When it came to selecting a tiller for the rudder of my Sooty Tern, UNA, I had to consider the two options designer Iain Oughtred provided for getting around the mizzen mast: a wishbone tiller that divides around the mizzenmast, or a Norwegian tiller, a short tiller set at a right angle to the rudder and operated with a push-pull stick. The former would provide the same feel as a conventional tiller; the latter would clearly take some getting used to.
Common to faerings (double-ended Scandinavian workboats), the Norwegian tiller traces its ancestry to the Vikings, and has been used for ages. It consists of the transverse tiller, an extension that reaches forward, and a flexible or articulated connection between the two. The connection can be simple or complex, anything from a rope with a tensioning cam cleat, two eyebolts interlocked, an oarlock modified with socket, or an off-the-shelf or custom-built tiller universal joint.
Unlike a conventional tiller that may sweep across the boat from rail to rail—and preventing anyone from sitting in the stern—the tiller extension of the Norwegian tiller moves only along its own length, taking up very little space even when the helm is put hard over in either direction. The helmsman can steer easily anywhere within reach of the extension. With an extra-long telescoping extension, it would even be possible to steer from the bow.
Leney Breeden
The author at the helm of his Sooty Tern, UNA. The laminated tiller extension arches over the gunwale to keep it from chafing the varnish.
The helmsman can shift his or her weight as the boat heels without the awkwardness that often comes with a conventional tiller. Sit, stand, hike out, or lie down; you’ll always find a comfortable way to hold the extension. If your boat has a neutral helm, you can rest the tiller extension in your lap, over the shoulder, or draped along the rail or held there to self-steer. At anchor it is readily lashed to the gunwale, out of the way.
Leney Breeden
UNA’s tiller uses an eyebolt to create a pivoting connection to the extension. To the port side of the rudder you can see the head of the wedge that locks the tiller to the rudder. The mortise it gets tapped into extends slightly into the rudder head to ensure that the wedge will come home against the rudder for a tight connection.
The transverse tiller can be square and mortised through the rudder head with a wedge to hold it tight, or round and set in an easily drilled hole and allowed to rotate so only a simple hinge at the outboard end of the tiller is required to provide the lateral range of motion. Allow about 1″ of tiller length for every foot of boat. My 20′ boat has a 20″ tiller. Its leverage may be less than that of a standard tiller, but with balanced sail trim for a neutral helm, the short lever arm is quite adequate. The extension can be as long as is practical. UNA’s is 8′ long, short enough to clear the main sheet when tacking, and long enough to let me stretch my legs near amidships when sailing.
Using the tiller requires some mental rewiring, but after an hour it’ll become second nature. I dare say this tiller may be adapted to any well-balanced boat with a rudder. Tested for centuries, it really works. It was the best choice for my boat and has been a joy to use. Give one a try, and see what you’ve been missing.
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.
Editor’s notes:
When Eddie first suggested this article I didn’t believe that readers with boats already outfitted with conventional tillers would make the switch to a Norwegian tiller. At the time, I was refinishing a 14′ lapstrake Whitehall that I’d built and sold in 1984 and had come back to me after two owners. Its rudder was equipped with a yoke for steering while rowing and a tiller with a pivoting extension for sailing. When I got the boat back on the water and under sail, the tiller and extension proved awkward to use and prevented having anyone sit astern of me.
Christoper Cunningham
This tiller, angled forward, made turning to starboard less positive than turning to port. I discarded it.
I made a transverse tiller with a locust crook and while it had a nice trim look, it put the pivot point of the extension forward of the rudder’s pintles and gudgeons, making turns to starboard (the tiller side) less effective. Even so, the Norwegian style was clearly an improvement over the conventional tiller.
Christopher Cunningham
A straight transverse tiller long enough to extend past the transom opens up the stern sheets for a passenger. The hole in the tiller on the port side of the rudder head is for a flagstaff.
I made a second transverse tiller that was perpendicular to the rudder head and extended just past the transom. With it the steering was positive in both directions and I could sail steer a passenger in the stern.
Christopher Cunningham
A simple rope connection can be made quite tight to eliminate play.
Some fans of the Norwegian tiller prefer not to use rope to join the extension to the tiller because it gets slack and introduces a disconcerting amount of play in the steering linkage. My solution is to thread a ¼″ braided nylon rope up through holes in the tiller and extension and pull it tight against a figure-8 knot on the end. The other end passes through a second hole in the extension, is drawn tight, and then wrapped around the cord between the tiller and extension. The wraps force those two pieces apart, putting the line between them under great tension. After a half-dozen turns, the tail end of the line gets half-hitched several times around the tiller, holding the tension. The wraps of the cord form a flexible but firm connection that has no detectible play. It’s cheap to make and easy to repair or replace in the field. —CC
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The mosquitoes the author and his future wife encountered during their 2003 Quebec-Labrador wilderness trip were not to be taken lightly. The Bug Shirts are designed to be cool in warm weather, so additional layering is required when it gets cold.
Back in my Outward Bound days, I couldn’t wait for my inaugural visit to the school’s northernmost outpost in Maine. I was a young, impressionable paddle geek, and the school’s Greenville base beckoned, with its maverick instructors and easy access to some of the state’s finest paddling. Upon arriving, one of the first things I noticed was that everyone owned the same bug shirt. In a region where biting insects vastly outnumber their mammalian brethren, this was no small detail. I ordered mine the next day. Since then, I have donned my Original Bug Shirt hundreds of times.
The fabrics used in the Original Bug Shirt have an exceptionally tight weave that stops mosquito bites; the microfiber is 100% effective and the cotton, 99%. Both fabrics are also virtually windproof and block 98.9% of UVA and UVB rays. The microfiber is available in four colors: Sandstone (the company’s best seller), Ivy Green, and Camouflage; cotton is offered in Natural. The Natural and Sandstone are considered the least attractive to bugs. Cotton is more moisture-absorbent than microfiber and thus might be considered cooler, but if it gets wet it stays damp longer. Personally, I prefer the cotton as it wafts a comforting sweetness, even after weeks of continuous use.
Erin Spencer-Mullen
The author’s Original Bug Shirt is still going strong after 17 years. Folded up, the shirt fits in the zippered front pocket.
The Original Bug Shirt comes in two styles: Original and Elite. Both feature high-quality construction and in each the densely woven protective fabric is used where the shirt drapes over the chest, back, and arms. Panels of polyester no-see-um mesh are used at the sides and underarms for venting. When it gets hot, I’ll often wear my bug shirt without an undershirt; I find this comfortable—the mesh panels keep me cool—and effective—I’m still fully protected.
Donnie Mullen
Wearing the Elite model, the author’s wife Erin has the face mesh unzipped and tucked into the collar.
The same mesh is used at the front of the hood to cover the face. The mesh is black to make it easier to see through, but observing the world through it can take some adjustment; I’ve come to think of the diffused view as a pleasing ethereal sheen to all that I see. When the bugs abate, the face panel can be unzipped and tucked out of the way, above your face in the Original and below in the Elite. The hood is designed with enough extra room for a visored hat, which will keep the mesh a bit farther from your face. The shirts are made long to allow for tucking in, though the adjustable waist cord is non-stretch, so it stays put if you cinch it up outside of your pants. The shirts stuff into their zippered front pockets to keep them compact and handy when not being worn.
The Elite has several design updates over the Original. The zipper for the mesh face panel has two sliders, allowing for incremental opening at any point along the zipper line to better accommodate eating and using binoculars or a camera. (However, if the bugs are still fierce when you get hungry, I recommend experimenting with eating lunch inside your shirt!) The Elite also has an adjustable knit cuff, which creates a better seal around the wrist. My favorite Elite update is the addition of an adjustment cord at the back of the hood, which addresses the only complaint I have of my 17-year-old Original: When I don’t wear a cap, the hood has a tendency to slip into my line of sight, requiring regular correction.
Early in our courtship, I convinced my wife to accompany me on a paddling trip deep into Quebec and Labrador. We wore our Original Bug Shirts for 30 days straight and, simply put, they saved our hides!
Donnie Mullen is a writer and photographer who lives in Camden, Maine, with his wife, Erin, and their two children.
The Original Bug Shirt Company sells the Elite online for $69.95 in microfiber, $75.95 in cotton, and $79.95 in Camouflage. The Original sells for $59.95 in cotton and $65.95 in microfiber. A shirt sized for children and pants are also available.
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The gunter sloop rig can point well into the wind and is easy for one person to sail.
Retirement can be hazardous to your health, but you can improve your chances of staying mentally and physically healthy by keeping happily occupied after you leave your job. Buzz Menz of Middleton, Wisconsin, started planning his exit strategy a decade before he retired: “I decided to build three boats to keep me busy, thinking that 10 years would be plenty of time. The plan was to start with a small row boat, then a larger sailboat, and finally a weekender type of sailboat.” By the time he brought an end to his career, he’d be ready to sail off, hale and hearty, into his sunset years. He had worked with wood for most of his life but knew that boatbuilding set a higher standard. “A boat is a different animal altogether, and considering it is the only thing between you and the sea, potentially holding your life in its cockpit, it is important to build it right. One of my biggest challenges was knowing when a particular construction detail was good enough.”
He liked the look of Steve Redmond’s Whisp, a 15′ 7″ sharpie skiff for oar and sail, ordered plans, and began building. He’d previously built a strip canoe, but that experience didn’t prepare him for the more challenging work required by the Whisp. “I was starting to have some doubts about my chosen path to retirement.” Enrolling in a boat building class taught by Karen Wales at the Penland School of Arts and Crafts, in North Carolina, boosted his confidence and he learned that even with boatbuilding’s high standards, perfection was not only unattainable, but an impediment to progress. Each step has a point at which it is good enough and it’s time to move on. After the two-week class Buzz returned to the Whisp and finished it.
Before moving on to the next boat on his list, the sailboat, Buzz built stitch-and-glue kayaks for himself and his wife. Three years down and seven to go.
His search for a sailboat project led him to Iain Oughtred’s Caledonia yawl. By chance he saw one sailing on Lake Mendota, the lake just a mile from his home. He spoke to the owner and learned that the Caledonia yawl sailed well with full sail in light air and reefed in a blow, had good stability, and was easy to sail single handed. The owner and his partner had built the yawl in a little over a year.
Buzz ordered the plans from The WoodenBoat Store. His garage wasn’t big enough for building the 19′ 6″ boat so he either had to rent or build a larger space. He decided to build an oversize garage next to his office, just a few blocks from home. A year went by before he could start the yawl. Six to go.
Buzz Menz
Although Buzz was first smitten by Oughtred’s original four-strake hull, he opted for the newly-updated plans for the seven-strake version.
He got a letter from Iain about an updated version of the Caledonia yawl with seven strakes instead of four, more volume, better stability, and other improvements. Buzz ordered the new plans and when they arrived he was ready to start.
It took two years to get the boat planked and ready to roll upright. He thought the greater part of the job was behind him but in retrospect decided “whoever said you are half way to done when you turn over the hull must have been building a canoe.”
Buzz Menz
GOOD’NUFF’s sheets and halyards are all led aft to ease single-handed sailing.
For the interior he came up with his own layout and installed decks fore and aft, bulkheads at either end of the cockpit, and enclosed benches for storage and additional flotation. To dress up the decks he milled up some cherry that had been gathering dust in his garage at home. He glued cherry strips to 4mm okoume plywood and was pleased with how strong the decks would be but daunted by the effort it would take to sand them down smooth. “I was having some wood floors refinished that week at my office, so borrowed their floor sander to grind all the strips down to a uniform thickness and finished up with a belt sander and finish sander. Once I fiberglassed and epoxied the cherry side, the results were stunning.”
With the pieces all assembled Buzz spent two months sanding, painting, and varnishing. The dust was still flying when his 10 years had elapsed.
Jim Forrestal
The aft compartment conceals the motor well on the port side and provides hidden storage for the motor on the starboard side.
A month after he retired, he launched the boat, alone fortunately, because he discovered a leak between the centerboard case and the keelson. That problem fixed, he returned to the lake for another launch and a maiden voyage. He motored out from the ramp with his brand new 2.5 HP Yamaha outboard in the motor well.
Buzz Menz
Buzz has had GOOD’NUFF out in some fierce wind on Lake Mendota and reports she handles the gusts well. He has had her up on the rail a few times, but wasn’t concerned about going over as she weather-helms nicely when everything is eased.
Clear of shore, he set sail. “Once I had the two sails set, the boat responded well quartering into the wind. I put it through all angles to the wind to see how it behaved and was pleasantly surprised. The boat responded the way it was supposed to respond. This was great, since I had just spent 5 years on and off building this boat, it was a relief to know that the finished product met my expectations.” GOOD’NUFF, as he christened his boat, was, after all, good enough and Buzz set sail, leaving his career in her wake.
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When the now-defunct magazine The Boatman was launched in the early 1990s, one of its objectives was to provide boat plans suitable for amateur construction. One such boat was the Mallard, the first of which was launched in 1994. The magazine’s initial brief to designer Andrew Wolstenholme was to produce a modern version of SWALLOW, one of the boats in Arthur Ransome’s book, Swallows and Amazons. The brief called for a “boat-shaped boat which will genuinely sail” and with “considerable visual appeal to inspire the builder in the first place and along the way.” It should be big enough for two adults and small enough to be easily handled ashore and to be built in an average domestic garage—a length of 12′ would satisfy these requirements.
The SWALLOW described by Ransome in his popular works of fiction had a long, straight keel and no centerboard, but Andrew wanted to give the new design “a sailing performance that meets today’s expectations” while retaining “the aesthetic feel of SWALLOW.” So he based his Mallard’s hull shape on his earlier design, the 11′ Coot, giving it “a rockered keel to ensure good turning, an efficient airfoiled centerboard and rudder for good windward performance and maneuverability, and a skeg aft to ensure good tracking under oar.”
all photographs by the author
Tim Harrison’s Mallard, newly christened TUCANA, was the only boat to brave the strong wind and rough water on Boatbuilding Academy launch day.
The Mallard was designed primarily for glued plywood construction—this satisfied the magazine’s aim to produce designs for the “more experienced, or more ambitious, builder”—but would also be suitable for cold-molding or strip-planking.
Although Jenny Bennett, the magazine’s editor, agreed with Andrew’s view that a gunter sloop rig would satisfy both the “sailing performance” and “traditional look” criteria, she also asked him to produce an alternative lugsail design. Ideally the mast for the lug version would have been unstayed and stepped through the forward thwart, but a further requirement was that the mast for both rigs be short enough to be stowed inside the boat when trailering. To do that without reducing the height of the sail plan, the mast was stepped on top of the forward thwart with shrouds to support it. This caused difficulties which Andrew foresaw and which the magazine’s own tester wrote about after sailing the prototype: “The problem is that the stays can interfere with the ability of the yard to swing well out or even forward of the mast when running.” A few years later Andrew had a specific request to design a cat rig for the Mallard (his Coot is also cat-rigged). The cat rig looked good and put the mast farther forward, opening up space in the cockpit for passengers. Adding mast partners at gunwale level close to the bow also allowed the forward rowing position to be used without unstepping the mast.
The mahogany gaff jaws were laminated to give strength to their curved shape. The gooseneck is an off-the-shelf fitting for a Mirror dinghy.
Tim Harrison is an ex-merchant seaman who also worked in the United Kingdom’s Hydrographic office, and when he retired he enrolled in the nine-month Boat Building, Maintenance, and Support course at the Boatbuilding Academy, Lyme Regis, U.K. He decided that while he was there he would build a boat that would be suitable to trailer all over southern England, and to sail with friends, his grown-up children, and his anticipated grandchildren—“real Swallows and Amazons stuff,” as he puts it—and the Mallard seemed to fit the bill. Having previously owned a glued lapstrake boat that he’d helped build, he decided that he would prefer “a smoother hull and a more modernish construction” and therefore would strip-plank his Mallard.
He ordered the plans from Andrew Wolstenholme, and although full-sized patterns were included, he lofted the boat in accordance with Academy course requirements. The package supplied by Andrew included CAD files, and Tim’s course tutors agreed, for convenience’s sake, that he could get the 10 molds CNC-cut by a local company rather than work them up from his lofting. The molds and the 7/8″-thick sapele transom were set up, upside down, on a structure raised to a comfortable working height. A solid sapele hog and a laminated khaya apron were fitted into recesses in the molds. Tim milled Western red cedar into 3/8″x 7/8″ strips and then started planking, a process he found to be relatively straightforward. He started at the sheer and worked toward the centerline, edge-gluing the strips with polyurethane glue and temporarily screwing them to the molds.
After cutting the centerboard slot through the planking and hog, he faired the outside of the hull and covered it with epoxy and 200gm (7-oz) fiberglass cloth. The hull was faired again after the epoxy cured. Tim then laid a 1/8” khaya veneer over the transom, and fitted the laminated khaya outer stem, the sapele 2 ¾″ x 7/8″ full-length keel, and a 1″-thick skeg. All but the top coat of two-part polyurethane paint was then applied before the hull was turned over to begin outfitting the interior structures.
After the inside was cleaned up, it was sealed with epoxy and 200gm cloth. The ¾″ plywood centerboard box was fitted, followed by the six ¾″-thick sapele floors to support the cockpit sole. The khaya gunwale cap was glued up with three sections: one inside the hull, one outside, and the third across the top. The top piece couldn’t be curved by edge-setting; it was cut to shape to match the plan view shape of the sheer. The completed cap gives the appearance of coming from one piece of 1 ¾″ x 1 1/8″ timber. Tim set a ¾″ x ½″ rubbing strake just below the sheer and painted the space between these two khaya strips red to give it the look of a sheerstrake above the white hull.
Originally, after some debate as to whether the Mallard should have side seats aft or whether people would prefer to sit or kneel on the floorboards to steer, Andrew included the seats in his drawings on the basis that individuals could always choose to leave them out. Tim opted to fit them along with the three thwarts, two of which would provide rowing positions, all in 7/8″-thick khaya.
Other khaya pieces included the hanging knees, lodging knees, and breasthook—all 1″ thick—and the centerboard trunk cap. Douglas-fir served for the floorboards and the mast; the boom and gaff are spruce. Tim made the sail himself—with the help of most of the other students—as part of the Academy’s five-day sailmaking course.
Finished with her first sea trials, TUCANA makes good speed on the return to the harbor.
As I drove into Lyme Regis on the morning of the Academy’s Launch Day I saw that, as forecast, there was a blustery breeze blowing from the east, straight into the harbor. I wondered how many of the seven new boats would venture out onto open water and if any of them would manage to sail. Tim’s Mallard, christened TUCANA, was the only boat to do both. Initially Tim and his crew Peter Holyoake, who also helped him throughout the build of the boat, rowed TUCANA out of the harbor and alongside a pontoon where they hoisted the sail. They then enjoyed a lively sail in the choppy waters of Lyme Bay. Tim is an accomplished dinghy sailor and he controlled the boat well, frequently planing downwind and occasionally spilling the sail going upwind. Not surprisingly TUCANA shipped some water, which Peter bailed out. Before launching, Tim told me that he might “scandalize” the sail to depower it when running back through the narrow harbor entrance, and I was slightly surprised to see that he did so by raising the boom with the topping lift. When he got ashore I suggested it might have been better to lower the outer end of the gaff and he agreed, but said that the peak and throat halyards were made off on the same cleat and he was worried that Peter might have inadvertently let everything go.
After a wet and wild maiden voyage, TUCANA brought her builder and crew safely back into the harbor.
Safely back in the harbor, Tim seemed to want to adopt a “quit while you’re ahead” strategy, but I persuaded him to have another sail with me, although we agreed that this time TUCANA would stay in the harbor. I took the tiller and immediately felt that she was exciting but controllable, although there was a bit of play in the rudder and tiller. (It would have been surprising if there were no teething problems and this was a very minor one.) It felt natural to sit on the side seats, and I am not sure if it would have been particularly comfortable kneeling on the bottom boards. Just as we started to tack, I noticed that the tiller had been mistakenly set above the mainsheet traveler rather than under it. Inevitably this meant that the rudder lifted off its pintles as we tacked through the wind, which resulted in a few moments of unwelcome excitement as I reached over the transom to replace it and get the tiller where it belonged. We were soon enjoying some more fun reaching in the harbor before returning to the shore.
While the builder mans the helm and the sheet, the crew keeps his weight aft and is ready to respond to gusts.
If I had been Tim, I’d have thought twice about sailing TUCANA in those conditions in Lyme Bay on her maiden voyage, especially when so many other sail-and-oar boats were staying inside the sheltered harbor and none were hoisting their sails, but the new Mallard met the challenge head-on and offered many pleasant surprises.
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.
Mallard Particulars
[table]
Length/12′
Beam/5′
Draft, board up/6 ½″
Draft, board down/3′ 1″
Sail area/83 sq ft
[/table]
The cat rig
The gunter sloop rig
Andrew Wolstenholme, designer, notes: “The stays are no problem with the gunter rig but less than ideal with the yard of the lug rig—the boom is OK but the yard has to swing in the narrow gap as the shrouds are closing on the mast toward the head. I have now drawn a longer, unstayed, hog-stepped mast for those keen on the lug-rig sail plan. I am generally not keen on that lug rig—too much of a compromise. The cat rig was designed for an early customer who had his Mallard professionally built and is a larger version of that on Coot with a proper high-peaked gaff rig with peak and throat halyards. A high-peaked lug rig similar to the International 12 would work well on that mast but I have not yet drawn it. For Coot and Mallard I suggest that boats sailing in open water should fit shrouds as preventers to stop the mast whipping in the event of hitting powerboat wash (irregular waves) when running or reaching in a breeze, and I see that the Lyme boat in this review has these. Otherwise just a forestay is fine as with the normal catboat rig.”
Plans for the Mallard are available for £110 (approximately $175) plus shipping. Jordan Boats will also develop kits for the Mallard subject to demand.
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!
ZO Boats is a new company started by Bill Koffler and Scott O’Connell, partners in Aquidneck Custom Boatbuilding, a company specializing in high-tech composite construction. [Note: This review is now archival material. The company is no longer in business.—Ed.] Involved in modern yacht construction for many years, they came up with a decidedly simple idea for ZO Boats: to offer small-boat kits that allow the novice home builder to produce professional results. The boats were to be as simple to use as they were to build, with no sacrifice of performance or beauty. Dave Walworth, a naval architect, drew up the designs in collaboration with Bill and Scott and now ZO Boats offers three models: the goZO, an 8′ pram designed for the true beginner; and the rowZO and sailZO, both versions of a 15′6″ flat-bottomed skiff design. I was lucky to have a morning with Bill, rowing and sailing the sailZO in the waters around Bristol, Rhode Island.
The sailZO is a 15′8″ double-chined skiff with a beam of 4′5″, designed to perform well under both oar and sail, carry three adults, and afford a couple or a small family the opportunity to explore coastlines and lakes, whether for an afternoon, or an overnight camp-cruise. The boat has three thwarts, each with a set of rowlocks, as well as a bow seat and sternsheets. With the centerboard and rudder retracted, the hull draws mere inches and under oars can poke into backwaters and glide over shoals. For sailing, the boat uses a simple free-standing lug rig stepped through the forward thwart. This was chosen for its ability to generate ample power while keeping the center of effort low, and to complement the traditional look of the boat. A high-aspect-ratio centerboard is enclosed in an unobtrusive trunk that spans between the second and third thwarts. The rudder is a kick-up type and steering it is accomplished by means of a continuous rope which passes through fairleads in the frames around the interior of the boat a few inches below the gunwale. The ends of the steering line pass through the transom and are made fast to the rudder’s yoke. This arrangement enables one to steer from anywhere in the boat.
courtesy of ZO Boats
The kits include all of the precision cut okoume plywood parts for the boat—including foil-shaped rudder and centerboard blades—and for the strongback, with legs to bring it up to a convenient working height.
There are two kits available, basic and complete. The basic kit includes all the plywood parts needed to build the hull, including seats, centerboard trunk, and rudder. The supplied hardware includes screws, binding wire, pivots for the centerboard and rudder, as well as copper tubing and a flaring tool to make up the steering-line fairleads through the frames. A plywood building jig, as well as a scarfing clamp, are included. All plywood parts are CNC cut and ready to assemble. The long pieces require scarfing, but the joints are precut hook scarfs, and in conjunction with the scarf clamp, result in precision joints without much fuss. The planking is sprung over the frames, stem, and transom—all aligned on the jig—and secured with screws. Bill assured me that their precision-cut planks require no trimming or bevels, and that the planks lie nicely over the frames right out of the box. He did mention, however, that an occasional wire stitch does help with the alignment, but many fewer stitches are used than in typical stitch-and-glue construction. Once the planking is in place, the seams are joined with epoxy fillets inside and out, and the whole hull is coated in epoxy. The kit includes 6-oz fiberglass cloth to give the exterior abrasion resistance and stiffen the hull.
courtesy of ZO Boats
The sailZO’s frames are placed in slots in the strongback (covered by tape) and supported by molds that extend to the floor.
After the hull is lifted from the building form and turned right-side up, the precut seats and other interior plywood parts are fitted using the same technique applied to the planks. Solid wood parts are not included, and lumber for the breasthook, rubrail, and oarlock pads to finish the hull must be procured by the builder. Plans for the sailing rig are also included in the basic kit, but the builder must supply his own stock and hardware for the mast, boom, and yard, as well as the sail and all hardware and running rigging required.
courtesy of ZO Boats
The hull is quite stiff after being glued and glassed; once it is off of the jig it will keep its shape without spalls to hold the beam.
The complete kit is includes all of the parts in the basic kit, along with a complete set of spars, sail, and all lines; two pairs of spoon-bladed oars and related fittings; and all hardware necessary to complete the boat, except for solid wood trim parts, epoxy, and fastenings.
John Robson
The light weight of the sailZO makes launching and retrieval easy, even when it can’t be floated off and on the trailer.
Bill and I trailered the sailZO down to the ramp and launched it into Bristol Harbor. The tide was low, and we didn’t have quite enough ramp to float it off the trailer, but this wasn’t a problem because the hull only weighs 150 lbs. A quick push freed the boat from the trailer bunks and left her floating in less than 6″ of water. Her narrow bottom had me slightly concerned when I first clambered aboard and took the forward thwart, but the sailZO proved to be quite stiff.
Bill gave one good push as he boarded, and the boat glided nicely out of the shallows as he settled in to the stern rowing position. We shipped the Shaw & Tenney spoon-blade oars and started pulling for open water. The boat had other ideas, and turned 90 degrees into the mild breeze within a few strokes. Unlike the rowZO version, the sailZO has no skeg aft, and directional stability was, well, anything but. The remedy was a simple one: we dropped the centerboard a few inches and set off again. The boat tracked true and straight, regardless of wind direction. Bill mentioned that the rudder was also very useful in helping the sailing hull track under oar, noting that friction from the steering line gave just enough resistance to hold the blade in proper orientation once set.
John Robson
The sailZO has three rowing stations and can be rowed with one, two, or three people at the oars.
My tandem rowing skills were a bit rusty, but a few off strokes aside, we had a fine time rowing through the anchorage. The boat is both fast and agile; the light weight allows her to respond quickly to each stroke. Rowing on my own was also a rewarding endeavor. The sailZO is a nice size for two, but certainly didn’t feel too big for one, either. In general, she gave us no surprises and performed well under oar power.
We returned to the beach next to the ramp and stepped the rig while the bow was nestled in the sand. The sailZO’s balanced lug rig is a thing of simple beauty, made up of the sail and three short spars—mast, yard, and boom—all of which fit in the boat for trailering. The sail is stored rolled around the boom, and its head left bent to the yard. To rig the boat, the free-standing mast is stepped through the forward thwart. The halyard is made fast to the yard, and then the yard is loosely affixed to the mast with a parrel. The sail rolls off the boom as the halyard is hauled. Once the yard is raised peaked, a second parrel holds the boom to the mast. Finally, the downhaul is tightened, and the two-part sheet is run through a block on the boom. The whole operation is very simple, and, with a little practice, very quick.
John Robson
The author goes along for the ride as ZO Boat’s Bill Koffler, seated amidships, manages the sheet and steers with the tiller lines.
Once rigged, we pushed off yet again. This time I took up station in the sternsheets, while Bill chose the thwart forward of the centerboard trunk. Bill let the sail luff while I worked the lines to lower the centerboard and rudder. The centerboard is unweighted, and requires one line to pull it down, another to raise it.
John Robson
The rudder is controlled by a line threaded through the transom and frames, allowing the boat to be steered from any position in the boat.
The rudder blade is deployed by a single line; pulling the line lowers the blade, while a bungee loop raises it when the line is released. With the rudder line that runs the perimeter of the boat, the sailZO can be steered from either side, or from both sides simultaneously if two hands are used. A push forward on the line will cause the boat to steer toward that side.
John Robson
The spars included with the complete kit are spruce and made by Shaw & Tenney. Leathers on the yard and boom protect the mast’s varnish.
Bill sheeted the sail in and we spirited away on beam reach, slightly erratic because of my unfamiliarity with the steering system. The breeze was mild, perhaps 8 knots or so, but the sailZO responded nicely. It was quick to accelerate, and somewhat quick to heel, though it hardened up well as we pressed along. Its narrow beam makes live ballast essential, and we both scooched to windward a little as she picked up speed.
The sailZO handled well on all points of sail, although Bill, in his forward seating position, did get a little wet while beating into the breeze through the harbor chop. For me, the most difficult part was the steering line, which demanded most of my concentration in order to keep the boat going straight in the direction I wanted to go. Like all things, I’m sure I would get better with practice. I’m also sure that the rudder design could be easily modified to include, or be replaced by, a traditional tiller. Although I did find it tricky, I will also say that it does open up some wonderful possibilities in small boats. Bill and I were able to hand off the steering and sheet to each other without changing position during our sail, and I think once mastered, the rudder line increases the number of tasks that can be performed safely while underway, as well as allowing a solo skipper more trim choices on different points of sail.
All in all, the sailZO is a right smart little boat that can be both built and sailed with an easily attained level of skill and effort.
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.
sailZo Particulars
[table]
Length/15′7 ¾″
Beam/4′4 ⅝″
All-up weight with rig, oars and sail/230 lbs
Sail area/61 sq ft
Draft/4″
Draft, board down/ 2′ 3 ⅝″
[/table]
Editor’s Note: 8/21/20 The ZO boat website is no longer active and the company is presumed closed.
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The Chesapeake Bay is full of islands, though most are only technically islands. Most are separated from the mainland by narrow creeks and marshes and connected by permanent bridges, so they don’t feel like islands. Surprisingly few are true islands at some distance from shore, and fewer still are places people call home; people have lived on Smith and Tangier islands for centuries, since the earliest Europeans sailed up the Bay.
From the end of the town dock, at the end of Main Street in Crisfield, Maryland, you can’t actually see Smith Island. You will think you can. Refraction makes the trees and houses of that place float above the horizon in a shimmering line. Sometimes it’s sharp and clear, others it’s a smudge of smoke that comes and goes as light and air change throughout the day, and still others it’s just a ripple at the waterline.
all photos and videos by the author
The fleet leaves Crisfield for the crossing to Smith Island.
You can see Tangier Island from Smith in this same way. The two islands are really just exposed parts of a single island mostly submerged. Six miles of shallows connect them, with water so thin you could almost wade from one to the other at low tide. The shallow flats are a garden of sea grasses, and that garden makes this one of the best places on earth for blue crabs. From the southern end of Smith, telephone poles march resolutely across the flats and over the horizon on the way to Tangier, linking the two. When a curtain of rain or fog closes off the distance, the poles are a reminder to each island that the other is still there.
We tack down and out the narrow canal that separates Janes Island from the Maryland mainland, come about leaving the mouth of Crisfield’s harbor, and then fan out across Tangier Sound. By mid-afternoon, five boats are scattered across the sound headed for Smith Island—two Joel White Marsh Cats, an Iain Oughtred Sooty Tern, a Howard Haven 12 ½, and a John Welsford Navigator, all hand-made, most of them owner built.
Tangier Sound has a bad reputation among the locals. With a long north–south fetch, conditions can change quickly. There’s a deep, steep-sided trough down the middle of it over an ancient and submerged Nanticoke River bed, and shoals line both of its sides. Rolling waves build up coming down the trough, then pitch fits when they collide with the shallows. We’ve set aside five days for the trip to account for bad weather. In the Middle Atlantic region, weather systems tend to blow themselves out in 24 to 48 hours. With a big enough window between them, a couple of days’ good sailing is almost guaranteed.
Today is an easy sail across, with a light southerly breeze at slack tide, though a storm front is expected sometime tomorrow. Heading due west, we follow smudges of the island that come and go; when in doubt, we aim for buoys, lights, and day markers. Halfway across, the wind fades and the sea turns a slick, burnished brass in the afternoon light. The wind returns, light but steady, and holds for the rest of the crossing, and all five boats converge again near the island.
Spotting the mouth of the main channel, known as the Big Thorofare, is a challenge. Land here is so low there’s little difference between what is water and what is not. And Smith isn’t a single big island, it’s a spatter of small ones, hundreds of them. It’s an archipelago of marshes and winding creeks that disappear and reappear with tides. Salt grass and shoals stretch out for miles north and south.
The low-lying land of Smith Island keeps it well hidden from the mainland some five miles away.
Once in Big Thorofare the water is wide, though the channel is not; depths marked on charts are overly optimistic. A rising tide helps here. With few landmarks tall enough to rise above the grass, straying from a marked course could easily get a stranger lost. All the creeks look the same so it’s good to steer by GPS or compass, and to have a shallow-draft boat.
The two Marsh Cats—Kevin MacDonald’s LITTLE T and Pete Peter’s OBIDAIAH— are in their natural element here. They’re wide, flat-bottomed, stable, and heavy and stable, with tall rigs that reach above the grass to catch the wind. The Sooty Tern—Eddie Breeden’s UNA— is graceful and nimble as a dancer, and glides along effortlessly. Kevin Brennan’s Navigator SLIP JIG is a biggish small boat; though it weighs only 300 lbs empty, it may be the most versatile in the fleet. Mike Wick’s JACKAROO is a Haven 12 ½ weighing over 1,409 lbs. With a deep keel and a fine bow, she’s the best suited of all for a rough crossing in steep chop, but here must pick her way carefully: though drawing only 1½′ with the board up, half the water within the island is less than that at low tide.
UNA and LITTLE T take advantage of the breeze in the Big Thorofare.
Once we’re in the main channel, the course bends to the northwest past the wreck of an old fish house hard aground at the edge of the marsh grass. Houses on the island are built like boats, by boatbuilders, and often meet the same end; undone by seas and storms, they’re left to crumble where they fall. Two miles in, the water opens up in a broad shallow basin. This is North End Bottom, a big beating heart at the center of the island, a mile wide, that pulses with tides and boat traffic.
On Smith Island there are three villages clinging to hummocks of land, separated from each other by marsh and water. Ewell and Rhodes Point are a mile and half apart. They are connected by a single-lane road that wobbles between them, when the water isn’t high, built on a bed of mud dug from the marsh. Tylerton is set off on its own to the south, accessible only by boat. All three are within sight of each other, and this helps diminish the sense of isolation.
At day’s end, the fleet rafts up for dinner at North End Bottom.
At North End Bottom we turn south toward Tylerton, tacking into a gentle current, sailing now for the pure pleasure of it. The light and the wind are fading quickly; we cross tacks in close quarters along the marsh until we run out of both. We anchor at the main intersection of North End Bottom, Tyler Ditch, and Big Thorofare, well outside traffic lanes, in the lee of a spoil heap covered with grass and seabirds.
LITTLE T, SLIP JIG, and UNA sort themselves out for spending the night at anchor in the lee of a ridge of dredge spoil.
This long hill of sand, dredged from the channels and piled high, is undoubtedly the highest point of land on the island, and good protection from the wind. The sun goes down and lights of the three villages twinkle on. It’s a beautiful night, with little to compete with stars overhead. This far from civilization, surrounded by shoals, there’s no disturbance from speedboats or commercial shipping wakes. Watermen go to bed early, so it’s quiet here. Laughing gulls and oystercatchers call all night; in the morning, a loon.
Waterways are the real roads on Smith Island. Not only do you reach the island by boat, but you must also travel within it by boat, as well. Laced with creeks, canals, guts, and ditches that intertwine from one end the other, these equate to busy avenues and side streets on the mainland. Names like Big Thorofare and Little Thorofare make the analogy obvious. Before dawn the watermen rumble out in big diesel-powered deadrises to tend their crab pots. A small private ferry comes in with mail, supplies, and some passengers.
After coffee, we up anchor one by one and head down Tyler Ditch, an inelegant name for such a pretty place. Tylerton lies at another big water intersection. To port is the working harbor; to starboard Tyler Creek, the main avenue that leads south to the crabbing flats, and beyond that to Tangier. Everything—houses, churches, a general store—is built a few feet back from high water, or over it. Crab shacks, where peeler crabs are tended until they shed their shells, extend out over the water on spindly poles. Boys here learn to row before they can ride a bike. Young girls trade dreams of horses for outboard skiffs that gallop through pastures of cordgrass and rushes.
UNA and LITTLE T tack up “main street” past Tylerton.
Barriers of water make distances more pronounced. Though related by history and a common ancestry going back centuries, each village on Smith Island has a unique character and residents identify strongly with the one they are from. Each has its own Methodist church, though they share a minister. Tylerton is detached from the others, and perhaps the most independent and self-contained, an island unto itself. Ewell is the largest, almost a town, and has done the most to welcome visitors with a ferry landing, some restaurants, and places to stay. Both Tylerton and Ewell are compact and cohesive. You could lift them up and set them down anywhere, and they would still hold together.
JACKAROO and SLIP JIG leave Sheep Pen Gut, headed for Ewell. The deadrise next to the shack is typical of the Smith Island workboats.
The village of Rhodes Point is on the west side of Smith. The smallest of the three, it looks worried. We reach it heading west from Tylerton into Rhodes Point Gut. At the bend we turn north into Sheep Pen Gut and coast downwind in light air, in a thin piece of water little more than a ditch that serves as Main Street to the village. Strung out in a long line, the houses face the gut, and across that a low marsh. Beyond the marsh you can see the broad waters of Chesapeake Bay. It feels exposed and tenuous here, like the gut is a moat and the marsh a door mat between the village and an ill-tempered landlord. Some houses have been lovingly maintained, shining with fresh paint. Others are in dire disrepair.
We pass a working boatyard, surprisingly large for such a small place. Watermen patch up last year’s abuses and prepare for the soft-shell crabbing season, which opens in a few days. Further on, women and kids stand on a dock with cameras and take photos as we pass. It’s so quiet we converse easily across the water. They say they’ve never seen anyone sail up their ditch. The view of our sails gliding past in the morning light clearly delights the group. There’s an appreciation for classic old boats in this place. A man hollers from a crab shack, saying we picked a good time coming through on the flood tide, which he pronounces “toyd.” “At low toyd,” he says, “’at ’ere ditch is all mud.”
JACKAROO needed the outboard to pick her way through the shallows.
A church, looking starched and pressed, more houses, crab shacks to port and starboard. Crabbing skiffs and workboats parked in slips like pickups in suburban driveways. Out the north end of Sheep Pen Gut it’s a mile jog up the Bay to the channel entrance for Ewell. A pair of long rock jetties protecting the harbor extend nearly half a mile into the Bay, like the pincers of a crab claw. They’re low, covered with water at high tide, and we almost don’t see the near one until we’re right on top of it; we veer wide at the last minute to swing around. Inside, what is marked on the chart as marsh is now open water, though shallow. We cut straight across with centerboards up, shadows of the boats visible on the sandy bottom. The Haven 12 ½ runs aground, unshipping the rudder. Mike drops sail and turns back under outboard power.
OBADIAH and SLIP JIG arrive at the canoe dock in Ewell.
Ewell has a main street of water, too. We cruise the waterfront looking for a place to dock, and for Ruke’s, a seafood restaurant famous for crab cakes and fried soft-shell crabs. Opposite an island that appears owned by feral goats, we find a canoe and kayak ramp between workboats and crab shacks, with new docks on either side to tie up. A man says hello, says Ruke’s is closed, as are all the restaurants until the weekend when the season officially opens. He offers to walk with us to the one place we can get lunch: the post office.
The town is quiet. He leads us along narrow streets, down alleys and, when those give out, across bouncing plank catwalks that span the wet spaces between backyards and lots paved with oyster shells. The restaurants are on piers, as is a hotel and the island museum. Houses, too, are built on piles, some with front yards of brackish water.
We arrive at what is indeed a post office, and general store, and café with tables out on the docks. Inside we find the family who photographed us in Rhodes Point, happy to see us again. The shelves in the store are mostly empty, and the food not famous, but we are glad to have it, and glad to have a table looking out on the water. Workboats go by—deadrises stacked high with crab pots. A fuel barge pushed by a tiny tug makes the turn into the harbor and glides past.
Water is God on these islands: It giveth, and it taketh away. Marginal places like this are the most fertile. The water around Smith and Tangier has provided a livelihood for people since the 1600s. Crab, oysters, fish, fowl, and fur have been harvested in astounding volumes. Proximity to the fishing grounds is what made the islands a desirable place to live, but Smith Island has lost over 5 square miles to the same water over the last century, succumbing to erosion as the water rises and the land subsides. Water covers some streets here during spring tides. Holland Island, to the north, once a thriving third inhabited island like Smith and Tangier, is now completely gone. The population is eroding too, dropping by a quarter between 2000 and 2010.
Neither God nor water are ever far from minds of the people who live here. Over crab cakes and fries at the post office we chat with the man who met us at the dock. He grew up on the island, and his family have been islanders for generations. He now lives on the mainland. He says there’s never been any formal government on the island. The church always served in its stead, the place where news is shared and decisions are made collectively. He relates the story of a new minister addressing a “crime wave” that involved a stolen bicycle. That’s the extent of crime on the island, apparently. He adds that it’s very hard to use a stolen bicycle on an island that only has two roads and fewer than 300 people. There is no alcohol served anywhere on Smith or Tangier, which probably plays no small role in keeping trouble at bay.
Still, in a place where passions run high, and extended families are large and related, feuds are not unheard of. Justice can be swift and harsh. A sign on Tangier describes an incident where a young man was shot and wounded by an overzealous deputy enforcing a Sabbath prohibition against loitering. The deputy was later himself shot and killed, and the identity of the shooter, likely known to many islanders, was never revealed.
It’s getting late in the day. A text message comes through from my wife, Terri, saying a storm knocked the power out at home. Whatever did that is coming our way. We pay the tab and head back to the boats to cast off for the mainland. We hear on radio the front is approaching from the southwest, with rain and gusts expected to 30+ knots. We tie in reefs and hope to get across before conditions become unpleasant.
The tide has slipped out and the boats touch bottom several times when tacking across the channel of Big Thorofare. Short-tacking into a headwind delays us and gives the wind time to pick up. By the time we turn east we’re in full foulweather gear. We have a crossing that will take at least an hour. A lot can happen in an hour. Waves roll up the sound, it’s spitting rain, and the wind is clocking around steadily from southeast to southwest. Fortunately, we’re in the lee of Tangier and the flats, and they block the long fetch across the Bay.
We have a long, vigorous romp on a broad reach back to the mainland. Whitecaps appear from the south. The wind is not yet dangerous, but building. Those of us delayed by the bumpy exit from Smith stick together, sailing yards apart, but we lose sight of the other boats in the blowing snot. Partway across we meet friends who wisely turn back with us to Crisfield and Janes Island.
By the time the boats are secured and battened down at the docks, the wind is whipping the treetops and rain comes and goes. At a restaurant in Crisfield we watch the storm. The islands have disappeared behind sheets of rain, but we know they’re out there.
Barry Long is a writer, photographer and media-arts professional from the Chesapeake Bay region, where he sails a pair of Melonseed skiffs. He keeps a blog at eyeinhand.com.
Getting there
The town of Crisfield lies due east of Smith Island on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, and is a good base camp for trips to both Smith and Tangier islands. Passenger ferries run to both from the municipal docks most of the year, but check the schedules. Crisfield is a small town with some form of most necessities: restaurants, hotels, hardware stores, etc. At the edge of town is Janes Island, an excellent state park with camping, cabins, bathrooms with showers, docks, and a good launch ramp. The gates are locked after dark, so it’s safe to leave vehicles there overnight. It’s also a popular place for kayaking in the surrounding marshes, and it can be busy on weekends in the summer. Spring and fall are pretty quiet. From the ramp at the park, it’s half a mile down a narrow canal to Crisfield and open water. Though it’s wide enough for small boats to tack upwind, if conditions are not favorable, and rowing or motoring is not an option, there are other ramps nearby at Little Boat Harbor, Jenkins Creek, and Somers Cove Marina in Crisfield’s harbor. Some are free; some charge a small fee.—BL
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.
In the southeast part of Norway lies the beautiful little village of Stavern. Once a thriving community where fishing was the main source of income, today the town hosts the country’s largest collection of once dominating double-ended motor boats called Sjekte. The sjekte is a local name for the more common snekke boat type.
Most of the sjektes of Stavern wear manila rope fenders that serve to both adorn and protect the boats. It is said that during whale-hunting days, discarded towing lines were put aside by crewmen aboard the whalers. In their spare time, they used these spent lines to produce fenders according to the following design. The design is both simple and effective, and fenders can easily be made at home. There are many theories on how to hang them, their proper size, etc, but the following is my take on how it should be done, based on 30 years of scrutiny of the authentic fishing boats residing in the Stavern Canal.
Opening photo by Paal O Solberg. All other all photographs and drawings by the author
All of the sjektes in this harbor are outfitted with traditional rope fenders.
Before the advent of nylon, natural fiber was the only option when purchasing rope for mooring. Rope could be made from grass, hemp, or other materials. Today manila is more or less the only classic rope available in Norway. Any well-stocked marine supply store should be able to provide the correct rope for the fenders, but prepare to open your wallet. Fenders should be sized proportionately to the boat. Fenders that are too large or too small will not look right or work properly, so rope diameter is critical. The “calf” is the core of the fender, and its length determines the final overall length of the fender. The calf is cut from the same diameter rope as the strands that will be used to braid the fender. The following table of has guidelines for selecting the correct size for sjektes.
The grading by the number of dry planks—strakes that are above the waterline when the boat is moored—is a local traditional measure of freeboard. The planks are typically about 5″ to 7″ wide and freeboard ranges from 15″ to 20″.
The rope’s diameter must be carefully proportioned to the length of the fender. If the rope is thicker than necessary for the fender’s length, or if the fender is too short for the rope used, the fender won’t lie properly against the outboard profile of the boat.
The length of each fender is matched to it position on the boat so that they all come about 3″ from the water no matter how much freeboard there is at its location. It is important that the fenders not be tightly woven. They must be loose enough to bend around the sheer and hang straight down.
There may be many ways to hang a fender, but the distance from the end of the fender to the surface of the water is the most important factor. The bottom of the fender should be about 3″ off the surface of the water. Higher than that and the fender may be pushed up out of position by the neighboring boat when moored; lower and the rope will start to wick water, causing the fender to rot prematurely. The fender’s first splice, called the crown, should rest on top of the washboard or side decks, just inboard of the rub rail. As the fender stretches over time, its eye can be pulled in farther to keep the lower end at the correct height, but there is no point in having the thick part of the fender protecting the side deck. Rigging the fender like this may jocularly be called “preparing for helicopter landing.”
For an average fender, you need 14′ to 16′ (4 to 4.5 m) of rope for braiding. In addition, you will need 16″ to 20″ (0.4 to 0.45 m) of rope for the calf at the core. A typical sjekte of about 23′ will carry eight fenders with an average of 15′ of line per fender; roughly 120′ of rope will be required in total. You will need 1/16″ marline or whipping twine for the ends and other uses. You may choose to use nylon or modern fiber for the calf; it will be completely covered by the braid and consequently no one will spot it.
Start by measuring for the fenders. It is common to have two different lengths, longer fenders forward where the sheer is higher, and shorter ones aft. Cut the calf to the appropriate length. If it is your first attempt, be prepared for the eventuality that the first fender may end up on the wall of your den instead of on the boat. Do not cut all your rope to length before starting to splice your first fender; you may wish to adjust lengths as you go.
For a calf of 18″, cut the rope for the eye and braiding at 16′. Find the midpoint. Bend the rope in half to make an eye, about 3″ to 4″ in length. Use a length of marline to seize the eye, nice and solid with 8 to 10 turns. Unlay both free ends of line up to the seizing. Tape the strand ends to prevent them from unraveling. The unlayed strands will make the rope look like a six-armed octopus.
Cut a suitable length for the first calf and whip both ends. Feed two 2′ lengths of marline in between the strands just below one whipping. Pull them through the calf strands until you have four loose 1’ strands of marline at one end of the calf.
A simple whipping
If you’re right-handed, hold the calf in your left hand. Put the octopus on top of the calf with its imaginary “beak” pointing down. (Note: Anyone who has read 20,000 Leagues under the Sea knows where the octopus has its beak. If you didn’t read it, do so before continuing!) Pull the calf’s marline lines over the whipping of the main rope and make several turns around the whipping.
Then secure the marline ends together with square knots, pulling them as tight as possible. This is essential to keep the calf secured inside the fender, preventing it from breaking loose and thus allowing the fender to sag in a year or two.
Hold the calf with your left hand again. Lift the strand to the left of your thumb around the thumb and over the next strand to the right, as shown in sketch.
Lift the second strand over the first and third.
Continue like this around the fender.
In the end there is just one strand left.
That last strand goes down through the starting loop that you first laid around your thumb.
Tighten the strands evenly and in many steps, until you have a symmetrical crown around the eye. Twist the individual strands as you pull to counteract the tendency for the strands to unravel.
Now, turn the fender upside down. You can now hold onto the eye in the same manner as you first held the calf.
Repeat the procedure as you did with the first full round. While the first crown brings the strands parallel with the calf, the second crown, and all subsequent crowns, will result in the strands pulled outward from in between crowns and at right angles to the core. Make sure to tighten all the strands equally.
Repeat the procedure ad nauseam. If you lay the strands counterclockwise around the calf every row, you will see a spiral pattern in the braiding when it is complete. I prefer to switch direction between each layer, alternating between clockwise and counterclockwise layers. The resulting braid looks quite different, but the function of the fender remains the same.
After 22 turns, more or less, you should have covered the calf all the way to the lower end. If you were careful tightening the strands equally, all the remaining strands should be about the same in length and there should be about 10″ of each strand left.
Finishing is very simple. Collect the strands below the calf and put a solid whipping over all of them below the lower end of the calf. This is a utilitarian work-boat fender, so any elaborated braiding to finish it looks out of place. This whipping should be sewn tight and is best done with a sailmaker’s palm and needle. Cut all the strands about an inch below the dressing, spread out the fibers, and voilà! You’re done.
When made and installed properly, the fenders will protect the sheer and resist riding up out of place when boats jostle against one another.
Braiding your own fenders is hard work—don’t plan for more than one or two a night—but the satisfaction of hanging your own fenders lingers on for a long time.
Lars Solberg is an engineer living in Stavern, Norway. This article is an excerpt from his recently published Sjekteboka. An English version, Sjekte Book, is in the works for publication in 2016.
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The Matsu I tested was sized to fit my disproportionally large chest and feet; the loose fit elsewhere was scarcely noticeable once the excess air was “burped” out through a gasket.
One of the great things about Puget Sound, my home waters, is that you can go boating in the middle of winter—the temperature of its waters is never far from 50°F. One of the not-so-great things about the Sound is that when you go boating on in the middle of summer the temperature of its waters is never far from 50°.
Many years ago my father was sailing a small boat far from shore when he capsized. The skipper of a cabin cruiser motoring nearby had seen the boat turn turtle, pulled up alongside, called out “You know you can only live 15 minutes in that water,” and then hauled Dad aboard. If you wind up in 50° water, dressed in street clothes as my father was, you may last longer than 15 minutes, but if you aren’t able to recover from a dunking on your own or get rescued, your time is as good as up. In short order your thinking will get muddled and your hands will become almost useless.
A drysuit, combined with insulating layers worn underneath it, can protect you from the detrimental effects of cold water. You’ll be much more comfortable in one made with waterproof/breathable material that can transfer moisture from your skin to the outside and keep you much drier than one made of non-breathable material, but the cost of such drysuits—from $700 to $1,000—may be prohibitive to many. Mythic Gear set out to lower that price barrier and now offers drysuits in a range of $250 to $395.
Mythic’s drysuits are made only in stock sizes, one of the ways of keeping the price low. The Matsu model I reviewed was an XXL, the size I needed to fit my 49” chest and my size 13 feet. An XL would have been a better size for the rest of me, but the extra fabric wasn’t much of a problem; the loose fit provided plenty of room for insulating layers underneath and enough slack for a free range of motion. The Matsu has an adjustable elastic waist cord to keep it from drooping, but by squatting or wading out into the water, I could bleed extra air out of the suit by lifting the edge of a gasket, and with the suit a bit “vacuum packed” around me, it didn’t feel at all bulky.
Even with most of the air intentionally vented while in the water, the Matsu still offered plenty of warmth, buoyancy and a full range of motion.
The Matsu, like other Mythic suits, doesn’t have all the details often found in other, more expensive drysuits— multicolor styling, pockets, reinforced seat and knees, and Velcro-cinched overcuffs at the ankles, wrists and neck—but the basics are all there. The sewing is first-rate, and the seams are all backed up by heat-sealed tape. The latex gaskets are supple and stretchy and, as expected, just needed a bit of trimming to customize the fit. The neck gasket has a pronounced bulge molded in; with the extra material I could turn my head to look over my shoulder without having the gasket tug at my neck. The integral socks have an extra layer of Oxford cloth and are seam-sealed inside and out, nice touches for an area susceptible to wear. The waterproof entry zipper does its job of keeping the water out. While a short relief zipper is a feature on other Mythic suits, there isn’t one on the Matsu. I didn’t miss it—I have a relief zipper on one of my other suits and I rarely use it.
Floating in a drysuit, even in cold water, can be as relaxing as resting on a waterbed, but my bare hands chilled quickly and became painfully cold, in sharp contrast to the comfort provided by the Matsu suit.
When I took the Matsu for a dip in Puget Sound, the water was painfully cold on my bare hands but, the drysuit did its job well, keeping water out and warmth in. I had a full range of motion for my arms to swim. The water-repellent treatment on the outer laminate of fabric does a great job shedding water, allowing the fabric to breathe better and reducing evaporative cooling when exposed to the wind.
At $325, the Matsu has a price that should encourage more boaters to invest in a piece of equipment that provides comfort and safety in foul weather and cold water.
UPDATE: 12/12/19 Mythic Gear’s web site URL is no longer valid and it appears that the company is no longer in business.
Mythic Gear has a one-year warranty for its drysuits and sells the Matsu for $325.
Christopher Cunningham is the editor of Small Boats Monthly.
Is there a product that might be useful for boatbuilding, cruising or shore-side camping that you’d like us to review? Please email your suggestions.
A campfire for cooking doesn’t need to be any larger than the pot it’s heating. The Emberlit keeps the fire small and contained, minimizing the impact on the wilderness.
Self-sufficiency is among the many satisfactions of camp-cruising in a small boat, and there’s a very satisfying level of independence that comes with using a wood-burning stove. Emberlit makes a line of lightweight, compact wood-burning stoves that disassemble to fit into a carrying case about the size of a large slice of bread. The stoves fire up with any burnable material at hand; for most of us, that’s small branches, sticks, and even dry leaves. At about 11oz, the weight of the stainless-steel Original model (reviewed here) won’t be noticed by the average boater, but when every ounce matters, a 5-oz titanium model is available for about twice the price.
The stove is constructed of four side panels that link together with slotted tabs around a bottom plate. The sides slant inward—creating a chimney that concentrates the flames—and are topped by two crossbars that provide a stable surface for pots of all sizes. Assembling the stove is easy and takes just one minute.
The stove pieces slip together with slotted tabs. Taken apart for packing, they occupy very little space.
Over the years I’ve used a number of white-gas and alcohol stoves and some tend to flare up frighteningly, while others run out of fuel at inopportune moments. I found the Emberlit to be comforting and straightforward. Because it’s essentially a tiny, enclosed campfire, organizing material inside the stove is critical. As with any campfire, small, easily ignited tinder goes in first, followed by twigs, then finger-sized sticks. After getting my fuel arranged properly, I can light a cooking fire with a single match. Once the tinder is burning, larger, longer sticks are inserted through the opening in the front panel and gradually fed into the stove as they’re consumed by the flames.
The Emberlit needs to be tended while cooking, but its wide base makes a stable platform and I never worried that the pot would tip off the cooking surface while I was feeding wood into the fire. Boiling a pot of water was simple and reasonably fast. A high-tech canister stove will boil water faster, but if you’re out camping, what’s the rush? To cook a meal in a pan without scorching it, I had to control the flames carefully by adding just the right amount and size of wood. When the cooking was done, the interior of the stove and my pots were, predictably, coated with soot and needed to be cleaned or wrapped in a rag to avoid soiling other equipment.
Because it can only contain a small mass of wood, if the Emberlit is left alone too long, the coals cool down and take some coaxing to reignite with new wood. While I enjoyed tending the stove, the necessity for constant maintenance might irk some. Just think of the Emberlit as pleasantly “interactive” and a fair trade-off for a cooking system that doesn’t rely on fossil fuels, won’t scar the landscape, and doesn’t consume as much wood as a campfire. I’d pack the compact, durable, and fun Emberlit anytime.
Bruce Bateau sails and rows traditional boats with a modern twist in Portland, Oregon. His stories and adventures can be found at his web site, Terrapin Tales.
Designer Karl Stambaugh found the inspiration for his Redwing 18 design in the Camp Skiff designed by Howard Chapelle.
Dr. Don Lewis liked the looks of Karl Stambaugh’s Redwing 18 from the first time he saw the boat’s lines 14 years ago, leafing though an issue of WoodenBoat magazine. It looked like just the right boat for cruising his home waters on the Rock River in Illinois and poking into the sloughs, creeks, and streams on the fringes of the river. For months the boat slipped into his dreams, and he eventually ordered the plans and set the project in motion. The Redwing was his first boatbuilding project. He had a workshop and woodworking tools, but he needed knowledge and lumber. For the former, he haunted libraries for boatbuilding books; for the latter, his local lumberyard for their best oak boards and sheets of marine plywood.
A month after the plans arrived, he was ready to begin work. The hull went together with bronze screws, thickened epoxy, and fiberglass tape. A year and a half later, the 18′6″ by 6′6″ hull was finished and ready to be rolled upright. The task was accomplished with a pair of plywood semicircles, a block-and-tackle, a truck, eight friends, and a case of beer.
PILGRIM’s 15-hp 4-stroke outboard is housed in an insulated compartment that keeps its noise from interfering with conversations in the cockpit.
With the hull back in the shop, Don installed the cabin, bulkheads, decks, and the engine compartment for the 15hp four-stroke Honda. Fiberglass and epoxy sheathing covered the completed topsides. In the final stages of construction, Don installed kerosene lanterns as running lights. The throttle and shift controls for the outboard were mounted on the starboard side of the cockpit, and the pulley-and-cable steering system was linked to an 18” wheel mounted on the forward side of the soundproofed motor compartment.
The wheel, mounted on the engine compartment, allows the skipper to steer without having his back turned to his passengers.
After PILGRIM was launched, Don reported that she “is a dream to conn.” The boat’s flat bottom provides plenty of stability, a blessing as long as the water is flat, but that high stability likes to keep the hull parallel to the surface of the water, so a bit of maneuvering is required for negotiating big boat wakes. “As long as I turn into the wake, all is fine. I try to meet the waves at 35–45 degrees, and there will be one slap and two-and-a-half rocks, and then we are all calm again. It is sort of a game.” Don and his wife Ann often explore the backwaters that the wake-throwing powerboats avoid. Even with just a 12” draft PILGRIM will run aground now and again, but the hull has enough rocker that shifting weight aft will get the bow unstuck and she can be easily backed off.
Over the years Don has done some additional work on the boat. Her replaced the kerosene lights with a 12-volt system, replaced the seats twice, and made repairs to the wear and tear of regular use. The work isn’t a burden for him: “Repainting and repairing a wooden boat is its own sort of Zen experience.” PILGRIM gets launched every year in April or May and gets hauled out for the winter in October.
PILGRIM sleeps two and is equipped with a galley and a small marine head.
For the summer season that she is afloat, Don and Ann will take her out as often as five times a week. “Every trip is an adventure, whether just a few miles on the Rock River, or putting in at a lake or a different river. If we get tired, we can always toss out the anchor, put on some coffee, have a snack from the little stove, or even take a nap in her comfy berth.” Every time they go out, PILGRIM draws compliments, and equally often Ann says to Don, “This is the best thing you have ever built.”
When the Rock River gets crowded with other boaters, PILGRIM’s 12″ draft allows her to explore quieter backwaters.
Don is a surgeon and a scientist and not prone to stray from demonstrable facts, but says, “I am blessed to be able to buy almost any small boat I want, yet I wouldn’t even get or build another, because that might hurt PILGRIM’s feelings. PILGRIM has a soul.”
Have you recently launched a boat? Please email us. We’d like to hear about it and share your story with other Small Boats Monthly readers.
A century ago Nathanael Herreshoff designed a 16′ keelboat known widely as the H 12½ after its 12′6″ waterline length. She was intended to handle the steep chop and strong winds of the Eastern Seaboard, and to serve as a sailing trainer for the young men of the Buzzards Bay Yacht Club. The late Joel White drew a shoal-keel version of the H 12½ that proved even more widely popular than the original, despite the fact that, with carvel planking on steam-bent frames, it is not generally regarded as an easy boat to build. John Brooks, after many requests from his students at WoodenBoat School, drew up plans for a glued-lapstrake version, and in 2002 launched RED SKY, the first Somes Sound; eight years later he offered his plans for sale. When I came across photos of the Somes Sound, I knew I had to build one. John’s plans for lapstrake construction eliminated many of the obstacles that would discourage the average boatbuilder from attempting to build this most beautiful sailboat. He employs a number of methods for decreasing the time and skill required to build the Somes Sound: planks are cut in one full-length piece from pairs of marine plywood sheets scarfed together end to end; using an inner and outer stem eliminates the need to cut a rabbet in the stem; and the garboards are planed flush with the keelson, then capped with the deadwood and the lead keel.
David Johnson
Canted benches and a broad, carefully angled coaming offer secure and comfortable seating while under sail.
John’s plans are very detailed and are accompanied by an extensive building manual. The boat is built upside-down on a building jig that keeps everything in alignment. To accommodate the rocker of the hull, the keelson has to be built up from two pieces. I made a vertical guide fence, an infeed table and an outfeed table for my bandsaw, and resawed 4/4 stock in half. Planed smooth into two 3/8″ boards, the two keelson halves were epoxied back together upon installation on the molds.
Building a boat with a full bilge and overlapping planks provides the builder with challenges as well as opportunities to learn new skills. Spiling strakes, cutting gains, planing rolling bevels, laminating inner and outer stems, building spars, and pouring a lead keel, all may be unfamiliar tasks to many but provide newfound pride when completed. In numerous blogs and comments by fellow amateur boatbuilders, I find one common theme runs through their experiences with the Somes Sound: All take great satisfaction and pride in learning new skills that they never dreamed they could master.
David Johnson
The centerboard was designed to set the trunk lower in the cockpit and make it less obtrusive.
The most challenging prospect for my building of the Somes Sound was the lack of a helper. I learned quickly that clamps and homemade jigs are the solo boatbuilder’s best friend. Wrestling a wobbly 15′ plank into place requires planning, an ample supply of clamps, and some homemade support brackets to keep things in place during alignment. Screws inserted into predrilled holes in the joint laps and anchored into backing battens align the strakes and produce epoxy squeeze-out to ensure a good bond. Epoxy is very slippery stuff even when thickened, so having an alignment system is critical.
By far the most daunting prospect for me was building a mold for the keel and then melting and pouring hundreds of pounds of lead into it. By scribing 1/8″ plywood to the keel and deadwood the keel, I transferred the contour to stacked 2×8s and cut them to shape on the bandsaw to form the bottom of the mold. The sides of the mold were ¾” plywood, and all of the surfaces that would come in contact with the molten lead were lined with a ceramic-fiber fire-resistant paper. Copper pipes created shafts for each through-bolt. When I had finished the pour, the mold had taken nearly 640 lbs of lead.
Another challenge was to figure out how to install that heavy lead keel by myself. The solution was to raise the keel and install it prior to turning the hull over. My biggest concern was the structural integrity of the steel canopy of my boat shed that would take the load. I attached a 2×12 to the steel rafters to spread the weight. After I’d removed the lead from the mold and cleaned it up, I lifted it using two ½-ton chain hoists. The copper bolt shafts provided alignment for drilling through the keelson. I did a dry-fit with the bolts inserted and tightened and, satisfied with the seam, I raised the lead, applied epoxy to the joint, and permanently bolted the keel to the hull.
David Johnson
Rolling the hull upright required three chain hoists: two for the slings that rotated with the hull and a third to ease the lead keel past the tipping point on its way to the shop floor.
Then the question arose: How do I turn the hull over while it’s still attached to the building jig and has over 600 lbs of lead attached? I wrapped wide nylon straps around the hull and raised it using the two chain hoists. I used a third hoist to control the lead keel during the rollover. When the hull was high enough, I removed the molds from the hull, and took the legs off the building platform to allow it to rest directly on the floor. The nylon straps supporting the hull were slippery enough to slide through the chain-hoist hooks, so I could lift upward on the starboard sheer and rotate the hull. Once the weight of the lead passed the tipping point, a third hoist controlled the rotation until the hull was upright and the keel was centered over the building platform. I lowered the hull onto the jig and installed braces to stabilize it. I had made the platform frame from 2×12s so the height was ideal for finishing out the interior. Later I used the slings and chain hoists to lift the boat and set it on its trailer.
For those who are not inclined to tackle the task of melting lead, the Somes Sound 12 ½ uses the same lead keel as the Haven 12 ½, and ready-to-go lead keels are offered by several foundries nationwide. For builders who aren’t close to a foundry that casts Haven lead keels, building the keel mold from the optional Somes Sound keel plan, then having a local foundry cast the keel is another option.
If you are contemplating building a Somes Sound, I encourage you to read John Brooks’s book How to Build Glued-Lapstrake Wooden Boats. If you want to peruse the construction process on the web, John has a photo series (mixed with other photos over two pages) on his website, or you can check out my blog.
Huguette Johnson
The Somes Sound’s mast is set farther aft than that of Herreshoff’s 12 1/2, shifting some sail area from main to jib for better windward performance.
Building the Somes Sound was truly a rewarding experience, and sailing the boat has been the frosting on the cake. I have sailed a wide variety of different boats over the past 50-plus years, but my Somes Sound, christened L’ETOILE DU MATIN (MORNING STAR) by my French-born wife Huguette, is truly my favorite.
I opted for the gaff rig John drew for the Somes Sound rather than the marconi. The mast for the gaff rig is 18′ long, making it easy to fit the trailered boat, with the mast laid on top, in my garage. The shorter mast and lower rig also gives the boat excellent stability. The hollow bird’s-mouth construction of the mast makes it light enough for me to step singlehanded. At the launch ramp it takes me about 45 minutes to step the mast and rig the sails. I installed side guides on the trailer so launching and retrieving is also a one-person job.
I sail solo on most occasions, and having a boat that does not involve a complicated rig was a high priority. Once the self-tending jib is adjusted, the only activity for me is to steer and keep the mainsail adjusted. L’ETOILE DU MATIN is so responsive she can turn 180 degrees in a radius of one boat-length. The lead ballast makes her stiff in a strong breeze, and the large weighted centerboard gives her excellent upwind tacking ability.
Huguette Johnson
With over 600 lbs of lead attached to its keel, the Somes Sound 12 1/2 carries its way well and does much of the work keeping upright so a solo sailor can stay comfortably seated inboard.
After a frustrating season of sailing in the Nevada County foothill reservoirs—where wind is the exception, not the rule—I took L’ETOILE DU MATIN to Southern California and sailed her out of Ventura Harbor. From late spring to fall there is a dependable onshore breeze every afternoon. It usually reaches 15 to 20 miles per hour, perfect sailing weather for a Somes Sound. The harbor offers both sheltered water in the inner channel and a full onshore breeze as you sail out the entrance channel. Because large swells are common to the Pacific coast, I have thus far opted to stay behind the shelter of the outer breakwater, but even there I have nothing to complain about; it’s a joy tacking into a strong breeze. Both with a crew and solo, L’ETOILE DU MATIN has shown herself to be an able sailer.
David Johnson retired in 2005 after 30+ years as a general contractor. After two years of remodeling his home in Grass Valley, California, he decided to try building a boat. His first sailboat was a 16’ single-chine cutter; that got him hooked. His next build was the Somes Sound 12 ½, his crowning achievement. He is presently building a Rundgatting Snipa that has morphed into a small Viking vessel.
I had spent a long time looking for a boat that I could build to sail the waters of Chesapeake Bay and beyond. The boat would need to be able to carry four for daysailing, accommodate two for camp-cruising for up to two weeks, offer good sailing performance, have a shallow draft for exploring backwaters, and carry a small outboard for auxiliary power. It had to be small enough to be built and stored in a two-car garage, easily trailered, simple enough to be built in a reasonable amount of time, quick and easy to rig at the launch ramp, and have the good looks of a classic wooden boat. Although my list of requirements seemed to grow as I browsed through books of boat plans, my focus narrowed down to catboats. Their generous beam, sometimes almost half their length, offers lots of room, and their single sail is as simple as rigs get. In the book Forty Wooden Boats, I finally found the boat I wanted to build, the Marsh Cat by Joel White.
Kevin MacDonald
The Marsh Cat’s broad beam makes the cockpit sole wide enough to sleep two flanking the centerboard trunk. A boom tent provides cover.
At 15′ long and with a beam of 6′11″, the Marsh Cat has a spacious cockpit. With that much breadth, there would be ample room for sleeping comfortably on the floorboards on either side of the centerboard case. The 152-sq-ft sail set on a high-peaked gaff rig supplies the power. The 1,309-lb displacement assures easy trailering and launching, and the 9″ draft, with the centerboard up, makes exploration of the Chesapeake Bay’s shallow estuaries possible. The Marsh Cat plans from The WoodenBoat Store offered all the detail needed for a first-time builder. The full-sized patterns for molds, stem, and transom eliminate the need for lofting.
Phil Maynard
Sailed level, the Marsh Cat has very little weather helm and can clip along at 5 to 6 knots.
The round-bilged hull can be cold-molded, or carvel-, lapstrake-, or strip-planked. I chose to strip-plank the hull with 5/8″ x 1″ western red-cedar strips. The hull is constructed upside down on a strongback supporting molds cut from 5/8″ OSB (oriented-strand board). The keel gets laminated in place over the molds, and the 1 ¼″ mahogany transom and laminated stem are secured to it. Starting at the sheer, I sprang the cedar strips around the molds and attached their ends to the stem and transom with bronze wood screws. I started with bead-and-cove strips, which nest together edgewise on the curving sections of a hull. but eventually I switched to making them with a rectangular cross-section, which saved time and wasted less material in the milling process; the rectangular-sectioned strips also seemed easier to bend. There are no tight curves in the hull, so the gaps between strips were minimal and easily filled themselves with the epoxy that squeezed out as I glued them in place.
With all of the strips in place, I removed the drips and runs of cured epoxy from the hull with a heat gun and scraper. I cut the centerboard slot, faired the hull, and ’glassed the exterior with 10-oz fiberglass cloth for a low-maintenance, watertight structure. The outer keel was then attached with epoxy and bronze screws. Priming and painting the hull revealed the sweet lines Joel had drawn. After turning the hull over I gave the interior the same cleaning, fairing, and ’glassing. I spiled, laminated, and installed the sheer clamps, then built the centerboard trunk with ¾″ okoume plywood sides and Douglas-fir head ledges. The molds used to form the hull served as patterns for the floors that I set in the hull with epoxy and fiberglass. The laminated Douglas-fir deckbeams, set in notches cut in the sheer clamps, were canted slightly from vertical and set square to the deck so the top faces wouldn’t have to be beveled. The ½″ okoume plywood deck easily took to the slight compound curve created by the deckbeams, a great relief. I laminated the coaming with three 1/8″ x 8″ mahogany pieces sprung into place; after the epoxy cured I removed the lamination and cut it to shape before installing it permanently. For the floorboards I chose ipe, a dense hardwood that is very durable but equally hard to work; I took great pains to install them with the holes for the screws drilled, countersunk, and plugged.
After I’d finished the boat, I turned my attention to the spars and rigging. I used Sitka spruce for the spars, but there’s no reason Douglas-fir couldn’t be used; there are valid arguments for both and, in my opinion, either is fine. When money is more important than shaving ounces, Douglas-fir is the less expensive option, with the added benefit of being more durable. I ordered my sail from Stuart Hopkins of Dabbler Sails, a company specializing in classic small-boat sails. The running rigging is all Sta-Set, a braided polyester line with low stretch, and the standing rigging is 3/16″ stainless-steel 1 x 19 wire with Sta-Lok terminals. If I had it to do over again I would use 5/32″ wire and terminals to save a little weight.
After 800 hours of work, my Marsh Cat was ready for launching. My wife Teresa and I trailered the boat to St. Michaels, Maryland, for its shakedown voyage. After arriving at the ramp we spent a long time rigging the boat, only because we were constantly interrupted by lookers-on with lots of questions and compliments. I backed the trailer down the ramp and LITTLE T slid effortlessly off the trailer into the water. After my usual scramble to secure the forgotten drain plugs, two of them, it was a relief seeing that she floated on her lines.
Kevin MacDonald
With a reef in her 152-sq-ft sail for a fresh breeze, LITTLE T’s 9″ draft allowed her to take a break in some thin but well protected water.
It was a hot, humid summer day without a whisper of wind, and we motored the newly christened LITTLE T around the St. Michaels harbor and past the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum. Several people shouted their approval from the shoreline, adding to our already swelling sense of accomplishment. As the day progressed, the clouds began to build and a breeze finally showed up. We raised the sail and were sailing at last, but the skies soon turned black and the wind increased markedly. We should have taken cover in a cove and waited out the storm, but we opted to travel out into the open Miles River with 6 miles to go to get back to the ramp. LITTLE T was really going to get a test. The wind howled and a torrent of rain came down. We bailed constantly to keep up with the rainwater pouring off the sail and into the boat. We made it back to the ramp in about an hour, glad that the maiden voyage and sea trial was over. The conditions for our first outing were quite challenging, but the Marsh Cat came through with flying colors.
It has now been six years since that initial launching, I have sailed my Marsh Cat about 4,000 miles, and in that time have gained a great deal of respect for the boat’s abilities. Catboats are known for their weather helm in stiff winds, and the Marsh Cat is not immune to this, but with a little experience and a proper reefing schedule it can be minimized. The Cat likes to sail level and the weather helm is all but eliminated when it is. With a single reef and a slackening of the mainsheet in gusts, it remains docile and in control in winds of about 14 knots. As the wind builds to about 18 knots, it’s time for the second reef. Above 25 knots, it’s time to head for the barn unless you have crew. I’ve sailed my Marsh Cat in the Florida Keys with a competent crew member aboard in 30+ knots of wind with a double reef and both of us—over 500 lbs—hiked out over the rail. In gusts we buried the leeward rail but were still in control and felt no need to return to shore. Beating into the wind, it is common to make 5.25 knots; 6.5 knots running before the wind. I have seen peaks of 9 knots surfing down waves. When the wind is down, a 2-hp outboard pushes the Marsh Cat easily to a slow cruise of 4 knots or well over 5 knots if need be.
Barry Long
The Marsh Cat was designed without arrangements for seating other than an expansive sole to stretch out on and a wide coaming to lean against. Some builders have added low benches.
It is often said that all boats are a compromise, but the Marsh Cat has met all my requirements and then some without any significant shortcomings. Simplicity is certainly one of its most appealing traits. The single sheet and sail make solo sailing a breeze. There is no interior furniture to get in the way: The sole is my seat and the coaming is my backrest. It can handle heavy loads and stay out when the rest of the fleet is heading for shelter. Its spacious accommodations are a delight when camp-cruising. A setup time at the ramp of less than half an hour isn’t an impediment to frequent use or going sailing on a whim. I sail backwaters of Chesapeake Bay often, and I’ve trailered LITTLE T from my home in Maryland to Maine to sail to Matinicus Island, over 11 miles from the mainland shore. I’ve sailed her along the Florida Keys and made the 45-mile passage to the Dry Tortugas. A crossing from Florida to the Bahamas is in the planning stages. From gunkholing to open-water sailing, the Marsh Cat can do it all.
Since early childhood, Kevin MacDonald has been involved in boating activities ranging from water skiing to offshore fishing. Small-boat sailing and camp-cruising became his water sport of choice 8 years ago. The lack of suitable production boats for camp-cruising necessitated his building of LITTLE T.
I had timed my launch for the afternoon slack tide; it was a late start, but at midday the ebb pouring through Rosario Strait would have been running against me at close to 3 knots. There were 18 miles to go to reach Matia, Sucia, and Patos, three small islands that crown Washington state’s San Juan archipelago, but I’d make good speed with the flood in my favor and my 2.5-hp, four-stroke outboard pushing HESPERIA, a 17′ camp cruiser I’d designed and built. My course paralleled the undulations of Cypress Island’s west shore up to the cusp at Tide Point and there I began a diagonal crossing of the strait to Orcas Island. In the open water the tide was with me but the wind was not and as light as it was, it still made a mess of the water. All around the buoy at Buckeye Shoal the waves were as ragged as rasp teeth. It wasn’t the kind of water that agrees with HESPERIA’s pram bow and shallow-V forward sections. At first I took just a bit of spray over the bow so I just partially unfolded FAERIE—my 4′8″ collapsible, coracle-like tender—like a dodger to keep myself dry. I soon retreated through the cabin to get my weight out of the bow and steered standing in the open hatch. It was still an uncomfortable ride so I veered west toward a bit of flat water on the downstream side of North Peapod, the largest of a cluster of rocks a half mile out from Orcas. I considered abandoning my plan and seeking the more sheltered waters between Orcas, Blakely, Lopez and Shaw Islands but just north of Lawrence Point there was an end to the chop.
Passing within 75 yards of Little Sister, a ragged islet bare but for a few patches of wind-shorn scrub, I steered between mushrooming boils and dimpled eddies toward Barnes Island. Beyond Barnes, the four-mile crossing to Matia offered smoother waters that slipped docilely under the bow. I didn’t turn on my GPS to check my speed; the overlapping hills of Orcas Island showed HESPERIA was making progress and that was enough: There was plenty of daylight left, I was where I wanted to be, and it didn’t matter how fast I was going. Matia and Sucia were drawing near while behind me the Cascade mountain range, a dusty blue deckle edge spanning the eastern horizon, was flattened and faded by distance.
I had been to Matia a few times before and had hiked by a small pocket cove on the south side of the island. A few dozen yards from the mouth of that cove I cut the motor and cocked it up, crouched through the cabin, and rowed to a band of gravel nestled in a 30′ gap between rock outcroppings. With HESPERIA pulled up just high enough to keep her from floating away, I picked my way across a tangle of sun-bleached driftwood. Among the long bark-bare poles and fluted trunks, two baguette-sized sticks caught my eye. I pried off long slivers to get beneath the silver-gray punk on the outside. The sticks were, as I’d suspected, both cedar, one western red and the other Alaska yellow. I took them back to HESPERIA as much for their fragrance as their usefulness as kindling.
The little cove, I’d decided, was too close to open water to afford much protection for anchoring overnight so I rowed around the southeast corner of the island and into Hermit Harbor.
All photographs and videos by the author
Once the cabin top is raised, the saloon has 17 windows though which to take in the view. The lower pair here open onto the aft cockpit.
There was plenty to do before I turned in for the night. To raise the cabin roof, the spars came off and were set across the cockpit. I lay down in the cabin, put my feet against the ceiling and pushed the cabin top up until the hinged struts in the corners swung down and supported it. With the stovepipe in place I could start a fire in the wood stove. The cedar kindling lit quickly and orange flames were soon glowing through the stove’s mica window. With the middle sections of the cabin doors in place, the cabin warmed up. Not wanting to take time to make a proper dinner, I set a pot on the stove to boil water for a camping meal that cooks in its zip-lock bag. I set the floorboards on the ledges that hold them flush with the benches, rearranged the cushions and made the bed: clean sheets, a down comforter, and the pillow I use at home.
Inside each bench cushion there is 3” of camper-pad foam on top of ¼” of closed-cell foam—good enough for sitting—but for sleeping, 1½” Therma-rest pads slipped underneath the cushions add a welcome measure of comfort.
By the time I was ready to push off the beach and anchor, it had grown dark and the woods that wrapped around the cove were a sooty fringe for a starlit sky. The first dip of the oars in the water set the blades aglow with pale blue light. About 50 yards out, I slipped the anchor over the bow and watched the bioluminescence wrap around it like an alcohol flame.
In the morning I unfolded FAERIE, put her over the side, and paddled ashore. The half-mile trail across Matia meanders around tall cedars and pines that knit a lofty canopy so tight that only speckles of sunlight reach the forest floor. Olive-drab and licorice-black slugs traced cellophane-clear tracks across the trail and moss flocked the tree trunks and boulders. The dock at Rolfe Cove at the west end of the island was empty; I had Matia all to myself.
With HESPERIA at anchor, I paddled my folding tender FAERIE ashore on Matia Island.
Back aboard HESPERIA, I spent a leisurely morning getting ready to row to Sucia Island. After breakfast I stowed the bedding, did the dishes, polished some of the silver, and shook the rugs out. The water in the cove and as far as I could see beyond it was slick and bright; without any wind in the offing I could leave the cabin up, snap the canopy in place over the cockpit and row to Sucia in the shade.
The south side of Matia is a band of ragged cliffs about 20′ high, not quite as tall as the trees perched on top of them. Eroded sandstone walls are pocked with irregular cavities arrayed like hollows in airy leavened bread. In the currents swirling off Eagle Point, the western extremity of the island, an outboard skiff drifted slowly with four fishermen aboard, each occupying a corner of the cockpit with his back to the others, a rod in hand, and head bowed as if in prayer.
Decked out for a day in the sun, HESPERIA has her canopy in place over the cockpit, a shower bag hanging from the gallows, and two solar panels charging overhead.
There was a slight current setting me to the south as the ebb sifted itself through the islands so I angled the bow northward to keep on course. Harbor porpoises worked the tide rips, showing only their backs, curved like ulu blades cutting upward through the water. I reached Sucia at its southeast corner where its slender peninsulas and islets are arrayed like the tines of a fork. As I entered Echo Bay the current grew stronger so I hugged the shore, keeping my starboard oar just a few feet from the rocks. I crossed to the Cluster Islands that separated the bay from Ewing Cove; the low water had joined several of the islets into a peninsula but there was a gap just wide to get through, though I’d have to hop my port oar blade over an ottoman-sized rock that sat in the narrowest part of the passage. The current was strong but I’d built up enough momentum to carry past the rock, get the port oar back in the water and keep working my way upstream.
Ewing Cove is well separated from Sucia’s more heavily used anchorages and campgrounds. It gets lots of visitors during the day but few, if any, stay the night.
Ewing Cove’s shallows were covered with chocolate-brown fronds of seaweed that reflected the sunlight in glimmers of iridescent blue. I found a patch of sand for the anchor and back-paddled at the end of a short rode until the flukes had buried themselves. After paddling FAERIE ashore I walked 1½ miles along the dirt path that weaves in and out of the woods along the margin of Echo Bay.
Back aboard HESPERIA I set to work making dinner. It would be a bit more elegant than the last night’s meal out of a bag and I eventually sat down to a tuna steak, pan-seared with sun-dried tomatoes; steamed asparagus spears under a thick pat of butter; a green salad with kale, dried cranberries, toasted pumpkin seeds, and poppyseed dressing; coconut water with bits of coconut meat; and a small chocolate truffle cheesecake.
It’s well known that even the plainest meals taste better in the wilderness and it should, of course, go without saying that sterling silver is an unnecessary extravagance aboard a small boat. Silver plate is more than adequate.
The solar heated shower bag that had been out all day had warmed up a couple of gallons of fresh water, and now that all of the kayakers and walkers who’d visited the cove during the afternoon were gone, I could shower in the cockpit and then retreat to the cabin to dry off in the heat of the stove.
On the north side of Ewing Cove there’s a 75-yard wide gap between Sucia and tiny Ewing Island and the tide flushing through creates an eddy running parallel to the beach that would set HESPERIA beam-to waves entering the cove from the east. To keep her from rocking all night as she would surely do even with sets of small waves, I tied the main sheet, the mizzen sheet and a few other lengths of line together as a stern line and paddled FAERIE ashore with it. Pulled tight and tied to driftwood, the line set HESPERIA across the current with her bow facing the entrance to the cove. The difference was quite noticeable—HESPERIA was serenely steady—and I would have slept soundly the whole night through if not for the midnight squabbles of Canada geese.
A mahogany cover converts the sink into a breakfast nook. The gypsy flowers, hastily carved of red cedar and yellow cedar driftwood, were as fragrant as any blossoms. The spork is, I confess, a silly affectation. I have plenty of room aboard HESPERIA to carry a separate spoon and fork and needn’t put on airs as if I were through-hiking the Pacific Crest Trail. The spork was, I should add, utterly useless for eating a fried egg, over easy, on a toasted bagel half.
In the morning, after breakfast, I got a fire going, set a collapsible water jug on the cabin roof to supply HESPERIA’s plumbing, and filled the sink with hot water for a shave. I’ve tried going without shaving on previous cruises but my encounters with strangers led me to understand that a few day’s growth make me look more feral than outdoorsy and clean-shaven I elicit kindness more than fear.
Only the sink is plumbed for hot (via a heat exchanger on the wood stove) and cold running water. The head, stowed out of sight in a compartment in the cockpit, is a portable rig with its own water supply and the bathtub, a soft-sided PVC liner for the cabin footwell, is used in conjunction with pots of stove-warmed water.
My plan was to continue west to Patos Island and spend my last night there. The crossing from Sucia is a short one, only 1 ½ miles, but when I motored along Ewing Island on my way out of the cove I saw a small outboard cruiser right where I was going to make the turn to head east to Patos. It was pushing a foaming white bow wave but making barely 2 knots over the bottom. My little 2.5-hp outboard would be no match for the current so I turned south across Echo Bay to consider my options. The wind coming across the bay was from the northwest and perfect for beginning my homeward leg. I killed the motor and went forward to raise the main mast; for the downwind run I’d leave the sprit main wrapped around it and use the jib halyard to raise the square sail. It billowed forward and HESPERIA steered herself, setting a course for the far corner of Orcas Island, exactly where I wanted to go. I stretched my legs out on the starboard bench and leaned up against the cabin, keeping only a light touch on the tiller line. Matia slipped by to port and Mount Baker’s sugar-white flanks gleamed under the lower yard.
The wind was light at first but halfway through the nearly 9-mile run to Lawrence Point, it strengthened, and HESPERIA was making 5 1/3 knots. After picking up a bit of ebb beyond the point we passed Buckeye Shoal making 7 knots over the bottom. The wind carried HESPERIA as far as the north end of Cypress. The square sail had made quick work of the 13-mile run and left me with only 2 miles of motoring to reach Eagle Harbor.
Cypress Island’s Eagle Harbor has broad mud flats at the head of the cove. While there were a dozen or more boats anchored nearby, no one else, oddly enough, had come ashore.
There were several boats anchored at the mouth of the bay but no one had ventured into the shallows. Perched on the foredeck I paddled ashore, stepped off, and post-holed across the mud flats with a long painter and a stake in hand. With HESPERIA tethered, I crossed the beach and walked a path so hemmed in by trees and brush that there wasn’t much to see; after just a few hundred yards I turned around. I gathered some nettles on my way back to the boat. They’re the limit of my foraging skills: I’m never sure about plants I think I know on sight, but nettles picked with bare hands provide an unmistakable sting.
I thought I could do better than labor through the mud back to HESPERIA and did a little beach combing for materials to cobble together some snowshoe-like footwear to keep me from sinking. I found a short length of line and two slats of driftwood. I unlaid the line and used two of the strands to tie the slats to my feet. They worked like a charm and kept me right up on the surface for most of the length of the mud flats but then got progressively stickier. With each step the trailing foot was harder to pry free, and the more I pulled, the more deeply I mired my lead foot. Soon I had both feet firmly glued in place, just two yards from the edge of the rapidly advancing tide. I had tied the line as tight as I could to keep the slats from falling off and didn’t have enough length to slip any of the knots. The knots were over my heels so I couldn’t see what I was doing and my fingertips, still stinging from my nettle harvest, were, in essence, quite numb. I stood up, a bit perplexed, thinking about a pen-and-ink illustration I’d seen in a WoodenBoat magazine article on shoal-draft cruising. It showed a boy running across the mud wearing splatchers, a fancier shop-made version of what was, at the moment, using me as bait for the incoming tide. All too often I’ve gone ashore without a knife, an oversight that I’d often regretted, but never more than now. I patted myself down and discovered a small folding knife in my pants pocket; I cut myself out of the bindings, stepped off the slats into shin-deep mud and slogged back to the boat.
After paddling out to anchor, I picked a spot in the shallows, well away from the other boats. The sun had not yet pushed the shadow of Cypress’s ridge across the cove so I set up the kitchen in the cockpit, steamed the nettles, cooked up a stir fry, and took my dinner al fresco. The nettles were a disappointment; they had neither the peppery attack nor the buttery artichoke finish they would have had a month earlier.
Setling in for the night, I fired the stove with the yellow cedar gathered on Matia; it put out so much heat I had to open the cabin doors and the hatch and step outside to cool off. Eagle Harbor was so still that I could get a good look at Jupiter through my binoculars and make out two of its moons. When the cabin was comfortably warm I was in no rush to crawl into bed and sat on the comforter with my pillow at my back, stared at the orange glow of embers behind the stove’s widow, and idly worked my way through a bag of pistachios. When I began to feel drowsy I tossed the mound of shells into the stove, turned out the lights and slipped under the covers.
There wasn’t a breath of wind when I left Eagle Harbor, but I set sail and motored out to find a breeze.
I was up early. The rapid knocking of a woodpecker somewhere in the woods was the only sound and it filled the cove. After a long silence an owl hooted its two-note ooo-hoo, clear and loud although more than 100 yards of water separated me from the woods. There was not a breath of wind but I rigged for sailing in the hopes of finding a breeze somewhere around Guemes Island. With main, jib, and mizzen up, I motored out into Bellingham Channel. Halfway across there was a patch of water scuffed by a breeze; I motored into it and sailed on a reach the remaining distance to Guemes. After rounding the north end of the island I had the wind behind me; it was light, and HESPERIA ghosted along under a high haze that put a faint rainbow ring around the sun. The jib didn’t have enough wind to draw its sheet tight so I dropped it and used the halyard to raise the square sail. It filled and drew nicely even though half of it was blanketed by the main. I thought I could get more of the sail out where it could do some good by slipping the lower yard to port through the loosely tied truss holding it against the mast. It worked and when the wind freshened I was making 4 ½ knots.
Saddlebag Island lay a mile to the east of Guemes, and although the wind had dropped enough to leave the water glassy, I made good headway on a reach under main and mizzen. When I arrived at the cove notched in the island’s north side I let the sheets loose and aimed for the beach. It appeared to be sandy, but I sat on the foredeck as I came in to keep an eye out for rocks. There were many and I slipped off the bow before running aground and held HESPERIA off. Behind me someone spoke my name. It was my friend Ted, an experienced paddler and a fixture in the local outdoor recreation industry. He and a friend waded in and held on to HESPERIA. I was going to have to anchor to visit the island and invited them both to climb aboard. We paddled out about 20 yards and dropped the hook. To get us all back to shore I unfolded FAERIE and had them paddle in one at a time, trailing a long tether so I could pull FAERIE back. I came ashore last, visited a while, and took a brief walk across the island’s wasp waist to the cove on the south side.
When I left Saddlebag there wasn’t any wind; as I motored west I dropped the rig and stowed it on the cabin roof. With the current in my favor I made 6 knots over the 7 miles back to the launch ramp Washington Park and when I arrived there, HESPERIA had carried me in comfort for 55 miles. By dusk, I’d be back home, in a house that hasn’t moved an inch in 88 years, and HESPERIA would be in the driveway, covered by a tarp.
Christopher Cunningham is the editor of Small Boats Monthly. He built a Chamberlain dory skiff in 1979 and rowed and sailed it 700 miles up British Columbia’s Inside Passage. In the fall and winter of 1983 he paddled 2,500 miles from Quebec to the Gulf of Mexico in a canoe he’d made of laminated paper. Two winters later he rowed a sneakbox 2,000 miles from Pittsburgh to New Orleans and continued another 400 miles under oars and sail to Florida. For a 1,000-mile rowing/sailing trip up the Inside Passage in 1987, he built a replica of the ninth-century Gokstad Faering.
HESPERIA
I’ve cruised thousands of miles in small boats and endured some miserable conditions, but I never had a Scarlett O’Hara moment: “As God is my witness, I’ll never be hungry again.” I was slow to catch on; the adventures that made me hungry, cold, wet, and tired only gradually lost their appeal and with each new boat I built for cruising I incrementally eliminated sources of discomfort and displeasure. I was quite happy with my Caledonia yawl ALISON as a camp-cruising boat until my son built BONZO, an Escargot canal cruiser. I decided I needed a cruiser like BONZO with a cabin, windows, and woodstove, but one that I could sail, motor and row like ALISON. I gave up the Caledonia’s rough-water ability for a boxier hull that could stay on a nearly even keel no matter where weight was placed, especially for dining and sleeping. I was drawn to Phil Thiel’s APHASIA, which he describes as a sampan-type hull. I enlarged the hull by 8 percent and modified the bottom to put some vee in the forward sections. It was a roundabout way of arriving at a garvey hull.
The hull went together quickly and I designed the interior as I went along, occasionally making sketches but more often using sticks and cardboard to mock up the accommodations. I had to get the hull out through a door, so the cabin was made to be removable. The centerboard trunk is placed off-center to keep it out of the way; it’s incorporated into the benches in the cockpit and cabin.
The cabin is built like a pop-top camper shell for a pick-up truck. Lowered, it provides a clear line of sight aft while I’m rowing; raised, it has good clearance for sitting in the cabin. I raise and lower the top by lying on my back and pushing the ceiling with my feet. Hinged support struts in the corners fall into place when the cabintop is raised. The doors have a removable center section to accommodate the 11″ of the cabintop’s travel.
In one corner of the cabin, a shelf supports a wood-burning stove I welded together from sheet steel; in the other corner there’s a small sink. A collapsible water jug set on the roof connects to the cabin’s plumbing and a heat exchanger made of copper pipe butts against the stove to provide hot water for the sink.
The passageway down the center of the cabin and cockpit has parallel sides and ledges to hold floorboards flush with the benches to create sleeping platforms in both the cabin and cockpit. Grabrails on the cabin roof are spaced to fit the cleats under the floorboards so they can be used as a catwalk or a sun deck.
A tiller line runs through the cabin and around the cockpit and another line connects to the outboard’s kill switch. Having the motor and cockpit separated by the cabin cuts down on the noise. The cabin sides have ports that open to thole-pin pads for rowing indoors in cold, wet weather.
The masts and the main’s sprit and boom are all about 12′ long and can be stowed in the boat. The cabin’s windage gave the sail plan I’d drawn more of a weather helm than I like so I added a self-tending jib on a club for better balance. The jib, main and mizzen were all cut from the protected Dacron in the middle of a weathered roller-furling jib discarded by a larger sailboat.
The square sail was inspired after taking this same San Juan Island trip with my ladyfriend Rachel. I had, as is my habit, loaded the boat and set out without stowing things properly. We were motoring along Rosario Strait when a strong following wind developed. Rachel was napping in the cabin and I tried to set the sprit main by myself without first setting the mizzen and luffing. Every time I tried to clip the main sheet into the boom, the boat would veer off course. In my struggle I didn’t realize that I’d stepped on our dinner—a deli box of hot polenta—until I felt the corn mush squeezing between my toes. Tangled up in the main sheet, I decided to sit down and give up before I got pitched overboard. Rachel appeared in the cockpit with a spoon, reshaped the box, carefully scraped the polenta from my foot and the floorboards and put it back in the box, assuring that we wouldn’t go hungry that evening. After that trip I made the square sail specifically for taking advantage of an unexpected following wind: It goes up in an instant and the boat practically steers itself.
LOA: 17′
Beam: 6′
Depth: 25 ¾″
FAERIE
HESPERIA, laden with cruising gear, is too heavy to move if the tide goes out from under her, and with tides in my area ranging up to 14′, constant tending is required when she’s nosed up to a beach. I’ve used a few systems to put the boat at anchor from shore, but they are all time-consuming and require very long lines. I wanted a folding dinghy that I could stow out of the way in the cockpit, so the fit there determined its dimensions. The only boat I knew of that small was a coracle but while studying the type I came across the Fliptail, a dinghy that was very close to what I had in mind: a skin boat with a folding frame. I laminated bows that would fit the forward end of HESPERIA’s cockpit.
Folded, FAERIE tucks into the forward end of the cockpit, taking up a minimal amount of space. Grab rails on the roof hold cabin floorboards in place.
The Fliptail uses hinges, but I couldn’t find any that were the right size, shape, material, and price. I sketched many schemes for using bolts as pivots before figuring out the geometry that would do the job. The skin is Hypalon I had from an old pool liner. A plank set across the gunwales serves as a seat and if I need floorboards for a passenger or cargo, HESPERIA’s dining table is a perfect fit. The high freeboard gives FAERIE surprising carrying capacity. I’ve paddled with my son sitting in the stern, and our combined weight is about 415 lbs.
FAERIE feels a bit tippy with the paddler’s weight carried so high, but I haven’t yet capsized her. On beaches with a moderate slope I can paddle up to the water’s edge, lean back quite confidently and set the bow just barely up on the land and step out with dry feet. I used a zig-zag sculling stroke at first but later discovered old film footage of coracles ( Boyne Coracle, A Bygone Craft, and Peeps though a Window of the World) being paddled with a draw stroke and the blade slashing in an out of the water from one side. It provides much more power and drives the little hull as fast as it’ll go, which is about 2 knots.—CC
LOA: 56″
Beam: 40½″
Depth: 14½″
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.
Friction will hold the cam lever in place securely even though the pin isn’t at top dead center.
In 1979, when I built my first wooden boat, I had to gather up the tools I needed as I went along. When it came time to lay the planks on, I made a set of planking clamps with the reach to get across the plank to the lap. Now, 36 years later, I don’t recall where I found the pattern for them, but the cam-lever design is still my favorite. The clamps can be applied with one hand, leaving the other hand free to hold and align the plank, and they’re very fast to operate going on and coming off. When I needed planking clamps with a longer reach I later made another set, the more common variety with threaded rods to apply pressure. They do the job but take two hands to operate; by comparison to my first set they’re quite cumbersome. I’ve also made simple plywood clamps that require a wedge slipped under one end for pressure. They’re okay when I just need to add a lot of quick-and-dirty clamps to a plank already secured in place, but they’re quite fussy.
I made my original set of seven clamps (top) 35 years ago with oak from salvaged from a discarded dining-room table. The second set of three (bottom), in Alaska yellow cedar, was thicker, had a shorter reach, and like the first set, tore the hinges apart. I went back to the original design and replaced the hinges with the hardwood cheeks and brass pivot pins.
I bandsawed parts for my first set of cam-lever clamps from ¾″ oak. I used Alaska yellow cedar for a second set of three more clamps, opting for 1 ½″ stock to give the softer wood more strength. They’re a bit clumsy, and I’ve gone back to using ¾″ oak. The semicircular notch in the top jaw is easily cut with a hole saw chucked in a drill press. You won’t have the advantage of a pilot bit in the work piece, but if you use gentle pressure to get the teeth started they’ll cut without skating off target. You can also saw the notch out with a narrow bandsaw or sabersaw blade. When shaping the circular part of the cam handle, a perfect fit in the notch is laudable although not required, but err on the side of making the circle slightly oversized–it will have a better grip in the clamp jaw.
A spring set in holes in the jaws pushes the clamp open, and leather pads glued to the tips provide padding or the planking and prevent damaging misadventures with epoxy.
The straps are 1/16″×3/8″ plain steel flat bar. For the pivot pins I’ve used 1/8″ steel or brass rod. Sixteen-penny nails work well too, and their heads save time peening. For the spring to open the clamp, the parts must move freely, so stop peening the ends just before all the slack gets taken up. If you use a machine screw and nut instead of a rivet to hold the straps to the lower jaw, you can have a second hole to offer a wider setting, but I haven’t found that necessary. The 3/8″ hardwood plates on the end of the clamp are glued in place. The cam levers hold well before their pivot rods hit top dead center, so the clamp has a wide enough range to lock on planks of the various thicknesses generally used for small boats. I’ve used hinges to join the jaws, but those small enough to fit the ¾″ stock are made of thin metal and don’t hold up to the pressure. The hardwood cheeks and pivot rods have proven much more durable. Leather pads on the pinching ends keep the jaws from damaging soft planking and help the clamp release: If a bit epoxy gets on the clamp, it will leave a little leather behind rather take a bit of planking away.
If you already have a set of planking clamps that use threaded rods or wedges, you could make a set of three of these clamps and use them first to get the plank secured in place and then fill in with the others. They’re almost as good as having a helping hand.
Christopher Cunningham is the editor of Small Boats Monthly
You can share your tricks of the trade with other Small Boats Monthly readers by sending us an email.
Cinched tightly around the user’s face, the LandShark Survival Bag prevents heat loss far more effectively than a space blanket.
The Land Shark Instant Survival Shelter is a multipurpose survival bag that’s affordable, lightweight, compact, and reversible: international orange on one side and digital camouflage on the other. The orange is highly visible, critical for rescue at land or sea, and the camouflage side, meant primarily for military use, might come in handy if you want to take refuge ashore without attracting unneeded attention. The outer layers of the laminated material conceal and protect a layer of aluminized film that reflects heat to provide warmth without the bulk of insulation. The bag weighs 22 oz and is 6″×8″×1″ when stowed in its zippered pouch and 38″×80″ when unfolded. It is designed to fit any person up to 6′3″ and we found that two people could fit inside the bag, an asset for rewarming someone with hypothermia. The waterproof, ripstop material is much more durable than a pocket-sized aluminized Mylar blanket, and bag provides better protection from the elements and warmth retention than a space blanket. It comes with a plastic clip and a whistle attached.
I tried the bag outside with the air temperature at 45 degrees Fahrenheit and without sunlight. I was barefoot and wearing shorts and a T-shirt. Getting into the bag is as easy as putting on a pair of pants: It takes about 20 seconds. After getting in, I tucked my head inside and pulled the drawstring tight to create a dead air space. Within 10 minutes the temperature inside climbed to 63.5 degrees. For a second trial, to simulate a man-overboard rescue scenario, I hosed myself down with 41-degree water, and slipped into the bag. I felt an even more distinct sense of warming up than I had when I was dry. As the bag warmed up, my reading glasses even fogged up. After 10 minutes the internal temperature stabilized at 57.2 degrees. Creating the dead air space was critical to warmth, and the great advantage of the bag over a blanket. Keeping the opening small and tight around my face kept me warm. With even a small gap I could feel cold outside air getting in. I minimized conductive heat loss by sitting on a boat cushion or dry forest duff on land. If I rested on heat-draining surfaces like concrete, I could feel the cold.
Capt. David Bill
Turned inside out, the LandShark bag has a camouflage pattern for those times you’d rather blend in with the environment.
I tried using the Land Shark bag in the water, a use indicated on the manufacturer’s website. It is feasible to get into the bag in the water, and it may, as the manufacturer suggests, extend survival time, but it is not a substitute for the buoyancy provided by a PFD or the functional thermal protection of a wet suit or dry suit.
The bag’s aluminized layer, by reflecting radiated heat, also offers “tactical stealth” and can help evade detection by thermal imaging equipment. While that’s useful in a military application, the thermal cloaking must be kept in mind in a survival situation. We conducted a mock search-and-rescue trial with an infrared camera. A person inside the bag was virtually invisible. An arm or a head left uncovered by the bag provided a clear image on the camera monitor. If you are in a survival situation and visibility is obscured you’ll want to get at least partially uncovered if you believe rescuers are nearby. They may be using infrared imaging to find you.
The aluminized film also makes a strong radar reflection—good news for small wooden boats. When we set a 40′ yawl’s radar at a ¼-mile range and 1,000′ away, the outstretched bag, suspended 6′ above the water level, was a smaller target than the 30′ to 50′ sailing and power boats moored nearby but just as easily discernible.
SBM
Packed in its zippered fabric case, the LandShark, its whistle, and clip are compact enough to be stowed on the smallest boats.
The Land Shark bag is a compact and versatile piece of equipment for a make-do weather protection for someone who neglected to bring rain wear, an unexpected bivouac ashore, an impromptu radar reflector if caught up in reduced visibility, or a means of warming someone after a man-overboard rescue. It’s worth having aboard.
Capt. David Bill is a Sea Survival Instructor at Tabor Academy in Marion, Massachusetts, and writes about his adventures on his blog, Boats and Life.
The LandShark Survival Bag sells for $65 and is available online from Corporate Air Parts.
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 GravityWorks filter is designed to remove protozoa, bacteria, and particulates—the common contaminants encountered in American and Canadian backcountry. It is not intended to remove chemicals, toxins and viruses that are more commonly found in urban and agricultural areas and developing countries.
My wife and I spend summers at our Georgian Bay island cabin. Like many lakes in North America, the bay, a part of Lake Huron, is safe for swimming but its water is not drinkable. For years we brought tap water from home or the marina. When we went cruising, drinkable water was a large part of our provisioning.
We looked into purifying our water. Boiling it is a possibility but takes time, consumes fuel, and doesn’t filter out particulates. We tried chemical treatments, but the taste and the long-term health implications put us off. Hand-pumping water through filters seemed like a lot of work. Then we discovered gravity systems. There are a wide variety of these available, and we decided to get a compact system that we could use at the cabin and for boating or canoeing trips.
George Hume
The water from the DIRTY bag flows through the filter, the optional Carbon Element (to remove compounds that affect the taste of the water), and past a pinch valve.
Platypus’s GravityWorks 4-liter water filter system consists of two 4-liter BPA-free plastic bags joined by a clear plastic hose with an in-line filter. The filter is a hollow-fiber membrane that is, according to the manufacturer, “effective down to 0.2 microns and meets EPA Guide Standards for the removal of bacteria and protozoa.” One bag is clearly marked DIRTY and the other CLEAN so they cannot be inadvertently mixed up. We added an optional charcoal filter as recommended to improve the taste of the filtered water. The water tastes quite pure without any trace of chemicals or impurities. Since we didn’t try the system without it, we can’t say whether it was necessary for our water. The rainwater we’ve collected from our cabin roof has a higher E. coli and pathogen count than raw lake water, but the test results of our GravityWorks samples have always shown perfect drinking water no matter what source the water came from.
We fill the DIRTY bag with water from the lake or the cabin rain-barrels, hang it on a stub of a tree branch, and connect the hose to the valve at the bottom of the bag. That starts the flow, and a few minutes later we pick up the filled CLEAN bag, close its valve, disconnect the hose from the filter, and drain the clean water into our drinking-water pot. On a boat, just hang up the CLEAN bag on its strap and use it as the reservoir. We don’t completely empty the CLEAN bag but reconnect it to the system and then lift it above the DIRTY bag to backwash the filter.
Although the manufacturer claims GravityWorks will filter 4 liters in 2.5 minutes, we find it takes closer to 5 minutes, so we go on about our day and empty it when we next think about it. We refill the DIRTY bag and start the process over again. Filling an 18-liter pot does the two of us for about three days. We use the GravityWorks every morning when we have guests, but we have found no reason to go to a larger system.
The caveats are few. The filter cannot be drained completely once it is in use—it must be kept wet between uses and cannot be allowed to freeze. The filter has to be replaced after about 375 uses (1,500 liters/400 gallons) or more frequently if the source water is clouded with suspended solids in it. The filter is fragile, so do not drop it. If you do, have a spare on hand until you can have the water from the original filter tested. The replacement filter costs about $54.95. If you’re venturing into the wilderness, try out the filter before you go and carry a spare.
The GravityWorks is a boon to small-boat cruisers. It comes in a box 6″×11″×2.5″ so takes up very little space when empty, weighs less than a pound empty, and is ready to use anywhere fresh water is available (it is not a desalination device, so it cannot be used with seawater). We are very happy with the system and would recommend it to anyone wanting safe drinking water with minimum effort.
George Hume is a retired architect living in Toronto and summering on two of the 30,000 islands in Georgian Bay (one to call home and one to look at). He is a member of the Antique and Classic Boat Society, the Shallow Water Sailors and a Life Member of the Canadian Power and Sail Squadrons. He paddles a canvas-covered cedar canoe and is restoring a Mirror dinghy that he built in the ‘70s.
The GravityWorks 4.0L Filter System sells for $119.95 is available online, from outdoor retailers and direct from Cascade Designs.
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.
Andy Saunders’ Ranger 15, after two-and-a-half years in the making, sits pretty at the far side of the learning curve.
In 2011, at the age of 64, Andy Saunders went to his first wooden boat festival. It was held at Goolwa, South Australia, near the mouth of the River Murray. At the festival, Bob, an old friend, proudly showed him a stitch-and-glue canoe he had made at a workshop put on by Duck Flat Wooden Boats. “Andy, have a look at what I built in 10 days!” On the way home, Andy thought: If Bob could build a canoe, so can I! Undeterred by his lack of experience, the difficulty of procuring materials, the cost of the project, and not knowing where or how he would use a canoe, he bought plans for a Prospector Ranger 15, a 15′ wood-strip canoe by Bear Mountain Boats.
Only one of the lumberyards he contacted was willing to mill the 17′-long western red-cedar ¾″×¼″ bead-and-cove strips he needed, and only after he had gone to pick up his order did he learn that the yard had never milled strips like this before. They could only get the thickness down to 5/16″. The canoe would be heavier for the extra wood, but on the bright side, the yard gave him all of their short practice strips—almost enough for another smaller boat.
The bead-and-cove cedar strips kept the seams tight around the turn of the bilge.
Andy had his share of challenges to overcome. The instructions called for molds to be cut from plywood, but the plywood he’d bought warped after being cut; he started over with ½″ MDF. His first attempt at laminating the stems fell apart when the epoxy failed to set in the chill of the fall weather; for subsequent gluing tasks he employed a heater. But he made slow but steady progress, and could fit and glue two or three strips per side each day. He took a suggestion from a friend and mixed resin, hardener, and filler in a zip-lock plastic sandwich bag. With a bit of a corner cut off, he could squeeze thickened Bote-Cote epoxy into the wood-strip coves just as one would ice a cake.
After Andy applied fiberglass and epoxy to the hull, the canoe sat idle until he brought in friends to help with the finishing touches.
Within a few months he had sanded, faired, and ’glassed the hull with West System epoxy, but then his project sat idle for a year and a half. Andy ultimately called upon friends at Duck Flat Wooden Boats to help him finish the canoe. The canoe surged toward completion. Hoop-pine gunwales went on, gaboon plywood decks and bulkheads were installed, and a rosewood thwart and Shaw & Tenney seats took their places. Andy also purchased cherry paddles from Shaw & Tenney. In November 2014, about two-and-a-half years after starting the project, he launched his canoe.
The Ranger 15 is modeled on a classic Canadian frontier canoe and is designed to carry several months’ worth of provisions. Without a heavy load aboard, it floats virtually on top of the water and easily catches the wind. Worried about paddling on nearby lakes where the wind was strong and unpredictable, he waited weeks for a windless day to launch in a local man-made seawater lake.
He took the canoe out for a paddle, but in a few hundred yards the wind sprang up and became so strong he could not get back to his launch point. With no option left he had to scramble up the rocky embankment struggling with the canoe, leaving scratches on the bottom, but for the short time he was on the water, the Ranger showed it had stability and traveled straight and fast. He also saw that it would do much better with two paddlers. Andy repaired the canoe, leaving no evidence of the damage, and when he showed the canoe at a recent wooden boat festival, it attracted a lot of attention and compliments. Andy is looking forward to exploring some of the many swamps up and down the River Murray where the wind won’t be such an issue, and where he can appreciate the tranquility and wildlife with too much concern about any damage to his pride and joy. He knows the canoe will make a great bird-watching and fishing boat and be very safe, in the right conditions, to take his young granddaughters out on adventures.
Have you recently launched a boat? Please email us. We’d like to hear about it and share your story with other Small Boats Monthly readers.
Within the pages of Eric McKee’s Working Boats of Great Britain there are drawings of a 24′ Thames skiff attributed to W.A.B. Hobbs* at Henley-on-Thames in the very early part of the 20th century. Thames river skiffs were an evolution of the wherries used to transport cargoes and passengers up, down and across the Thames for many years before bridges and other forms of transport put them out of business. Although the vast majority of skiffs have been used for leisure purposes, they are worthy of inclusion in McKee’s book as so many of them have earned a living by being hired out.
Retired firefighter Lawrence Shillingford decided he wanted to build a version of the Hobbs skiff when he enrolled in the nine-month course at the Boat Building Academy in Lyme Regis, UK, in 2014. The workshop space there was limited so the design was scaled down to 21′ with a CAD program by tutor Mike Broome. The process was by no means simple, primarily because the boat already had very little freeboard. “It was just a question of tweaking it a bit,” Mike said “In essence it’s the same as the Hobbs boat but with more freeboard and a tiny bit more beam.”
Photographs and video by the author
Built in a shop with limited space available, ROSINA MAY is 3′ shorter than the century-old skiff that inspired her builder.
Although Lawrence had planned to retain the Hobbs boat’s two rowing positions, he realized during the lofting that the forward position would be too cramped and that the beam there would be too narrow. He found a drawing of a 21′ skiff with a single rowing position and decided to adopt its interior layout.
Although there is no such thing as a standard Thames river skiff, there are, as Lawrence puts it, “certain ways of doing things.” So, to find out more about skiff-building traditions and practices, he visited two Thames boatbuilding companies: Henwoood and Dean, and Richmond Bridge Boathouses where skiff builder Mark Edwards allowed him to walk around his workshop with a camera and measuring tape.
The building process began by setting up a temporary structure on the workshop floor to which the keel—laminated from two full lengths of oak with a slight amount of rocker—was temporarily fixed. The stem—with the inner part laminated for strength and the outer part solid for aesthetics—and the sternpost were then added. Epoxy was used in all glued joints.
The shapes of the 1″-thick transom and the nine building molds were determined during the lofting process, and the planned position of the top of each plank was also marked on the edges of each of them. Any inaccuracies in the planking lines of a clinker boat will soon be betrayed by the human eye, so after the transom and molds were fixed to the centerline and shored up to the ceiling, a batten was run between each set of planking marks to check the fairness and a few minor adjustments were made.
On each side of the boat there are six ⅜″-thick khaya planks and at the sheer there is a ¾″ thick saxboard, rabbeted so that its inner face is flush with that of the top plank. Lawrence worked from the bottom up, fitting the garboard plank first, a time-consuming process as it was rabbeted into the keel. The academy had obtained khaya, a type of mahogany native to Africa, long enough to do all the planks in one piece, although an entirely forgivable human error resulted in one plank having to be remade with a scarf joint in it. The plank laps were coated with varnish before they were fastened with copper rivets.
Lawrence remained faithful to the traditional Thames skiff system of discontinuous frames. The ⅝″-thick oak futtocks are closely fitted to the inside of the planking and have half joints where necessary. None of the futtocks are taken as far inboard as the centerline. Those in the ends of the boat nearly do and each of them is adjacent to a corresponding floor; amidships, the futtocks and floors are at different stations. Started at the bow, Lawrence riveted the futtocks and floors to the planking and removed the molds as he worked his way aft.
The locks are incorporated into the saxboards and have easily replaced bearing surfaces.
The saxboards were made from especially wide timber so that the fore and aft supports for the oarlocks are an integral part of them. Extended futtocks provide strength across the grain of the saxboards. Each oarlock consists of two vertical tholes and a horizontal sill, all oak and held in place by brass strips so they can be easily removed for repair or replacement.
It was a relatively straightforward process to fit the remaining parts of the boat, including the ½″ x ¾″ khaya rubbing strake; the oak breast hook and stern lodging knees; the stretcher with its three positions to fit rowers of different sizes; the oak and khaya rudder and its yoke; and the khaya thwarts and their oak knees. Time restrictions prevented Lawrence from including two details from the Hobbs drawing: He made slatted bottom boards instead of gratings, and the backrest for the cox’s seat is of oak and khaya rather than framed woven cane.
Another academy student who spent a great deal of time working on Lawrence’s skiff was Brooke Ricketts from Maryland. Brooke’s brother-in-law had felled an oak tree not far from Lyme Regis, and it was from this that the transom, rudder, yoke and seat back were made.
The boat was coated with Deks Olje—three coats of D1 saturating wood oil, applied wet-on-wet, followed by D2 high gloss oil finish—a combination that Lawrence believes will require less maintenance than varnish.
On the academy’s Launch Day in December 2014, Lawrence’s skiff was christened ROSINA MAY, in honor of his mother, and few months later I met with him in Weymouth—about 25 miles east of Lyme Regis—and launched ROSINA MAY from her trailer into the sheltered harbor. Although she felt slightly tippy when I climbed aboard—perhaps not surprising as a narrow waterline beam is an inherent part of the traditional skiff design—as soon as I was seated and rowing it was clear that she is comfortably stable.
It had looked to me as if the distance aft from the rowing thwart to the oarlocks might be too small, but I soon realized that it was just right. Lawrence told me that McKee’s book provided this and other such ergonomic dimensions and that he also had occasional doubts about them during lofting and construction, but centuries of skiff design were clearly proved to be of value.
Each of the students had been obliged to make an oar as part of the course—as well as a hollow plane for working the concave side of its spoon blade—and ROSINA MAY’s oars were made by Lawrence and Brooke. They are to the academy’s standard design but Lawrence and I agreed that oars with blades a couple of inches longer would be better suited to his skiff.
While seating of a sort is provided in the stern, the passenger who’ll be doing the steering sits farther forward to maintain proper trim.
It had been a long time since I had rowed while another person steered. Initially when Lawrence pulled on one of the yoke lines I thought we had been somehow pushed off course by wind or waves and that I should correct it. The reality, however, is that the very long keel gives the boat tremendous directional stability and it needs little help from the oarsman or coxswain to hold its course. Conversely this also makes her hard to turn, so a companion at the rudder is a welcome addition for rowing along a meandering river.
The Thames waterman’s stroke, the traditional form of rowing for a skiff of this type, is described in the Sept/Oct issue of WoodenBoat.
ROSINA MAY is quite heavily built. Lawrence realized she would be when he visited Mark Edwards’s yard but by then he was committed to slightly larger scantlings in some parts of the boat. However, Lawrence is happy that she is strong and, although he isn’t sure of her exact weight, on the launch ramp it was surprisingly easy for the two of us to pull her back up on a trailer with its tires only just touching the water and without using its winch.
Lawrence is contemplating a couple of modifications to the cox’s thwart and back rest to create more leg room. He would, after all, like to have a forward rowing position and so he is thinking of fitting small outriggers—removable for aesthetic and practical reasons—to get the oarlocks far enough outboard.
While Weymouth is geographically the most convenient place for Lawrence to trailer ROSINA MAY from his nearby home, he is looking for a suitable base for her on the River Thames, a wider piece of water where she would be able to mingle with a variety of other elegant rowing boats, and so clearly her natural habitat.
*According to Tony Hobbs, a member of the Hobbs boatbuilding dynasty who was appointed Royal Waterman to Her Majesty the Queen in 1981, he is W.A.B. Hobbs and the book’s reference should have been to W.A. Hobbs, his grandfather. However, the boat shouldn’t have been attributed to W.A. Hobbs. Tony is certain that the boat McKee measured in 1976 was built by Wally Downing in 1906. Downing’s name is inscribed, as is the boatbuilders’ custom, on the underside of the stretcher. At the time, Downing was working for E.T. Ashley of Pangbourne-on-Thames. Ashley’s business and the skiff were later acquired by Hobbs so when McKee measured the boat, she was then owned by Hobbs, hence the confusion, presumably. The boat is now in the Racing and River Boat Museum at Pangbourne.—NS
Nigel Sharp is a lifelong sailor and a freelance marine writer and photographer. He spent 35 years in managerial roles in the boat building and repair industry and has logged thousands of miles in boats big and small, from dinghies to schooners.
Particulars
[table]
LOA/21′
Beam/43″
Freeboard/10″
Draft/5½″
Weight/ approx. 220 lbs
[/table]
For a lines drawing and a table of offsets, email Mike Broome at the Boat Building Academy. Constructional details largely followed those of the 24′ Hobbs skiff depicted in Working Boats of Britain: Their shape and purpose by Eric McKee.
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!
What was left of the boat rotting in the brambles on the north shore of Clear Lake in Western Washington was once a very fast boat under oars. Back in the 1930s John Thomas “could row it across the lake, fill up two gallon jugs with spring water and row halfway back on one cigarette.” When John Sack, Thomas’s nephew, took over the lakeside family cabin in the 1960s, the boat had been sitting at the base of the largest pine tree on the property, unused for a decade.
In 1983 John asked me to build new boat to replace the one his uncle had thought of so highly. Rot had taken a heavy toll and although most of the sheerstrake was gone there was enough boat there to measure it and to show how it was put together. My search for the origins of the boat led to the lines of a lapstrake Whitehall Livery Boat in Maynard Bray’s Mystic Seaport Museum Watercraft. The shape, dimensions and many of the construction details—shortcuts for an easy, quick build—were a nearly perfect match. Bray writes: “…in spite of the quick and dirty way she is built, there is nothing at all second rate about her shape; she is one of the nicest modeled puling boats in the entire collection.” I ordered the plans and set to work.
Photos and video by the author except where noted
“There is nothing second rate about her shape; she is one of the nicest modeled pulling boats in the entire collection.”
The livery boat is 13′6 ⅝″ long with a beam of 3′7 ½″. It has seven strakes and steam-bent oak ribs on 5 ½″ centers, clench-nailed at the plank laps and riveted at the gunwale. The last two frames at either end take very tight turns at the keel, so supple bending stock is a must.
The keel and the keel batten (as they’re labeled on the plans) run nearly straight from stem to sternpost. There is no deadwood forming a skeg as on some Whitehalls, so the garboards, rather than turn upward to the transom, follow the keel and batten and twist to vertical at the sternpost, much they would in a double-ender.
The plans note that the boat has a one-piece stem. I’d be surprised if that were indeed the case. The aft end of the garboard and broad strakes run past the sternpost and are capped with a small triangular false sternpost, fastened after the planks are trimmed flush. The forward end of the garboard in the relic I saw has an odd jog around the outer stem (a detail that isn’t clear in the plans or the photograph in Bray’s book) that suggests the use of a false stem.
Lightly built, the livery boat makes rowing a pleasure.
The plans indicated that the garboards were run past the keel batten and then planed flat to accept the keel in the same manner that a dory’s garboards are planed flush with the bottom and protected by a false bottom. With rabbets and the time they take to shape eliminated from the stern and keel assembly, it seems unlikely that the stem would be of one piece and rabbeted to accept the hood ends of the planks. I built John’s boat with a two-piece stem.
Bray notes: “…what appears to be the keel is in reality only a chafing strip to protect the garboards from damage. Thus built, the garboard seam is hidden and cannot be caulked later.” To avoid problems with the seam between the keel and the garboard, I widened the keel batten, and the garboards overlap it much like any other plank lap for most of their length. With the oak keelson resting mostly on the oak batten for much of its length, it has a more solid footing than it would on the feathered edges of soft cedar planking. The 3M 5200 I used in the seams has kept the laps at the keel and the rest of the hull tight and leak-free for 31 years.
The boat is, as you might expect of a fast pulling boat, a bit tender. I can stand in it with confidence, but stepping upright from one thwart to another gets a bit twitchy. The stability picks up quite quickly so it doesn’t twitch far, but I prefer getting aboard or moving about with my hands on the gunwales. Seated, of course, the boat is comfortably stable. When I sit at the side of the center thwart, my 200 lbs bring the sheerstrake to the water’s surface.
The frames in very ends of the boat take some very tight turns. Better trim could be achieved with a passenger aboard by making the stern bench longer and adding a backrest to put the additional weight farther forward.
There are two rowing stations but a boat this size doesn’t gain anything by having two people at the oars—more power won’t make it go appreciably faster. One station is for rowing alone and the other for rowing with a passenger in the stern. The volume of the stern sections is carried quite high, so it’s best to have the heavier occupant at the oars. With John in the stern sheets and his daughter Mary at the oars, the boat settled down by the stern. Had they changed positions the boat would have trimmed well. The thwarts are set just 5 ½″ below the sheer, so the oarlocks are set in pads that add another 2″ of height for more clearance for rowing.
The plans call for thwart knees sawn from straight-grained ¾″ stock, certainly the simplest solution to bracing the hull, but I opted for bent knees for a less clunky appearance and adequate strength for the boat’s purpose. Simple blocks of wood secured to the center floorboard provide foot bracing adequate for casual rowing.
The hull’s very fine waterlines aft and ample drag keep it tracking arrow straight. If I were to build the boat again I might move the thwarts 6″ or 8″ to have the stern settle not quite so deep. For now, any cargo, like John Thomas’s gallon jugs of spring water, would serve the trim best when set in the bow.
The short waterline length makes the livery boat easy to maneuver. Changing course while underway takes few strong pulls on side, and at a standstill I could spin the boat through 360 degrees in 10 strokes, pulling one oar and backing the other.
For Mary Sack, John’s daughter, and her two brothers, rowing has been one of the pleasures visiting the family cabin on Clear Lake.
With a lazy pull at the oars I could poke along at a GPS-measured 3.5 knots and go almost as fast backing. A little more effort took me up past 4 knots. I peaked at 4 ¾ knots, about what I’d expect for a waterline length of just under 13′. Not being a smoker I didn’t try to see if I could get across the lake and halfway back on a single cigarette. At speed the wake’s transverse waves are small; there is no gurgling coming from the stern as the boat eases the displaced water back together. The boat carries well between strokes. The hull is light enough that when I swing my upper body aft during the recovery, the boat surges ahead.
Mary Sack
At a relaxed pace the livery boat is easily driven. Here, pushed hard, it does around 4¾ knots.
John, a devotee of racing shells, equipped the boat with folding bronze outriggers that increased the span between the locks by 13″. The arrangement worked well enough with his 9′3″ racing sculls, although the boat won’t go any faster; rather than increase the speed, the longer oars just lower the rowing cadence and for some, that’s a more pleasant way to row. The outriggers have sockets for the original rowlocks so the boat could still be rowed as designed, on the gunwales, with the 7′3″ spoon-blade oars I built for the boat. The shorter oars offer the higher cadence I prefer and more clearance over the legs for the stroke’s release and recovery. The clearance for the stroke was good for flat water I’ve had on the lake whenever I’ve rowed John’s boat, but there’s enough freeboard and enough clearance for the oars to take on the kind of chop a small lake is likely to generate when the wind comes up.
This boat is not a workhorse. Only 15½″ deep amidships (13¾″ measured inside), it hasn’t an abundance of freeboard for rough water or carrying heavy loads. Bray surmised that the design was for a boat that “might have been kept by a lakeside summer hotel for use by its guests.” The boat I built for John, like the boat his uncle took such pride in, was ideally suited to his lakeside cabin.
The plans from Mystic Seaport are on three sheets: lines drawings, a table of offsets, and construction details. If you’re unfamiliar with traditional lapstrake construction there are good books to guide you through the process—Walter Simmons’ Lapstrake Boatbuilding and Greg Rössel’s Building Small Boats, to name just two. Some of the “quick and dirty” details of the livery boat’s construction can actually fare quite well with today’s modern adhesive sealants, eliminate some fussy and time-consuming tasks, and get you on the water faster.
Christopher Cunningham is the editor of Small Boats Monthly.
A gray sky, and a river the color of silver: the morning is above all dreary. Enormous barges and small freighters disturb the calm of the Escaut River estuary. Tugboats come and go, some toward a liner ready to depart, others toward busy wharves in the harbor. Two leave the right bank at downtown Anvers, and are snatched up by the tide’s flood and carried upstream. On board, we are pleased this voyage we’ve imagined for a decade is now underway.
For my companion—Jean-Marie Huron—the exhilaration is short-lived: his kayak, VAILIMA, insists on veering to the right. I had many occasions to try mine, SILVERADO, but Jean-Marie didn’t board for the first time until the day before departure. The prospect of constantly adjusting his course for three weeks was more than depressing.
The route we intended to complete was Antwerp in northern Belgium to Pontoise on the outskirts of Paris via the rivers and canals. It had been completed 1876 by the writer Robert Louis Stevenson and his friend Walter Simpson. The future author of Treasure Island was then 27 years old and had reached a crossroads in his life. Although he wished to make his living as a writer, he acceded to his father’s insistence that he work as a lawyer in London. To escape this destiny, the young Scotsman saw only one way forward: to publish a book and hope that its success would be enough to sway his father.
He followed suit with what was a flourishing genre of the time: river adventure. The initial destination the two companions chose was Grez-sur-Loing, near Fontainebleau, where they could meet up with young impressionist painters—a merry group that included Fanny Van de Grift, a woman the writer had encountered some months earlier and for whom he had fallen head over heels.
Two aspects of An Inland Voyage, the book that Stevenson published about the voyage, touched me immediately: first, the course, which I found wonderful and even exotic despite its geographic proximity to my home in Bordeaux; and, second, its vagabond spirit, which struck me as reawakening an ethic of leaving much to chance, a dance with luck, relying on unplanned encounters and unfolding episodes.
As we paddled away from Antwerp, two workers in fluorescent orange vests hailed us from a high bank above the Escaut River: “Where are you going?” I would have responded, “Pontoise,” but Jean-Marie was more convincing: “Paris!” “Ah, Paris!” came the reply from above, “It’s beautiful, right? Like Antwerp, the capital of Belgium!”
Welcome to Flanders—where Flemish northern pride takes precedence over allegiance to Brussels in the south. We spent most of the day paddling in the busy Escaut and enjoyed the turn in the quiet river Rupel. Our plan was to stop in the city of Boom as our predecessors did. But as we found no place to disembark, we decided to try the lovely village standing on the other bank. Amusingly, our kayaks were housed for the night in a boatyard that specializes in high-speed motorboats.
All photographs by Jean-Marie Huron
Getting back to the water, as here in Verberie, France, was often challenging.
The second day started with an exhausting portage around the lock at Zemst. To clear that 27′ rise, we had to haul, pull, and push, grabbing alder branches and tufts of thorny weeds in our bare hands; then, to put in again, go under the astonished eyes of wizened fishermen lined up above—all this backbreaking work only to learn, a few minutes later, that the guardians of this fortress would have opened their gates, if we had only dared to ask them.
The welcome at the Royal Sport Nautique of Brussels, Belgium, was an enthusiastic one.
We landed at a float in front of the Royal Sport Nautique of Brussels, where a dozen club members awaited us. We had hardly disembarked before our kayaks were hauled out of the water, carried across the club’s graveled courtyard, placed on gentle cradles, washed, rinsed in fresh water, polished with soft cloths, photographed in front of the vine-covered façade, and, at last, sheltered in the vast boat shed among the club’s shells and skiffs.
Showers, dinner, and beds were all so rapidly organized that I could not help thinking of our predecessors and how their evening at Royal Sport Nautique degenerated. At first overjoyed by the good fortune of being celebrated by their Belgian hosts, they ended up being irritated by their obsessive attention. Were we to have an onslaught of questions about French rowing or kayaks, clubs, and champions, its waterways, its competitions? Would dinner turn into a nightmare?
As it happened we were only slightly interesting to the young athletes who stopped at the bar after their arduous training. Jean-Marie and I hadn’t been 20 years old for at least 20 years, so we talked with the elders, their trainers and managers. We spoke of the voyage, of the evolution of the Flemish language, of the intractable Belgian government. Of the Vilvorde, also, the industrial center whose riverbank we had traveled along just before our arrival. “The traumatic closure of the Renault factory in 1997 was a blow,” explained Marc Legein, the quiet, friendly president of the rowing program. The fallow industry has opened the way to gentrification and enticed oarsmen with water less toxic and air less nasty.
At Abbaye de l’Aulne, Belgium, the canal of the Sambre is served by very small locks.
We did not escape, however, our hosts’ curiosity about our kayaks. The idea to make these specialized boats for the project came from the documentary filmmaker Florent the La Tullaye, with whom I was originally intending to do the voyage. But it was only when I encountered Jean-Baptiste Bossuet, and discovered his boatyard, that making the boats became essential to the project. The man comes across as a little surly, but he is direct and honest when giving his opinion, full of passion when it comes to describing the art of building a performance sailboat. Though solidly anchored in a tradition founded six generations earlier, Jean-Baptiste is no less open to innovation. “Those who came before me were always searching for the most effective techniques of their times,” he insists. “I was raised that way.” On my visit to the boatyard, situated at the entrance to the Bay of Arcachon on France’s southern Atlantic coast, I was taken with this wooden shed full of tools, shavings, and all sorts of sounds from saws, mallets, surfacing machines, radio and even the ducks that Jean-Baptiste raises. For my objective—the kayaks—all that remained was to convince the guardian of this temple. His response was tepid. There was a bit of suspense, but finally, we reached agreement: “Let’s go!”
After several attempts to stow gear on VAILIMA’s deck and in her two watertight compartments, Jean-Marie found the right combination. With a little less weight forward, his kayak tracked as well as mine. We slipped away late that morning, and it was nearly noon when we reached Brussels. The waterway was constrained by two high quays allowing no access to the city. We had to content ourselves with waves of dirty water reflecting off the graffiti-covered walls until we reached the first lock. We called the lockmasters: they would open for us but asked if we would go aboard the SAINT JEAN BOSCO, a barge that was behind us. The lock could not take all three boats, and the mariner was in a hurry. Doubly raised by the passage through the lock and by the height of the barge, we could finally see the Belgian capital.
The barge SAINT JEAN BOSCO got an early-morning start heading for Seneffe, Belgium, with a load Chinese silicone.
Our host asked: “Why not stay aboard until the next lock, or even farther if you like, until the inclined lock at Ronquières?” We didn’t hesitate long. The prospect of climbing 68 meters of slope aboard SAINT JEAN BOSCO, itself hauled in an imposing moving tank mounted on 600 wheels, was too tempting to resist.
The afternoon was sunny. We passed Anderlecht, a suburb in the countryside. From time to time, a small town, a group of windmills, or a factory came in view of the canal. Aboard the barge we came to know Valerie Rigole—daughter, granddaughter, great-granddaughter, and sister of Belgian mariners—and her husband, Matthieu, from Bordeaux. “When our daughter Lana was born,” Valerie recalled, “we were working at a campground. We enjoyed the work, but it was demanding and incompatible with the time we wanted to spend with our child. So we decided to get licensed as river captains.”
Aboard SILVERADO, Donatien waited for gates to open in the impressive lock at Marchienne, Belgium.
A lock approached. Matthieu bounded forward to prepare the mooring lines. I was taken with this quickness, which didn’t match my preconception of canal transport. “My family laughs at me,” Matthieu says, “They often say, ‘You are hyperactive and you live at 10 kilometers per hour.’ Aboard SAINT JEAN BOSCO there is always something to keep me busy, things to learn, I am always calculating and keeping myself informed.”
In the evening, a large plate of carbonara was the payoff for kilometers covered…without paddling. In the saloon, with its clean white partitions and its modern settee, Lana watched a Disney film on the flat-screen TV. We were far from Stevenson’s depictions of working life on the canals, but soon, as I was reading my hosts a passage from An Inland Voyage that evokes the peaceful life of mariners, Valerie exclaimed: “It’s exactly that! It’s in the photos of my grandmother, with the clothes drying on the line, the little mutt dogs, the flowers, the draft horses.”
A gentle breeze on the canal from Brussels to Charleroi provided an opportunity for SILVERADO (here) and VAILIMA to set sail and race.
The next day SAINT JEAN BOSCO was moored in front of the bucolic Central Canal, and we parted. We set out in the beautiful glow of a late-summer day, and wound through river bends amid pastoral and level countryside until we came to a long stretch lined by reeds and framed by wooded hills. A slight breeze was at our backs—an ideal time for sailing. I slipped the mast into its sleeve and set the battened sail up. The race was on. VAILIMA and SILVERADO, named after places Stevenson had visited, vied for the lead. Gaining from the slightest puff, playing the eddies to the utmost, SILVERADO edged ahead and but for the treachery of a bank ahead and the insidious backwash of fast-moving barge, my victory would have been certain.
Coming up on the Viesville lock I furled the sail round the mast, slipped its gray cloth cover over it, and put it in its place on deck. We “knocked at the door” of the lock, but it was shut tight for the night. We turned back and chose a copse of birches for our first bivouac.
For centuries Charleroi thrived on coal, glass, and steel. The factories survived World War II but the industry fell into decline in the years that followed. Rusting and idle, the factories are eerily quiet.
Ahead lay the ghostly industrial complex of Charleroi, the Sambre canal system, and the French border at Jeumont. Stevenson and his friend, put off by the number of locks, the frequent delays caused by river traffic, and the incessant rain since their departure, decided to take a train from Brussels toward Maubeuge, but we kept on paddling.
Most of the heavy industry in Charleroi appeared to be closed. The banks of the Sambre River made a ghostly picnic.
We arrived at the village of Pont-sur-Sambre, presenting, as Stevenson put it, “a most dubious sample of civilization.” We were dirty and tired. Jean-Marie had fallen first thing in the morning and had suffered a bruise. Our equipment was scarcely better. A bit of the brass stem band on VAILIMA had broken during a tight turn at a lock, and one of our portage carts was broken. Eight days out, we needed a break. We had, fortunately, been in touch with Michel Detrait, the mayor of Pont-sur-Sambre. We phoned him in the morning, and upon our arrival, his family–if not the whole village–was waiting for us, ready to help. At the grand brick house of Myriam and Michel Detrait, the dinner—a fondue of organic beef accompanied by chips and a cheesecake— was the beginning of our recuperation.
We were a very different team–shaved, showered, laundered, and restored by sleep–when we left the next afternoon. The day was made for boating. Under a blue sky I paddled in silence, following the track left by VAILIMA in water covered with yellow pollen.
The closure, in 2006, of the canal bridge at Vadencourt made it impossible to go all the way to Paris, avoiding the Central Canal, as the canal from Sambre to Oise has become a cul-de-sac. We went by truck from Étreux to Chauny and there rejoined the Oise. The absence of rain, while a welcome contrast to the incessant showers our predecessors suffered through, prevented us from launching at Vadencourt as there was not enough water in the river there for navigation. Downstream we confronted barriers of branches and rubbish, quagmires held by obstinate cattle, but soon enjoyed a string of the most sinuous and wild river bends we had seen since Anvers. An avid trout fisherman, Jean-Marie delighted in the outbreak of flies and the frequent strikes off his bow. For my part, I enjoyed the river scallops in the shallows, the escort by pair of green sandpipers, the bullet trajectory of martin-fishers, and a heron’s first try at flight.
The light was declining, the mist was gathering, and it was time to find a refuge. Ahead we saw above the alders and willows the pointed towers of a small Renaissance chateau. After arriving at the chateau du Plessis-Brion, the caretakers, Loic and Laetitia Marquet, put us up in their cottage. That evening we discussed stags, wild boars, and fox terriers while sipping a fine whisky.
The morning mist had not yet lifted when we started off. At the confluence of the Saint-Quentin and Aisne canal, the Oise becomes a river again. Barges passed us at full speed seemingly without seeing us, and industrial equipment and silos lined the banks. We passed Compiegne, then arrived two days later, in a drizzle, at Creil. At a bend of the river above Villers-Saint-Paul, we encountered Jean-Baptiste Fléret and Étienne Pillier, training in their rowing skiff. With their white outfits and their youth, they wouldn’t be out of place on a rowing team at Oxford in Stevenson’s time. Following their directions, we put in at the Étoile Nautique de l’Oise where they promised a secure place for our kayaks.
Situated on an island in the middle of Creil, the once splendid club seemed to be collapsing with the city, a victim of lost industry. That didn’t diminish at all the beautiful camaraderie of the oarsmen who gathered around us and admired our kayaks just as the oarsman at the Royal in Brussels had done. We were even saluted by some drunkards sprawled with their dogs under the willows on the opposite bank. After the oarsmen helped get our boats settled, the boat warden, a beekeeper, and several others complimented our kayaks on their great speed and their lustrous varnished mahogany. We soon found ourselves in a McDonald’s in a commercial zone with the two handsome oarsmen we had encountered on the water.
Near the village of Sassegnies, France, the Sambre meanders through farmlands and forests. The lock here was closed and we had to portage around it.
The next day, our 17th day, would be the last. All night, among the weights, the dumbbells, and other implements of sports torture scattered around the workout room of the Étoile, I tried in vain to sleep. One question, among them all, persisted: Where would we stop? At Pontoise? That seemed improbable given the distance yet to go. At Auvers-sur-Oise? The idea appealed to me for the connection with Grez-sur-Loing, which was Stevenson’s initial destination—and the one he and Simpson finally attained after abandoning their kayaks at Pontoise.
We woke up early determined to go as far as we could. It was around noon when we reached the lock at Boran-sur-Oise. But despite our insistence, the gatekeeper would not accept to let us in and no mariner would give us the lift we needed. We took it as fate, as it was clear that we had no energy left to haul our kayaks onshore and that the good luck that had followed us during our entire trip had run out.
We had a look at the small village of Boran-sur-Oise. Except for a strange abandoned nautical stadium from the 1950s at its entrance and a kebab restaurant in one of its few streets, it appeared to have remained the same since the 19th century. With its ever-present line fishermen, its willows, and its bell tower, we decided, with a glass of champagne, that it was not a bad place to end our humble voyage in the wake of young Robert Louis Stevenson.
As a journalist and a writer, Donatien Garnier was part of the Argos Collective, a group of French photographers, writers, and cartoonists dedicated to documentary journalism. After 10 years of focusing on seafarers, climate refugees, and travel, he turned his attention to literary projects. He is the author of “Le Recueil d’Écueils” (The Collection of Rocks), a combination of poetry and fanciful cartography, and of “Fluxus “ a volume of poetry published in the form of a scroll. He is currently working on a ballet adaptation of his documentary work about seafarers.
VAILIMA and SILVERADO
A Thousand Miles in the Rob Roy Canoe, published in 1866, inspired Robert Louis Stevenson a decade later to have built a pair of Rob Roy decked, double-paddle canoes and take his own trip on Europe’s rivers and canals. SILVERADO and VAILIMA continued the tradition nearly a century and a half later.
In An Inland Voyage, Stevenson wrote little about the boats. Only that one was built with “a strong heart and English oak” and the other of cedar. ARETHUSE and CIGARETTE were decked canoes, probably resembling the ROB ROY of John McGregor, the British pioneer of light-boat adventuring, used with double-bladed paddles. Jean-Baptiste Bossuet designed two kayaks in the spirit of ROB ROY, capable for sea or river, equipped with a removable sailing rig and flotation chambers, built as light and strong as possible but stable enough to let the photographer do his work. Jean-Baptiste designed a hull with sharp ends, sweet lines, and his signature, a plumb stem and sternpost. The kayaks measure 14′ 5¼″(4.4 m) long and 24¾″ (0.63 m) wide. The skin is 5mm mahogany plywood glued and copper-nailed to the red cedar structure, protected by fiberglass, epoxy, and varnish. A brass band protects the keel, and lengths of clear pine reinforce the sheerline.—DG
If you have an interesting story to tell about your travels in a small wooden boat, please email us a brief outline and a few photos.
Having the monkey’s fist and its heaving line tied together instead of all in one piece frees both to do other jobs.
When I’m camp-cruising, I carry gear that is simple and multifunctional. My heaving line and a monkey’s fist come in handy for a variety of situations. They’re traditionally parts of the same line, but having them separate makes both more versatile.
The separate monkey’s fist makes it possible to use other lines for heaving and to get lines over high branches when setting up camp. The line, 60′ length of ⅜″ laid poly, gets used for everything from tying the boat up at the dock, to setting my sea anchor, warping out of a crowded marina, anchoring, and setting up camp. Tied to the monkey’s fist, its light weight makes throws longer and keeps it afloat for easy retrieval.
The monkey’s fist is relatively easy to tie, taking only about 5 to 10 minutes. It is a series of wraps perpendicular to each other. The monkey’s fist here is tied with a length of manila around a round fishing cork with two ¾-oz fishing leads I’d inserted into it. The lead adds weight for better throwing without losing buoyancy. Golf balls also add some heft and aren’t so dense that a poly monkey’s fist won’t stay afloat with one at the core.
It’s easiest to insert the core after the second series of wraps begins. After the third series of wraps all of the slack is worked out from the bitter end and through the turns. The tail is usually spliced into the integral heaving line at the other end, but a short loop is what I use. The two ends of the line can be tied or spliced together to form the loop, but a quick-and-dirty finish is to cut one end flush and tuck the other in alongside it. Superglue keeps them in place. I finished the one shown here with a quick half-hitch braid around the loop.
When I need to toss a line, I tie it to the monkey’s fist with a clove hitch. There are a couple of different techniques for setting up to throw, but I prefer to coil the line (starting by tucking the tail end between two fingers so I can hang on to it when I’m throwing) into my non-throwing hand and then carefully transfer three or four coils of the line into my throwing hand with the monkey’s fist hanging about even with the bottom of the coils. It is important to coil the line properly. I coil both laid and braided clockwise into my left hand, adding a slight twist with the thumb and forefinger of my right hand to keep the coils loose and even.
I can consistently throw the line and monkey’s fist 50′ to 70′ with good accuracy. I try to get the monkey’s fist well past the target and slightly to one side to avoid hitting the receiver. With a little practice you can get fairly accurate with your throw.
Having a heaving line and monkey’s fist at the ready may just make a critical difference one day in an emergency, but in the meantime it can spare you the embarrassment of throwing a line only to have it land in a heap far short of its target.
A native Floridian, Thomas Head grew up working on his father’s home-built stone crab boat in the small coastal town of Inglis. He has 19 years of service in the U.S. Navy. His account of racing in the Everglades Challenge appeared in our November 2014 issue.
SBM photos
While a monkey’s fist can be tied by starting the wraps around your fingers, a simple jig makes the process faster and easier to master, especially with soft line like the braided nylon. The jig here is for a golf-ball core and ¼” line. The 7/16” dowels—just large enough to provide clearance for the third set of wraps—are set outside of the perimeter of a 1⅞” circle for a loose fit around the 1.68” ball. The finished monkey’s fists are, from left to right: sisal, finished with a spliced loop; poly, with the tail whipped to the heaving line; and braided nylon. Only the poly monkey’s fist floats.
The ¼” line covers the golf ball with wraps made up of five coils, here starting and ending at the striped dowel.
The second set of wraps is made around the first and the golf ball goes in halfway through this step. Note that the second wrap starts by crossing the gap between the first wraps. This is less obvious when tying without the jig.
At the end of the second set of wraps, the line goes directly into the gap under the first set.
The top view showing the start of the last set of wraps.
When every side of the knot shows 5 wraps, it’s ready to come off the jig.
With the last set of wraps complete, the jig can be slipped out. Chase the slack out in a couple of steps. Cinching the line up too quickly will bunch up the wraps.
You can share your tricks of the trade with other Small Boats Monthly readers by sending us an email.
The leather is stiff enough to push water forcefully and supple enough to keep from marring the boat’s finish.
Once upon a time the boat sharps on the Delaware River were sailing 15 footers with sail areas running to 400 sq ft. No self-bailers, no buoyancy tanks, no crash boats. When they capsized they had to right the boat, swim it to the bank, and bail. Bailers had to float and not damage the lightly built hikers, tuckups, and duckers. Wood and leather did the trick.
Joe Liener, who was running the wooden boat shop at the Philadelphia Naval Yard before he retired, taught me about duckers and about their bailers. A wood-backed leather scoop bailer gets into corners, doesn’t damage light framing, and can be plucked out of the water when you lose your grip. You can bail faster than a pump and, shaped right like any fine tool, the bailer is a pleasure to use. The handle is turned so you have a nice round fat part in your palm and it is angled just right so you can hook your thumb over the wooden back.
Ben Fuller
The lathe-turned handle is set into the bailer’s back at 85° for a more comfortable grip.
Making it is pretty easy The back ought to be a good 1″ thick and shaped like the stern of a catboat: a bit of flat on the bottom with some tumblehome at the top to help stiffen and support the leather. Cut out the back, then position and bore the handle hole. Angle the bit about 10 degrees. Make a pattern to mark out the leather; a thin plywood template will give you a solid edge to guide your cut. To do the handle, you’ll need a lathe. Before modern glues, the handles were cut where they went into the hole and wedged like an axe head. You can use a straight-sided handle but it’s just not as nice in the hand and you’d need to cut a mortise instead of boring a hole. The leather should be the heaviest you can find. Copper tacks fasten it to the back.
Scoop bailing is easier if you don’t have floorboards or can take up a section. The Delaware builders used to make removable floorboards, called floor flats, in three sections. Two ran either side of the centerboard or daggerboard trunk and one was aft, leaving a frame bay clear side to side just aft of amidships. These were held together by cleats on the underside and had turn-buttons to keep them in place in capsize. Old drawings show a two-handed bailer with a leather scoop bigger than mine but the one hander is all you need to deal with rain and spray that gets aboard.
Ben Fuller
Even after 40 years of use, the author’s bailer has lots of life in it. Unlike a cut-off plastic bottle, it won’t slide around after it has been tucked away.
I’ve had my bailer as long as I’ve had my ducker, a few years short of 40. I’ve releathered it and repaired the handle after using it to bang some blocks of ice out of the winter dory. It also works well for clearing snow. When rainy days put a few inches in the bottom, using the bailer is kind of fun. A hundred scoops with the right hand, another hundred with the left, seeing if I can bail fast enough to get a second scoop in the air before the first one hits the water. It’s my warming exercise before rowing.
Ben Fuller, curator of the Penobscot Marine Museum in Searsport, Maine, has been messing about in small boats for a very long time. He is owned by a dozen or more boats ranging from an International Canoe to a faering.
SBM photographs
The parts of the bailer, ready for assembly. Note the saw kerf in the peg end of the handle. The dark lines on the handle are made with a piece of wire wrapped halfway around the handle while it is spinning on the lathe. Friction chars the wood.
The hole for the handle is drilled at 85°. Careful repeated saw cuts get the flange of to sit flush against the back.
A wedge locks the handle securely in place. The wedge is as thick as the kerf is wide at its narrow end and about three times as thick at the other end. After driving the wedge home, saw the peg off flush. If you’re using an unyielding hardwood like maple for the bailer’s back, flare the hole with a rat-tail file to allow the handle’s peg end room to spread and lock.
Pilot holes drilled in the leather and bailer back will allow you to hammer 3/4″ copper tacks in without having them buckle or hook around in the wood.
An occasional application of tallow will protect and preserve the leather.
The bailer will hold about 3 cups of water, but will “throw” almost twice that.
Bailing as if it matters can move about 25 gallons per minute.
More interested in using the bailer than making it? Rodger Swanson, whose trailer review appears in this issue, offers them among his line of rowing accessories.
You can share your tricks of the trade with other Small Boats Monthly readers by sending us an email.
T-nuts slide in slotted aluminum box beams for a wide range of adjustments.
I have a small-boat business with an emphasis on tradition-based rowboats and rowing accessories and I usually do the fitting-out of hardware at my shop, often requiring that I pick up the a customer’s boat and return it when the work is completed. Recently, I’ve also been offering custom rowing craft intended for recreational use or racing. These boats range from 15′ to 20′, but they are lightly built and must be handled—and transported—with care. I learned early on that most damage to boat hulls is caused by improper transport, launching, retrieval and/or storage. Damage on the water occurs only up to 10 percent of the time. To avoid any problems in transporting boats, a proper trailer was in order.
Rather than reinvent the wheel, I chose to survey the transport choices my compatriots were making. At races and boat shows the most well-cared-for boats were transported on Trailex Trailers, with the SUT-350-S the apparent favorite.
The Trailex Company, located in Canfield, Ohio, has been offering well-designed and well-constructed aluminum small-boat trailers since 1966. They have national distribution, an excellent reputation for product quality and durability, and excellent customer service. Their SUT-350-S is just one of a score of small-boat trailers. It is 18′6″ long, 4′6″ wide, and weighs 155 lbs. I have two: one is equipped with a jack, winch and spare tire bracket options, and one isn’t, but will soon have those accessories. The 350-S is designed to accommodate boats up to 22′ in length with a maximum weight of 350 lbs. The lightly sprung leaf-spring suspension softens the jolts of bumpy roads.
Rodger Swanson
Designed to be sold as kits, Trailex trailer frames are bolted together, not welded. The light springs protect small boats from rough roads.
I’m now into my third year of 350-S ownership and continue to be totally pleased. The trailers allow me to transport my own boats and customers’ boats with perfect confidence. They are easily loaded, balance well and behave predictably and smoothly on the on the highway. The combination of light weight and good balance allows for safe and effective solo loading and unloading—particularly important for me as I work alone most of the time.
Tire pressure is critical: they are designed for 25 psi; any more will cause excessive bounce when on the road. The trailer frame is intended to be close to parallel to the road surface so avoid canting it with a hitch that is too high or too low. Trailex trailers have a low profile, you may have difficulty seeing your rig in your rear view mirrors. I have a pennant on a 4′ fiberglass shaft affixed to the transom of my own boats. This shows up well in the rearview, helpful in maintaining safe distance on the road and in backing up to launch sites.
In my line of work I can’t afford to have boats take a beating on the road. With the 350-S to back me up, life is good!
Rodger Swanson has been in the business of traditional rowing for 40 years. He specializes in hard-to-find accessories for fixed-thwart and sliding-set rowing, including the bailer featured in this issue. His “flagship” product is tallow, a traditional oar-leather and oarlock lubricant; he is currently the only remaining marine tallow producer in North America.
The SUT-350-S sells for $1,146 and is shipped as a kit or available from the Trailex factory for an additional $100.
Is there a product that might be useful for boatbuilding, cruising or shore-side camping that you’d like us to review? Please email your suggestions.
At full power, DOCKHOUSE QUEEN scoots along at 7 knots.
Terry Everman grew up in a Columbia River tugboat family, and after a 30-year career in the shipbuilding industry, he built a tug for himself. It wasn’t big, like the tugs that he’d seen as a boy, but it was the biggest tug he could build in a one-car garage. He had gathered experience building other small wooden boats: 8′ MiniMax hydroplane, Phil Bolger’s Cartopper, Warren Jordan’s Baby Tender (a cradle boat), Mac McCarthy’s Wee Lassie, and a traditional Melonseed skiff.
Genie Cary
The curved stern was difficult to construct but has the right look for a tug.
The mini-tug started with measuring the garage that would be Terry’s workshop. A length of 16′ would leave him some room to get around the ends, and the 7′4″ beam left just 1″ of clearance on either side to get through the garage door. He began working up the design on a basic computer program. His friend Harry Schoenauer lent a hand fine-tuning the design before building began.
Terry Everman
The rolling building platform and the roll-over frame were sized to get through the garage with only 2″ to spare.
After a year devoted to designing the tug, the first project was to build an 8′ x 16′ rolling platform so the hull could be moved outside when it came time to roll it upright. Shaped panels of marine-grade plywood—½″ on the bottom, two layers of ¼″ below the side rail, and ¼″ for the bulwarks and house— gave the tug its shape. The rounded stern was essential for the classic look but a challenge to build. Thickened epoxy fillets strengthened the joints, and sheathing of 7-oz fiberglass cloth with epoxy reinforced and protected the hull. Empty spaces below the deck were filled with a poured-in foam mix for flotation. When the hull was finished, Terry and friends pulled it outside and rolled it over, and then pushed it back into the garage. The tug’s house was built in a separate garage and later set on the hull.
Terry Everman
The spaces between frames below deck were filled with poured foam for flotation.
Back in the garage, the tug was given its power plant, a brushless electric motor (72V, 350A) from Electric Motorsport. Powered by six 12-volt deep-cell marine batteries, the motor would produce the equivalent of 31 hp. A 14 pitch x 10″ propeller is driven through a 2:1 double V-belt reduction. The keel added to the V hull to protect the shaft and prop brought the tug’s draft to 24″.
Terry Everman
The electric motor sits above the drive shaft and is connected to it with a 2:1 double V-belt reduction drive.
Terry built DOCKHOUSE QUEEN in south Florida and completed construction in two years. He and his wife Sandy then towed the tug to their homeport in Cathlamet, Washington. The cross-country trip drew lots of compliments: people enjoyed the unique cartoon character of the boat. DOCKHOUSE QUEEN performs as Terry expected for a vessel with a sheer plan shaped like a watermelon and a one-ton displacement. At a minimal effort of 30 amps, she makes 4 knots. Top speed with a 150-amp draw is 7 knots. At a casual cruising speed of 3 to 4 knots, the batteries will provide power for several hours. “A quick charging session,” says Terry, “and she is good to go. No fueling fumes, messy bilges, or fuel-dock credit cards.” Terry entered DOCKHOUSE QUEEN in Cathlamet’s yearly Wooden Boat Festival, and she was awarded First in Class.
Afterword
Terry Everman passed away unexpectedly just two months after this issue was published, and now DOCKHOUSE QUEEN is in need of new owners. Please email me if you’re interested. Christopher Cunningham, Editor
In the comments below, Ed was interested in hearing more about the rolling platform. Terry replied with photos and details:
“I built the platform on casters mainly to move the structure from side to side because of the limited space. I even rolled it out, turned the boat around and rolled it back in for better access to the bow or stern. After the roll over, I supported the boat cradles on furniture dollies and rolled in back in the garage for finishing still with the ability to move side to side. The platform was dismantled. The option to move the boat around in the single car garage was a life saver and I was very pleased with the method.”
The platform frame
The platform with decking in place
Platform at the start of construction
After roll-over, the hull and frame rest on dollies.
Rolled back into the garage on dollies, the boat is a tight fit in the workspace.
I was sitting in the cabin of the Escargot canal cruiser BONZO, a boat my son, Nate, and his friend Bobby Calnan built the summer after they’d graduated from high school. It was a winter evening—cold and dark outside—but I had a fire going in the woodstove and a few candles lit. I heard a knocking on the hull and opened the door to find a woman peering over the transom. “Hi,” she said, “I just wanted to say how much I love your boat.” I invited her to come aboard and she climbed over the transom, a bit awkwardly because she was wearing a long skirt and fashionable leather boots with high heels. I couldn’t fault her for her attire because she’d just gotten off the bus on her way home from work. BONZO was on the trailer, high and dry in my driveway.
Photographs and video by the author
After spending a quiet and cozy night with BONZO aground on a gravel bar, Nate tidies the forward sleeping quarters while his sister, Alison, does the dishes. The rising tide floated BONZO for the downstream home stretch on the Snohomish River.
As a wooden boat, the Escargot is an unlikely charmer. It has a hull like a shoebox, only two curves to speak of, and is entirely bereft of brightwork and brass. Nonetheless, it has an ineluctable appeal inside and out. The cabin with its arched roof and stovepipe has the look of a gypsy wagon and the lure of running away from it all, in comfort. My father said of it: “The moment I step aboard, I’ve arrived.”
The cabin and the forward berths are separated by small bays for the head (left) and the wood stove (right).
The Escargot, like many of the small boats designed by the late Phil Thiel, is meant to foster the ideals of what the French called a flaneur. Charles Baudelaire described the flaneur as the “passionate spectator” for whom “it is an immense joy…to be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the center of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world.” The Escargot steers us in that direction. As a “flaneur afloat” Phil aimed to “savor the shore-side pleasures at the ideal rate of speed—slowly. The faster you go through the environment the less you can enjoy it. At slower speeds the world around you reveals itself on a smaller, more human scale.”
Let’s get the Escargot afloat. Phil intended her for “use limited to sheltered inland waterways.” The canals he frequently traveled in France were his inspiration, and similar narrow waters free of wind and waves are where the Escargot performs most admirably. The barge-like hull is an 18′ 6″ by 6′ rectangle. The flat bottom meets the bow transom 6″ above the waterline and the stern transom just even with it. The cabin is 11′6″ long and divided into three sections: a cabin with a galley and a dinette/berth, twin berths partially tucked under the foredeck, and a 2′ bay in between for the head and a hanging locker. The foredeck and the cockpit are both about 3-1/2′ long.
In thin water it’s time to kick up the motor, stow the oars and haul the Escargot on foot.
Phil calculated the weight of the bare boat at 750 lbs; displacing 2,000 lbs, the Escargot will draw only 6″. Nate and I have pulled BONZO across shallows scarcely more than ankle deep. As you’d expect, the barge-like hull has exceptional stability. I have yet to ask passengers to shift their weight to trim the boat.
The Escargot is not a petite boat but its shallow draft gets it into some small waterways. Standing in a forward hatch, Nate explores a backwater frequented by beavers but not by boats.
We don’t have canals in the Puget Sound area, but there are a number of narrow sloughs where the rivers take their sweet time crossing the flatlands between the foothills and the Sound. Here the Escargot is quite at home: the water slips quietly under the bow and curdles up astern.
We’ve taken BONZO out on the local lakes and on the wide salt water of Puget Sound, and have had a few run-ins with wind and waves. In a bit of chop the bow transom will begin shaving the tops off the waves, and in anything much over 12″ high it will throw up some spray. The cockpit is far from the fuss and protected by the cabin, so it’s a good refuge for the helmsman. With only a 2.5-hp for power, BONZO carries enough momentum to keep moving forward through the waves we get in the lakes we frequent.
The kick-up rudder coaxes the Escargot through turns; steering with the outboard makes her much more maneuverable in tight quarters. While underway in a crosswind there’s enough steerage with the rudder to hold a course, but when idle, the bow will slip downwind. I’ve thought that a slot in one of the rub strips would make it easy to slip a daggerboard alongside the foredeck; it would resist the downwind drift of the bow and give the hull a point to pivot around.
Phil had originally designed the first two versions of the Escargot to be driven by a pair of SeaCycle pedal drives: “This pied-à-l’eau approach was, and remains the ideal. However, the pedal-drive unit I proposed using was not suitable for slow speeds and heavy loads.” SeaCycle’s drives are designed for light, easily driven catamaran the company makes, the largest of their boats being only 14′10″, 175 lbs, and capable of 12.8 mph. The pitch of SeaCycle propellers is not well suited to a boat the size, weight, and speed of the Escargot and couldn’t be pedaled at a comfortable cadence. (There are some Escargots in Germany that use pedal drives, but they’ve been outfitted with custom-made props.) The Escargot plans available now call for a 2- to 5-hp outboard. BONZO is powered by a 2.5-hp, four-stroke outboard that’ll get us up to about 4.5 knots.
The cockpit of SHAMBALA is built according to the plans. Builder Bryan Lowe omitted the hinged hatch over the companionway on the aft end of the cabin roof, but kept the one over the smaller passageway forward. Bryan steers SHAMBALA with his outboard. BONZO was ultimately outfitted and steered with the rudder drawn in the plans.
Building an Escargot Canal Cruiser
There are a few modifications we’ve made to the design. Our first experience with the design was aboard Bryan Lowe’s SHAMBALA, and we followed his lead and added 6″ to the height of the cabin sides. It’s a bit more complex than working with the standard 48″ width of plywood sheets and adds to the windage, but the extra headroom is a better fit for tall passengers. Bryan’s cockpit, built to the plans, felt a bit confined, so we lengthened BONZO’s by 12″. The easiest way to do that was to add the length to the flat part of the bottom to shift the aft third of the hull out past the cabin wall. We have more elbowroom for starting the motor and sharing the space with passengers.
The catwalk added to the cabin roof proved to be a popular perch aboard BONZO. The bow often allows stepping ashore with dry feet, though in this case, with very muddy boots.
Nate wanted a catwalk on the roof to use as a runway that he and his friends could use for diving on summer outings. It turned out to be a very pleasant place to sit with a commanding view, and it saved Nate and Bobby from making the hatches over the companionways.
Christened, launched, but not quite finished, BONZO experiments with oar power. With the cabin obscuring vision between oarsmen, synchronizing was difficult.
We added oarlocks at both ends of the boat and hatches on the foredeck to create footwells for the bow oarsmen. Rowing was a nod toward a human-power ideal we share with Phil, but ultimately it proved impractical for covering long distances. Even if we could get four oarsmen, the bow rowers couldn’t see the oars of the stern rowers and couldn’t row in synch with them. The hatches turned out to be useful for stargazing from the forward berths.
With the roof an extra 6″ higher, the main cabin has plenty of headroom and an open, airy feel.
The galley Phil designed for the main cabin has a built-in sink and a recess for a stove to starboard. Nate didn’t anticipate needing a permanent galley and opted to put seats on both sides so he could have a fourth berth. Large plexiglass windows in all of the cabin compartments let in plenty of light, provide expansive views, and, when open, a cooling breeze. The hanging locker was converted to make a space for a small homemade wood stove.
The number of modifications we made isn’t an indication that the design lacking in any way, but that it is easily adaptable to suit the needs of the builder. With so many straight lines and right angles, it’s very easy to shift things around for personal preference.
The Escargot is initially assembled upside down. Uprights on the transoms and bulkheads extend to a baseline to align them. After they are secured to the sides and the bottom, the extra length is sawn away.
The plans are exceptionally well detailed, covering every element of construction from the cutting schedule for the 23 sheets of plywood to the drain slots on the window molding. There won’t be much head scratching in the building, even for novice woodworkers. The instructions specify marine-grade plywood. We used marine-grade fir plywood for BONZO. It used to be pretty good stuff, but I’d steer clear of it now. Mahogany BS 1088 plywood costs more but has fewer defects, is easier to work with, and lasts longer.
Materials for BONZO cost about $4,000 in 2009. We didn’t keep a log of hours, but Nate and Bobby poked along through the summer and put on a big push, working nearly full-time in September to get her ready to launch before cold, wet weather set in.
Nate and his friends often take summer weekend cruises in BONZO. For myself there are two times each year when I especially like to be aboard: to celebrate my birthday and to do my taxes. It is (with apologies to Charles Dickens) the place to be in the best of times and in the worst of times.
Christopher Cunningham is the editor of Small boats Monthly.
Escargot Particulars
LOA: 18′ 6″
Beam: 6′
Draft: 6″
Bare Hull: 750 lbs
Recommended outboard engine: 2–5 hp
Print and digital plans, at $75, are available from the WoodenBoat Store.
Leney Breeden
Leney Breeden
Christoper Cunningham
Christopher Cunningham
Christopher Cunningham
If you already have a set of planking clamps that use threaded rods or wedges, you could make a set of three of these clamps and use them first to get the plank secured in place and then fill in with the others. They’re almost as good as having a helping hand.
Two aspects of An Inland Voyage, the book that Stevenson published about the voyage, touched me immediately: first, the course, which I found wonderful and even exotic despite its geographic proximity to my home in Bordeaux; and, second, its vagabond spirit, which struck me as reawakening an ethic of leaving much to chance, a dance with luck, relying on unplanned encounters and unfolding episodes.
