MerryMac Particulars
[table]
Length/13′6″
Beam/5′
Draft/6″
Sail Area/90 sq ft
[/table]
Piper Boatworks in coastal New Hampshire is the authorized builder in wood and fiberglass for MerryMacs. For pricing and information contact Piper Boatworks, P.O. Box 879, Rye, NH 03870, 603-686-2232, [email protected].
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One day in the early 1990s, a local contractor visited my boatbuilding shop in Marblehead, Massachusetts, telling me he’d been hired to convert an old boatshop into a playhouse. “The museums and antique dealers have been through it,” he said; “take anything you want or itʼs going to the dump.” The shop had been run by Samuel Brown, an MIT-trained naval architect, and his brother Bill, a boatbuilder.
The building was mostly empty but there were two steamboxes and a wood-fired stove for their boiler. I took those. In the long back room there was a planking bench with odd parts scattered around. Above the bench, tucked under the eave, the blackened end of a tight roll of paper caught my eye. I took the roll down, dusted it off, and put it in the truck. I loaded everything else that looked useful and drove off. That evening, I unrolled my find.
The roll was three sheets of drafting linen with edges black and ragged from years of dust and smoke. Pencil-drawn designs were inscribed “Lines Plan, Construction Plan, and Sail Plan,” for “Racing Dory designed for Swampscott Club,” signed C. D. Mower, each with their separate dates, 16 and 18 December, 1898, and March 14, 1899. I knew the Mower name, mostly from R-boats and New Jersey catboats of his design. This plan was old, but beautiful, interesting, and very racy. I had to find out more.
I visited Peter Vermilya, small-craft curator for Mystic Seaport Museum. He retrieved a February 1900 article on the design from The Rudder. The pencil drawings were virtually identical with the inked drawings in the article. Charles Drown Mower was a native of the Boston area, and had worked with Arthur Binney and then B. B. Crowninshield. He had become the design editor for The Rudder in the summer of 1899 and this design was believed to be his first commissioned design. Peter’s first remark on seeing the drawings was “Now you have to build one!”
All photographs courtesy of the author
The lack of decks on the dory helped determine where it fit in among the racing dories of its day.
I later made my way to the Swampscott Club in Swampscott, Massachusetts. There I found pictures of these dories racing and club members who knew their history. They told me that after the first year, these dories were decked over and concluded the plans I’d found were for the “X-Dory.”
Lee Van Gemert, a former national champion in the Indian Class, also saw the drawings and said “Thatʼs where the Indian came from. ” In 1921 people from the Massachusetts Yacht Racing Association had gone to yacht designer John Alden asking for a children’s boat like Mower’s dory. William Chamberlain, a Marblehead boatbuilder, built six boats but the Indian was never really a kid’s boat and at the end of the first summer they were all put up for sale and bought by people from Boston’s South Shore. The Indian then became the largest class in Massachusetts Bay. Sam Crocker, working for Alden, gave the Indian a broad transom and a skeg-hung rudder, but the hull shows its connection to the Mower dory. The Indian carries a big marconi rig and calls for 350 lbs inside ballast.
The Rudder index put together by Mystic Seaport showed another 21′ Mower Dory design from 1911. This turned out to be an update of the 1898 design, this time for Massachusetts Bay. The changes were minimal, with a very slight chine added in the middle of the earlier wide garboard, a rectangular centerboard, and other alterations to make the design easier to build. Matt Murphyʼs book Glass Plates & Wooden Boats incudes Willard Jackson photographs from 1903 and 1907 showing X-Dories decked and rigged with shrouds, and sailing often with four people aboard. I have since found one undated Jackson photograph of an undecked boat sailing off Marblehead.
Suzanne Leahy, a Cape Cod boatbuilder who grew up in Marblehead, saw the drawings and mentioned a similarity to the Beachcomber, William Chamberlain’s 21′ racing dory. In Building Classic Small Craft John Gardner noted that the Beachcomber was a popular racing class until 1913 when a young Sam Brown designed OUTLAW, a similar dory with a flatter sheer and better speed. Sam Brown’s archive is in the collection of the Peabody-Essex Museum in nearby Salem, Massachusetts. Curator Dan Fenimore found the plans for OUTLAW among Brown’s papers. OUTLAW looked a lot more like the Mower than a Chamberlain suggesting that Sam Brown had these very Mower drawings when he designed OUTLAW. It’s likely he had rolled the drawings, then tucked them over the planking bench where they sat for 77 years.
The garboards are built up of three planks joined with flush dory bevels and rivets. The seams between them are visible here with one running out at the transom and the other at the garboard’s upper edge. To the far left is one of the butt blocks on the broad strake.
Building the Mower dory took place over a couple of years. I set up a long shrinkwrap-covered wigwam with bent saplings and in it built the hull during one winter. I lofted the boat and then began work with sawn white-oak frame halves joined with rivets, a white-oak stem, and a white-pine transom.
A single 26″ wide white-pine board became the bottom. I cut it to shape with the circular saw set at its maximum angle and still had plenty of planing to do for the bevels that receive the garboards: The shallow deadrise required 6″-wide bevels through the boat’s middle. For the garboards I had a few Atlantic white-cedar boards that had the length but not the width I needed, so I built up each garboard from three planks joined with flush dory laps riveted together. The broad and binder strakes are Maine white cedar, butt-blocked to get the length and shape. Both the port and starboard planks for the sheerstrake were cut from a single 26′-long white pine board. The strakes are dory-lapped with 45-degree bevels on the tops of the plank, rolling bevels on the bottom edges of joining planks, and rivets every 3″. In between the sawn frames are pairs of steam-bent white oak ribs riveted in place.
Raising the mast is made easier by a hinged partner and a ramp to guide the foot of the mast to the step.
The breasthook and quarter knees were cut from hackmatack crooks. The inwales are bent in place and screwed to the sheer strakes. For the two rowing stations, butternut pads on the rails are drilled for tholepins. The butternut thwarts sit on yellow pine risers and are braced with hackmatack knees. I made the centerboard rectangular—like the 1911 update and even more like the Indian. It’s a 17″-wide piece of African hardwood with a ¾″ square brass rod on its leading edge. The centerboard trunk has 2″ x 12″ white oak logs riveted to white oak head ledges secured to the bottom board with hanger bolts. To make it easier to step the mast I used hinged mast partner of an old whaleboat design. The mast step is a 3″ thick chunk of oak with a big knot drilled out.
The white oak rudder has gudgeons that slide down a single long transom-mounted pintle. The top of the pintle gets lashed into a groove set near the transom top.
The flat sheer of the Mower dory distinguishes it from the Beachcomber class that preceded it.
The 21′ mast is solid, rounded out of glued-up 2″ Sitka spruce. The 20′ boom is also Sitka. Every bit of wood got multiple coats of raw linseed oil before and after installation. The interior has boiled linseed oil for a finish, the exterior has Swedish linseed oil paint, the bottom antifouling paint over red lead. I sewed the 27-sq-ft jib and the 175-sq-ft leg o’ mutton main. It was time to put Mowerʼs lost design to the test.
The dory proved herself well sailing in Connecticut, Massachusetts and Maine. The strongest breeze I’ve encountered, about 15 knots, was off the WoodenBoat waterfront at Brooklin and the dory was well balanced and exciting. I found her remarkably stiff when moving about the boat at rest or keeping her upright in a breeze, and she moves very easily under either sail or oars.
An article in a 1900 issue of The Rudder reported that “the [Swampscott] Club had a fleet of about 10 boats, which were raced throughout the season, and a great deal of sport was had, as the boats turned out very satisfactorily and proved their ability to whip everything in a good breeze…. Their strong point was their ability to go to windward, while their quickness in stays and ability to lug sail were also noticeable points in their behavior.” Over a century later, all this remains true.
Thad Danielson restores, builds, and designs classic wooden boats for sail oar and power. He does business as Thad Danielson Boats in Cummington, Massachusetts.
Mower Dory Particulars
[table]
Length/21′
Beam/6′
[attr style=”font-weight:bold;”]Draft
Board up/7″
Board down/30″
[attr style=”font-weight:bold;”]Sail Area
Main/175 sq ft
Jib/27 sq ft
[/table]
The sail plan, one of the three original drawings, shows signs of its age around the edges.
For copies of the drawings and a table of offsets, contact the author through his web site.
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The morning on Lake Nipigon brought cool air, clear skies, and a few faint wisps of cloud to color the sunrise. I unzipped the tent and crawled out onto this narrow beach on Murchison Island. There was a line of fresh moose tracks between me and the water’s edge, barely 3′ from my front door. So much for thinking of myself as a light sleeper.
Until last night I had been sleeping aboard at anchor. This was the first beach I had seen in 80 miles, and only the second island I’d managed to set foot on. Everywhere else, the lake ran right up against thick forest or steep cliffs, making it almost impossible to get ashore, much less find a place to set up the tent. I’d been confined to a 15′ boat for five days and nights so when I noticed the bright fringe of sand at the head of the bay, I hadn’t hesitated —I just sheeted in to gather speed and ran the boat, a Phoenix III I’d borrowed from my brother, right up onto the beach, eager to step ashore for a while but unambitious enough that “a while” soon changed to “for the night.”
all photographs by the author
Murchison Island’s narrow sand beach offered a rare opportunity to camp ashore. I didn’t have to think twice about stopping here when I saw it—I hadn’t set foot on land in two days.
After setting up the tent on the flattest patch of beach, I unloaded the gear, shoved a couple of plastic fenders under the keel, and rolled the boat up onto the sand as far as I could. It wouldn’t be far enough if the wind backed west, but I’d had southerlies all week. I wandered through the island’s dark interior, a maze of swamps and spruces so dense that I could hardly believe that the moose whose trails I was following had been able to fit through the gaps between trees. At dusk the mosquitoes swept in like the wrath of God and I retreated to the tent.
A head net is essential gear for any Lake Nipigon trip. Mosquitoes weren’t too bad at anchor most nights, but ashore, they were fierce and unrelenting.
Camping ashore makes for a slow start. The sun was already high overhead by the time I’d dragged the boat back down the beach to the water’s edge, reloaded the gear, and shoved off. I had only the vaguest of plans: Head south until I found somewhere to stop for the night, repeat for the next 60 miles over three or four days, and get back to the South Bay boat ramp. The wind was southerly and light enough that rowing would have been faster than sailing, but I reminded myself that if speed were the point I wouldn’t be sailing. I hoisted the sail, sheeted in, and started tacking down Murchison Island’s west side, past a scattering of heavily wooded islands too small for names. I shuffled a couple of boat cushions around and settled in for a long day. I had sailed my brother’s boat before, but this was my first chance to sail it alone. It had seemed like a very good boat with both of us aboard; with me alone, it was nearly perfect.
With summer rains and high water levels drowning the beaches at many of the official crown land campsites, the ability to live comfortably at anchor—or nosed into a reed bed—was a big advantage.
As I rounded Selwynn Island the wind faded away until the boat was barely moving. I packed the seat cushions away and stood up. I didn’t feel like rowing—there had been plenty of rowing already on this trip, whole days of it—so I was happy to discover that, standing on the garboards with the tiller between my knees and the sheet in one hand, it was easy to shift my weight enough to give the sail a good shape and keep it drawing. The boat kept gliding smoothly forward across flat water.
I had been thinking of anchoring somewhere off Shakespeare Island, but it was 20 miles away and the sun was already dropping toward the horizon. There were a few other islands within reach, clustered at Murchison Island’s southwestern edge, but none offered a place to step ashore. About 4 miles past Rodger Island and before the 7-mile crossing to Shakespeare Island there was one last pair of islands, one with an anchor symbol marked on the map. Harbor Island, I decided, would be where I’d spend the night.
Tall cliffs and rocky headlands guard the lake’s southern shores. I kept well offshore to get steady sailing winds.
But the wind kept shifting as evening came on, header after header, and by the time I cleared the southern tip of Rodger Island, the sun was touching the horizon. The wind was growing stronger and my pleasant day was going to end with a cold, wet beat 4 miles dead to windward. I dropped the centerboard all the way, tensioned the outhaul, and sheeted in tight. I was soon hiked out on the side deck, trying to manage the sheet and zip up my rain jacket at the same time. After nearly a week of broad reaching and running, working to windward seemed painfully slow. And cold. The water must have been somewhere around the 50s, and sailing solo there was nobody on the forward thwart to block the blasts of spray.
Southerly winds mean fair weather on Lake Nipigon, and long days of reaching and running. I often set out under oars before the morning breezes set in, and set the anchor as the sun went down.
Soon the wind was strong enough that reefing wouldn’t have been out of the question, but I kept on without it, hoping a longer leading edge to the sail would be an advantage for windward work. The wind was getting stronger, about 20 knots, more than enough to churn up a short, steep chop. I was forced to fall off a few degrees to preserve momentum, and then a few degrees more as the wind kept building. By the time I was closing in on Harbor Island’s northern tip, I was barely making any headway at all, and even that was mostly taking me in the wrong direction.
From the brief glances I could spare for the map, it looked like Harbor Island’s anchorage might have a southern exposure, exactly wrong for these winds. It was hard to be sure—the island was small, and the map was printed at such a low resolution that the smaller features were pixelated and indistinct—but conditions were approaching the point where running off would be my only option anyway.
It’s hard to fall back on Plan B when you’ve barely managed to form a Plan A, but I had little desire to beat down along the southern side of Harbor Island only to enter an unfamiliar and dangerously exposed anchorage on a moonless night. I headed up into the wind and scanned the horizon for better options. The sail swung wildly back and forth in the gusts, snapping the loose sheet around the cockpit while the boat lurched and yawed in the waves. The sun had set more than an hour ago. Whatever I was about to do, I’d be doing in the dark.
Three nights ago I had anchored at Dawson Island. It has a well sheltered bay that I knew I could find, even in the dark. I grabbed the map and made a hasty measurement: two thumbs northwest of Harbor Island, 6 miles from here. Dawson Island’s low silhouette was just visible off the starboard quarter, a broad reach in this wind. Relieved to have discovered a reasonable course of action, I tucked the map away and fell off on a port tack.
Darkness set in so slowly during the rush to Dawson Island that I didn’t realize just how dark it was until a cold wave broke over the boat without warning, leaving me soaked and shivering. A few minutes later another wave crashed over me and I was ankle-deep in 50-degree water. All I could do was keep the boat pointed northwest and hope that the two breaking waves had been anomalies rather than the new normal. It was too dark to see much of anything, so it was difficult to gauge speed, but I must have been doing 6 knots.
All at once there were breakers off the starboard bow. Waves were crashing onto Dawson Island’s southern shore, a dark and looming form that I could barely see. My perception of distance had been distorted by the darkness and I had come in too close. Just as I was about to try to fight my way off, the wind died away as abruptly as if someone had flipped a switch. I jumped forward and dropped the rig, set the oars in the locks, and started rowing. Shore was barely 5 yards off.
It was awkward rowing past the tip of Dawson Island with the big waves on the beam, but soon I was able to turn north, letting them sweep the boat along the 2-mile-wide channel between Kelvin and Dawson Islands. I kept in close to shore, not wanting to miss the entrance to the anchorage. And eventually the anchorage was there. I rowed up into the head of the bay, threw out an anchor, and rigged the boat tent. I’d come more than 30 miles from Murchison Island, most of them dead to windward. Just before crawling into my sleeping bag, I dug out my watch from under the side deck to check the time: 12:47 a.m. I’d spent 15 hours at the tiller and the oars. No wonder I was tired.
At Dawson Island a cold, all-day rain provided a perfect excuse to huddle under the boat tent and read A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Thoreau’s account of one of his own sail-and-oar journeys.
The next day was all gray skies and rain, but at least it kept the mosquitoes away. I huddled under my improvised boat tent, reading and eating whatever didn’t require cooking. Every few hours I’d bail out the boat, and then go back to reading. I have a high tolerance for sloth, but it was a bit much even for me. Toward evening the sun broke through for a moment and two otters scampered across Dawson Island’s tiny beach and into the forest. Cheered by the clearing skies, I leaped up and started rolling up the tent so I could at least row around the bay. A few seconds later the clouds closed in and the rain came pouring down again. I flipped the tent back up and dived beneath it. Back to my book.
When morning finally came around again with clear skies, I didn’t waste time. After rolling up the tent and packing everything away, I rowed out of the bay and straight into a north wind—the first of the entire trip, and strong enough that I hoisted the sail with the first reef tied in. I let it luff while I thought about what to do. Too strong a northerly wasn’t ideal for the long hop to Shakespeare Island, and it was still early, which meant the wind would get even stronger as the day went on. With 15 miles of open water and a 40-mile fetch, conditions would only get worse from here. Then again, it might be the only northerly I was going to get, and on one long broad reach I could easily manage 5 or 6 knots; it would take less than four hours to reach Shakespeare, where I could hide behind the tall bluffs at Kings Head.
Besides, I had a boat I was confident in. If I did capsize, my drysuit that would protect me from the cold, and I was confident I could recover quickly. Or, before the worst could happen, I’d drop the rig and run off under oars. The Anderson Islands were about halfway through the crossing, and I could duck into the little cove and a campsite on the middle island’s south side where I could wait it out.
No, it might get a little uncomfortable out there, but I didn’t think it was blatantly stupid to set out. I made sure everything was lashed down or tied in and set out on a port tack, steering toward Kings Head, just visible on the horizon. The lake was already all whitecaps and gusts, but the boat surged ahead smoothly over the waves, getting closer to a safe harbor every moment.
Strong northerly winds and a 40-mile fetch called for caution at the start of the long run to Shakespeare Island. I started out with a single reef tied in, but by the time I sailed into the lee of the Kings Head bluffs ten miles later, I was kicking myself for not double-reefing instead.
Several hours later, as I neared Kings Head, the waves were rising behind me, their crests looming well over my head. They rose up over the transom, one after another, tumbling ranks of steep 6-footers, but as each wave came up, the boat rose with it. There’d be the merest wiggle of the transom and then I’d be slicing straight down the face of the wave, with no tendency to broach. Finally I rounded the corner and cut into the quiet water in the lee of the Kings Head bluff. The long crossing was over. The boat had handled it easily, but it was definitely time to get out of the wind. It was time to release my grip on the tiller, relax, and breathe deeply.
After the long and wild run from Dawson Island, a tiny unnamed river provided a quiet rowing route through the interior of Shakespeare Island.
The rest of the day was perfect sailing, reaching and running down the lee of Shakespeare Island with plenty of wind and nearly flat water. Out on the open lake the waves tumbled along in a growling rush of whitecaps, but all that was behind me. I stopped for lunch at the mouth of one of Shakespeare Island’s tiny rivers, and rowed upstream until it got too narrow for oars before turning around and drifting back. Ten miles farther on I found a secluded anchorage in a cluster of unnamed islands. I dropped the sail, set an anchor, and settled in for my last night the lake. A couple of beavers swam around the boat, eyeing me, and a loon’s calls echoed across the water. I’d seen only one boat in the eight days I’d been out, but the beavers and the loon were all the company I needed.
A hidden anchorage just east of Shakespeare Island provided a peaceful setting for a final night aboard.
With the last of my evening chores done, I leaned back on the thwart and watched the faint breeze write ripples across the bay. By early afternoon tomorrow I’d be back at South Bay, get the boat onto the trailer, and hit the road, but for now I’d watch the world grow slowly darker, the light fading away to blackness until the sky was covered in a dense speckling of stars, with the bright belt of the Milky Way stretching from horizon to horizon. A shooting star streaked across the sky above me, and, a few minutes later, two more in quick succession. The sudden slap of a beaver’s tail broke the stillness. Reluctant to miss whatever might be coming next, I rigged the tent and zipped myself into my sleeping bag.
Ross Lillistone’s Phoenix III is just over 15′ long, with a beam of 4′ 6″. When I reviewed it for Small Boats 2013, I wrote that I couldn’t see much that would improve it, and my opinion hasn’t changed. It can take a 76-sq-ft balance lugsail or a 104-sq-ft spritsail sloop rig on an unstayed mast or a Bermuda sloop rig with a taller stayed mast. For cruising, I’d argue that the balance lug is the best choice: It’s easy to reef when things breeze up. All spars for the lug and spritsail sloop fit inside the boat for trailering, and these rigs take only minutes to set up. A non-stretch halyard and downhaul are essential for good performance, but few expensive fittings are necessary. My brother’s boat uses simple lashings wherever possible, a method I’ve come to appreciate for its simplicity and economy.
The Phoenix III is big enough for two to sleep aboard comfortably, using a platform rigged from the side benches and a couple of extra planks. There’s plenty of storage space under the thwarts and in the sealed buoyancy chambers. Once unloaded, it’s not too heavy for a solo sailor to roll up onto a beach.
The fine entry slices cleanly through the waves, while the wide outwales knock down much of the spray and make excellent handholds for moving the boat. Best of all, this is a boat that simply does not want to capsize: The hull shape makes it round up when pushed too hard, giving you plenty of time to react. If you do manage to knock it down (in my capsize tests it took a concerted effort by a couple of 200-pounders just to dip the lee rail), the wooden spars keep it from turtling. A tug on the centerboard, a few minutes of bailing, and you’re on your way.
The excellent plans, building notes, and glued lapstrake construction make the boat suitable for a motivated first-time builder. If glued lap seems intimidating, the First Mate design is essentially the same boat in stitch-and-glue. Study plans, photos, and information are available at Ross Lillistone Wooden Boats. See WoodenBoat issues 236, 237, and 238 for the designer’s three-part article on building the Phoenix III.—TP
About Lake Nipigon
At 60 miles long, and 40 miles wide, Lake Nipigon has more than enough to keep a sail-and-oar cruiser happy: wide stretches of open water, hundreds of uninhabited islands, and an almost complete absence of roads and development.
The well-protected South Bay ramp, which allows camping, is probably the most convenient launching point. The Forgan Lake access point at the Nipigon River’s Pine Portage Dam is a few miles closer, but camping is prohibited. Both ramps are public access, with no fees. There are private ramps along the eastern shore near the town of Beardmore, and at Kings Landing.
The South Bay boat ramp is one of the busiest launching sites on Lake Nipigon. Of course, in northern Ontario, “busy” is a relative term.
There are no charts available, but Chaltrek in Thunder Bay offers the Lake Nipigon Signature Site map, which covers the entire lake. Although it doesn’t show water depths, contour lines, latitude and longitude, or even a compass rose and declination, the map is probably accurate enough for most small boat cruisers. Despite its failings, in fact, it’s almost essential, if only because it marks boat ramps, access roads, and the dozens of official Crown Land campsites that are scattered around the lake’s many islands. The map also explains seasonal camping closures from March to August to protect nesting birds and calving caribou (yes, caribou—this isn’t the Arctic, but it’s still the North). A set of topographical maps covering the area are also be useful.
Nipigon is a big lake, with long crossings between islands, dangerously cold water, and little chance of outside assistance; visitors should be well prepared and self-reliant. They should also be ready to sleep aboard. Not only does anchoring out eliminate the need for non-Canadians to purchase an expensive Crown Land camping permit ($10 per person per night, available at the Pigeon River Border Crossing between Minnesota and Ontario, or wherever Canadian fishing licenses are sold), but it reduces exposure to the aggressive mosquito population (bring a head net) and discourages any black bears out looking for an easy meal. There are plenty of shallow protected coves; I never needed more than 20’ feet of anchor line.
Some campsites are well maintained; others are not (check Paddling Light for brief descriptions of selected campsites). Thick brush can make setting up a tent, or even simply stepping ashore, very difficult. And Nipigon is bear country so food needs to be secured accordingly. At many campsites there may be no place to beach a boat, particularly in periods of high water, but with no tides to worry about, it’s often possible to anchor from the stern in knee-deep water with a bow line tied to shore.
Bring everything you need. The town of Nipigon, thirty miles from the South Bay ramp, has just a few basic amenities: gas station, convenience store, commercial campgrounds, and a Subway. The nearest bigger towns are Thunder Bay, 100 miles west, and White River, 200 miles east.—TP
If you have an interesting story to tell about your travels in a small wooden boat, please email us a brief outline and a few photos.
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all photographs by the author
Two aspects of An Inland Voyage, the book that Stevenson published about the voyage, touched me immediately: first, the course, which I found wonderful and even exotic despite its geographic proximity to my home in Bordeaux; and, second, its vagabond spirit, which struck me as reawakening an ethic of leaving much to chance, a dance with luck, relying on unplanned encounters and unfolding episodes.
