There’s a little balancing act I have to do when hauling my boat up on its trailer. After I draw the boat in by its painter, I tiptoe down the trailer tongue pulling the winch cable out as I go, clip the cable’s snaphook into the bow eye, and walk the tongue back to the car. I haven’t fallen off yet but my number’s bound to come up. As I crank the boat forward with the winch the cable accumulates on the drum, effectively increasing its diameter and I lose mechanical advantage just as the boat’s full weight is coming to rest on the trailer. I often have to pull the cable sideways to distribute it more evenly on the drum; I have to be very careful not to let my hand slip along the cable lest my palm get laid open by a broken wire.
The Sky Winch put an end to this nonsense. It uses the painter so I can lead the boat to the trailer and put the winch to use immediately while I’m still on solid footing at the back of the car. The winch drum is essentially a round jam cleat that grips the rope and then feeds it out after a half turn. The rope doesn’t accumulate and the mechanical advantage doesn’t diminish.
The 1/2″ braided painter takes a half turn around the drum and then feeds out the top of the winch.
Attaching the Sky Winch to my trailer took under half an hour. Its sturdy steel L bracket is secured to the trailer post with two bolts and the angle of the nylon winch body can be adjusted to suit the angle of the post. My trailer has a plywood deck and a pair of carpeted supports to support the bilges of the boat on it, a Caledonia yawl weighing about 400 lbs. (The manufacturer specifies the winch is for “lighter-weight boats under 18′/1,000 lbs.”) The trailer is painted, not galvanized, so I usually back it up to the point where the axle is just above the surface of the water. The boat doesn’t get floated on and off and dragging its full weight across the plywood deck puts a lot of strain on the winch, much more than there would be if the trailer were equipped with rollers. Dragging the boat forward the last 6′ with my cable winch takes two hands on the handle.
The manufacturer notes that the Sky Winch will accommodate line up to ½″ and recommends ½″ solid braid line for best results. I experimented with ⅜″ nylon line, both solid braid and three-strand laid line, and it worked fine until that last 6′ and then slipped. Neither type of ½″ nylon line slipped, though the laid line bunched up leaving the drum. Solid braid ½″ line is indeed the way to go.
The 9″-long Sky Winch handle is a direct drive for the 1½″ drum and its mechanical advantage feels similar to that of my geared cable winch. A trigger on the bottom of the Sky Winch allows the drum to reverse and release its grip on the line. The only problem I have with the Sky Winch was with the spring that keeps the line pressed to the top of the drum. With wet rope the spring can get pulled back rather than letting the rope slide by. With one finger on the trigger and another on the spring, I could get the line to back up and slip free of the drum.
I’ve seen a lot of awkward performances as boats get loaded on trailers and with the Sky Winch I’ll gladly avoid adding my wobbly balance-beam routine to the gymnastics offered at the ramp.
Christopher Cunningham is the editor of Small Boats Monthly
The Greenfield Sky Winch is available from numerous retailers at $41 to $60. It carries one-year manufacturer warranty.
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WHIO’s gaff rig carries 235 sq ft of sail. When the wind fails, an outboard mounted forward of the transom provides power. The notch in the transom allows the motor to be kicked up.
Ralf Schlothauer first tried to build a boat when he was six years old. He scavenged bits of plywood and lumber from the neighborhood and then enlisted the help of his sandbox playmates. The result was not a boat but a collection of even smaller bits of plywood and lumber. In his 30s his wife gave him a copy of The Backyard Boat Builder by John Welsford. He thumbed through the pages for a few years trying to decide what kind of boat he should build. “I never really fell for any of the dinghies and small sailboats. If I was going to make my lifelong dream come true, I had to build something special, something for my whole growing family would enjoy, something that would be like a mini campervan on the water but not compromise on a classic look.”
With her centerboard retracted, WHIO can anchor safely in waist-deep water.
He was drawn to Welsford’s Penguin, a 21′ pocket cruiser. It sleeps four, two in the roomy V-berth forward and two berths that extend from the main cabin aft under the cockpit seats. The galley, large enough for a two-burner stove and cookware, opens up to the port side of the main cabin. A portable head sits to starboard off to the side of the passageway to the forward berth. The accommodations were all his family required for extended weekend cruises and yet the Penguin would be small enough to be kept at his home and trailered to their New Zealand cruising grounds.
Designer John Welsford (right) pays a visit aboard WHIO. The view looking forward takes in the galley and the portable head head tucked in the passageway to the forward berth.
“When I ordered the building plans from John Welsford I had only very basic shop skills, and enough naivety to fool myself about how long it would actually take to finish the project.” Ralf persisted with occasional help from John and the informative mistakes that slow the going on the steep side of the learning curve. As his skills improved he “looked forward more and more to my time in the workshop. It gave me the satisfaction of doing something real to balance a day job that consists mostly of phone calls, emails and meetings.”
WHIO, named for a New Zealand river duck, emerged over the course of seven years and was launched quietly with just family and one boat-wise friend present. “The first time in our own boat was every bit of the magical experience I had hoped for,” says Ralf. “The kids could swim, jump in the water, play Frisbee and later we could all sit in the cockpit or cabin having a well-deserved cuppa tea or even a handmade espresso.”
WHIO’s bulder, Ralf Schlothauer, sails Lake Rotoiti, a 9-mile long mountain lake on New Zealand’s North Island.
Ralf made a few modifications as he got to know the boat and WHIO performed beautifully: “The boat feels extremely stable and safe.” With her cutter rig she is very well balanced. “When she heels a slight weather helm emerges as John intended.” WHIO easily reaches 4 to 5 knots and has, so far, peaked at 5.7 knots in about 15 knots of wind. “She is all I had dreamed of and worked for over those long years of building.”
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At Dark Harbor, Maine, the legacy of the Rossiter Skiff outshines that of even its most popular fiberglass counterparts. Dark Harbor, located on the mid-coast island of Islesboro, is home to a small summer colony. The family of skiffs that evolved here has been around for decades, and summer residents and local fishermen alike continue to use these boats more than a half-century after the design’s debut. Some of the boats have become family heirlooms.
First built by Willis Rossiter toward the end of World War II, the Rossiter Skiff—originally called the Willis Skiff—was designed around the increasing availability of small and reliable outboard engines. The skiffs’ plywood construction made them relatively light and the extreme rocker built into the bow allowed the boats to run up a beach for some distance before grounding out. Island picnic-goers prize the boats, as their shallow forward sections allow passengers to alight with dry feet while, on a beach of average slope, engines can remain in the water with ample depth for safe operation. Additionally, the hulls are more efficiently driven than similar-sized V-bottomed designs. The hard-chined hull is easily built and provides enough stability to accommodate whole families.
all photographs by the author
The generous rocker forward will set the bow high on the beach for stepping ashore dry-shod.
The extreme rocker in the bow has an additional benefit: Combined with the boat’s considerable length, it allows these skiffs to be towed rather well at moderate speeds. Instead of ploughing down into the water, as some tenders do, the stem of a Rossiter Skiff lifts clear without the stern squatting; the hull simply planes along nicely.
The Rossiter Skiff has evolved over the years. Willis, after building as many as eight each winter for the better part of 20 years, built his last skiff in the early 1970s. At that time, two basic models were available: a 14-footer and a 16-footer. The 14-footer had the option of a standard or narrow beam, while the 16′ boats were all built with a beam of 5′8″. Since then, a number of builders have created their own renditions of this legendary skiff. One of the more prolific ones was island carpenter Butch McCorrison who expanded the list of offerings to include hulls as short as 9′.
More recently, Pendleton Yacht Yard (PYY), also of Islesboro, has been building Rossiter Skiffs to order. They’ve continually tweaked the design, and today’s hull is a little wider than the original version—largely to accommodate the weight of modern four-stroke engines. Also, the majority of recent builds have been the 16′ version, as this hull is large enough to tow youngsters in a tube or take the whole family on picnic outings.
With its bit set well forward, the skiff maintains much of its maneuverability when towing.
The design is based upon economy of construction, for it takes only four sheets of plywood to build a 16′ hull. Options were and are few. The stem, frames, stringers, keel, and other structural pieces are of white oak, while thwarts have, by habit, been of mahogany. Likewise, hulls have traditionally been built of Douglas-fir marine plywood, though other good plywood options exist. Various species of mahogany plywood might take a finish better than the tried-and-true fir, but island residents—including the crew at PYY—are still partial to fir’s golden glow. Also, as PYY’s project manager Marc Clayton explains, the outer veneer of fir plywood is thicker than that of many of the other options, and this allows for the inevitable wear of frequent beaching.
The sides are of 3/8″ plywood and the bottom of 1/2″. In a nod to economy, the pieces cut away from the bottom panel at the bow are glued to the stern in order to gain the needed width, which is greater than the standard 48″ plywood sheet. Likewise, both sides of the hull are less than 24″ tall, allowing for mirror-image panels to be cut from single sheets. For the sides, a 16′ hull uses two sheets of plywood glued together and essentially ripped in half. Other offcuts from the hull are used to make the partial bulkheads under the thwarts.
PYY builds their hulls around a simple jig, and once the stem and transom are in place and the side panels fastened to them, the boat has a substantial degree of structural integrity. An oak rubrail wraps around the sheer and conceals the top end-grain of the hull’s plywood. This rail is let into both the breasthook and quarter knees. On a completed hull, this rail is largely hidden by gunwale guard.
An oak stringer running the length of the hull at the height of the thwarts provides stiffness. The thwarts are supported by partial bulkheads and significantly strengthen the hulls. Sawn frames run from the bottom stringer to the tops of the hulls. The use of the sawn frames has diminished over time; original hulls had as many as five per side while newer hulls have only one set between the aft thwart and the stern.
While transoms have typically been of solid mahogany, PYY now uses two pieces of 3/4″ plywood glued together for a beefy 1½″ of thickness. Substantial oak stringers run the length of the bottom and provide protection during beaching as well as directional stability when under way or under tow.
The towing bit prevents the center thwart of this skiff from being used for rowing but a set of rowlocks forward is well suited or rowing with cargo or passengers in the stern.
The Rossiter Skiff is a jack-of-all-trades, and as a result, perhaps not a master of any. However, the skiffs are rowable, extremely stable, and easily powered. They do have some downsides: They can pound in a chop and are heavy to move back to the water if left high and dry on the beach. And, being flat-bottomed, they have no bilge in which to conceal small amounts of water. However, deluxe versions have teak gratings in their after portions to keep any nuisance water well away from the operator’s feet.
Under power, with only the operator aboard, a 14-footer’s narrow hull will comfortably cruise at 14 knots with an 8-hp outboard motor. Typically, the 14′ boats use around 10 hp and 16-footers use between 15 hp and 20 hp. The 16′ hulls can easily achieve between 18 and 20 knots with two adults. While under tow a 16-footer is more stable than a 14; even a 14 will tow safely at 15 knots.
A canvas gunwale guard protects the boats tended to by this Rossiter skiff. A set of fenders hung over the rail from the thwart knees provides additional cushioning.
In addition to towing well, the Rossiter Skiff itself makes a great towboat. At PYY, these skiffs are used when hauling and launching engineless craft. Many summer families use their skiffs as tenders to their Dark Harbor 20 racing sailboats, and it is a common sight to see a “20” under tow behind a Rossiter on a windless race day. As the boats are so often used as tenders, canvas gunwale guard is standard on almost all of them, as it has been since Willis built his first skiffs. A couple of skiffs have even been fit with purpose-built towing bitts, allowing great maneuverability when towing heavy craft. The towing bitts have an added benefit: They can be used as the vertical support for a variety of canvas covers.
There is sufficient stability for an adult to easily stand on the rail of a skiff, which inspires much confidence. Although they are prone to the aforementioned pounding and chattering, in a seaway they feel secure and stable.
Islander Linda Sienkiewicz has fond memories of her father hand-hauling lobster traps and taking the family on picnics in their 16′ Rossiter Skiff. She recalls it was one of the first of many boats her family owned, and she clearly remembers it with affection. In fact, almost all islanders have at least one story to tell involving a Rossiter Skiff. These fond memories inspire a certain loyalty, and that, no doubt, is what made this design endure and thrive.
Nakomis Nelson is a sailor, freelance author, and father. His armchair ambitions include sustainable architecture and organic farming. He is an avid backcountry skier and constant seeker of the unspoiled world. Nakomis and his wife run a charter yacht company in Midcoast Maine aboard their 58′ wooden motor yacht and live at the dead end of dirt road on an island off Maine’s coast.
These days, I do my cruising in small, open boats. They’re cheaper to build, easier to haul, quicker to set up, and more exciting to sail than big boats. I’ve learned to accept their limitations, happily for the most part, but there are times, like a third straight day pinned down by high winds and driving rain, when what I really want is a small, cozy cabin. I don’t need anything fancy, just a dry place to lay out a sleeping bag and small stove, but the boat still has to be cheap and simple to build, light enough to trailer easily, and enough of a shoal-draft cruiser to pull up to a beach or anchor in knee-deep water.
For that kind of sailing, John Welsford’s Sweet Pea is well worth a look. The name is an allusion to Swee’Pea, the quick-scooting baby from the Popeye comics and cartoons. Welsford originally drew Sweet Pea as a club racer, but his clients also wanted the boat to be suitable for cruising their sparsely inhabited, relatively sheltered home waters. Welsford describes the result as “sport cruising on a budget,” and that’s exactly what Sweet Pea offers: a fairly fast shallow-water cruiser for those who prefer the comforts of a cabin and a portable toilet to a tent and a trowel. The boat could even be a contender in endurance events and adventure races, where a place for the off-watch crew to rest comfortably out of the weather can offer more of an advantage than pure speed.
all photos courtesy of John Welsford
The hull’s flat center panel will keep the Sweet Pea upright on a falling tide.
Sweet Pea’s multichined hull is built upright, with hull panels defined by stringers over plywood bulkheads erected on a narrow bottom panel—a simple and inexpensive construction scheme that Welsford often uses. Indeed, Sweet Pea may be simpler than most. Sail Oklahoma! boating festival founder Michael Monies, who built the Sweet Pea described in this article, described the process as “way easier than building a Pathfinder,” a similar-sized Welsford design with no cabin in glued lapstrake plywood, and “about the same as a Scamp,” the popular 11′11″ micro-cruiser designed by Welsford for Small Craft Advisormagazine.
The side panels—three per side, including a narrow sheer plank that adds some tumblehome aft—are 9mm plywood, with the main chine just above the waterline. A large steel centerboard provides plenty of lateral plane, while its weight adds some stability. With its plywood hull, outboard motorwell, and raised-deck cabin, Sweet Pea’s aesthetic is relatively modern rather than ultra-traditional. Two rigs are shown: marconi sloop with spinnaker carrying 198 sq ft of sail, and gaff yawl with 180 sq ft. For a cruising boat, I’d choose the yawl for the advantages a mizzen offers. Those more interested in racing might prefer the bigger sloop rig, although Sweet Pea’s light weight, fine entry, and clean run should have her well over hull speed when reaching or running, even with the smaller yawl rig.
When I first saw John and Ellen Miller’s Sweet Pea on the beach at Sail Oklahoma!, it wasn’t immediately obvious how well it fit my idea of a good small cruising boat. That’s because, like most Welsford boats, it seems far bigger than it is. The cockpit could hold six adults for short daysails—I found it luxurious for two or three when we took it out for a long sail—and the raised-deck cabin offers two full-sized bunks and comfortable sitting headroom, even for skipper John Miller, who is 6′3″. Sweet Pea feels like a 20-footer, well into the category of “big boats” for someone like me, more accustomed to cruising in a 15′ dinghy. And yet, she’s only 17′5″ long, including the short bowsprit, and weighs about 1,100 lbs empty—light enough, no doubt, for a motivated crew to manage the mandatory beach launch (sans trailer) at events such as the WaterTribe Everglades Challenge.
Although the Millers haven’t committed to the Everglades Challenge yet, they did take their newly launched Sweet Pea on the Texas 200, a popular five-day adventure cruise along the Gulf coast of Texas. “I’d never really sailed a small boat in the conditions we had down in Texas,” John Miller says. I know from my own Texas 200 experiences that winds above 20 knots are typical, and there are stretches of open water that can be challenging for small boats. But Sweet Pea handled it quite comfortably, even though the Millers had only sailed their new boat for about two hours total before setting out on the race.
The yawl rig carries 180 sq ft of sail and short, manageable spars.
“I never felt out of control or struggling in any way,” Miller reports. “The boat told you what it wanted to do.” As a result, the Millers sailed along in perfect comfort, averaging about 8 mph according to their GPS, and surfing easily at 10 mph. And with the mizzen for balance, they were able to make their Sweet Pea self-steer—an important consideration for an event where 40-mile days, and long stretches at the tiller, are standard fare. “I don’t think we really touched any of the sheets or the helm all the way from Panther Cut to South Pass,” Miller says, describing one 6-mile close reach. They also discovered that the boat offers plenty of room for cruising. “We lived on it for a week,” Miller tells me. “We could probably go for two weeks on that boat with the two of us.” Having spent a full month aboard a 15’ dinghy this summer, I imagined happily spending six or seven weeks aboard a Sweet Pea. With a supply stop or two, I could easily spend an entire summer aboard—and never get trapped ashore in a sagging, dripping tent. Sweet Pea was starting to sound like my kind of boat.
That impression only got stronger when Ellen Miller invited me out on Sweet Pea for a long, windy sail, along with Michael Monies and designer John Welsford. Launching was simple: Wade out into knee-deep water, manhandle the boat into the wind like an oversized dinghy to raise the sail, and hop aboard. The offshore breeze pushed us off into deeper water, where we dropped the heavy steel centerboard and set off across the lake.
The offset mizzen and the outboard flank Sweet Pea’s rudder. The sides of the footwell are angled provide comfortable footing when the boat heels while under sail.
Once we were moving, my first impression was that I was on a much bigger boat. Sweet Pea is beamy enough to feel quite stable underfoot, and even hard on the wind she’ll heel only so far and then lock in place firmly. Minor triumphs of comfort and ergonomics reveal themselves everywhere aboard, and what might seem to be trivial features make quite a difference. The sides of the cockpit footwell, for example, are perfectly angled to provide a stable footrest as the boat heels. Everyone I talked to who had sailed in the Millers’ Sweet Pea noticed this, and raved about how comfortable it was. The seats themselves are wide and comfortable, and visibility from the helm is excellent, with the cabintop low enough to see over easily. The tiller felt light and responsive, needing only fingertip control.
Even on a broad reach we were able to play the mizzen to make the boat steer itself, virtually hands-off. When we hit planing mode, the shift was so subtle that Welsford had to point it out the first time. The subtle smoothness of that transition is an intentional feature of the design; Sweet Pea’s rocker is designed to lift the bow and slip up on plane easily, rather than “popping out” by brute force when the wind powers up enough to overcome the bow wave. “It sails wonderfully,” John Miller told me, summing up Sweet Pea’s performance in the Texas 200. “It’s way more capable than I realized at first. I would feel comfortable taking it on some pretty big water.” Very quickly, I found myself agreeing. Sweet Pea sails as if she wants to take care of her crew.
Still under construction, this Sweet Pea cabin awaits its roof. The benches flanking the centerboard trunk serve as full-length bunks.
Of course, no boat is perfect. Sweet Pea’s cabin, comfortable as it is at anchor, is less comfortable while sailing. The big centerboard restricts legroom, and an angle of heel that feels perfectly comfortable in the cockpit feels much more extreme below. Everything feels much more extreme below, with the cabin magnifying even the smallest sounds; a routine tack can sound like an emergency. The centerboard tackle runs down the cabin’s centerline, making it difficult to switch sides during tacks (at rest that’s not a problem, because the tackle can be temporarily removed, and replaced with a bolt to hold the board in place).
But those complaints are minor, and every skipper will find his own way of dealing with them. One issue that can’t be avoided, though, is setup time, which is far greater than the time needed for a 15′ open boat with an unstayed rig. “You’ve got two to two-and-a-half hours of setup and takedown for however much time you spend on the water,” John Miller told me. Which means that unless you plan to keep a Sweet Pea on the water, either on a mooring or in a slip, it’s not a good choice for a boat that will be dry-sailed and trailered. But the solution to that problem seems especially simple to me: just set up the boat once in spring, and spend your entire summer cruising. Simple enough.
[table]
LOA/17′ 5″
Beam/7′ 4″
DRAFT
Board up/8″
Board down/4′ 5″
SAIL AREA
Sloop/198 sq ft
Yawl/180 sq ft
[/table]
The cruising yawl rig has short manageable spars and sails that are easily reefed.
The sloop rig’s 198 sq ft of sail will bring the Sweet Pea up on a plane in a reach or a run.
The plans call for 9mm plywood skin over the chines and plywood bulkheads, a simple structure quickly constructed. The cockpit will sea six and the cabin will seat four and sleep two.
In the early 1960s Martin Litton, a travel editor for Sunset magazine, came to the McKenzie River in Oregon to write a story. When he got there, he saw wooden drift boats on the water; they would change his profession, his life, and river running on the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon forever.
Martin and Pat Riley, his partner on trips in the 1950s, were planning to run the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon in 1962 before the Glen Canyon Dam opened the following year. They needed new boats because the cataract boats they had used on previous trips were at the bottom of the Colorado River. They had been patched so many times they were literally falling apart at the seams—so, midway through a descent through the Grand Canyon in ’59, Pat scuttled them at Pipe Creek and his group hiked out of the canyon on foot.
The fiberglass cataract boats Martin and Pat used on the Colorado then were built to a design first developed for plywood construction by Norm Nevils, a river-runner of the ’30s and ’40s, for running the cataracts—whitewater—of Utah’s San Juan River. They had a low profile with vertical sides and a slight rocker, and held only one or two passengers. They sliced through waves, rather than riding over them which was hard on the boats and made for a wet and often unstable ride.
As Martin watched the graceful McKenzie drift boats cutting through the technical rapids and surfing high on the waves, he thought he might have found the perfect boat for the Colorado. The boats sat with both ends rising almost a foot out of the water. With that amount of rocker, they could pivot and spin on the tops of the waves with just a flick of the wrist from the oarsman. The river flowed under and around the boats rather than colliding with the stern, pushing them relentlessly forward with the current.
Dave Mortenson Collection
During the 1962 trip Martin Litton rowed PORTOLA and Pat Reilly rowed SUSIE TOO, the new McKenzie-inspired boats. Brick Mortenson rowed FLAVELL II, a cataract boat .
Dave Mortenson Collection
Dave Mortenson, ready for the river. The foam mix that his father Brick used to fill the space in his boat’s buoyancy compartments was very expensive so he used empty Clorox bottles to take up some of the volume. He sent Dave into every laundromat in the San Fernando Valley to dig through the trash looking for the plastic bottles: In those days they were the only plastic bottles you could find. If that wasn’t bad enough, Brick had Dave wear two bottles tied to his life jacket. Fortunately, the requirement for extra flotation was dropped. It had been, according to Dave, “a 13-year-old’s worst nightmare.”
Recognizing the advantages the boats would have on the Colorado, Martin ordered two from Keith Steele, the most active boatbuilder on the McKenzie. In the spring of ’62, Martin picked them up and commented on how big they were compared to the cataract boats. He and Pat initially referred to the new boats, PORTOLA and SUSIE TOO, as “monsters.”
On that Grand Canyon river trip in 1962 there was a third boat, FLAVELL II, a cataract boat built and rowed by Brick Mortenson who took his 13-year-old son Dave, with him on the trip. Almost 50 years later, I met Dave at the 2011 McKenzie River Wooden Boat Festival at the Eagle Rock Lodge in Vida, Oregon. He had come to see the boats that had first caught Martin’s eye and to talk with some local boatbuilders. Dave had a vision: He wanted to re-create that trip of ’62 on its 50th anniversary to honor his father and the other river runners who blazed the trail in these Oregon-built boats. When he brought up replicating those boats, I was hooked by the idea and his enthusiasm. I agreed to build a replica of PORTOLA, even though the only record of it was in old photographs and videos. A good friend of mine, Randy Dersham, agreed to build a SUSIE TOO. He had a boatshop on the McKenzie only a few miles from where the original boats were built. Dave would not succeed in having the replica FLAVELL II built until 2014 but he was thrilled that the two Oregon boats being built for the 50th anniversary trip.
Over the course of that summer, Randy, his son Sanderson, and I assembled the hulls of our replica boats. As we slowly bent the side panels around the frames, we heard the sickening pops of wood approaching its breaking point. We listened to the wood, slowed down our bending, held our breath, fastened the panels to the frames, and hoped they would hold. I wondered, with so much tension, would my boat just explode on contact if I hit a river boulder? We all felt better after we fastened the side panels to the frames and attached the bottoms, holding everything together.
With the hulls finished, I hauled mine to my garage shop where I could work at my usual snail’s pace. The hundreds of pictures and video from the 1962 and 1964 trips were my guide to building the interior.
The paint on PORTOLA was still drying as I backed it out of the shop and headed for the Colorado River in the spring of 2012. Passing through Oregon snowstorms, Utah rainstorms, and high-desert dust storms, we finally reached our launching ramp at Lee’s Ferry, Arizona, 16 river miles below Glen Canyon Dam and the beginning of the Grand Canyon. Fifty years ago at this spot Martin Litton, Pat Reilley, Brick and young Dave Mortenson, and six other passengers launched three boats that had never touched water. I wondered whether they were either a bit crazy, poor time managers, or just very confident in their boatbuilding ability.
I eased my PORTOLA down the ramp for her first touch of water and prayed this would not be the most embarrassing launch in the history of Colorado river running. She slid off the trailer and floated for the first time in the quiet entry to the Grand Canyon. The crowd on shore was as pleased as we were to see PORTOLA and SUSIE TOO floating together alongside the cataract boat replicas FLAVELL, SUSIE R, and GEM.
In the clear pool above the Colorado’s first riffle, I took the first pulls on my 9′ red-and-white wooden oars and looked downriver, admiring the impressive rose-colored canyon walls rising 1,500′ on both sides of the river. The point of no return was only a few strokes away. Beyond it there would be no rowing back upriver against the current.
I was part of a 16-member team that included some of the most experienced oarsmen on the Colorado and five support rafts. I’d developed my skills in Oregon boats on Oregon water, but I was uneasy. This was the Colorado River, and I had only a fraction of an inch of plywood between me and disaster.
Dave Mortenson
Badger is the first significant rapid on the Colorado downriver from the launch site at Lee’s Ferry. It has a 15’ drop and is rated Class 4 to 6 depending on the water level. The untethered oar Greg lost was fished out of the river down below by teammate Craig Wolfson.
Our first real test was a Class 5 rapid (a 1-to-10 scale is used on the Colorado instead of the I-to-VI classifications used elsewhere) called Badger just a few miles below Lee’s Ferry. It has a drop of 15′ over a sixth of a mile, an impressive wave-train of high rollers down the middle, and sharp hydraulics on the edges caused by hidden boulders washed into the river from two side canyons. At the start of the trip I’d been told I needed tethers for my oars, in case they popped out of the oarlocks and out of my hands. Pop out of an oarlock maybe, but out of my hands? Not likely! After logging thousands of hours and as many miles rowing a drift boat on technical water, I had never lost an oar, never even come close.
As I raced through the first drop, it felt like I was in the front seat of a roller-coaster and should stick both hands in the air and scream. A cold wave splashed over the bow and slapped me in the face. I dug the left oar deep in the current to get out of the wild ride in the middle. The river pulled back and lifted me out of my seat. In a split second of good judgment, I let go of the oar and avoided being catapulted out of the boat.
I suddenly had an untethered oar adrift in the water and only one in hand to finish the rapid. Craig Wolfson, one of our most seasoned Colorado river rats, was the safety spotter waiting in cataract replica SUSIE R in an eddy below the rapid. He fished my oar out of the river. “Welcome to the Colorado!” he laughed as he handed it over. That night I made tethers for my oars.
We camped where the Litton party camped and could recognize the places recorded in their diaries and photographs. Many nights I rolled out a canvas cowboy bedroll and slept on the soft sand under the stars wrapped in a wool blanket. When I had the energy to set it up, I slept in a canvas pyramid tent similar to those used in the ’60s. It had a familiar musty smell from the moisture of the morning dew that reminded me of the tents at Boy Scout camp when I was growing up.
Dave Mortenson
Greg races PORTOLA down the tongue, hitting his line in Soap Rapid. This second major rapid has a 17′ drop and gave the rowers a feel for the river and their newly built boats.
About 40 miles downriver from Lee’s Ferry we camped at a place called Tatahatso, right in the heart of Marble Canyon where soft-pink stone walls rise up straight out of the river, leaving just a winding ribbon of river a half mile below the canyon rim. A narrow strip of sand nestled between the canyon wall and the river was the perfect campsite for our group.
Before dinner I took a hike in a side canyon above our camp with teammate Tom Pamperin, one of the support raft oarsmen. After a half hour of boulder jumping and trail scrambling we reached an overlook about 300’ directly above our campsite. In the fading sunlight the river looked like a thin twisted piece of chrome. We could clearly hear the clatter of pots and pans in the camp kitchen below, and the air had a wonderful aroma of campfire, tamarisk, and food cooking on the camp stoves. From this vantage point high above camp I began to see and feel the immensity of the canyon: I was amazed at how much bigger it was than I’d imagined.
We tried to replicate many of the 1962 photographs as we could. At Boulder Narrows a rock five stories high juts straight out of the river, forming a channel on each side of it. Perched on top of the rock is a helter-skelter pile of tree trunks and root wads and driftwood deposited by a high-water flood in 1957. They’re still there unmoved, a half-century later.
The camping gear used in the early ’60s was often canvas and wool. In a nod to that era, I camped every night using either a canvas tent or cowboy bedroll. Nighttime temperatures were usually in the ’40s. Here at Tanner Wash I pitched my tent away from the river and did a little hiking.
We talked around the campfires at night and over coffee in the morning about the rapids we had already run and the challenges of the rapids ahead. Each presents a different problem to solve and a unique challenge to overcome. At House Rock the main current sends you faster and faster toward a rock the size of a two-story house where the river makes a hard right turn. If you can’t break through the grip of the current and pull to the right, you’ll smash right into the rock and your boat will either flip, break apart, or get sucked into the huge hole on the other side of the rock. Hermit has a wave-train created by boulders buried underwater; it builds to a crescendo at a towering fifth wave followed by an exceptionally deep trough. At Bedrock the river runs with great speed into an imposing rock wall that violently splits the river in two. The safe line is to the right, but not too far or you’ll run through shallow water filled with boat-wrecking rocks. If you screw up and go through the left channel—and survive—you’re entitled to wear a T-shirt that says, simply, “I went left at Bedrock.”
Dave Mortenson
Randy Dersham, rowing SUSIE TOO, hits his line perfectly between two explosion waves in Crystal Rapid. Before Glen Canyon Dam controlled river flows, Crystal was a minor rapid but a major flash flood dramatically changed its difficulty and is now considered by many to be the biggest rapid on the Colorado.
Crystal, a Class 9, is a loud, angry, and confusing rapid where waves explode out of nowhere and send boats spinning out of control. There never seems to be a clear line through Crystal, and there are two huge holes at the bottom on opposite sides of the river that can swallow a boat.
Dave Mortenson
In Lava Falls success and failure both take only take 30 seconds. Greg takes PORTOLA successfully through the maelstrom as safety kayakers stand by ready to come to the rescue.
And then there’s Lava Falls, a 10, with a steep drop at the top, big rolling waves, huge holes, boat-flipping lateral currents, and big rock obstacles. There is a scouting perch on top of a huge black boulder where you can watch the carnage of boats attempting the falls until you can make yourself believe there’s a way to run the rapid unscathed and muster up the courage to get back in your boat.
Dave Mortenson
Granite, located at river mile 93 and rated a Class 8, requires a quick dip in the top hole in order to miss the larger hole at the bottom. Stefane Poirier, rowing SUSIE TOO, takes a big bite out of the hole but came popping out on one of the wildest runs of the trip.
Granite is a Class 9 that you can hear long before you can see it. Its roar is louder and more unsettling than most because of a precipitous drop and haunting echoes from a sheer canyon wall that rises straight up on the far shore. You can pull off the river and walk several hundred yards down to the point where the water drops out of sight. The only path is on the far right, balancing boats on a ridge of water welling up between the canyon wall on one side and one of the largest and deepest holes on the river—a Scylla and Charybdis with no margin for error.
There are rapids to run in almost every mile of the river, though most are rated no higher than Class 6. At mile 150 we arrived at Upset Rapid, one of the prettiest and yet most treacherous rapids in The Grand Canyon. With a beautiful red canyon wall as a backdrop on one side and a cobble garden of boulders on the other, it’s possible to scramble the entire length of this rapid on the river-right side at the water’s edge. It’s hair-raising to be so close to the power of a Class 8 rapid as it thunders along between the walls and over the ledges from top to bottom. One ledge at Upset runs across the entire width of the river, creating a steep drop that can easily flip boats. There is a deep hole on the right, and the run along the left requires nerve and a steady hand from the boatman to put the nose of the craft as close to the left wall as possible.
As we picked the running order for this rapid, we sent a few of our support rafts to test the line before sending the wooden boats. Tom was the first to go. He set up his raft for a river-left run at the top of the rapid and dropped into the turbulence. With his strong and steady rowing he avoided the dangers of river right, hit the ledge hole nose-first, and powered through the drop. At the bottom of the rapid he eddied out and stood by as a safety boat.
Yoshi Kobayashi went next. At just 4′10″ she has to stand up to power the oars and move the big raft through the rapids. Just before the ledge the river turned her, and she hit the drop-off slightly sideways. The raft boat hit the dip and stopped abruptly, and Yoshi was thrown into the fast-moving cold water. She managed to swim to the raft and grab the flip lines on the upriver side but was unable to pull herself up onto the raft. Craig, this time rowing SUSIE R, another cataract boat, tossed a throw-rope and pulled her out of the icy water.
Dave Mortenson
Upset Rapid at mile 150 has a 15’ drop and a big spread in its rating: Class 3 to 8 depending on the water level. Greg keeps PORTOLA perilously close to the canyon wall in order to break through a big lateral wave at the bottom of the run.
I was next. PORTOLA dropped into and flew down the rapid so close to the canyon wall that I thought she’d leave red paint on the rocks. I hit the ledge bow-first and dropped over. I pushed hard to get enough momentum on the climb out of the trough; then a tidal wave of water crashed over the bow and over my head, and PORTOLA rose as if shot from a cannon. The bow pointed straight up into blue sky, and I thought PORTOLA might pitchpole backwards. Breaking through the crest of the wave, I struggled to see through the sheet of water pouring over my face. PORTOLA landed hard, but with a few tugs on the oars I was safe in the eddy at the bottom of the rapids. This was what it had been like to be in this exact spot a half century ago, exhausted and elated in a gentle eddy at the bottom of a powerful and inspiring Colorado River rapid.
We had replicated many elements of the 1962 trip—the boats, the campsites, the pictures—but during our three weeks and 280 miles on the river the excitement of running each rapid, the dread as we heard another rapid ahead, the emotional highs and lows we shared with teammates, and the awe that the Grand Canyon inspires were experiences uniquely our own.
Greg Hatten is an outdoor writer, a consultant for active-consumer products, and a licensed Oregon Outfitter and Guide who hosts outdoor river adventures in a hand-crafted wooden drift boat pursuing steelhead on the fly.
Afterword
Two years after Litton and crew ran the Grand Canyon in their McKenzie-inspired boats, those same pioneers used these same boats on a trip for a public-relations campaign to halt construction of two dams that would have inundated the canyon and put a halt to river running. They were successful, and PORTOLA and SUSIE TOO were referred to by many as “The Boats That Saved the Grand Canyon.”
Dave Mortenson
A dam was almost built near here but Martin Litton and his fellow river runners documented their travels through this amazing place in 1962 and again in 1964 and showed the world what would be lost. Greg and Pam Mortenson in the replica PORTOLA are surrounded here by the vertical Redwall limestone cliffs that were saved, in part, by the original PORTOLA.
In the late 1960s, Martin Litton left Sunset magazine and formed a guide service called Grand Canyon Dories. During an era when most commercial guide services started using rubber rafts, he insisted on using wooden dories on the Colorado River. The appeal of wooden boats helped him bring people to appreciate and preserve wilderness. He named the dories in his fleet for natural wonders that had been destroyed by development. PORTOLA was renamed DIABLO CANYON, commemorating a pristine stretch of the California coastline where Martin and the Sierra Club had lost a bitter battle in 1968 to prevent the construction of a nuclear power plant atop an earthquake fault. SUSIE TOO was renamed MUSIC TEMPLE after one of the most beautiful side canyons within Glen Canyon. It was inundated when the Glen Canyon dam was finished, and now lies at the bottom of Lake Powell.
Litton last rowed the Grand Canyon in 2004; at the age of 87 he was the oldest person to do so. On November 30, 2014, he passed away at his home in Portola Valley, California, at the age of 97. His obituary in the New York Times called him “an unrelenting scout in the battle to preserve what was left of the wilderness in the American West, most notably the Grand Canyon and the Colorado River.” —GH
Replicas of the 1962 River Dories
Overall dimensions on the hulls of the PORTOLA and SUSIE TOO were 16′4″ long with a beam of 82″ at the sheer and 58″ at the chines. Although the hull form of the McKenzie river boats was well suited to the Colorado, an open boat wouldn’t survive the rapids. The interior had to be filled with sealed compartments to preserve buoyancy in rapids that could suddenly submerge the entire boat and fill it with water.
Greg Hatten
Using hundreds of pictures of the original PORTOLA from the 1962 trip, Greg carefully matched the placement and dimensions of the hatches, seats, and hardware. The various compartments were complex and extremely hard to replicate.
In the 60s Keith Steele used old-growth Douglas fir plywood hulls– ¼″ for the sides and ½″ for the bottom. Known for it’s long straight grain and superior strength, it was a preferred boat building material in the Pacific Northwest and was used in making some excellent plywood. We had to use the fir plywood available today and it was not nearly the quality that it was 50 years ago. Our cataract boat replicas were also built out of plywood. The originals were fiberglass and after many patches and repairs, they were quite literally fell apart.
When Martin picked up the boats in the spring of ’62, he commented how wide the hulls were compared to the cataract boats they had used on previous trips. The cataracts they had been using were about the same length but were almost 2′ narrower. One of the biggest differences however was the rocker that was introduced with the new boats. PORTOLA and the SUSIE TOO had enough rocker to keep their ends out of the water, making them more agile than the cataracts, and allowing them ride up and over big waves rather than through them. I’ve logged a lot of hours rowing McKenzie river boats and while my PORTOLA was almost too maneuverable and felt a little flighty she was very agile in rock gardens.
Sawyer Oars provided the replica oars and spares we used. They were as close to the originals as possible. We painted them to match the original colorful schemes of the boats.—GH
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.
With the additional seating aft of the center thwart you can slide around the tiller between tacks and shift your weight aft.
As age makes its inevitable changes to the sailor’s once supple joints, certain positions that were once assumed without thought become uncomfortable, if not actually painful. When I was younger and singlehanding, my favorite place to sit was on the floorboards with my back against the side planking. If conditions are right, it’s hard to beat this position for comfort and a sense of being one with the boat. This position only works going to windward in a moderate breeze or on a reach in more boisterous conditions. As the wind dies or the boat heads downwind, it is necessary to scooch toward the boat’s centerline to maintain proper trim. Here the posture is nowhere near as comfortable. Tacking while sitting on the boat’s bottom brings out the grunts and groans.
The thwarts and stern sheets of my own rowing-and-sailing skiff are placed, as they need to be, for the best trim with varying numbers of crew. The center thwart is the rowing position for one person in the boat. The forward thwart is placed where the oarsman will balance a passenger at the stern. Either thwart can be used for rowing with two passengers.
The middle and aft seating positions are usually not ideal for sailing. Few small, light boats sail well with the helmsman sitting in the stern sheets: The transom drags and lateral resistance moves aft, upsetting the balance of sails and hull. Keeping the helmsman’s weight near center of the boat to preserve fore-and-aft trim for light air requires that he sit on the middle thwart. In a boat over 10′ long, this requires an impractically long tiller.
One solution to the problem is a second board butted aft of the original center thwart that increases the seat’s total width to about 16″. Extending aft from each side of the widened thwart are arc-shaped boards supported by the seat risers and cleats at the added thwart’s after edge. A rower sits on the original seat with thighs extending across the added board. The sailing position is on the new woodwork, closer to the tiller. The skipper can slide around the arc created by the doubled thwart and the sideboards to a nearly ideal position either for light air or for going to windward in a breeze, and come about, without having to rise from the seat or pass by the tiller.
The sheet on most boats this size leads from a point on the boom either directly above or somewhat aft of the sailing position, so facing aft when coming about makes handling the sheet and tiller smoother. Tacking thus becomes an easy slide around the arc of seating with no crouching or pirouetting required.
When two people are aboard, the forward thwart is often a wet place when sailing to windward. Balance is best achieved when both people sit on the center thwart. The doubled thwart with its wings makes this a comfortable arrangement.
Harry Bryan is a boatbuilder, purveyor of plans, and contributing editor for WoodenBoat magazine.
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From top: Tasman Salt, Salt 1, Atlantic Salt, Pacific Salt, Mariner Salt
A good knife for boating has to hold up well in the marine environment. The blade has to be rustproof and hold a sharp edge. The Salt series of knives by Spyderco have been some of my favorites. I’ve collected a handful of them in the past nine years and they’ve held up well. The folders have remained easy to open and the blades have held their edges well and have been unaffected by salt water. (Some of the knives shown here are no longer in production or are available with a serrated edge only. Check Spyderco for the models currently available.) With just one exception, the Salt knives are made with H-1 steel. According to Spyderco, it’s not a true steel, but an exotic steel: It uses nitrogen instead of carbon in the alloy. Carbon reacts with the chloride in salt water to cause rust; nitrogen doesn’t.
After five years of exposure to salt water, the Caspian 2 had spots of rust, not from the H-1 steel but from iron-bearing grit picked up from the environment.
My longest running test of the H-1 steel for corrosion goes back to 2009. In the spring of the year I strapped the sheath of a Caspian 2 Salt, a model now discontinued, to the front of my PFD. For the five years the knife has been in that sheath it has been subjected to countless immersions in salt water (rolling was a regular part of my kayaking routine) and a regimen of neglect. At best, I’d hose my PFD off with fresh water, but I never removed the knife from its sheath to rinse and dry the blade. When took a look at the blade to report on it for this review there was rust stain at the base of the blade, a bit surprising so I took a closer look with a high-power loupe. The rust was in an area where the blade makes contact with the sheath. There were coffee-colored stains and some small black nodules of rust. A wipe with some fine steel wool removed the stain and the nodules and the H-1 underneath showed no signs of pitting or any permanent stain. While it had looked like the H-1 steel had rusted, the rust was from iron particles that had attached themselves to the blade. The blade was slightly magnetic, confirmed by tiny fragments of the steel wool fiber I found stuck to the H-1. I looked with the loupe at another knife that I’d used for many years and saw particles of what must have been iron, not yet rust stains, stuck to the blade. I lightly brushed a brand new Salt knife with steel wool and found tiny fibers of steel, too small to see seen with the naked eye, attached to the blade. So, while I found rust on the H-1, it was from foreign particles attracted by the weak magnetism of the blade.
After being intentionally dulled by whittling through a nail, the resharpened H-1 blade could cut cleanly into the loose edge of a piece of note paper.
To test how well the H-1 steel would take an edge, I needed a dull knife so I started with Atlantic Salt with a plain edge (this model is now only available with the Spyderco serrated edge) and whittled through a 16-penny nail. The factory edge was sharp enough and tough enough to curl up little shavings of steel from the nail and after going through the nail the blade was dull but not chipped. I restored the edge with my usual sharpening sequence: a diamond hone, two Japanese water stones and finally a buffing wheel charged with rouge. In 2 minutes the blade was sharp enough to pass the thumbnail test, catching instead of sliding, and in another minute, sharp enough to slice into the loose edge of a piece of paper.
The Jumpmaster is designed to cut through cordage and webbing. While developed for parachute mishaps, it has qualities well suited for marine emergencies.
Among the latest offerings in the Salt series are the Jumpmaster and the Tusk. The Jumpmaster has a 4″ serrated blade and textured fiberglass-reinforced nylon grips. Developed for Army parachute troops, it’s meant to cut through cordage and webbing quickly. I cut through ½″ solid braid nylon line in a single easy swipe and almost as easily sliced 8 layers of 1 ½″ nylon webbing —a combined thickness of 3/8″—in one go. A fiber-reinforced ½″ vinyl hose also succumbed to a single pass of the serrated edge. A tougher job is cutting out through a bight of line, but the Jumpmaster easily went through 3/8″ braid, and although the serrations made it hard to get a pull started on a bight of 1/2″ line, a single swipe cut through. The Jumpmaster and other Salt knives are good candidates for safety and rescue work where entanglements pose a threat.
The Salt Tusk has titanium grips and a LC200N steel blade.
The Tusk has blade of LC200N steel. Like the H-1 steel, the LC200N has nitrogen in the alloy to keep it from rusting. The blade is 2 ¼″ long, a very handy size for daily tasks and well suited to whittling. The titanium grips incorporate a tab to lock the blade in the open position and a spring-loaded ceramic ball to lock the marlinspike, a polished piece of 300-series stainless steel. A slot in the spike and the space between the spike and the handle serve as shackle wrenches. The hole in the blade, a Spyderco signature element, lets you open the blade with one hand.
The Tusk’s blade is locked by a tab just below the belt clip. Its marlinspike is held in the open position by a spring-loaded ceramic ball.
It should come as no surprise that the knives Spyderco makes for marine use are so well suited to their tasks. Sal Glesser, Spyderco’s founder and chief designer, and his wife Gail also run a company that makes sailing pocket cruisers.
Christopher Cunningham is the editor of Small Boats Monthly.
Spyderco’s Salt-series knives range in price from $69.95 to $399.95 and are available direct from Spyderco and a network of dealers.
Is there a product that might be useful for boatbuilding, cruising or shore-side camping that you’d like us to review? Please email your suggestions.
The Rescue Laser Flare Magnum (top) and the Green Rescue Laser Flare (bottom) project a beam that will be seen by your targets as a bright and distinctive flash of light but won’t cause temporary loss of vision or injury.
There are many tools you can use to call for help when you’re on the water: VHF radios, handheld or aerial flares, mirrors, flags, horns, smoke, and dyes. They all have their advantages and shortcomings; in an emergency you’ll want the tool best suited to the job at hand.
Greatland Laser’s Rescue Flares are effective visual distress signals. While pyrotechnic flares can be seen from any direction, they are short-lived and dangerous to handle. A laser has to be aimed, but lasts for hours if not days and is safe when used properly. Greatland’s lasers are available in red and green signals, both of which are the size of small flashlights. The red Magnum uses two common AA alkaline batteries for 72 hours of continuous use, and the Green Rescue Laser Flare has a single CR123 lithium battery good for 5 hours. The life of the flare is virtually unlimited: The laser diodes for the red light are rated for 10,000 hours, the green for 5,000 hours.
Both flares have rugged anodized aluminum housings, vinyl color-coded caps to protect the lens, and available nylon holsters with a webbing belt loop. To use the flare, remove the vinyl cap and simply twist the unit on. A sight ring aids in signaling a target; with the ring at the top, the fan of laser light is oriented vertically. Unlike simple laser pointers, which project a single dot of light, the flares produce a line of light that increases in length moving away from the flare. The green flare projects a beam covering 3°, the red 5°. At 8 miles, the red projects a beam 3,000′ long, and a 6,000′ beam at 16 miles. The spread of the light not only provides compensates for aiming errors, but also makes it safer for those who catch sight of it.
Eddie Breeden
The rescue flares have an integral sighting tube, but it can be difficult to see properly in the dark. To aim the laser without it, hold the flare next to your eye and hold out two fingers with your target in between them. Sweep the beam of light back and forth across your fingers and you’ll hit your target.
Which brings us to a caveat: Greatland Laser warns against viewing the laser at a distance less than 13 feet. Beyond that distance the power of the laser is below the level that can cause injury to eyes. Unlike laser flares, pointer lasers do not fan the light out, and their intensity isn’t radically diminished over distance: The flash of the single beam can temporarily disrupt the vision of pilots and even do permanent damage to their eyes. The light from the laser flares is much less powerful than that of many laser pointers, and yet still distinctive and visible at long distances.
How long? Greatland claims that in normal night conditions the Magnum flare is visible from 20 miles, the Green from 30. As a comparison, typical handheld signal flares offer just 5-mile visibility. Obviously, best distances are given at night, but daylight use is possible too, with a reduction in range, 3 miles for the Magnum, 3 to 5 for the Green.
To make sure there was no chance of the lasers being taken for signaling an actual emergency, we tested the visibility of the flares in broad daylight over a 3-mile distance in an area where the laser wouldn’t be noticed. The 3-mile distance is the maximum rated daylight range for the Magnum and the low end of the Green’s daylight range. When the flares’ beams fanned across us, we saw very brilliant flashes. The green did appear brighter. We were impressed. At night the flashes are even more brilliant.
Greatland rates the Laser Rescue Flares as waterproof to 80′. I tied the flares to a line, turned them on, and lowered them to a depth of 25’ for 15 minutes. I also left the lights, turned off, submerged in a bucket of water overnight. The flares survived both dunkings in good working order.
With the protective caps over the lenses, both of the flares provide a diffuse low-level light for close tasks without degrading night vision. The flares are very effective in locating objects such as buoys, markers, or clothing that are equipped with retroreflective material but be very careful when using the lasers for non-emergency use. While the laser flares produce a brilliant return from retroreflective materials, a bright white flashlight should be your first option for locating markers. Flashlights cast a much wider beam, and you’re likely to find what you’re looking for much more quickly; but, more importantly, a white flashlight is also much less likely to be mistaken for a distress signal and won’t put you at odds with the many and varied local laws restricting the use of lasers.
Keeping a Rescue Laser Flare tethered to your life jacket and at the ready would provide a brilliant, distinctive, and long-lasting emergency signal, a great addition to your survival gear.
Eddie Breeden grew up racing Moths and Lasers and has a bit of offshore sailing— Bermuda and Block Island—to his credit. A native Virginian, he’s an architect, married with four children. As an amateur boatbuilder he has built a Sooty Tern, an Eastport Pram, a cedar-strip kayak and a couple of skin-on-frame kayaks, all described on his blog, Lingering Lunacy.
The Rescue Laser Flare Magnum, $124.95, and the Green Rescue Laser Flare, $299.95, are available from Greatland Laser and their US and international dealers. (When this issue of Small Boats Monthly went live on January 1, the prices listed were for 2014. On January 6 we received word that Greatland Laser had to increase prices for the first time in eight years. The updated prices for 2015 are listed here. —Ed.)
Update, 4/2/19: The price of the Green Rescue Laser Flare has been reduced to $224.94.
Thanks to reader Michael Vetsch for suggesting this review of laser flares. Is there a product for boatbuilding, cruising or shore-side camping that you’d like us to review? Please email your suggestions.
Last April, Tom Potrykus launched his center-console outboard skiff, TRADEOFFS, in the shallow inshore salt water near Beaufort, South Carolina. When the hull touched the water for the first time, it was already 15 years old.
Tom had started building the boat in 1998 shortly after retiring. At that time, he and his wife, Sue, lived in Illinois. Tom found the plans for the 16′ by 6′ Shoestring skiff advertised in WoodenBoat magazine. It was designed by Karl Stambaugh for Gary Clements of GFC Boats in New Jersey. Tom bought the plans, a book on how to build a plywood boat, 13 sheets of marine ply, fiberglass cloth, epoxy, and the tablesaw and belt sander he had always wanted.
all photographs by Tom Potrykus
The outboard’s fuel tank is housed in the console to keep the weight more evenly distributed.
He got off to a good start, and in five months he’d finished the hull and given it a coat of primer. Winter brought a halt to the project, and he covered the hull and put out in the yard. It soon lay buried in the snow, but only briefly. Tom and Sue bought a house on an inshore island near Beaufort, South Carolina, so the hull was pulled out of a snowdrift and moved to their new home. Tom was eager to take up saltwater fishing and bought a used fiberglass boat. The unfinished skiff sat gathering dust under the house for 13 years and got to be a bit of a joke in the neighborhood. So last year Tom decided it was time to finish the project.
Tom and the hard-won fruits of his labors
This wasn’t Tom’s first boat. He had built and repaired several small wooden boats for power and sail over the years, so he had more than enough experience to take on building a Shoestring. It’s designed for easy construction. The plans include full-sized patterns for the frames, so lofting isn’t required. The ½″ plywood bottom and 3/8″ plywood sides are tacked and taped along the chines. Tom used deck screws to quicken the rough assembly and later replaced them with bronze to finish the construction. He modified the hull slightly by lowering the sheer about 6″. “I think the original design was for rougher water than I like to fish in,” he said. That lightened the boat, and Tom cut more weight by reducing seat console sizes. That reduced TRADEOFFS’ draft to accommodate South Carolina’s ubiquitous oyster bars. Moving the gas tank from the stern to the console leveled the boat and further reduced the draft.
TRADEOFFS, Tom says, “runs straight, true, and fast. The 50-hp Yamaha is all this 650-lb boat needs. It uses only as much water as a skiff, and handles the rough chop just fine, much to the delight of my wife.”
Tom reports that TRADEOFFS turns heads wherever she is launched or docked. “While I see room for improvement in my craftsmanship, people seem to appreciate looking at something other than yet another white fiberglass boat—a little brightwork goes a long way.” TRADEOFFS’ name, he says, “reflects what she is and what a lot of life is.”
Study and construction plans for the Shoestring skiff are available from Chesapeake Marine Design.
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.
BUNDUKI is a sport boat built to Australian John Georgalas’s Deep V 16′ design. Initially, the design was to be a one-off for an American friend, but the drawings have since been made available through John’s company, Classic Wooden Boat Plans (CWBP). For this design, John was inspired by the 17′ WYNN-MILL II, designed by Jim Wynn in the early 1960s. That boat was raced with great success, including a victory in the six-hour Paris Race. Wynn subsequently collaborated with Walt Walters and Don Aronow on a production version, the Ski Sporter, which was later dubbed, and became much better known as, the Sweet 16. That was the first boat built by Aronow’s company, Donzi Marine, after it was formed in 1964.
The Sweet 16 was about a foot shorter than WYNN-MILL II, and it lacked the original boat’s pronounced tumblehome aft, presumably because of the practicalities of molding it in fiberglass. At the height of production, 20 of these boats were produced each month. President Lyndon Johnson owned one, and the Israeli armed forces had a dozen of them, some of which saw action in the 1967 Six Day War.
The original brochure for the Sweet 16 described it as the “softest riding, driest high-speed sports boat ever built.” The 24-degree deadrise would have contributed to those characteristics, and this has been retained in the Deep V design, as has WYNN-MILL II’s tumblehome, which John and his American friend particularly admired.
all photographs by the author
Brian Reford, a student at Lyme Regis Boatbuilding Academy, built BUNDUKI with an eye toward wake-boarding and water-skiing. He was particularly drawn to the design’s pronounced tumblehome at the transom.
In March 2013, Brian Reford enrolled in the nine-month Boat Building, Maintenance and Support course at the Lyme Regis Boat Building Academy, where he had an opportunity to build a boat for himself. He wanted one that could be used for water-skiing and wake-boarding and, after looking at “masses of designs” on the Internet, he found the Deep V and ordered a set of plans from CWBP.
Having printed the drawings full size, Brian decided there was no real need to carry out any lofting, although he later came to regret that decision. His starting point was to make the eight permanent frames—mostly ring frames to include the deckbeams, but with three hull frames in the open cockpit area, which needed temporary braces across them. The way he decided to construct them—from ¾″ red cedar, 8″ deep in the keel area but much narrower in the topsides and across the deck, and with halving joints between their various components—was quite different from the detail in the CWBP drawings. He made those changes with the guidance of his course tutors, and from then on he gradually came to rely less on the plans and more on his own instincts and the tutors’ advice, a course of action which, he later realized, allowed him to learn much more than he would otherwise have done.
BUNDUKI, built to John Georgalas’s Deep V 16’ design, is a descendant of WYNN-MILL II, a legendary raceboat that gave rise to the speedboat company Donzi Marine.
The various fore-and aft components came next: the 3″ x 2″ mahogany keel, with four laminations along the majority of its length and twelve around the stem; the spruce chine logs, which started off at 1 ¾″ x 1″ before they were beveled; and three 1 ¼″ x ½″ red cedar stringers each side on the bottom and one at the sheer. The bottom was then cold-molded with three layers of 3/16″ Robbins Elite plywood, all in the same diagonal orientation but with their joints staggered. Brian decided to turn the hull the right way up to fit the stringers and the two layers of 3/16″ ply to the topsides, not because it would be any easier to do so—although it would be in the tumblehome area aft it would be harder at the flared bow—but because it gave him the chance to first check the fairness of the chine in the forward sections by eye and make small adjustments to it.
BUNDUKI is built of three 3⁄16” layers of cold-molded plywood laid over stringers set into notched frames. The angles of the deadrise and transom almost exactly matched those of the jet ski that provided the engine.
Now it was time for Brian to turn his attention to the power unit. He could, of course, have fitted a similar type of engine to the one originally specified for the Sweet 16—a 110-hp Volvo Penta with an outdrive—but he had other ideas. Primarily for safety reasons when water-skiing, he wanted to fit a jet drive, and he decided the best way to acquire one would be to take one out of an old jet ski. He managed to find a suitable one—a Kawasaki STX 3-Person Cruiser with a three-cylinder, two-stroke 130-hp engine—on eBay. Having removed its important parts, he cut a hole in the underside of his boat, rabbeted the outside of the hull around the hole, fitted the jet unit’s flange (which had been part of the jet ski’s hull) into the rabbet, and bolted it in. Fortunately the angles of his boat’s deadrise and transom almost exactly matched those of the jet ski. He could have kept the engine and jet as one unit and fitted them into the boat together—and his course tutors encouraged him to do so—but he wanted “the engine to be part of the boat and not the jet ski,” so he fitted conventional engine beds for it.
The bottom was reinforced with 15-oz biaxial cloth, and the entire hull was then sheathed in 6-oz cloth before being filled, faired, and painted.
But before installing the engine itself, he had more work to do on the bottom. After fitting a ¼″ plywood sub-deck and machining a 2″-wide rabbet around its perimeter, he turned the hull upside down again to allow the outside of it to be fiberglassed with 15-oz biaxial cloth over the bottom panels and then a 6-oz plain-weave cloth over the whole of the outside, around the sheer, and into the rabbet. The hull was filled, faired, and painted, and then turned the right way up again.
The visible deck is an overlay applied to a ¼” subdeck. It consists of a khaya kingplank and covering boards, and spruce planks caulked with black polysulfide.
A 3mm-thick decorative deck was then fitted. This consisted of a khaya kingplank and margins, and fore-and-aft-laid spruce planks caulked with Sikaflex and then varnished: three coats of two-pack followed by seven coats of single-pack. The dashboard and engine box top are both veneered with ash, with khaya trims and inlays. After every piece of plywood was epoxy-coated, the visible areas of the cockpit—the seat fronts, the inside of the hull, and the cockpit—were all lined with a polypropylene carpet.
The “gear shift” lever of the controls operates a bucket that diverts the jet drive’s water either forward or astern. The controls take some getting used to, for the shift’s neutral position directs the water straight down, causing the boat to move slightly.
On the Lyme Regis Launch Day, which is the culmination of the course, Brian christened his boat BUNDUKI, which is Swahili for “rifle,” in memory of his father, who once ran a gunsmith shop in Nairobi and who had recently died. BUNDUKI managed to get up to 38 knots that day, but when I met up with Brian six months later on a small lake adjacent to the River Thames at Pangbourne, environmental considerations would have restricted us to about 5 knots even if local by-laws didn’t.
Power is supplied by a two-stroke, 130-hp engine harvested from a Kawasaki Jet Ski.
The principle of a jet drive is that the engine, which is always in gear, drives a large impeller, which draws water through an intake in the bottom of the boat and discharges it at high velocity through a nozzle at the stern. The “gear lever” controls a bucket which diverts the water to drive the boat forward or astern, but when the lever is in neutral the flow is downward; this often results in a very slow, somewhat disconcerting, movement of the boat. With no rudder, the wheel turns the discharge nozzle to port or starboard.
BUNDUKI’s steering system allows about one-and-a-half turns hard-over to hard-over. This differs from jet skis, which have bike-type handlebars. At very slow forward speeds, BUNDUKI is difficult to steer in a straight line. However, steering became noticeably easier at about 5 knots, and Brian told me that at higher speeds it isn’t an issue at all. She is very easy to turn: At slow speeds with the wheel held hard over she will just keep going round in a circle in her own length, and Brian said that she “banks massively” when turning at top speed. When going astern, however, she takes a long time to respond to any turn of the wheel. The engine sounds a bit rough when it’s ticking over, but at slightly higher rpm it is much smoother, albeit with a deep throaty roar. With the whole timber hull acting like an acoustic musical instrument, it sounds very different from a jet ski. Brian thinks that the 55-liter fuel tank located under the foredeck will provide “just a few hours’ playing and that’s it; it isn’t very economical, but it’s a toy, so you’ve got to look past that.” He advances a similar argument to justify his tolerance to the high-speed noise levels.
When I rode with him, Brian had yet to use BUNDUKI for water-skiing or wake-boarding. In fact he still hadn’t fitted a ski pole, but he wants to take some care with this to make sure it is removable so as not to spoil the look of the boat. He will then be ready to take her to one of the several lakes near his home on the Thames. “But really the ideal place would be one of those lakes in America,” he told me. “A bit far away, but maybe one day.”
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.
You can see BUNDUKI at speed in a video posted on the Boat Building Academy’s Facebook page.
BUNDUKI Particulars
[table]
LOA/16′ 4″
LWL/14′
Max Beam/6′ 9″
Draft (est.)/1′
[/table]
The Deep V 16’ is similar to the legendary Donzi Sweet 16 model, which in turn was a development of WYNN-MILL II. The Sweet 16, however, did away with the alluring tumblehome—presumably to ease production. Designer John Georgalas has revived the shapely hull in the Deep V 16’.
Plans for the Deep V 16 are available from Classic Wooden Boat Plans. The cost for the set is US $195. Plans are supplied as PDF files, which buyers must have printed.
Is there a boat you’d like to know more about? Have you built one that you think other Small Boats Monthly readers would enjoy? Please email us!
Joe Youcha wants to build boats. A lot of boats. Not only does he want to build boats, but he wants you to build one as well. Back in the 1990s, Joe was head of the Alexandria Seaport Foundation’s community boatbuilding program. He and his shop crew had built “a hundred different boats” with members of the community, but none that he considered perfect for introducing the public to the joy of building, and the math that goes along with it. He wanted a boat that not only could be built anywhere by anyone, but one that would be worth building as well, and one he could teach with. In his mind, the boat would be simple to build, with no single step in the building process taking longer than 45 minutes. The boat should maximize materials, and finally, the boat should be a stable and safe platform for its builders to use, together, to learn the basics of boating once complete.
all photographs by Matthew P. Murphy
Bevin’s Skiff is versatile. With the rig removed, it makes a handy yacht tender. A few rocks in the stern will keep the bow from rooting when the boat is being towed.
He decided on the most unassuming of American traditional small craft forms, the humble flat-bottomed skiff. Taking inspiration from Uncle Gabe’s skiff, a Chesapeake Flattie skiff described by Sam Rabl, in his book Boatbuilding in Your Own Backyard, and the Westport Skiff, as described by Bob Baker, Joe and his crew built a couple of prototypes before settling on a design he liked. What stood proud on the sawhorses was a 12′ plywood skiff for oar and sail. Joe wanted to name the boat UBIQUITOUS, but the shop crew shot him down on that one immediately, insisting that the boat be named after the Shop Supervisor: Joe’s dog, Bevin. Thus Bevin’s Skiff was born.
Hull number one was completed in the Foundation’s shop in 1997. Since that time, more than a thousand have been built by numerous programs, family boatbuilding events, and individuals. The boat has been built in almost all 50 states and in at least 12 countries around the world. Those are the boats that Joe knows of, anyway. In his travels as the head of Building To Teach, and The Teaching With Small Boats Alliance, Joe is constantly running into examples of Bevin’s Skiff. “Its like running into children I never knew I had,” he says. Most are simple, some are fancy, and one, from the Midwest, even has a mahogany runabout-style deck.
Bevin’s skiff is offered both in kit and plan form from the Alexandria Seaport Foundation. The basic plans for the rowing version are very detailed and include a 26-page step-by-step construction guide that leaves nothing to the imagination. A complete list of tools and materials is included, as well. Plans for a leg-o’-mutton spritsail rig are available separately. Although it is possible to add a rig to an existing Bevin’s, it is highly recommended that both sets be purchased at the same time, as later modification would require undoing some of the prior work to the foredeck.
The mast step and partners are simple pieces of joinery and form a solid support for the unstayed spar.
The boat is built using traditional plywood construction methods. No jig or strongback is necessary, although several sawhorses will make the job go more easily. The boat is fastened with ring nails, and all seams are payed with marine adhesive sealant before assembly to ensure against leaks. The two scarfed plywood side panels are fastened to a rabbeted oak stem, bent over one central frame made of fir with plywood gussets, and fastened to a transom fabricated from clear “two-by” lumberyard stock. The chine logs are then set in with more goop and ring nails before using the same technique to install the oversized plywood bottom. The bottom is then taken down to meet the side planks and the boat completed by the addition of a plank keel, skeg, gunwales, frames, seat rail, foredeck, and seats—all of which are fastened using the same method.
This is a boat that goes together in weeks of part-time work, not months, and many are assembled from kits over a weekend during family boatbuilding events. A more experienced builder with a little gumption could possibly bang one out in a week of nights. In my experience, the sailing rig doubles the average construction time, but adding the trunk, daggerboard, rudder, and spars is well covered in the plan; for the most part, it’s a simple operation. Shaping the round-sectioned tapered mast requires the most diligence to get right but, with a little patience, it is not beyond the average first-time builder.
I have supervised the building of four boats to this design as part of a fledgling after-school boatbuilding program for junior high and high school students. The materials list plainly states that only clear-grained stock and marine-grade plywood are to be used, but, faced with cheap boat or no boat, we constructed our first from exterior-grade fir plywood, and the best 2x6s I could pick from the pile, all glued with PL Premium construction adhesive and fastened with stainless-steel ring nails. The boat went together fine, and is still going strong five years later as a trailer-sailer. However, one should always strive to use the best materials available, and I would not recommend those materials for a boat that will spend summers floating at the dinghy dock. We then built two rowing models, one of which utilized 1/4″ marine plywood, with a plywood transom framed in fir, for a significant savings in weight. This “cartopper” model proved itself to be as capable a rowboat as the one built to the specifications, although I doubt the lighter construction could handle the stresses involved in adding the sailing rig.
Bevin’s Skiff is a fine sailer, stable and predictable. Although best as a singlehander, one may carry a passenger as live ballast on the center thwart without too much loss of performance.
And, finally, there’s UNDERDOG, pictured here in this article. She received a high-aspect-ratio centerboard lodged in a trunk underneath the center thwart, along with a low sprit rig. These modifications were made to make the boat more suitable to the high winds and rocky shores of Buzzards Bay. In addition, 1″ was added to her freeboard, as suggested by Joe Youcha. As the boat is designed, three sheets of plywood will produce all the needed planking for one boat, along with one extra side plank. That’s a boon when constructing multiple boats, but if you are building only one, the boat benefits from the higher freeboard.
In its barest form, Bevin’s Skiff has proved itself to be very capable under oar. As designed, the boat can carry 460 lbs, and I have rowed comfortably with two adult passengers in calm water without undue concern or incident. The flat bottom, combined with subtle rocker, makes for a very stable little boat—one perfect for beginners. But speed does suffer from the immersed transom when carrying a passenger aft. A second pair of oarlocks forward would help keep Bevin’s closer to her lines when carrying a friend. The boat will tow well as a tender, but care must be taken to locate the towing eye as low as possible through the stem, or the bow will have a tendency to root.
Setting up the Bevin’s Skiff for sailing is fast and simple. The rig of UNDERDOG, shown here, stows in a single bag with the sails laced on. Simply unpackage it, step the mast, and run the sheet.
Bevin’s Skiff is a fine sailer, too. It’s stable and predictable, sailing best while the occupants are sitting on the cockpit sole. If sailing will be the boat’s primary use, Joe recommends removing the aft thwart entirely in favor of more room for the skipper. Although best as a singlehander, one may carry a passenger as live ballast on the center thwart without too much loss of performance. As with many flat-bottomed boats, it is necessary to bring the weight down to leeward in light air. This allows the chine some extra bite, as the board alone proves itself insufficient for windward work at low speeds. When the wind pipes up, it is best to forgo cleating the mainsheet, as gusts will require a quick ease to keep everything right-side up.
Although there is no mention made of outboard power in the plans, it is a question I have heard from many. The transom and quarter knees are robust, and one should be able to mount a motor of less than 5 hp. A third knee between keel and transom would also be a worthy consideration. But remember: Bevin’s Skiff is no planing craft, and any more power would do little good and more than its share of bad for the structure of the boat and safety of the crew.
Bevin’s Skiff is not built for speed, but it can be speedily built. This little boat is the epitome of simplicity and utility. Few boats to be used in May can be started in April, or May, for that matter, and the hull is as forgiving to build as it is on the water. As intended, this is a boat for first-timers, but although simple, or perhaps because of it, Bevin’s Skiff will remain fun and useful well beyond the beginner stages. Given a little upkeep along the way, she will provide years of service to her owner. If you’ve never built a boat, build Bevin’s Skiff. If you have built a boat or two, find someone who hasn’t, and share the experience. You’ll be glad you did. So will Joe.
Christian Smith is a third-generation boatbuilder, and a circumnavigator, chainsaw artist, and general Renaissance man who classifies himself a “new old school Yankee.” He founded the New Bedford, Massachusetts-based youth boatbuilding program Greenfleet, and he cures his own bacon.
Bevin’s Skiff Particulars
[table]
LOA/11′ 8″
Beam/4′ 4″
Draft at 240 lb displacement
(board up)/ 3″
(board down)/2′ 4″
Sail area (as shown)/52 sq ft
Capacity/450 lbs
[/table]
Bevin’s Skiff is chine-built, which is to say that longitudinal framing members join the topsides to the bottom. It can be built without epoxy—a big plus if one is building the boat with children or young adults who lack the protective gear and skill to work safely with this glue.
At Cathedral Park in Portland, Oregon, the Willamette River was flowing gently, leaving barely discernible eddies around submerged pilings a few yards from the beach. Skamakowa was 75 miles downstream, and I had five days to get there, relying on the current and a pair of oars. My boat, named MAC after my father, is the first of the four dories I’ve built. A narrower and more elegant version of a traditional Gloucester working dory, MAC is outfitted with a drop-in sliding seat and outriggers. As I swung into the Willamette’s current under the long shadow of St. Johns Bridge, I pulled hard to get away from diesel and car exhaust, ski boats, and boom boxes, and headed to the other side of the river looking for the southern entrance to Multnomah Channel.
Barely 1/4 mile downstream I rowed past a line of berthed tugboats, and a deckhand on one watched me glide by. I hollered, “How far is Multnomah Channel, and where I can buy food once I’m on it?” He yelled back, “Two-and-a-half miles, make the turn, you’ll see Fred’s Marina!” I gave him a thumbs-up and then kept a steady cadence close to shore as yachts, ski boats, and fishing boats motored midchannel into Portland proper at the end of a warm weekend.
Sliding-seat rowing efficiently transfers my energy to the oars and keeps me moving and flexible. I tried kayaking, but my back couldn’t tolerate the sitting position: My legs went numb. The rear-view bicycle mirror clipped to the visor of my hat is my front-view mirror for rowing.
The usual afternoon northwesterly was in a kerfuffle with the river, and I rowed into a mild chop. In the bicycle mirror clipped on the bill of my baseball cap, I saw the entrance to Multnomah Channel begin to widen; over my transom the white summit of Mount Hood stood sentinel over the Cascade Range. Floating homes were packed along a mile and a quarter of the mainland shore of the channel, with Fred’s Marina anchoring the neighborhood’s southern end. The store had pints of milk, a dizzying array of sodas, coolers full of beer, smokie sticks, jerky, chips, cookies, V-belts, fuel filters, and gas. No fruit or veggies. I bought a package of jerky and a bottle of water and left, rowing past houseboat after houseboat, most with docks for porches, kayaks stored next to lounge chairs and ski, sail, and cruising boats tied alongside.
The concrete fixtures of some pipes used for flood control on Sauvie Island create a harbor just the right size for MAC.
A muscle boat blasted heavy-metal music, and I was eager to get to the farmlands and forests beyond this clutter of pleasure boaters still reveling in the weekend’s last hours. Although this was a no-wake zone, few boaters seemed not to know or care about that, and I hoped I would encounter less traffic farther up the channel. After an hour and a half of gliding northwesterly, the channel turned north into a lee and the water turned silky flat. I searched for someplace to eat, and asked a teenager hand-lining from a dock if there was a restaurant up the channel. He said “Yes, Mark’s, about 4 miles.” It was two hours to sunset, and I had another hour of rowing to get to the restaurant. Soon I smelled food coming from a kitchen, still a mile ahead. Mark’s turned out to be a floating restaurant in the middle of a neighborhood of floating homes, and the food was better than I hoped for—made from scratch with organic produce from the local farms. The advice was good, too: The staff warned me of pile dikes, submerged pilings, and the sudden opposing currents at the confluence of Multnomah Channel and the Columbia. The most valuable information was about the marine park on Coon Island, 5 miles downstream: The mosquitoes there were very bad. That wasn’t good news, for I sometimes have allergic reactions to mosquito bites. And besides, I didn’t relish being trapped in my tent listening to the incessant hum of flying bugs wanting a taste of me. I needed to camp where there was a breeze.
Fatigue set in as I got back aboard MAC. I had been on the water since five a.m., had traveled 23 miles, and needed to find a campsite soon. (I’d begun the day escorting a friend on the Bridge Swim on the Willamette, an 11-mile swimming endurance event through the heart of Portland.) The sun would set in an hour. Two standup paddleboarders quietly glided past me in sharp contrast to the floating party I’d experienced at the outset. The weekend was settling down, and despite my exhaustion, my hopes for serenity on the river rose.
The last three miles of Multnomah Channel offer quiet and solitude between wooded banks. Beyond the paper mill in the distance lies the Columbia River.
The dogleg in the channel ahead promised a gentle evening breeze on its northerly stretches, and as soon as the channel turned north, I found my campsite just out of view of a nearby farmhouse. MAC’s bow nosed into a flat muddy shingle, and I pulled on my rubber boots and carried dry bags to a grassy flat area. The tide would rise overnight, but I wasn’t sure how much, so I trailed a line from MAC to the tent. I’d sleep with it tied to my wrist. If MAC floated and drifted, I’d know it. I zipped the tent’s mosquito netting door down snug to the rope and, finally, stretched out to sleep. In the darkness, distant thunder rumbled while a gentle rain sharpened the smells of grass and earth.
A bend in the river surrounded by farmland and forests provided me a place to camp. With little current and minor tides in the Mutlnomah Channel I could leave MAC overnight only slightly aground. A line from her bow to my wrist as I slept was all I needed to assure me that she’d not leave without me.
I slept soundly and woke at 5 a.m., checking the weather forecast on my VHF with the volume very low to keep from betraying my presence. After spending 45 minutes quietly repacking and stowing gear, I pushed off and floated along on flat water with a gray ceiling above. As I leisurely ate granola and nuts that I’d soaked overnight in a ziplock bag with water and some powdered milk, cows slowly made their way along the roadway up on the bank. I had about another 10 miles—a little over two hours of rowing on the ebb—to reach the town of St. Helens and the possibility of a hot meal.
A river tug pushed a gravel barge by me. I rowed through the right-angle bends in the channel, and for long stretches silence surrounded me except for the rhythmic sound of rowing, the lowing of cows, and the chip-chip call of ospreys. On this stretch of the channel were the remnants of a fishing industry that fueled growth in this region until 40 years ago: Ships rusted in disuse, some sank in place. Rotting stumps of pilings with bushy green tops of volunteer grasses slid aft. An osprey hovered over the water in the distance. For almost three hours, I took in the pastoral quiet of the channel, watching the busyness of birds while the oar blades drifted aft and the current gently carried me downstream.
Ospreys, like this female in a nest on top of a dolphin by a paper mill, are often mistaken for immature eagles but adult osprey are two-thirds the size of bald eagles and have half the wingspan. Still, it’s impressive to see an osprey hover fifty feet above the water, fold its wings, plummet, and dive as much as three feet into the water, then emerge with a fish in its talons.
As I passed a paper mill an osprey with brown wing tops, gleaming white chest, underwings, and crown alit on its nest on top of a mooring dolphin. Fledglings tested their wings, flapping furiously while their talons gripped the edges of the large nest. As I rowed toward the base of the dolphin, the adult female osprey loudly admonished me with a sharp, descending skreeee. Forty years ago, DDT had driven ospreys to the brink of extinction. Now their nests are on the top of practically every mooring dolphin and navigation marker. The Army Corps of Engineers has accommodated the osprey by constructing nest platforms away from lights and markers on the Columbia River.
Pile dikes extend from both sides the Columbia’s shoreline. A “king” pile, the tall bundle of piles, marks the end of the pile dike for better visibility. These dikes are meant to keep the river banks from eroding and sediment from settling in the channel. Some argue that they do just the opposite. Either way they can cause small craft a lot of grief if trapped against them by the current. The river current during an ebb can exceed five knots and on many of the older pile dikes that kind of hydraulic scouring action wears each pile in a dike thin and the flow can pull floating objects against the dike. I avoided all of them.
The northern tip of Sauvie Island finally slipped by to starboard where Multnomah Channel flows into the Columbia. Off my port bow an 80-yard-long pile dike angled out from the St. Helens shoreline, forcing me into the middle of the river and closer to another dike, one extending 450 yards from Sand Island. In the ¼-mile-wide gap between the dikes, the current suddenly accelerated away from the marina entrance. I struggled to round the tall king pile and had to pull hard to get to the St. Helens marina.
At the long dock paralleling the river I secured MAC and walked up the ramp and into town. It was just 11 a.m., and I had to wait half an hour for the restaurants to open. After lunch, and feeling recharged, I ambled back to MAC. Mount St. Helens, the volcano that erupted in a 1980, was visible to the northeast.
When I rowed out into the Columbia, MAC began to drift upriver. I had dawdled through the late-morning slack tide and now I’d have to work against the flood, pulling down the river channel past sandy beaches and private and commercial docks. Three quarters of an hour later I pulled MAC onto the sandy north end of Goat Island to have a cup of tea and rest for a few hours. Anticipating a breeze, I set up my tent, curled up on my sleeping pad in front of it, and fell fast asleep.
Cargo ships crossed paths in mid channel while I rested on Goat Island. I am always awed by how ships as large as Panamax freighters can navigate so close to the shoreline as they cut their wakes upriver and down. With such close quarters on the river I use a smart-phone app to keep tabs on river traffic while I’m underway.
When I awoke, an otter at the water’s edge was staring at me. I lifted myself onto my elbow, and it ducked into the water and swam upstream along the shoreline. I lumbered up and checked MAC to see if anything had been chewed up by the otter. All was in order. I went back to my camp stove for a wake-up cup of tea while watching two freighters approach from opposite directions. Safe on the island, I opened the marine traffic app on my smartphone to get the names of the ships. This app has proven quite useful for checking on river traffic. Before I had it, I would call Vessel Traffic Services (VTS) on my VHF ship traffic advisories; now I can simply look at my phone to avoid the big boats headed my way.
The wind had increased while I slept, so I dragged my tent higher on the beach and waited for the wind to abate before heading to Kalama, a protected boat basin about 5 miles downriver. It was dark when I set out in a mild breeze. I checked my phone for river traffic, and found no ships in my area. I switched on MAC’s running lights, scanned the river for fishing and pleasure boats that wouldn’t shown on the app, and then pulled hard for 10 minutes to get to the Washington side. Then I turned downstream to Kalama. I rowed past a line of seven grain-elevator silos so brightly lit they ruined my night vision. Two miles farther downriver was the entrance to the Kalama marina. To my dismay, a freeway and a railway blocked me from town. It was almost 10 p.m., and I fretted about having to sleep on the dock. A security officer patrolling the boat basin got out of his car and asked me what I was doing. Upon hearing my plight, he called a motel, drove me to it, and said he’d keep an eye on MAC. I trusted him; he was the retired Chief of Police of Kalama, after all.
In the morning, after a shower and large breakfast, I called for a cab. Back at the marina MAC was right where I left her with everything intact, and in just 10 minutes I was back on the river. In the daylight I got a good look at Kalama and admonished myself for not checking access on my phone before stopping there. Its waterfront is industrial, and the marina is the only riverside accommodation for pleasure craft. There is a pedestrian bridge over the railway to an underpass under the freeway to get to town, but it’s a half-mile walk to get to it, and another half mile to the only motel in town. However, I could have made camp on Sandy Island, a 1½-mile-long wooded island directly across from the marina.
The morning was overcast as I rowed away from the noise of the freeway on the Washington side and pulled past Trojan, once the site of a nuclear power plant. Its 500’-tall cooling tower was an Oregon landmark until it was spectacularly brought down with an implosion in 2006. Heading northwest toward the Cowlitz River’s confluence with the Columbia at Longview, I stayed in the river rather than endure the noise of the freeway and railway along Carrolls Channel on the other side of Cottonwood Island. While following the 3-mile-long inside curve of the island, I felt a slight drizzle and pulled on my rowing jacket and snugged down my rowing cap. High slack at the confluence was still a couple of hours away. Longview was hidden behind Cottonwood Island, but I could see the steel lattice of the 1½-mile-long Lewis and Clark Bridge arching high over the Columbia. As I drew closer to the entrance to the mouth of the Cowlitz River, I began to feel the gathering countercurrent close to the island. The flood tide was still slowing the flow of the rivers, although not for long. I was apprehensive about the strength of the two rivers coming together.
At the north end of Cottonwood I pulled hard around the tip against the current and worked my way upstream 1/4 mile into the Cowlitz. There were several sportfishing boats anchored along the river’s ½-mile-wide mouth. I got my camera out to take pictures and let the current carry me out to the Columbia. While looking through the viewfinder, I heard a loud “Heads up!” I was drifting between a fisherman’s anchored boat and his fishing line. I lunged to the bow, lifted the fishing line over my running lights, an oarlock, my head and the stern light, and fended off the fisherman’s bow with my foot. Drifting away in the 5-knot current I apologized to the fisherman. Feeling foolish, I scurried into the Columbia and pointed MAC’s bow toward the gray fog downstream.
Green Point on the Oregon side of the river is appropriately named. It’s an expanse of granite wall covered with moss and topped with tenacious trees.
I moved quickly along the 5 miles of Longview’s working waterfront: gantries, conveyors, and cranes for containers, steel, lumber, logs, pulp, and paper. A bulk carrier was approaching on its way upstream, so I rowed closer to the Oregon side, waved to the GIOVANNA as it passed me at a stately 8 knots. While its wake rolled under me, I checked my phone for other traffic. There wasn’t any, so I turned downstream and pulled steadily for another half hour. The fog lifted and the breeze that had brought it upriver softened, and the sun peeked through holes in the gray. I approached Lord Island and turned into the protected channel behind Lord and Walker Islands. It was a quiet green passage, just water and trees, with not a boat on it. The sun sparkled on water rippled by an afternoon westerly. Egrets, seagulls, and Caspian terns called as I rowed toward Green Point, an expansive granite wall covered with moss and topped with tenacious trees. Riding an ebb that would last until about 6 p.m., I was averaging just under 5 knots.
An abandoned fish-procesing plant and net-drying shed at Mayger still stands on on the Oregon shoreline though the pilings holding them are all tilting upstream in a very slow collapse. In a few years it would all come tumbling down.
The afternoon wind created a mild chop, so I pulled to find protection behind Wallace Island. I saw calmer water between Wallace and Cooper Islands, but the slough there turned directly into the west wind. There MAC yawed between every stroke. My speed decreased to 2 knots, and my energy was draining fast. I looked for a place to beach MAC and make camp. I spotted an abandoned dock with a large clump of weeds at its end. There were no houses or barns in view, so I decided that no one would be alarmed if I tied up there for the evening. With MAC tethered, I wolfed down dehydrated pear and apple slices and made some tea. The effect on my demeanor was wondrous. The wind rose to a steady 15 knots and MAC tugged on her bowline. Her outriggers were banging hard against the dock. With five lines I finally secured MAC firmly away from the dock. I sat again on the dock, my spirits sagging as the wind buffeted me. Just up the ramp was a flat strip of mowed pasture grass with a tall hedgerow running parallel to the river. I set my tent where there was least wind and positioned its door toward the dock to keep an eye on MAC. The dock buckled and jerked in the waves. I’d have to use earplugs to get any sleep.
With the wind at a steady 15 knots MAC bucked and tug on her lines. I had to reposition her after the outrigged oarlocks started banging hard into the vertical edge of the dock. I could see gouges. Not good for the dock, not good for Mac.
It was a fitful night with a dog barking nearby, cows mooing, cars driving by on the other side of the hedgerow into the wee hours. I was awake at 5 a.m. The wind had softened and I quietly broke camp, loaded MAC, and shoved off, drifting happily while munching on crackers, cheese, and a bit of jerky—enough sustenance to get me back into rowing. In the morning stillness the overcast thinned as the sun rose. I headed for the Oregon side of Puget Island, thinking that if the wind did come up I’d find more protection there. I rowed around the island to its downstream end. There I found a B&B owned by Carol Carver and George Exum. They invited me to breakfast, and I would have stayed there that night had there been room. But Carol called another B&B and arranged for the proprietress to meet me in Skamakowa, another 5 miles down river, and the end of my voyage. George recommended I take a backwater slough through the Julia Butler Hansen Wildlife Preserve, so I headed for the Elochoman Slough.
I passed through the narrowest part of the 3-mile-long slough at high tide, the only time a boat with a 16’ wingspan would have rowing room. The passage was filled with great blue herons, northern harriers, geese, mallards, and Columbian white-tailed deer. I was startled by a four-point buck at the edge of the sedge grass, and we both jumped. The downstream end of the slough joins the Columbia and I rowed another mile along the river’s edge to Steamboat Slough, the quiet channel that would take me directly into Skamakowa. I rowed slowly, knowing I’d soon be leaving the river. There was a whole archipelago downstream from Skamakowa that I wanted to explore. I didn’t know when, but I knew I’d be back to wend my way to the Pacific, 33 miles downstream.
Dale McKinnon began rowing in 2002 at the age of 57 and in 2004 rowed solo from Ketchikan, Alaska, to Bellingham, Washington. In 2005 she rowed from Ketchikan to Juneau. The Salish Sea of Washington and British Columbia is her playground. She lives in Bellingham near her grandkids, with her partner, Berns, and chocolate Lab, Thea, and builds the Oarling for other rowers.
Building and outfitting the Oarling
MAC is an Oarling, a Sam Devlin stitch-and-glue design that I built in 2002. She is 17′3″, with a beam of 3′10½″. At about 80 lbs, MAC’s not too heavy for me, at 143 lbs, to slide onto my car’s roof racks. The hull is built of 3/8″ okoume plywood sheathed with fiberglass and trimmed with mahogany gunwales.
The boat is outfitted with a Piantedosi RowWing, a drop-in sliding seat/outrigger device with a 5′ spread between the Concept II gated oarlocks. I row with 9½′ Concept II carbon-fiber oars called Big Blades, a style of racing oar from the 1990s. These hatchet blades are more efficient than standard tulip blades, and the carbon fiber oars are lighter and can withstand more abuse than wooden oars. The oars sleeves have one flat surface that sets the blades either squared or feathered in the oarlocks during the stroke. Collars attached to the sleeves prevent the oars from sliding through the locks.
At MAC’s launching, she’s ready to row with a Piantedosi drop-in rowing unit. Some builders of the Devlin Oarling put rowlocks directly on the gunwale or on short outriggers and row from a fixed thwart. I use a sliding seat not just for the more powerful stroke it provides but for the therapeutic exercise I can get in spite of a serious tele-skiing injury to my left knee and skydiving injury to my back.
MAC has plenty of room for gallon jugs of water, a tent, sleeping bag, sleeping pad, cart, handheld VHF radio, GPS, ice chest, espresso maker, anchor, 400′ of rode, tool kit, and dry bags filled with food, clothing, and toiletries. For this row MAC was relatively spacious. For a longer and more remote trip along the Inside Passage in 2004 I built Devlin’s Fairhaven Flyer, a 20′ version of the Oarling with more cargo capacity. When setting my gear bags aboard I trim the boat as best I can, but wind and sea conditions usually change during a day of rowing. I keep two or three gallon jugs of water near my seat and reposition them to keep MAC trimmed to a neutral “helm,” allowing me to row with even pressure on each oar. I usually row at 15 to 20 strokes per minute, a leisurely, efficient pace that takes advantage of MAC’s long glide. In rough conditions, a pulling boat is only under control when blades are in the water, so I shorten my stroke to reduce the amount of time my blades are out of the water. —DMcK
The Willamette and Columbia Rivers
This was a short trip with B&Bs, marinas, motels, and campgrounds accessible along both Washington and Oregon sides of the river. I looked forward to spending at least one night, if not all of them, in a bed with shower facilities. Although I prepare for all possibilities, as I age a bed and a shower are a necessity by about the third day of a rowing trip. The Lower Columbia must be rowed or paddled with a constant awareness of both wind and tide, particularly downstream from Puget Island. If the winds are easterly, the Columbia can be almost flat, regardless of flood or ebb tide, until one reaches Little Cape Horn. But past Little Cape Horn, an ebbing tide in a westerly can be dispiriting at best and dangerous at worst. While boating on the river it’s wise to have access to the information provided by the Automatic Identification System (AIS). The Marine Traffic app on my iPhone shows me the location, direction, speed, vessel names and call signs of all large marine traffic in the river. This allows me to keep clear of ships and anticipate and prepare for their wakes.—DMcK
This inner tube has more than enough length to get water out of a boat with 6′ beam. The hose is set up without twists to assure the unimpeded flow of the water.
The manual bilge pump that I use for my kayak isn’t very useful aboard my other boats. Without a hose it can’t get the water from the centerline some 3′ to the gunwale and overboard. My other pump, the one with a hose attached, went missing one day and I came up with a way to add a nice long hose to my kayak pump using an old inner tube for a 26″x 2.125″ bicycle tire. I cut away the section of tube with the inflation valve and had a 6’ hose that was just the right diameter to stretch over the spout of the pump. It worked like a charm. Used as a discharge hose, it doesn’t need to be reinforced the way an intake hose does. It works instead just like a fire hose, expanding only when the water fills it.
The inner-tube end has a keyhole-like cut to create a band to slip over the top of the pump. The short section is cut to form a strap between loops that fit over the other end of the inner tube to keep it in place during pumping.
I made a few refinements to keep the hose where it belongs when water is surging through it. To keep the hose from slipping off the spout if a kink stops the flow of water, I cut partway through the inner tube about ½” from the end. This creates a rubber band, still attached to the hose, that slips over the pump handle and around the top of the pump just above the spout. To keep the cut from tearing further, I cut a small circle at the end. To keep the other end of the hose from flying around I cut 6″ from the end and cut away most of the middle, leaving a strap between two loops. The loops fit over the hose and when snugged together give the strap enough slack to fit over a tholepin or oarlock and keep the hose aimed overboard.
The inner tube wraps flat around the pump, making a compact, easily stowed package. The integral band at the top of the pump keeps the hose from slipping off if you pump hard when there’s a bad kink in the hose.
I jury-rigged this hose just to get some rainwater out of a boat I have parked on a trailer at home, but I’ve come to prefer it to the hose-equipped pump that went missing. The inner tube had plenty of length to reach well over the side from any point in the boat and being flat when not in use, wraps snugly around the pump, making it much easier to stow. I happened to have an old inner tube on hand—I keep all of my old inner tubes to use for laminating spars—but I’d spend $5 for a new one and be well ahead of the cost of the reinforced hose.
Christopher Cunningham is the editor of Small Boats Monthly
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Elevated and contained by the Pack & Carry Fireplace, this campfire leaves no trace.
By the time I graduated from high school I had studied Latin for five years. There wasn’t much call for it as a spoken language, but I was fascinated by what it revealed about English words. One that I found particularly telling was “focus.” It’s the Latin word for fireplace. When we stare into a fire, it is easy to focus on the flickering flames to the exclusion of everything else around us. At a fireplace we can easily drift into an almost meditative state of relaxed concentration. In the out-of-doors, campfires are an integral part of the restorative quality of the wilderness experience but unfortunately they can scar the landscape. I stopped making wilderness campfires years ago—I’d seen too many campsites spoiled by half-burned logs and black scars on the ground.
SnowPeak’s Pack & Carry Fireplace offers us a way to enjoy the benefits of a campfire and leave the land as we found it. It folds up for easy storage and transport and, made of heavy-duty stainless steel, it’s built to last. It has a heft that won’t appeal to backpackers but the durability that comes with its stout construction is well suited to coastal camp-cruising.
The sloped sides of the Fireplace make it self tending: Wood slips downward into the heart of the fire.
Folded, the fireplace is ¾″ thick; opened it’s an inverted pyramid propped up on four sturdy legs of 3/16″ stainless rod. There are rows of holes along the upper edges of the sides for airflow. The spaces along the hinged edges also allow for airflow without being so large that coals and ash readily fall through. If the wood used is broken, chopped, or sawn to fit the fireplace, the fire is self-tending—as the wood burns it gathers in the center. (I usually carry a hand-operated survival chainsaw. It makes quick work of wood too thick to break.) Left to burn itself out, the fire leaves behind just a handful of charcoal, easy to pack out or carry to another campsite for the next fire.
When the Fireplace is folded, none of its sooty surfaces are exposed so you can handle it and still keep your hands clean. The carrying case adds an extra measure of tidiness.
The fireplace comes with a nylon carrying case that keeps ash and soot separated from your other camping gear. There are two accessories for the stove that I didn’t have for review: a flat steel base and a cooking grill and a support for it. The base plate is meant to reflect radiant heat from the fireplace and keep it from damaging the ground. I used the stove, less the base, over dry grass and leaves and the ground directly under the stove was merely warm to the touch. The base would be quite useful for supporting the fireplace on sand, and perhaps even snow; the legs sink in and don’t provide much stability. The grill can be set at different levels to suit the cooking job.
The fireplace I tested is the smallest of three sizes offered by SnowPeak. It’s 11″ square, stands 8″ high, and weighs 4 lbs. The medium fireplace opens to 13 ¾″ and the large to 17 ¾″. The fire in the small fireplace burns in an area just under a square foot, so it’s a small fire, but it brought a pot of water to a boil, dried a pair of wet socks, cast a warm glow, and took the chill off the 45° night air. It didn’t throw off heat the way a campfire burning large chunks of wood does—the fireplace’s cluster of glowing embers is contained in a small area and radiates warmth rather than scorching heat. I could sit right by the fire and be pleasantly warm and, yes, sitting there I could not help but focus on the flickering flames. The Pack & Carry Fireplace could return me to an element of camping that I’ve often missed.
Christopher Cunningham is the digital editor of Small Boats Monthly.
The small, medium, and large Pack & Carry Fireplaces area available from SnowPeak for $109.95, $149.95, and $189.95 respectively.
Is there a product that might be useful for boatbuilding, cruising or shore-side camping that you’d like us to review? Please email your suggestions.
The Navlite includes port and starboard lights secured in a case that can be folded to provide a baffle between the lights. It also minimizes the glare for a kayaker looking over the foredeck.
On the water, you may know who, what, and where you are, but after dusk, that may not be apparent to other boaters. Illuminating your presence becomes not only prudent, but US Coast Guard required. Small sailboats under 23′ “shall, if practicable,” display running lights to make your boat’s position and direction known. Small sail, row, and paddle boats must have “a white light that shall be exhibited in time to prevent collision.” I’d rather have running lights indicate my presence long before that time, especially in populous areas where an encounter at night with a speedboat is likely. Large vessels have lighting and electrical systems built in, but lighting for small craft is often hampered by short battery life, difficulty adapting to your boat’s configuration, lack of waterproofing, and impaired night vision.
The red and green lights can be removed from the case and displayed separately. The white light has a split ring secured to the webbing loop to provide an easier way to secure the light to a halyard or other line.
Tektite has addressed all these issues. The Navlite system is a well-made, rugged, and easy-to-operate set of side lights. The red/green lights are housed in a sturdy Cordura pouch with Velcro straps. Grommets and a webbing attachment point make the system quick to secure to kayak deck lines. The fabric housing is designed primarily for kayakers and rowing shells but the strap fittings on each light broaden the lights’ use on other small boats. An O-ring between lens and housing seals out water and a firm twist of the lens illuminates the lamp. Power is supplied by three AA alkaline batteries, offering a listed burn time of over 50 hours. The LED bulbs have a 10,000-hour life and use about one tenth the power of an incandescent bulb. A pair of LEDs in each light illuminate a 2″-long white plastic insert in the lens that radiates the light in all directions. The red light has white LEDs, the green light has green LEDs.
Each light has loops for 1″ webbing. The red port light here has been removed from the fabric case and set on the gunwale.
The Navlite’s brightness was quite good 100 yards down our dark driveway. I lashed the red lamp to a telephone pole on a straight country road, drove away about ¾ mile, and could still make out its glow. I took the Navlite and Tektite’s white Mark III 1-LED Chemical Lightstick Alternative along on a short cruise in my newly built 20′ open sailboat, UNA. When the sun set on our first day of sailing we were 2.5 hours from our anchorage. I tied the white light from the mizzen boom. I took the red and green lights out of the fabric housing and with 1″ webbing passed through the lights’ loops and secured them forward under the gunwales. The lights shone steadily and glistened across the water. After dusk, a tug pushing upriver was headed our way. I hailed him on the VHF and learned that he could make out our lights at a distance of 1.25 nautical miles. The wind died with the daylight and the oars came out. It was a comfort knowing that with my back turned to the bow these lights showed my presence. At anchor for the night I put the white light aloft on the main halyard. The light was still strong at daybreak.
That old adage, you get what you pay for, certainly applies here. The quality of the Navlite and the Mark III 1-LED make them well worth the price. Flexibility of use and adaptability from boat to boat make this a fantastic setup.
Eddie Breeden grew up racing Moths and Lasers and has a bit of offshore sailing— Bermuda and Block Island—to his credit. A native Virginian, he’s an architect, married with 4 children. As an amateur boatbuilder he has built a Sooty Tern, an Eastport Pram, a cedar-strip kayak and a couple of skin-on-frame kayaks, all described on his blog, Lingering Lunacy. His yawl, UNA, is the subject of the Reader Built Boat in this issue.
The Navlite, retailing for $59.95 and the Mark III 1-LED, for $19.95, are manufactured by Tektite.
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.
UNA is a double-ended yawl built by Eddie Breeden in his garage in Midlothian, Virginia. The project took him 10 months, and after he launched UNA in mid-July this year at Mattaponi River at West Point, Virginia, he was often asked: “How long did it take you to build it?” He’d logged his time so had a precise answer—567 hours—but he often felt the question was really “Where did you find the time?” He had an answer, of sorts, for that too: “How much television do you watch each week?” Average Americans watch between 24 and 50 hours of TV per week, so he has a good point: Not watching TV adds up to enough time in 10 months to build two or three boats like UNA.
Iain Oughtred estimates 600 hours for building his Sooty Tern design, the most recent development in a line of sail/oar faerings that includes the Ness yawl, Caledonia yawl, Whilly Tern, Tirrik, and Arctic Tern. These designs have options for sloop or yawl, gunter or lug rigs; UNA carries a balance-lug main and Bermudan mizzen.
all photos by Leney Breeden, agirlnamedleney.com
Here the main mast is set in its forward position for use along with the mizzen. It’s stepped in a box that guides the mast to its step and keeps the forward compartment watertight. When the mizzen is not raised, the main mast is set just aft of the foredeck .
The Sooty Tern has a length of 19′8″, a beam of 5′4 ½″, and a depth of 21″. The hull weighs around 300 lbs, 400 lbs fully rigged. The planking is 8mm okoume marine plywood, the gunwales ash. The thwarts and knees are white oak; the spars, floors, floorboards, foils, and side seats Douglas-fir; and the rudderhead, centerboard case cap, and deck hatches are cherry. Eddie built everything from scratch except for a few chandlery items such as blocks and deck cleats. His sails were made by Douglas Fowler Sailmakers of Ithaca, New York.
The rudder is controlled by a push-pull tiller that isn’t obstructed by the mizzen mast and easily shifts position along with the helmsman when tacking.
Eddie didn’t log the time he spent pondering: “Thinking through the boat’s systems became a compulsion. There were times I had to walk away from the project, either out of frustration or other life demands, but I can attest that the process and resulting boat were more than worth it.” His “obsessive daydreaming” led to a multitude of details that make his Sooty Tern like no other. While he was building UNA he documented his progress on his blog and found valuable support by participating in the WoodenBoat Forum. He has taken UNA on a couple of overnight cruises and won some informal races. “She has simply performed wonderfully. I’m enchanted by Iain’s designs, and hooked on boatbuilding.”
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.
In boating circles, the word friendship brings to mind the classic Maine-built sloop from which pre-internal-combustion lobstermen tended their traps. For Richard Armstrong, however, the word conjures up a different image—a small catboat designed for the burgeoning summer community of Friendship, Maine, in the beginning of the 20th century.
In 1925 Friendship summer resident, artist, and sailor Bill Kirkpatrick (“Billy Kirk” to his friends) set about designing a small boat that would satisfy the needs of his community. He wanted a simple, inexpensive craft that could serve as a sail trainer and family daysailer, but also provide spirited performance around the buoys. The Friendship Catboat was the result.
Early last fall, Richard Armstrong asked Buzzards Bay Yacht Services, the shop I work for, to build a pair of Friendship Cats. The plans arrived in my inbox shortly thereafter in the form of a single JPEG file that printed out to a scale of ½″ to the foot, along with a handwritten table of offsets. A quick trip to Staples resulted in a more workable copy, representing 1″ to the foot.
The lines showed a simple, two-chined hull with a flat bottom and measuring 16′1″ overall. The hull draws a little more than 4″ with the board up, and a beam of 5’8″, which is narrow in comparison to a Cape Cod catboat of that size. The boats also differ from a Cape-style cat in the pronounced rake of stem and transom. The plan shows a traditional gaff rig, somewhat high-peaked, with a boom that overhangs the transom slightly. The sail area is roughly 130 sq ft—more than ample to deal with the often light breezes of Maine and provide spirited performance when the wind pipes up. My first impression was of a handsome little boat that, while being easy to build, was also pleasing to the eye.
this and opening photo by John Robson
Buzzards Bay Yacht Services of Rochester, Massachusetts, launched two new Friendship Catboats last summer for longtime Friendship summer resident Richard Armstrong, who gave the boats to his daughters.
The summer residents around Friendship evidently agreed, and eight boats were built over the next few years for $100 each. Archie Thompson and Gene Brown of the Friendship Boatshop were in charge of the construction. The boats were a hit; families used them to explore the area’s rocky coastline, a competitive racing series was quickly developed, and many a boy and girl learned the fundamentals of sailing in the cockpit of the Friendship Cat.
One of those boys was Richard Armstrong, who first took the helm at the tender age of nine. Richard’s family had been involved with the boats since the beginning. His grandparents received one of the original five Friendship Cats, as did his great-aunt and -uncle. Some of the boats were passed through generations, while additional boats were acquired by his extended family over the years.
A resurgence of interest in the class began in 1979 with a boat built by the Apprenticeshop, which was then in Rockland, Maine. Six more were built in 1983 and 1984 by Doug and Paul Lash of the Lash Brothers Boat Yard in Friendship. One of these boats, HARLEQUIN, was built for Richard, and was on hand in our shop during construction of the new boats. Another, ANDIAMO, was built for Richard’s sister, Amy.
In all, 17 Friendship Cats have been built over the years, and most are still sailing today. Seven of those have ties to the Armstrong family. The older boats are mostly original, although all that are still sailing have been updated with ’glassed-over plywood bottoms, a modification that Richard himself introduced.
Jeremey Burnard
Richard Armstrong tows a line of Friendship cats home from the racecourse.
The original boats were built upside down, with heavy 3/4″ pine planking sprung over molds to meet the equally heavy oak stem and transom. The topside planks were riveted to the upper and lower chines every 4″, while the bottom was cross-planked with 1″ pine over a robust 8″ x 1 ¼″ oak keelson and fastened with ring nails to the 1″ x 3″ oak chine logs. The transverse oak framing was somewhat minimal, with three sawn pairs located at high-load areas. The trunk sides were also 1″ oak, screw-fastened without benefit of logs from below; the trunk housed a heavy oak centerboard. The trunk’s forward post tied into the aftermost full deckbeam, while its aft end is braced by a thwart that captures the after trunk post. Decking was 5/8″ pine over heavy oak beams.
By now you may have noticed that the word “heavy” is showing up a lot in this description. I believe this was as much a result of readily available lumberyard stock as it was the Friendship Boatshop’s familiarity with building workboats. Richard wanted his two new boats to be lighter and stiffer than the originals, and so chose plywood for the topsides and bottom.
We lofted the stations full size and built the pine molds directly on this lofting; we then stood the molds upside down on a strongback, notching them to receive the keelson and chine logs. A 2″-sided oak stem, faithful to the original, was added, as well as a ¾″ plywood transom, framed with ¾″ fir. To these, the ¾″ fir keelson and chines were bent, glued with epoxy, and fastened before planking. Plank patterns were taken off the mold using strips of 1/4″ plywood doorskin glued together with hot glue. These shapes were traced directly onto 3/8″ marine plywood that had been previously scarfed to length. Rather than stitching with wire to be removed later, the planks were epoxy-glued and permanently fastened with stainless-steel screws at chine, knuckle, stem, and transom. The plywood bottom was fastened to the keelson and chines using the same method, then sheathed in two layers of bidirectional fiberglass cloth set in epoxy.
At this point, the hulls were removed and braced to the correct shape while the decks were framed with ¾” fir, which in turn was stiffened by a series of plywood knee-like frames. The centerboard trunks were built of ½″ plywood over posts and logs of oak, and fastened using the same technique, before being through-bolted into place. The centerboards were cut from ½″ G-10 fiberglass sheet, while the rudders are ½″ plywood wrapped in ’glass, with copper-riveted oak cheeks.
The decks are 1/4″ plywood covered with Dynel set in epoxy, which added a little stiffness, along with providing a durable nonskid surface.The entire boat was sealed with epoxy before painting. Mahogany coamings were added, and the rubrails, cleats, and tiller are all of black locust. The boats are often sailed from the cockpit sole, like a Beetle Cat, so teak grating was fitted to keep the captain and crew’s bottoms dry. The spars are of solid spruce.
John Robson
Author Christian Smith revels in the simple joy of sailing a Friendship Cat.
The result is a stiff and rugged boat able to withstand years of use with a minimum of upkeep, while being lighter than the originals. The cockpit is capacious, and the volume sufficient to carry a family of four and a dog, if the pooch behaves itself. The teak grates make for comfortable, dry lounging, while the addition of two removable seat backs that brace against the forward coaming offer an extra level of comfort for passengers.
The flat bottom, long shallow rudder, and free hanging centerboard make for a great boat to explore the rocky marshes of the Westport River in Massachusetts, where Richard now lives. When faced with a calm, a captain of one of the original boats could row the Friendship Cat seated on the thwart aft of the trunk. On the new boats, this thwart was replaced with a wineglass-shaped knee at the aft end of the trunk, in favor of more room in the cockpit. A pair of long paddles live under the foredeck, and it is where they will stay if anything close to a breath of wind presents itself, as these new boats have shown themselves to be quite the light-air performers. The afterdeck supplies a wonderful space for the helmsman to sit—although, while sailing solo, I often found myself hiking my cheeks over the coaming onto the side deck in even modest puffs to keep the boat flat, where she sails best.
John Robson
Annabelle Armstrong skippers the catboat her father had built for her.
Let the boat heel, and the generous flare amidships helps keep everything right-side up. I did manage to dip the rail once or twice upwind, but everything remained smooth and fluid, with no sudden panic-inducing lurches; a subtle ease of the sheet or feather of the rudder brings everything back to rights. The boats exhibit excellent upwind performance for a cat, and easing the sheets only adds to the excitement, as even the heavier originals are known to get up on a plane when sailing off the wind.
This boat combines good looks, simplicity, and exciting performance. Still, every boat has its limits, and on an evening sail last summer I had to remind myself that this cat was designed for Maine’s light breezes and island-protected coast. I’d consider adding a second reef before calling it a sail trainer. It’s not a boat in which to conquer the heavy wind and steep chop of Buzzards Bay. Even a stiff breeze in the harbor will have the captain wanting a reef, or crew, or both. But, as the name “Friendship” suggests, this is a boat that invites company to enjoy in the fun. Whether on a Saturday family excursion to the beach down harbor, an evening cocktail cruise through the marshes with a sweetheart, or a wet windy afternoon around the buoys, the Friendship Cat will supply no shortage of fun and simple joy.
Christian Smith is a third-generation boatbuilder, and a circumnavigator, chainsaw artist, and general Renaissance man who classifies himself a “new old school Yankee.” He founded the New Bedford, Massachusetts-based youth boatbuilding program Greenfleet, and he cures his own bacon.
Friendship Catboat Particulars
[table]
Length/16’1″
Length on waterline/13’9″
Beam/5’10”
Draft/6″ (board up)
/2’4″ (board down)
Sail area/122 sq ft
[/table]
The Friendship cat, as measured by the Maine Maritime Museum in 1979.
The Pinguino 145 is a stitch-and-glue plywood sea kayak that comes as a kit from Pygmy Boats in Port Townsend, Washington. [The company closed in 2020. —Ed.] An alternate version, the 145 4PD (it has a four-panel deck), has a lower deck than the 145, on an identical multichined hull. With a beam of 25.5˝, the Pinguino isn’t as svelte as most of Pygmy’s other single kayaks, but its ample midsection offers good cargo capacity for a 14´6˝ kayak and very comfortable stability. Epoxy and 6-oz fiberglass give the 4mm, three-ply marine mahogany plywood strength and durability while keeping the weight down to an easily shouldered 36 lbs.
all photographs by the author
The cockpit in the top photograph is of the Pinguino 145 PD; the lower one is of the 145.
The 145 I paddled had an optional large cockpit opening that makes it very easy to get in and out. If having your legs tucked under a kayak deck makes you anxious, the 19˝ x 36˝ opening should put you at ease. I had plenty of room to pull my knees up for working out the kinks out and lounging about while afloat. The aft deck and the backrest on the 145 came to about mid-back on me. That limited layback for rolling but didn’t interfere with torso rotation while I was paddling. The 145 4PD has Pygmy’s standard 17˝ x 33˝ cockpit opening with flanges to accept adjustable and easily modified foam thigh braces. The fit of the 145 4PD was ideal for rolling and advanced boat control.
The seat is a simple affair: a self-inflating Therm-a-Rest pad Velcroed in place. With just the right amount of air bled out through its twist valve, I could float my sit bones just above the hull and have comfortable, evenly distributed support. The optional molded foam seat with integral hip pads would make the connection to the boat more solid, especially for paddlers with hips narrower than mine.
The Keepers foot braces are an industry standard. Their plastic pedals slide on aluminum tracks bolted to the hull. The pedals have locking levers that are easily operated by foot. Hook a toe on the far side of the pedal and pull, and you’ll trip the lever and move the pedal back. Hook a toe to trip the lever with one foot and push the pedal with the other, and it will slide forward. The foot room provided by the beveled edges of both the 145 and 145 4PD decks offered enough clearance even for my size-13 neoprene booties.
Hatch covers are cut from the deck after fiberglassing; they are held in place with straps and sealed with foam-rubber gaskets.
The hatch covers are cut from the deck after it has been glued and ‘glassed. Three straps with cam levers press each hatch tight against the foam rubber gaskets and flush with the deck. The levers have jogged edges to keep the straps from releasing accidentally. Earlier versions of these levers were smooth-sided, and the plastic loops that held them against the webbing could be disengaged by an errant sweep of a paddle or a kayaker climbing back aboard after a capsize. These more recent levers are secure without being difficult to disengage by hand. The hatches are as watertight as you make them. The straps must be adjusted to provide proper tension, and the gasket must be intact and clean to provide a good seal. Don’t be tempted to use the hatch cover straps for securing paddle shafts or deck cargo; they have a more important job to do. Rigging the hatch covers with internal tethers is always a good idea.
The deck lines are anchored with a combination of plastic pad-eyes and bolted loops of nylon webbing. Both of the Pinguino models I paddled had bungee patterns for holding gear both forward and aft of the cockpit and safety grab lines around the decks. I like to keep a backup take-apart paddle on deck, so I’d add lines to hold the shaft ends. As a builder you could easily modify or add to the arrangement. Thickened epoxy poured into each end while the kayak is stood upright allows you to drill holes through the stems for bombproof grab loops.
The Pinguino’s initial stability is exceptionally high. Angle your hips just a few degrees, and you’ll get nudged back upright, well before you start to feel twitchy. It’s quite well suited to relaxed paddling, fishing, and photography, or just hangin’ out, pursuits where you’re expecting the kayak to take care of itself and you. For more aggressive paddling, the Pinguino’s secondary stability provided me with solid support for edged turns. The righting force stayed quite strong with the sheer just submerged, and began to soften up as the coaming touched the water, but by then I was at the limit of my flexibility.
The 145 4PD sacrifices a bit of cargo capacity for a lower profile in the wind and a more compact fit. Its cockpit coaming rests on a deeply recessed deck panel, and a nicely sculpted piece provides a graceful transition to the peaked deck. The coaming and the backrest are significantly lower than in the 145; the layback clearance was excellent. Only the padding on my PFD kept me from getting my head to the aft deck. That position was not only great for rolling, but quite restful as I looked up at the sky.
On both versions, the Pinguino hull held a straight course while underway. The bow yawed perhaps 3˝ between strokes at a slow pace, about half that at speed, and had no tendency to stray off course. There wasn’t a rudder on either Pinguino, and while one is available as an option, I didn’t feel the need for one. The Pinguinos went where I pointed them, and almost any kayak can make tighter turns without one. The Pinguino turned quite nicely when edged. It continued to carve between strokes and even when I stopped paddling. When I put a strong edging on the kayak, the turning radius tightened but the stern didn’t skid around. While having the stern skid can be handy for maneuvering in tight quarters, it kills speed. By favoring carved turns, the Pinguino carries momentum well.
The Pinguino turns nicely when heeled to one side, or “edged”; in this position, it will continue to turn even when the paddling stops.
I did some speed trials in the still waters of a marina, and with a GPS I logged 4 knots at a relaxed all-day pace, fast enough to match the average pace of a group of average kayakers. I could hold 4 ¾ knots at a fast sustainable aerobic effort, and peaked at 5 ¾ knots. Those aren’t racing numbers, but that’s not the sort of kayak it’s meant to be.
All of my paddling in the 145 and the 145 4PD has been during the summer “doldrums,” so I haven’t had much wind for my sea trials, but I have yet to paddle a Pygmy kayak that can’t manage a crosswind without making a fuss. Pygmy designer John Lockwood seems to have found the sweet spot of boat trim where the lateral resistance above and below the waterline are in balance, and his kayaks aren’t plagued by a tendency to weathercock.
For rolling and self-rescue drills, I much preferred the 145 4PD for its lower aft deck and snugger cockpit. Rolling was a cinch, especially when I used a layback rolling technique. A long sweep of the paddle brought me up on the aft deck with minimal effort. Wet-exiting after a capsize wasn’t hampered by the standard cockpit’s shorter and narrower opening. The Pinguino’s light weight made it easy to empty water from the cockpit. I could lift the bow of the capsized kayak and hold it high while the water drained out. After I let the kayak roll itself upright, only a couple of pints of water remained in the cockpit. To reenter from the water I was able to get up on the aft deck with a single kick and lunge. The opening of the standard cockpit was long enough for me to get back aboard seat-first, then feet—a quicker and more stable method than having to slide feet-first into a shorter cockpit. The reenter and roll was also easy. I could slip into the capsized kayak by setting it on edge; then as I submerged, I could quickly lock myself in and roll up.
The Pinguino 145 and 145 4PD are versatile kayaks, even though they are a couple of feet shorter than most standard touring kayaks. It’s a well-mannered design with a respectable cruising speed and a good amount of cargo space for carrying several days’ worth of camping and cooking supplies. Its high stability makes it a platform well suited to a variety of non-paddling activities. If you’d like to develop your skills as a kayaker, I’d highly recommend the 145 4PD for its lower profile. It doesn’t sacrifice much carrying capacity for the other advantages it offers.
Christopher Cunningham is the editor of Small Boats Monthly. He has been building kayaks and other small boat since 1978.
Pinguino 145 and 145 4PD Particulars
[table]
LOA/14′6″
Beam/2′ 1½″
Depth 145/13″
Depth145 4PD/11½″
Weight/36 lbs
[/table]
Pygmy Boats has been closed since the outbreak of the pandemic and isn’t filling orders. The review is now presented here as archival material.
In September 2013 I was perusing the Internet and stumbled onto a forum about an adventure race called the Everglades Challenge (EC). Intrigued, I found the homepage of an organization called the Watertribe where it described a grueling race that would test even the hardiest adventurers.
It begins at Florida’s Fort Desoto State Park in Tampa Bay and runs roughly 300 miles south to the Sunset Cove Hotel in Key Largo. How boats get there is up to their crews as long as they sign in at each of the three checkpoints along the way within the allotted deadlines. The boats are all small because each solo racer or team of two must drag their boats from the high-water mark to the water’s edge without assistance. The EC is unsupported; you’re on your own.
Thomas Head collection
After the quick build we christened the dory JESS and set her in the water for the fist time.
The EC was in March, only six months away, and if I were to do it, I needed a boat. A man named Neil Calore had won the event in 2012 in some very tough conditions in a kit boat, the 17′ Northeaster Dory. I ordered the kit with a balance-lug rig, and it arrived in mid-December. It would be a challenge itself to finish by the end of January and have enough time for sea trials, but by mid-January I had a hull and spent the rest of the month making the seats, centerboard, and spars.
On February 3, 2014, we christened the dory JESS, after my oldest daughter. Sea trials followed. The dory rowed quite easily, and the lugsail proved to be a good choice, as it was simple and easy to handle, and moved the boat nicely—especially on a reach.
Thomas Head collection
The starting line of the EC is an impressive array of small boats stretched out across the beach.
Thomas Head collection
I arrived at Fort Desoto one day prior to the race for last-minute preparations and race briefings. Just making it to the starting line is half the battle. The half yoke on the rudder and the push-pull tiller provide full control of the rudder without having to shift my position in the boat.
They say the hardest part of the EC is making it to the starting line, but on March 1 I stood there proudly with my boat and family, ready to embark. Shortly after the bagpipes played, the whistle was blown. The kayakers flew off the beach first, followed by the catamarans, then the larger sailing vessels. With most of the crowd away, I eased JESS into the water and was off.
Do I take the Intracoastal Waterway (ICW) or the Gulf of Mexico for a more direct route? Winds were forecast at 5 to 10 knots from the northwest that first day. Ideal sailing winds and a calm Gulf made the decision easy. I rounded Passage Key and entered the Gulf. The winds were mild and I tried a little “motorsailing”—which is to say, rowing with sails up. I averaged over 3.5 knots. After I rowed for an hour, the wind picked up and I was making 4.5 knots under sail on a course to Stump Pass.
Thomas Head collection
The adventure begins under clear skies. A steady NW wind was perfect weather for sailing. Minutes after the start, JESS trails the sailing fleet.
The sea breeze kicked in that afternoon and I was surfing with a nice 2′ chop. The winds quickly picked up to a steady 15 knots and the Gulf built into steep, closely spaced seas. I was suddenly surfing white-capped 2′ waves doing almost 8 knots. I should have reefed, and I wanted to, but I had to keep the dory on a straight course and if I left tiller, I’d broach. I held on and ran with full sail.
But I needed to get out of these conditions. Running Stump Pass at night in big breakers was not an option. The GPS showed Venice Inlet 5 nautical miles away. It has long breakwaters that extend out 120 yards; I would have to jibe to sail down between them. As I crested a wave I made the jibe and was in the trough when the sail whipped over. A wave broke on the stern and the rudder came off. Luckily, I had tethered the rudder to the boat. The boat broached violently, and I sprang forward to drop the sail. It came down quickly, landing half in the water. With my sail and rudder both dragging in the water, I grabbed the oars and rowed hard to avoid the rapidly approaching rocks. My port oar was hitting the lugsail yard, limiting my stroke. I managed to get the boat to the middle of the channel, but the tide was ripping out against incoming rollers and I was stuck there and making no progress. I eased into the lee of the barrier rocks on the side of the channel, pulled the sail aboard, and rehung the rudder.
As I continued south along the Intracoastal, I berated myself for not following the rule of reefing early.
A little after 1 a.m., I made Checkpoint 1 at Cape Haze Marina, just south of Stump Pass. After getting into dry clothes, it was time to set up camp. I preferred sleeping in my hammock, but there were no trees available to string it to, so I arranged the boat for the sleeping bag. It was a short, restless night, but I woke around 6 a.m. in high spirits. Craving strong coffee and hot oatmeal, I set up my stove and made breakfast. After eating I felt strong and eager to get going.
It was 85 miles to Chokoloskee, the second checkpoint, and there are many different routes to it. I chose to take the ICW to Gasparilla Pass, and then move outside. This would allow me to avoid some bridges, channels, and boat traffic. I rejoined the ICW at Boca Grande, made good time, and arrived in San Carlos Bay early in the evening. I camped on Picnic Island rather than attempt Sanibel Pass at night and avoid running Big Carlos Pass, the next practical camp area, in the wee hours. I had covered only 35 miles, but I’d make up for this by getting an early start on day three. The hammock worked great, and I was asleep by 11.
I was up by sunrise and made it through Sanibel Pass to the Gulf. Winds were light but favorable; however by afternoon they picked up and I was reaching at a steady 4 knots. I arrived outside Big Marco Pass just after dark and ran Big Marco River rather than round Cape Romano. I coasted through the river and entered the Everglades in the wee hours Monday morning.
It was a dark, moonless night and there wasn’t an ounce of wind as I rowed through the small outer islands and back into the Gulf. Seeing the reflected night sky was like peering into another universe. Bioluminescence stirred around my oar tips and mixed with the starlight.
I rowed a few more miles and decided it was time to camp. No longer among the long barrier islands with sandy beaches, I was surrounded by clusters of mangrove islets. I approached several, shining my spotlight as I looked for a sandy spot to land. Roosting birds squawked loudly and hundreds of mullet jumped in the shallows. I eventually found a campsite.
I had been moving nonstop for 22 hours, covered 55 nautical miles, and rowed the last 12. I needed sleep.
The low-hanging sea grape trees and mangroves were not ideal for the hammock—their skinny limbs bowed under the strain. The hammock had mosquito netting, but in the time it took to climb in and rezip, 50 mosquitoes had made it in with me. I was too tired to care and quickly fell asleep to their steady whine. JESS, tied to a mangrove stump, rested on a patch of sand.
I woke around 7 a.m. and peered out at my little dory, high and dry about 30 yards from the water’s edge. It was dead low tide. The sand was littered with rocks and shells. I cleared out a path the best I could and tried to move the boat, but it was firmly suctioned to wet sand and wouldn’t budge. I finally managed to wrench it free and get it afloat.
Thomas Head collection
I arrived at Checkpoint three, Chokoloskee, in the early afternoon. It was too early to stop for the day, so after a quick resupply of water I set out again for New Turn Key.
I hoisted sails and reached to Indian Key, the entrance to Chokoloskee, and arrived at Checkpoint 3 early in the afternoon. I cleaned up with a hose at a fish-cleaning station and refilled my water jugs. Refreshed, I headed out through a maze of mangroves toward the outer islands. It was a hard row against the tide, and I didn’t reach the outside until sunset.
I had a challenging night of sailing on a reach with 2’ seas. The wind eventually died, and I rowed the last 3 miles in a choppy Gulf and made it to New Turn Key around midnight. As I rounded the tip of the island, I aimed the spotlight on a wide beach that had a very shallow slope, but it was covered with large rocks and shells. The tide was dead low and there was about 30 yards of exposed rocky beach. I would normally set up a clothesline loop on the anchor to pull the boat out to deep water, but I was exhausted. I found shrubs to hang the hammock on and tried to get some rest. I didn’t manage much sleep; I could hear the dory getting beat up on the rocks as the tide eased in. I woke several times and pulled her as far out of the water as I could. The mosquitoes filled the hammock each time I opened it.
At sunrise I gave up trying to sleep and pressed on. The weather channel was chattering about a frontal system a couple days out and approaching South Florida. I could continue inside along the Wilderness Waterway to Flamingo, Checkpoint 3, or remain outside around Point Sable and enter from Florida Bay. My plan was to take the outside, weather permitting.
The winds were forecast as south at 5 to 10 knots, so I opted for Point Sable. The wind was light and I “motorsailed” with the oars. By afternoon the winds was a steady 15 knots. The waves were a steep 2’ and closely spaced–so much for the 5–10-knot forecast.
On a beat the dory, light and lug-rigged, couldn’t make progress south toward Point Sable. She didn’t carry the momentum needed to punch through the waves. I was 5 miles out and 38 miles north of Point Sable. Darkness would descend in six hours, and I was in a rough sea forecast for 6’ to 8’ the next day. I was very concerned. I needed a new plan.
Unable to sail, I decided to try rowing toward Point Sable. I rowed hard into the chop, but at my average of 1.5 knots, it would take 20 hours to row to Point Sable. Needless to say, I was daunted by the thought of spending the night getting tossed around on the Gulf. It was time to scrap Point Sable. Ponce De Leon Bay was 6.85 miles away, and from there I could pick up the last of the Wilderness Waterway.
I plugged the coordinates for the bay into the GPS and started rowing hard—really hard, still averaging a knot and a half. If I maintained this pace, I’d make the entrance by sunset. Failure was not an option. I took it one mile at a time.
I neared the bay entrance just before sunset. The closer I got to the shoreline, the shallower the water became. The wind started ripping and the waves turned into breakers. The dory made a cracking sound as it slammed into the backs of the largest waves. The last mile was the worst. Once again, I was spent and had to dig deep.
Rounding the last point at the northern edge of the bay and entering Shark River, I was thrown a real treat: a favorable tidal current. For an hour I rowed the twisted river, making 5 knots over the bottom. I tore into a can of smoked oysters and chased them with sardines, then entered Whitewater Bay just as the sun set.
Thomas Head collection
After spending most of the day in rough, windy conditions my hands were quite waterlogged.
I rowed what seemed like an eternity through the canal that leads to Flamingo. I arrived at Checkpoint 3 shortly after 2 a.m., having covered 50 miles, 15 of them rowed. I had a bad blister on my lower back from leaning into the centerboard trunk on the pull stroke. My sleep-deprived brain seemed to be operating in slow motion, and simple tasks were a challenge.
Fantasizing that Flamingo was a luxurious resort, I imagined indulging in a hot bath, a four-course meal, and a good night’s sleep. What I got was a horde of mosquitoes, a cold sink in a muddy bathroom, and dehydrated beef stroganoff. Several kayakers were already snug in their tents when I arrived, and by the time I set up the hammock it was after 3 a.m. I was giddy at the thought of a good night’s rest.
The skies appeared clear, so I didn’t set up the rain fly. The usual mob of mosquitoes joined me inside the hammock. I fell asleep quickly but was awakened about 30 minutes later to the rumble of thunder and gusty winds. I rolled out of the hammock as the rain began to fall, and retrieved the rain fly from the boat about 100 yards away. I set it up as quickly as I could in the rain, with the mosquitoes attacking me.
Thomas Head collection
In the predawn light I made a last check of my gear. We’d been warned not leave any food stored in boats overnight. Raccoons would have raided the stores. I was glad I covered the boat with a tarp because it also kept everything from getting soaked from a heavy dew.
So much for a good rest. Around 5:30 I woke and peeked outside. All the kayakers were gone. Feeling like I’d overslept and was late to work, I jumped into action. The wind was forecast to blow 20–25 all day, and I was glad I wasn’t on the Gulf. A little reorganizing of the dory, and I was rowing Flamingo Channel out to Florida Bay.
I had studied the charts of the bay for many hours in preparation for the Everglades Challenge and had a good plan to get across. The winds were very strong, out of the SSW at 20 knots. I rowed up to the last channel marker, put in a double reef, and raised the sail. Off I went with a ripping wind.
The channels were well marked, and I flew along on a broad reach averaging 5.5 knots. I could be at the finish line by early afternoon. I exited Twisted Mile and popped out into a very steep, nasty chop. Sheeting in the main, I tried to point to Jimmie Channel. Waves washed over the rail filling the dory, and I sailed with one hand and bailed with the other. There were rocks to leeward and I couldn’t ease off. I steered a few degrees downwind of the channel entrance—the best I could do—and ran aground in muck just shy of the entrance. Hopping out, I sank to my thighs, leaned on the boat, and trudged to deeper water. Afloat again and with the oars ready, I jumped back in. I was soon back on a reach making good time.
A quick jog through Manatee Pass, and I was back in a protected bay heading toward the Intracoastal Waterway and very close to the end of the race. I sailed by a fellow competitor in a kayak and we exchanged greetings. As I approached the Intracoastal, I paused to put Sunset Cove in the GPS. The kayaker passed me, paddling very casually. With the numbers entered, off I went. Glancing astern, I couldn’t believe what I saw.
Dana Clark
This storm hit when I was about two miles from the finish line and packed high winds. Weather can be big challenge and the EC officials emphasize that you are the captain of your ship and should not venture out in conditions that you’re not confident that you can manage safely.
The sky was black from one end to the other and a roll of clouds was closing fast. There weren’t any islands close enough to provide a lee. I was smack in the middle of a bay. I’d just have to deal with the storm when it hit. I passed the kayaker and pointed astern. He looked, whipped around and took off at an Olympic pace.
I was a half a mile from shore—I could see the houses and docks clearly—when the front hit with a sudden gust. I dropped the sail. A wall of rain sped toward me and when it hit I lost sight of land. It was blowing from the west, gusting over 40. The dory didn’t seem to care and ran with the wind under a bare pole. I simply sat and waited. I knew I was rapidly approaching shore, but couldn’t see it. If I washed up on rocks, JESS would take a horrible beating. I hoped for a rare sandy beach. Suddenly I saw a green marker and started to make out the shoreline. I steered to starboard and a red marker appeared. I was going to make it.
I coasted into the marina of Buttonwood Bay Condos. People on their balconies watched the storm, and I waved to them as I coasted into a nicely protected slip. They looked a little puzzled.
Dana Clark
Having sailed through high winds and driving rain, I approached the finish with a deep reef in the sail.
The storm let up after about 30 minutes, and with a light rain and strong but steady wind again I raised a reefed sail and headed out. The looks from the condo dwellers went from puzzled to stunned as I left marina. I was 5 miles from the finish.
Dana Clark
I arrived at the finish smiling at the sight of my three girls waiting for me. It was the first time I’d seen them since the race started. One of the great gifts of the EC is a fresh perspective on what truly matters.
Rounding the point into Sunset Cove, I looked for a crowded dock. I snaked through anchored boats and then saw people jumping up and down waving and cheering. It was the finish line. The whole scene was a little overwhelming. My brain was foggy and processing very slowly, and I stopped the boat just short of the dock to allow my mind to catch up. Then I spotted my family in the crowd.
Dana Clark
Finishing the EC requires a steady if not grueling pace. The final days of the EC are the toughest, your brain is foggy and your body is worn from working the last few days in a saltwater environment.
It was over. The Everglades Challenge had lived up to its reputation. Both my body and mind had been tested, and both were, at last, relieved.
Thomas Head collection
After the race I posed with the T shirt bearing my Watertribe name. In my left hand is the award for the win in my class and in my right the coveted shark’s tooth awarded to all finishers.
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. Thomas ranks his boatbuilding and sailing skills as novice at best, but he loves wooden boats. His review of a handheld depth finder also appears in this issue.
Building and outfitting the Northeaster dory
Building the Chesapeake Light Craft Northeaster dory was as straightforward as a kit build gets. CLC’s LapStitch stitch-and-glue method is simple and the machine-cut rabbets make aligning planks much less fussy than ordinary stitch-and-glue where panels fit edge to edge and are susceptible to drifting out of alignment.
I stuck to the building plans with the exception of making the mast partners permanent (they’re normally removable to allow tandem rowing) and leaving out the forward thwart. Two rigs are offered for the dory: sloop and balanced lug. The lug is a simpler sail to handle and did exceptionally well running and reaching. The extra reefs I added to the sail came in handy during the race.
I built my boat on a tight timeline and had my share of unexpected delays but no major goofs. I built the dory in my backyard with a circular saw, a belt sander and an assortment of homemade clamps made from PVC pipe. Don’t let a lack of tools keep you from building a boat.
The Northeaster proved itself seaworthy in previous Challenges and consistently performed well in EC’s monohull sail class. I had no significant problems dragging the dory unassisted across beaches, navigating winding mangrove channels or sailing open water in rough conditions. It draws mere inches, an advantage in shallow Florida waters. I had plenty of freeboard with my racing gear aboard and I would confidently carry a much heavier load for cruising at a more relaxed pace.
Outfitting the boat for the EC was both fun and challenging. Food, shelter and safety were the three main areas I had to address. With two days as my longest planned time between check points, I was confident five gallons of water would be enough. For energy during the day I ate a variety of energy bars and snacks and each night I used a MSR Reactor stove to boil water for a Mountain House camp meal. Sleeping in a small, tender dory is difficult, so I chose a Hennessy Hammock for my primary sleep system and slept ashore whenever possible. It worked great in a variety of terrain. My safety and contingency equipment included a hypothermia kit, safety signaling devices and additional flotation. The most important piece of gear was my life jacket, It had to be comfortable, hold some safety gear and be reliable. I used a Ronny Fisher by the Astral Buoyancy Company. Designed as a PFD for kayak fishing it provided plenty of places to attach and store necessities. The Watertribe website has a list of required equipment and tips for packing light that would be useful for anyone planning to do some wilderness cruising in a small boat. —TH
The Everglades Challenge
The Watertribe‘s Everglades Challenge is a tough seven-day adventure race with a few rules that make it unique and challenging. The primary rule is that racers are on their own from start to finish and entirely responsible for their own wellbeing. Self sufficiency is very important because the course goes through some very remote areas; you may go a couple of days and not even see another racer or have cell-phone coverage. Racers should not expect any assistance unless they activate an ELB in an emergency.
Boats may only be human or wind powered and must be dragged by the racers without any assistance, if only at the start at the start—about a dozen yards from the high tide mark to water’s edge. This requirement keeps the boats small. There are four classes of boats: kayaks, sailing catamarans, monohull sailboats, and experimental craft. The starting line of the EC is an awesome sight of cool boats outfitted to the gills for a serious expedition.
Each racer must sign in at all three checkpoints by a set deadline. The time allotted between points requires racers to keep moving. It is about 60 nautical miles from the start to the first checkpoint and racers are given 29 hours to complete that first leg. That’s an average of two knots without stopping. Factor in stops for sleep, weather or other contingencies and the result is a pretty aggressive timeline. Subsequent checkpoints are farther apart and are given more time, but a steady pace is still required. Most racers will complete the 300-nautical miles in four to five days.
Just making it to the start of the EC is no easy task and requires a lot of preparation and commitment. When the whistle blows, racers drag, push, and even roll their boats to the water’s edge. They will tackle a wide range of coastal conditions, headwinds, storms, ripping tidal currents, exposure and fatigue. Racers must have a measure of mental toughness just to keep moving forward. Those who attempt the EC are guaranteed a fresh perspective on what is hard and meaningful in life and for those who finish, a great sense of accomplishment and confidence. —TH
I prefer to anchor out when we are camp-cruising, but with Alaska’s 20′ tide range that isn’t always an option in some of the shallower coves. Boats with flat bottoms wide enough to keep them upright will ground comfortably on a falling tide, but our Caledonia yawl, with its narrow keel, will come to rest heeled over. This is where beaching legs, also known as sheer legs, come in handy. This decidedly low-tech gear is just the thing to keep your boat upright on the beach, allowing the continued use of your boat as a base camp between tides.
Without her beaching legs, this Caledonia yawl would be resting on her planking and heeled at about 10°, the angle of her deadrise. With the legs she’s level, supported by her keel and gunwales and fit for habitation.
Captain Ahab’s spares? The author’s yellow cedar beaching legs were a driftwood solution to the problem of sleeping aboard on a falling tide that would leave the boat high and dry in the middle of the night.
Although it would be tempting to make an adjustable set of legs, the sort used on larger boats, this isn’t necessary. I made a simple set from an Alaskan yellow cedar pole I salvaged from the beach on one of our camping trips when it became obvious that we were going to spend the night high and dry. They worked so well, I brought them home and refined them a bit.
The length of the legs was determined by holding the boat level on a flat beach and measuring from the bottom of the outwale to the ground. To that I added 12″, so there would be enough above the rail to secure the legs to the boat. The legs are notched to tuck under the outwale, providing a good strong contact point with the boat. It is better to err on the short side from foot to notch, since you want the keel taking most of the weight. Mine are then tapered toward the foot, which was also left wide for a nice bearing surface on the ground. If the ground is especially soft, a flat rock or a slab of driftwood will keep the foot from sinking.
A thole pin serves as the simplest of attachments for a beaching leg. The pin pulls the notched leg in tight so the load can be taken by the outwale
The upper end of each leg has two Velcro straps, secured with screws and finish washers, which are wrapped tight around the tholepins (something that could easily be adapted to a more conventional oar lock). On big boats it was standard practice to through-bolt the legs to the hull and run guy lines fore and aft from the foot of the leg to the rail, but this doesn’t seem to be necessary on a small boat.
When the legs aren’t in use they’re easy to stow. Their simple attachment makes them easy to deploy while still afloat, for times when you’re going to dry out in the middle of the night. Just be sure you know what’s under you; it would be a shame to be surprised by a big rock in the wrong spot.
Beaching legs are simple to make and quite useful for those of us who camp-cruise in tidal waters. Make a pair and see for yourself.
Jim Danner is an IT manager for the state of Alaska. When he’s not working he’s spending time with his family or messing around with small boats. His article about cruising with his family appeared in our September 2014 issue.
Editor’s notes:
After reading Jim’s article I decided that my Whitehall needed a pair of beaching legs. Varnished inside and out, it wasn’t intended for rough handing on shore. While it has a narrow plank keel and will balance upright on its own, a pair of beaching legs would assure that it wouldn’t rest on its bright-finished Port Orford cedar planking.
Christopher Cunningham
The detachable foot of the beach leg keeps it from sinking into soft ground.
The Whitehall has oarlocks instead of thole pins so I followed up on Jim’s suggestion to fabricate a way of connecting the legs to the rowlocks. A ½″ rod fits perfectly into the rowlocks socket. I bought a 2′ length of mild steel rod at the hardware store for a few bucks. Brass or stainless steel might have been a better choice but not so easy to find nor as inexpensive. Aluminum would have worked well too but I am not familiar with heating and bending it.
The rod required a bend of about 80° to go from the nearly vertical hole in the rowlock to the horizontal hole through the beach leg. I made the bends before cutting the rod to length—the extra length gave me a lever cool to the touch. I heated the rod with an ordinary propane torch. It took about 4 or 5 minutes to get the steel to glow red. I kept the flame aimed at a single spot to focus the heat, and thus the bend, in a small section of the rod. Only an inch or so was glowing brightly when I turned off the torch and went to the vice to make the bend. After cooling the rod in water I cut the ends to length with a hacksaw. With a new blade the cuts don’t take long.
Christopher Cunningham
The block attached to the bottom of the steel rod transfers the load taken my the beaching leg to the inwale, a strong structural element.
For the rod to keep the beaching leg in place it has to be kept from sliding up. There was no easy way to use a cotter pin, so I made an oak block to attach to the rod. To make a groove to fit the side of the rod I clamped the two blocks together and drilled down the center with a ½” Forstner bit. Each top of each block would press against the bottom face of the inwale, keeping the rod in place and transferring any strain to a structural part of the boat. I drilled a 17/64″ hole in the block and drilled and tapped the rod for a ¼″ x 20 thumbscrew.
Christopher Cunningham
The straight side of a hairpin cotter pin rests in a kerf, keeping the beaching leg vertical.
The beach legs are ¾″ oak. A ½″ hole fits over the rod. On the tablesaw I cut a kerf through the hole to make a passageway for a hairpin cotterpin. The pin holds the beach leg against the outwale and the slot captures the pin to keep the leg pointed down.
At the bottom of each leg I cut a shouldered tenon and made a foot with a loose-fitting mortise. A bungee cord laced through the foot and leg keeps the foot in place. The loose fit adapts to uneven terrain and makes it easy to remove the foot when the beaching legs are stowed.
Christopher Cunningham
The parts of the beaching legs fit in a small fabric bag that’s easily stowed.
For about $20, and a mostly pleasant afternoon in the shop, I was in business. I did have one moment of despair: One of the holes I drilled for the cotter pin angled well away from the center of the rod. There was no way to drill a new hole and I thought I’d have to start over and make a new piece. Fortunately the hole was just the right size to drive a 16-penny nail through. I cut the ends flush, dabbed on a bit of flux, and hit it with the torch and a bit of silver solder. That saved the day. The new hole went in straight and true.
The Rocker Stoppers nest when not in use. Weight is provided by a homemade mesh bag loaded with beach rocks.
I enjoy sleeping at anchor. There’s something soothing about the gentle rocking of the hull. Gentle rocking. I don’t enjoy being jostled about when waves find their way into what had started out as a quiet anchorage.
On many nights I would have traded my favorite pillow for anything that could keep my boat from rocking and let me fall asleep. Rocker Stoppers look like they’ll do the job. They’re orange plastic gizmos that look like they could do double duty as sombreros for Chihuahuas. Hung in multiples from each side of a boat, their resistance to vertical movement will help hold a boat steady. For boats up to 26′ the manufacturer recommends using three from each side of the boat with a 5- to 10-lb weight at the end of the line running through them. A mushroom anchor is suggested as a handy weight—it will nest inside the Rocker Stoppers—but I’d rather not lug two more anchors around. I used some mesh bags filled with beach rocks.
In gentle waves, the kind I’d expect in a small, protected anchorage, the Rocker Stoppers, hung from the sheer, did dampen the roll. My inclinometer rolled through an arc of 10 to 12 degrees without them and about half that with them. After the Rocker Stoppers had some time in the water, the hitches capturing them on the line snugged up, widening the gap between knots and allowing more play. Getting the knots close together (solid braid line is easier to work with than three-strand line) more effectively restricts rocking motion.
The Rocker Stoppers were most effective when deployed well away from the gunwale. A pair of oars served as outrigger booms.
While deploying the Rocker Stoppers from the rail produced measurable results, there wasn’t quite the wow factor I was hoping for. The label on each Rocker Stopper says: “Sailboats can use the end of a boom or a spinnaker pole.” So I set a pair of oars up as outriggers, handles outboard and blades tucked under the opposite gunwale. The effect was dramatic. Getting the Rocker Stoppers another 5′ out from the rail all but eliminated rocking.
The inclinometer wavered through only 2 degrees (see video). I could see the looms of the oars flex, an indication of the amount of force going into stabilizing the boat. With a little adaptation my mainmast could be employed as a single stout outrigger for both sides. I didn’t try the Rocker Stoppers in anything but small waves and rolling boat wakes. If I had to spend a night where the water was going to be choppy, I might set the boat at anchor, but I wouldn’t sleep aboard.
Each Rocker Stopper is 14″ in diameter and 6″ tall. They nest compactly together when a line isn’t threaded through them, but the stack of six ready to deploy takes up some space that can be hard to find aboard a small boat. Be that as it may, I place a high value on a good night’s sleep, and the Rocker Stoppers would earn a place aboard.
Christopher Cunningham is the editor of Small Boats Monthly
Manufactured by Davis Instruments, Rocker Stoppers sell for $13.99 each.
The most common and useful electronic device aboard large boats is undoubtedly the depthfinder—it keeps them from running aground. With most small boats you can often see the bottom before you hit it, and if you do run aground you can usually shove off with an oar or get out and push, as I did in in Florida Bay during the Everglades Challenge (see my story in this issue). There are times where water depth is an important piece of information for small boats, particularly when anchoring in coves where a rising tide can diminish the scope of your anchor rode and a falling tide can set you on the rocks in the middle of the night. Knowing the depth can also help you find good fishing holes. The H22FX HawkEye Handheld Sonar System by NorCross Marine gives us a way to determine depth up to 200’ quickly and accurately.
No bigger than a flashlight, the H22FX is small enough to fit just about anywhere. Simply add four AA batteries and the unit is ready to go with a flip of a switch. All you have to do is place the front of the device in the water and get a reading on its backlit LCD screen. The sounder floats and is rated waterproof to 3′.
In my sea trials aboard my fishing skiff, the sounder accurately measured depths from 3′ up to 80′ on trial depths on a variety of bottoms, verified by my onboard depthfinder. The H22FX was also useful in checking my depths when I went spearfishing from my kayak.
In addition to measuring depth, the H22FX can also be aimed horizontally to find distances to shore or submerged obstructions. It has a built-in thermometer to provide air and water temperature and doubles as a 20-lumen LED flashlight with easily changed clear, red, blue, and green lenses. The LED can flash SOS, a nice nod to safety, but it is not a substitute for Coast Guard–approved distress-signaling devices.
The H22FX has a fish indicator feature to help locate fish, and it did display the fish symbol when fish were present. While that’s a nice-to-know bit of information, any experienced fisherman knows that even more sophisticated sounders that show you a picture of the bottom and the fish are primarily used to find underwater structures and contours where you are most likely to catch fish.
The H22FX is capable of shooting through aluminum or solid fiberglass hulls but not through wood. In a small boat the water is within reach.
The H22FX is a useful tool. Depths marked on charts don’t have the details in the shore-side waters frequented by small boats, and taking soundings with your anchor before setting it is clumsy and time-consuming. With the H22FX, determining depth is quick, easy and reliable.
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 appears in this issue.
With 130 square feet of sail set, the Coquina slips along in light air.
Joe Brennan’s as-yet-unnamed Herreshoff Coquina is a cold-molded version of the lapstrake cat-ketch that Nathanael Herreshoff built for himself in 1889. This is Joe’s first boat, built to test the idea of a career as a boatbuilder: “So I had this silly idea . . . ,” he said. He purchased plans from Doug Hylan of Brooklin, Maine. The plans for the 16’8” by 5′1″ Coquina, developed by Doug with Maynard Bray, include directions for Herreshoff’s original construction of white cedar on oak as well as for glued-lapstrake plywood. Joe enlisted the help of Terry Schuster, a craftsman in Pittsburgh who brought his knowledge and experience as a boatbuilder to the project. They chose to build the Coquina in cold-molded red cedar. Using a CAD program they drew out full-sized patterns for the stations and all of the parts, except the planking. Western red cedar planking measuring 17′ x 5″ x 1/8″ came from Baird Brothers Lumber of northeast Ohio. Joe and Terry book-matched all the planks that would show inside and outside of the hull. The building of the hull was done one side at a time. The inner and outer layers were laid horizontally, and the middle layer diagonally. After each side was planked it was removed, sanded, and finished, then put back on the molds. A bead of 3M 5200 and silicon-bronze screws secured the hull halves to the keelson. The builders installed white oak mast steps and knees to hold the side decks and the seat cleats. The seats are white oak and mahogany. The decks are marine-grade plywood with highly figured African mahogany faces. The transom is sapele.
Ed Rombout Photography
The cold-molded construction provides a clean interior and a light but strong structure.
The masts, booms, and yards are Sitka spruce and were built by Max Peterson of Max’s Woodworks of Bethel Park, Pennsylvania. They were delivered ready for sanding and varnish. Tom Bell of Bell Sails in Washington, Pennsylvania, made the Dacron sails—an 83-sq-ft main and a 47-sq-ft mizzen. The centerboard is high-strength steel and the rudder is aircraft aluminum. Steering is as designed by Herreshoff: a rope through the transom and running around the perimeter of the interior. Joe, on his “crazy tangent,” worked nights and weekends in a rented shop for about three years. He launched the boat in the summer of 2013 on a small lake near the shop to see how she would row. “At the first stroke of the oars she took off like rabbit,” he said. Later, he took her out for a first sail. “She stood up to the wind, rain, and chop. She stayed dry for the most part and was a pleasure to sail—a dream come true.” The boat still awaits a christening, a name, and an owner. Joe is now working on a Rushton wooden canoe, a project that is much more manageable and less expensive.
The Golant Ketch is a 20′ hard-chined camp-cruiser designed by Roger Dongray. Dongray is perhaps best known for his Cornish Shrimper, which he designed in 1976 with the intention of building only one in plywood, for himself. But after various friends showed an interest, 10 more plywood boats were built, and in 1979 Cornish Crabbers started building them in fiberglass and have now delivered 1,132 of them. At first glance the Ketch and the Shrimper seem to have similar hull shapes, but this is perhaps only because the eye is distracted by their wide-plank clinker-effect construction. The Ketch is actually slightly longer and wider, and also has a finer bow, a fuller stern, and a less-raked transom.
In September 2013, after a 24-year career in the wine business, Keith McIlwain enrolled in the Lyme Regis Boat Building Academy’s nine-month Boat Building, Maintenance, and Support course, in which about half the students get the opportunity to build a boat for themselves. For some years Keith had admired the 18′9″ round-bilged Golant Gaffer—another Dongray design, from 1993—but was worried that her fixed keel and 2′9″ draft would make her difficult to road-trailer. So when he came across the Gaffer’s centerboard cousin, the Golant Ketch, of which just one had been built at that time, he knew that this was the boat for him.
all photographs by Nigel Sharp
The foredeck is recessed to keep lines and gear from going overboard.
It was by no means certain that he would be allowed to build one, however, because the Academy staff needs to ensure that the boats produced by each class will give the students a wide range of experience in terms of construction methods and materials, and that it will be possible to complete them all during the time available. In fact it is unusual for any boats longer than about 16’ to be built. What won the day for Keith was the Golant Ketch’s plywood construction—as opposed to the more time-consuming cold-molded or strip-plank options for the Golant Gaffer—and the fact that Dongray had produced particularly detailed drawings.
The construction began with five permanent transverse bulkheads and partial bulkheads, all of ½″ plywood, set up, upside down, on a temporary framework on the workshop floor. Longitudinal bulkheads defining the cockpit were then added, and glue-fastened with epoxy. The keel was then fitted, it being of 5”-thick Douglas-fir with the centerboard slot cut through it; it was fastened in place with silicon-bronze screws and epoxy.
Chines of 1¼″ x 1″ Douglas-fir—three per side—were notched into the bulkheads and beveled to provide suitable landings for the 3/8″ plywood hull planks. Once the hull was planked, its exterior was sheathed with two layers of 6-oz plain-weave cloth and epoxy resin before a capping, laminated from ten layers of 1/8″ khaya, was fitted to the stem and around the forefoot. The outside of the hull was then faired and painted with Coppercoat, the copper-filled epoxy resin said to negate the need for antifouling for at least 10 years, being applied below the waterline. The topsides were painted with a two-part polyurethane, and the transom and stem cap finished bright.
A cradle was then built over the hull with the corners cut away on one side to allow it to be easily turned over. As soon as that was done, all of the plywood intersections on the inside of the hull were epoxy-filleted and two coats of epoxy resin were applied to the entire inside of the boat.
For accessibility, most of the interior fitout was carried out before the deck went on. The foredeck well, coach roof, and cockpit were all constructed of 3/8″ plywood supported by a Douglas-fir structure. To avoid the need for a mast support post in the middle of the cabin, the mast and chainplate loads are taken by a substantial deckbeam made up of six 5/8″ x 3″ Douglas-fir laminations sandwiched between two layers of ½″ plywood. Most of deck was painted with Hempel Multicoat (a combined primer and topcoat) while various pieces of khaya, such as the gunwales, cappings for the cockpit coaming, the companionway hatch and trim, and the surround for the foredeck well, were coated with Rustin’s Danish Oil for easy maintenance.
This pulley and axle provide a mechanical advantage for raising the lead-weighted centerboard.
For ballast, 880 lbs of sheet lead was secured in the bilges adjacent to the centerboard, effectively by laminating it together with PU adhesive. The centerboard was made up of four layers of plywood totaling 1½″, with a large section of the two inner layers removed and replaced by 112 lbs of lead. The rudder is predominantly plywood but has a lifting stainless steel plate which limits its draft to no more than that of the fixed keel. It has two pintles on the transom and a third one on a stainless-steel tubular structure that is connected to the aft corner of the keel to provide some protection to the outboard motor.
Dongray’s drawings included the specification and position of every deck fitting, and also details of some parts that needed to be specially made, including the centerboard control system, tabernacle, and other mast fittings. Throughout the build Keith rarely strayed from any of the drawings and even then only in minor ways after consulting Dongray himself.
Keith built the spars of spruce. Jeckells Sailmakers made the sails; when they were complete, Keith managed to step the rig inside the workshop by maneuvering the boat under the highest point of the roof.
The course’s finale is Launch Day, when all the new boats are launched into Lyme Regis Harbour one after another, to great fanfare. This deadline accurately reflects the real world of commercial boatbuilding and the students cheerfully put in the hours to make sure their boats are ready. Keith’s latest night was quarter to one in the morning, but on a couple of other occasions he got up at 3 a.m. just to apply a coat of paint on part of the deck so it would be dry when he started work properly after breakfast.
The Golant ketch caries 235 square feet of sail.
The new boat was christened DAYDREAM as she slipped into the water for the first time on a glorious sunny day in June. Unfortunately, Launch Day also brought with it a great deal of wind, and so Keith had to make do with a short outing under reefed headsail alone. The next time he got to sail DAYDREAM was with me, one week later. The day was again sunny, but the breeze a gentle 4–6 knots. Despite the slightly disproportionate chop, DAYDREAM made her way effortlessly through the water. She had a reassuring small amount of weather helm and she tacked through about 90 degrees, albeit slowly. This was hardly surprising given her long keel and the sea state, but the plus side of that is that she tracked straight. All the sail controls are led back to the cockpit, and it will be possible to reef by reaching the main gooseneck when standing in the companionway. The mainsail didn’t come down very easily, but Keith thinks that is just a question of coordinating the easing of the throat and peak halyards more effectively. That will be important as Keith anticipates he will sail the boat with just the mizzen and jib in strong winds.
Stainless-steel tubing supports the rudder and protects the outboard.
DAYDREAM’s 6-hp Mariner outboard is mounted in a well—into which the cockpit drains—immediately forward of the rudder, and its controls can be reached comfortably. Although it is possible to steer by turning the outboard through almost 90 degrees, thanks to its prop-wash over the rudder it is unlikely that this will be necessary when going ahead.
The practical interior includes a V-berth forward with an infill to form a double, and a quarter berth to starboard; a small seat to port adjacent to a compact galley area containing a two-burner gas cooker; a chemical toilet below a hinged lid by the companionway; and a shelf outboard on each side. Most of the interior is painted, but varnished khaya shelf fiddles, centerboard trunk, and companionway trim provide a pleasing contrast.
Keith is planning to set up his own boat building and repair company, called Daydream Boats, near his home in Bristol. From there he plans to sail DAYDREAM in the Bristol Channel, where there is a massive tidal range of 43′. But he is also looking forward to putting her on her trailer and taking her to less-demanding estuaries in other parts of the West Country, to Ireland, and to the Continent.
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.
The Penobscot Wherry from Cottrell Boatbuilding of Searsport, Maine, is based on the Lincolnville salmon wherry, a beamy high-volume boat used to remove salmon from weirs in the days when there was a commercial salmon run on Maine’s Penobscot River. “Wherry” is a nebulous term generally used to describe a relatively light rowboat. This particular wherry has a narrow, flat bottom with lapstrake sides, making it a specialized type of round-bottomed dory. “Bottom board” boats such as this one are found all along the Atlantic coast, both with transoms and pointed sterns; these boats include sea skiffs in New Jersey, tuckups and duckers on the Delaware, Staten Island skiffs, and Great South Bay’s Seaford skiffs. This general hull form is also found inland in Adirondack guideboats. The common element among all of these boats is a flat bottom board in place of a timber keel—a feature that allows the boat to sit upright when pulled up onto a beach or trailer.
all photographs by Matthew P. Murphy
The shapely wineglass transom tapers down to the garboards and the waterline of a double-ender.
Transom-sterned boats of this family have a narrow “boxed” stern with the garboards coming into the keel at almost 90 degrees, creating a hollow skeg at the stern below the water, and a wineglass shape above. For the Penobscot Wherry, builder Dale Cottrell had naval architect Richard Lagner work up the basic design. The resulting shape is elegant. At the waterline the hull is double ended. A raked, curved stern is both pleasing to the eye and useful in a following sea, lifting much more readily to waves than the squared-off stern of most rowing boats. The rake in the stern is complemented by an easy curved raking stem, a shape that makes it possible to work a little flare into the bow, which helps keep the boat dry when rowing to windward.
A nicely sculpted stem head punctuates the intersection of the curves of the sheer and the stem.
Dale Cottrell likes to build small rowing boats and dinghies. While he can do a fine job of plank-on-frame construction, his boats are primarily of glued lapstrake plywood, which makes them handier for people whose boats live on trailers, as the plywood planks do not shrink and swell with changes in moisture content. This construction also produces a lightweight boat as compared with a plank-on-frame hull. Like the products of most small boat shops, Dale’s boats need to go out the door to customers. The boat we trialed, however, is one of the rare ones he chose to keep for himself and his wife, Lynn. They call her OLIVE. OLIVE measures 15′ with a 52” beam. She is set up with two seats for pair rowing or single rowing with a passenger. The freeboard is relatively low so that 7’6” oars work well at the rowing stations. If someone wanted a single amidships thwart, 8-footers might be needed. Ten nicely lined-off planks per side make the complex shape of the stern and the bit of flare in the bow possible. She has an open interior that could be equipped with floorboards. The seats have a subtle pleasing curve when viewed from above—something I’d not seen before in small boats; they have a stiffener fastened to their undersides. OLIVE has fixed stretchers set up to catch the rowers’ heels. Amidships, the section is veed for about four planks going out from keel, then curves smoothly up to the gunwale. This provides stability when heeled but a lively feeling when rowing. The boat reminds you to sit in the middle, but provides plenty of stability when you slide to the gunwale. As with most fast rowing boats, stepping into the middle and grabbing the gunwales when boarding is a good idea. Fifteen feet is a great minimum length for a fixed-seat rowing boat. Any shorter and there is not much benefit rowing with a partner. Here two can have a fine row and there is nice power when there is wind. Customers have set up their Penobscot Wherries with a sliding seat for more leg power, but this is not ideal for this boat—it pitches with the rower’s weight moving back and forth. This is a fixed-seat boat, at heart.
The glued-plywood lapstrake construction creates an interior that is uncluttered and easy to maintain.
We’d planned for a still and clear early morning to test OLIVE, but got only some of that. It was a clear early July morning with great light, but we were served with a stiff northwesterly breeze running down the mile or so of harbor, kicking up a chop with the odd whitecap. It gave us a good chance to test the boat in conditions where many rowers might stay ashore, breezy enough for testing the reefing gear on a small sailboat. It was a great day to see how the boat handled in the wind.I first tried some laps with tight turns. This demonstrated how easily she spins—and indeed she spins quickly. She sits lightly on the water, so only a few strokes are required for a 180-degree turn (as compared to plumb-stemmed, straight-keeled Whitehalls which have a much wider turning circle). Dale then joined me, rowing stroke, to see how she behaved with two aboard. Which brings us to the matter of trim ballast. Small rowboats really benefit from trim ballast. The problem is that when a boat is set up to trim level for pair rowing, if rowing single the bow or stern is high depending on the seat chosen.
Reviewer Ben Fuller takes the Penobscot wherry out for a solo row with some ballast in the bow to keep the boat in trim.
For the trial Dale picked up a large beach boulder and put it in canvas bag. Not knowing that, I had a soft five-gallon water container with me, which is what I usually take along in my larger dory. When rowing single from the after seat, I’d slid the stone ahead of the forward seat. With Dale aboard, we tucked the rock under him, as I’m a bit bigger. Doubling the power with the same windage made pulling into 15 knots or so of wind seem like rowing into a light breeze. As expected, with two aboard, and the boat deeper in the water, some coordination was needed for a quick turn.
Matthew P. Murphy
With two at the oars, the wherry wasn’t significantly slowed by a 15-knot headwind.
Then I took her out for a solo spin around the harbor. Surreptitiously, I’d slid my GPS onto my rowing thwart. First I went downwind—the easy way—and was hardly working while running at an easy 4-plus knots, surfing wind waves. Thoughts of a couple of drybags of gear and Islesboro and an island campsite a dozen miles to leeward crossed my mind. With my weight in the stern seat and the ballast stone under the bow seat, she was quite well behaved going straight without wanting to turn up into the wind. Coming back was more work, but a steady pull into the teeth of the wind gave me better than 2 knots. I slid the ballast rock quite far forward to trim the bow down. Perhaps most interesting was rowing across the wind, which is where many rowing boats will misbehave. Three knots was easy, but what impressed me the most was the ability of the boat to stay on a straight line without needed hard pulls on the windward oar—something that is often the case. In big dark puffs, the boat just slid sideways a little. After I gave OLIVE back to Dan and Lynn, they jumped in, pulling well together upwind. My last sight of them that day was their turning around after a mile upwind to the head of the anchorage. If I were not overequipped with boats, I’d add this one to my to the fleet. She is great for anchorage and estuary cruising, poking up narrow coves, or heading across a broad harbor. Her flared bow and raking stern keep the water out if a sea is running. Her size is ideal: light enough to be easily maneuvered onto a beach or light trailer but capacious enough for two or three on a picnic. Dale could put a sailing rig in her, but I’d not bother with this as she slides along nicely without one under oars alone. While a competitive racer might seek a longer boat, this wherry is about as big as one might want for solo recreational rowing. A foot or so longer and narrower would be faster, but at her current size, the low wetted surface makes her an easy pull, a boat that you can row faster than you can walk, all day long.
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.
