When you spend time on a small boat, you typically don’t expect luxury. You give up a plush couch for a well-worn, often damp cushion; swap cool air conditioning for the salty sea air; and fully accept that an overnight stay might mean using a lifejacket as a makeshift pillow. Life aboard a small boat might not be glamorous, but in my opinion, that’s all part of the magic.
Every now and then, however, you come across something that changes the expectation of “roughing it”; a small tool, trick, or product that slightly elevates your life on the water without making it too over-the-top. For my husband and me, aboard our wooden sailboat this summer, the Harpswell Island Designs pillow has been that something. It may seem like a small thing, but in our boat, where space is limited and every item needs to earn its keep, small things can make all the difference.
Photographs by the author
Harpswell Island Designs offers many stock patterns such as appliqué nautical signal flags and yacht club burgees as well as embroidered designs like the compass rose seen here on a 20″ × 20″ pillow.
The idea that one could maximize comfort without sacrificing function is what inspired Ann Mayer Grout to launch Harpswell Island Designs in 2022 in Harpswell, Maine. Ann is a local business owner who, like me, enjoys working on wooden boats and cruising around Quahog Bay. She’s combined a lifelong interest in nautical flags and burgees, a long career in the textile and production industry, and a desire for comfort, beauty, and practicality afloat, to come up with a product where form most decidedly follows function, but sacrifices nothing in so doing.
Like many boat owners, I’ve always been cautious about bringing fabric items onboard. Between the damp (and, in our situation, salty) air, small enclosed quarters, and rainstorms that sometimes leak through our wooden deck, fabric has a way of trapping moisture. However, Ann’s pillow covers are made exclusively from water-resistant Sunbrella fabric. Sunbrella is as durable as it is stylish, and has long been used for the covering of many boat cushions. It’s crafted to withstand harsh conditions under the sun, and to be on the water year after year. And it’s easy to clean: for smaller spills (even a cup of coffee) the pillows can be spot cleaned with a sponge and soap; if a more substantial clean is needed, they can be machine-washed.
The pillows come in two sizes, 20″ × 20″ × 6 1⁄2″ and 22″ × 14″ × 5 1⁄2″. Designs are either embroidered or appliquéd and can be ordered from stock or custom-created. The covers are zipper-closed, made of water- and stain-resistant Sunbrella, and easily cleaned.
The pillows come in an extensive range of styles and colors, making choice challenging. Stock designs include yacht club burgees, International Code flags, nautical-themed patterns, and Maine-inspired designs. They can also be custom-made with applique and embroidered designs. They are available in two sizes, 20″ × 20″ × 6 1⁄2″—perfect for sleeping aboard—and 22″ × 14″ × 5 1⁄2″, for hanging out in the cockpit. All the fabric edges are heat-sealed, all the covers are removable—fastened with a YKK zip—and the inserts are of non-allergenic, water-resistant microfiber.
Quality and comfort are at the heart of every pillow. Ann is committed to using USA-sourced materials, ensuring exceptional quality and durability that holds up season after season.
Putting the boat away at the end of the season is always a sad time, but this year we’ll be able to bring the pillows back home and use them through the winter months, bringing a little piece of the boat with us through the dark and cold.
Juliet Frederick and her husband Keith Frederick have restored NEREUS, a 21′ John Alden Sloop built by Harry Bryan in 2006 and enjoy sailing her from Harpswell, Maine. They frequently log their adventures on Instagram: @sailingthenereus.
For 30 years John Diamond has been a hobby woodworker, building furniture for the family: beds and bedside tables for his daughters, a desk, a dresser, an entertainment center, a music stand. But about five years ago, he and his wife, Justine, started watching YouTube videos of people building boats. “First we watched videos of people building wooden sailboats,” says Justine, “then we found cedar-strip canoes.” They were captivated. “We didn’t think we’d be able to use a sailboat or a rowboat, but a canoe was approachable, and we could see ourselves using it.”
Photographs courtesy of Justine and John Diamond
After several hours of searching through the stacks at the lumberyard, John (seen here) and Justine had found five beautiful western red cedar boards, which they were able to mill into 72 strips to build the hull of their Bob’s Special.
They began searching for a suitable design, something they could build at home, that was short and light enough to be car-toppable, but long enough to accommodate two paddlers. They settled on Bob’s Special, a 15′ canoe developed from the Chestnut Special, a 50-lb canoe advertised in the 1950 catalog of the Chestnut Canoe Company in Fredericton, New Brunswick. In 1993 Ted Moores of Bear Mountain Boats took the lines off an original Chestnut Special, and the following year Steve Killing modified and redrew the lines for the homebuilder. It is one of Bear Mountain Boats’ popular designs. “Of all the canoes we looked at,” says John, “it checked all the boxes, and was recommended as one of the most stable.”
Growing up in Westchester County, New York, Justine had paddled canoes as a youngster during family summer holidays in Nova Scotia, but John was less familiar with them. “He’d been in a canoe once, while on a family holiday in France,” says Justine. “He had no idea if he’d even like it.” But they were determined the canoe would be their next project and before they had even ordered the plans, they visited a nearby lumberyard where they were invited to take their pick from the stack of western red cedar boards. They spent hours pulling out boards, inspecting them for grain, color, and knots until they had five 17′ to 18′ flawless boards that the yard agreed to deliver free of charge.
John built the strongback in the basement workshop before he and Justine carried it up the stairs, outside, and around the house to their two-car garage. There they assembled it upside down before turning it over and leveling it.
From the outset, Justine and John had agreed that they would build their boat from scratch—no kit, no pre-milled strips. John had a well-equipped workshop with a table saw, router, and planer and the challenge of doing it all for themselves appealed to them. John had never milled his own lumber and nor had they worked with strip planking before but, John says, “YouTube is a wonderful and instructive resource.”
Building the extras
In August 2022, the cedar was delivered, and so were the plans along with CAD files for the molds. Justine is on the staff at Bergen Makerspace, a community learning center in Hackensack, New Jersey, where they had just taken delivery of a Shopbot CNC router. It had not yet been assembled, indeed was still in its packing case as a set of parts, but the center agreed that the Diamonds’ molds could be the first items to be cut. As they prepared the CNC router, which they built with assistance from another member of staff, John and Justine worked on preparing as many other parts as they could.
The stems (each composed of an inner and an outer stem) were laminated of ash. John steamed the ¼” strips and then, working quickly, bent them around the stem form. After they had cooled and the curve was set, he removed the laminates, applied epoxy to create the inner and outer stems, and reclamped both to the form with a layer of masking tape between them. The hull was strip-planked to the inner stems; the outer stems were fitted after planking was complete.
First came the business of turning the five cedar boards into 72 strips each with a bead and cove molding. Their basement workshop had its constraints. The only access was via an internal staircase or through some small ground-level windows. The room was 33′ long, giving only just enough space to mill boards 16′ long. After the boards came down through a window, they were planed to a thickness of 13⁄16″ and strips were then cut to a thickness of 1⁄4″; each was routered with a cove and bead. As they worked, John and Justine numbered each strip according to the board and the position on that board from which it came. “When we built the boat,” John says, “we book-matched each strip to the next, so the grain of any two neighboring strips was mirrored.” The finished strips went back out through the window and around to the two-car garage where the canoe would be built. John built the plywood strongback in the basement, constructing it in two halves so that he and Justine could carry it up the basement stairs to the garage, where they assembled it on adjustable legs to ensure that it was precisely level.
They also built as many other parts as they could: a pair of paddles with ash shafts and beaver blades and grips laminated of basswood and cedar; a pair of seats with ash frames and synthetic cane; the ash gunwales; and the decorative accent strips for either side of the canoe, which, says John, “took a lot of time, each strip has about 100 pieces.” John tried to get all the ash components out of a single board, but in the end there wasn’t enough wood for both halves of the gunwales, so he fashioned the outwales out of a 9′ board with a long scarf joint.
John and Justine decided not to use staples when planking the hull. Instead, each strip was glued to the one below, clamping blocks were placed inside the upper cove to protect its vulnerable edges, and then a bungee cord—attached to a clip—was wrapped around all the laid strips and tightened to apply pressure to the new plank as the glue cured.
As soon as the CNC router was assembled at the Makerspace, the Diamonds went over with their CAD files and, with the assistance of family friend Alan Zenreich and fellow staff member Dave Beckerx, cut the 13 molds and two stem molds out of MDF. They were ready to build the hull.
Planking the hull
John and Justine had decided to plank the hull without the use of staples. “We wanted to avoid the staple marks, but it did make the build more fiddly,” says John. With a 3-D printer he created some spring clips with hooks, to which he attached thin bungee cord. As each strip was glued to the strip below, it was held in place with the clips, clamping blocks were placed into the cove of the uppermost strip, and the bungee cord was wrapped down around the lowest strip and back up, applying pressure as the glue cured. John says he later learned that instead of the bungee they could have used painter’s tape; “it’s simpler and would have worked just as well.”
They stripped each side of the hull simultaneously, but as they neared the centerline they worked on just one side. Rather than weaving the two sides together herringbone fashion, the Diamonds had decided they would end with a straight line down the middle. The first side was straightforward: they laid all the strips, overlapping the centerline, and then, with an oscillating multitool, cut the straight line down the middle of the bottom. Each of the strips coming in from the second side, however, had to be cut to length and shaped with a block plane before being glued into place. For the final center gap (the whiskey plank), they glued two strips together, shaped it into the required elongated football, and glued it in.
As the strips neared the final layup, John and Justine stopped planking on the port side and instead planked only the starboard side. Then John cut the ends of the starboard planks in a straight line along the centerline of the hull. The port side was then finished until there was only an elongated gap into which John dropped a pre-fashioned two-strip “whiskey plank.”
Next, John and Justine had to cut the strip ends back to the stems. John fashioned a plywood guide with the same profile as the real stem, set it up alongside, and attached a piece of wood to the block plane so that, as he moved the plane down the strips, it followed the guide and correctly shaped the ends of the strips.
At last, they had a fully planked hull. Before turning it over, they sanded the outside using longboards with 80-grit paper and then applied 6-oz ’glass cloth saturated in epoxy. They spread the resin using mohair rollers and squeegees, applying four coats, sanding between each coat.
On launching day, Justine stands ready with the beavertail paddles, which John made. The two paddles are identical save in length: Justine’s is roughly an inch shorter to better fit her. The feature strip includes two diamonds, one each for John and Justine Diamond.
About a year after they had bought the cedar boards, the Diamonds turned over their finished hull and laid it in carpeted slings suspended from a pair of stands. There was still much to do, but they had something that looked like a boat. They sanded the interior with a random-orbit sander and laid 6-oz cloth with one coat of resin so that the weave of the cloth could still be felt, providing a slight non-slip surface inside the hull. Then all that remained to be done was fitting the seats, the gunwales, the thwart, and the cherry decks, and of course, sanding and varnishing, varnishing and sanding. By Thanksgiving 2023 the canoe was finished. The weather had turned and rather than launch in the cold, they took the canoe to the Makerspace to give a presentation on the build, and then tucked it away in the garage.
A delayed launching
The following spring, they pulled it out for the big launching. It was the perfect day: the sun shone, and the breeze was minimal. As they launched the canoe into the water for the first time, they spotted a 2″ blister in the epoxy in the middle of the interior. Then they saw another, and another. Their hearts sank. As the warmth of the sunlight hit the canoe, blisters were appearing in a 4′ section through the middle of the boat, gunwale to gunwale. It became evident that in that one area the epoxy resin had failed to cure properly. They took the boat home.
Not to be daunted, the Diamonds did the only thing they could; they fixed it. “We cut the fiberglass cloth at each end of the failed section, peeled it off, scraped off the remaining uncured resin, sanded back to bare wood, laid some new cloth, and applied fresh resin and varnish. It took us about six weeks and if you don’t know to look for it, the repair is barely visible.”
With two people aboard—here John and his daughter Kate—the canoe is well balanced. When a single paddler is on board, the canoe’s direction of travel is reversed, and the forward seat here, which is nearer to the center of the boat, becomes the paddler’s seat.
In June 2024, John and Justine relaunched LARK—“we’d built her on a lark,” says Justine, “so it seemed a good name.” Since then, they’ve had no further maintenance issues. They’ve taken LARK to lakes, reservoirs, rivers, and canals in New Jersey, New York, and Massachusetts, and they exhibited her at The WoodenBoat Show in Mystic Seaport, where they were awarded the honorable mention in the Owner-Built category. They are, Justine says, “continually exploring new water, often on a weekly basis.” And to the evident relief of both of them, John is as enamored of the boat as Justine is. “Paddling,” she says, “has become a passion for us both.”
Jenny Bennett is editor of Small Boats.
In late 2023 John and Justine Diamond gave a presentation at the Bergen Makerspace; it was videotaped and uploaded to YouTube as LARK—Building a Strip Canoe.
Do you have a boat with an interesting story? Please email us. We’d like to hear about it and share it with other Small Boats readers.
For the world of small boats, the past two months have seen both highs and lows. To begin with a high: During last month’s WoodenBoat Show, I got talking to Pieter Roos, curator of the Wells Boat Hall at Mystic Seaport Museum. Founded in 1929 as the Marine Historical Association, Mystic Seaport Museum has long been a leader in maritime history and preservation. Yet for the first two years of its existence, it had not one boat in its collection. That changed in 1931 with the arrival of ANNIE, an 1881 sandbagger whose 28′ hull supported a sail plan that stretched 68′ from the tip of its bowsprit to the end of its boom. From ANNIE, the museum’s boat collection has grown ceaselessly. It now holds more than 450 small American watercraft ranging from working boats to speedboats, from one-design sailboats to indigenous kayaks. Probably the oldest is an 1824 dugout canoe, the newest a Mini-Transat racer. For decades a few of the boats have been visible in the museum and shipyard and even on the waterfront where some can be sailed by visitors, but most of the collection has been kept in storage, most recently in the 19th-century Rossie Velvet Mill building across the street from the museum’s principal campus. Visitors could see the boats by appointment, but the museum had no way of displaying them. That is about to change.
Photographs by the author
Not all the boats in Mystic Seaport’s collection are traditionally built, but they all tell a story, such as the development of leisure and one-design sailing in the U.S. as revealed through sailboats such as the Sunfish and Jetwind dinghies seen here in the Rossie Mill building.
Since 2024, work has been on-going to convert 34,000 sq ft of the Rossie Mill into the Wells Boat Hall, which will house a permanent exhibit of some 170 of the museum’s small boats along with many of its 450 engines. Pieter has his work cut out for him. Not least of his challenges has been selecting the boats that will be included in the exhibit, “Even 34,000 sq ft gets gobbled up pretty quickly when your smallest artifact is a 6′ pram,” he says. “The treasure is so extensive, so wide, and so deep that you have to figure out how to present it. From the start, the concept has been to break it down into manageable ‘neighborhoods,’ each of which will be its own exhibit. So, for example, we’ll have ‘Sailing for Pleasure and Speed,’ ‘Evolution of Design,’ and a whole area devoted to engines. And we’ll be making use of technology so visitors can dig deeper if they want to. All the labels will have between 50 and 100 words, but for about 70% of the exhibits there’ll also be a QR code, which visitors will be able to scan to see history, photographs, drawings, even video.”
One of the more recent acquisitions, EVERGREEN, is a 20’-long 1910 E.M. White motorized canoe. Her 6-hp, two-cylinder inboard Eagle engine is original.
When I spoke to Pieter in June, he was excited to report that the hall’s renovation is nearly finished, and the plan is to open the Wells Boat Hall to the public as soon as fundraising can be completed. It will give Mystic Seaport Museum an interactive year-round offering and, says Pieter, will “allow us to tell stories that, thus far, we’ve not been able to share. For example, in the 19th and early 20th centuries the maritime world was a male domain, but there were a lot of women participating and we want to tell their stories. One of my favorites is about the first one-design sailboat race. A race for North Haven Dinghies held in North Haven, Maine, in 1887, it was called the Grand Dinghy Race. It was sponsored, advertised, there was a judge…pretty much all the things we’d recognize in a modern regatta. But there were only three contestants: two guys (both very experienced racers) and Ellen Hayward, who was an experienced sailor but didn’t have much racing experience. As soon as the race started, the guys got into a tacking and covering duel and totally missed the fact that Miss Ellen was about to eat their lunch…the first one-design race anywhere in the world was won by a woman.” It’s just one of the many small-boat stories that Pieter and Mystic Seaport Museum look forward to sharing with visitors.
The museum has 450 engines in its collection, many of them outboards. While there are a few foreign classics (I spotted at least one mid-20th-century British Seagull), most of the engines are American made. The Wells Boat Hall will have an exhibit devoted entirely to engines, which will include video and interactive displays.
On a less happy note, in early July came word that after 25 years, Duckworks Boat Builders Supply was closing its doors. The current management wrote, “This decision has not come easily. Rising costs, increased tariffs, slimmer margins, and increasingly complex shipping logistics have made it unsustainable to continue operating the business at break-even levels.” Sommer Ueda of Duckworks’ sister company, Gig Harbor Boat Works, added, “Duckworks has always been about more than just plans and supplies—it’s been a hub for creativity, craftsmanship, and community.” As designer John Welsford shared on the WoodenBoat Forum, “since way back…it’s been the go-to place for small-craft plans, fittings, and materials.”
As the Duckworks announcement filtered through the small-boat community around the world, many expressed sadness that there would no longer be an easily accessed and reliable source for plans. But, in the last week or so, there has emerged better news: Chuck Leinweber, who founded Duckworks back in 1999, has purchased the website’s domain name and will be reopening to sell plans and sails. When Chuck and his wife, Sandra, started Duckworks it was as an online magazine (a free-access archive can be found at duckworksmagazine.com). But four years in, he says, “we were making no money with it so started selling sailcloth, boat plans, and hardware. It was a great success, and on the advice of John Welsford, we soon separated the store from the magazine.”
Courtesy of Chuck Leinweber
Chuck and Sandra Leinweber started constructing their home in the Texas Hill Country in 1980 and, says Chuck, they’re still working on it. Part of the blue addition, seen here to the right, became the original Duckworks warehouse. Within a year of first selling parts, plans, and sails, Chuck and Sandra had moved the business to a 2,500-sq-ft building.
Chuck sold the business eight years ago but continued to help out part-time, mostly in customer support. When the decision was made to close he was, he says, “caught off guard. Almost all the designers whose plans we sold were friends of mine, people I’ve known for 20 years.” But it looks like the loss—at least of plans and sails—will be short-lived. Chuck hopes that the website, duckworks.com, will be live by September 1, 2025, but until then is happy to take orders for plans via email; contact him at [email protected]. “We’ll be offering both custom and ready-made sails,” he says, “and the biggest collection of boat plans in the universe.” A happier ending and the promise of a bright future for Duckworks customers everywhere.
Of all human senses, it is said that smell is the most evocative: the unexpected waft of perfume that brings back the long-missed presence of a loved one, the subtle odor of mustiness that transports you to a little-used summer camp of childhood, the lingering hint of newly baked bread that recalls a grandmother’s kitchen…. For Dylan Spaulding, the smell of fresh-cut cedar carries him straight back to childhood memories of his father.
Dylan grew up in rural New Mexico, a state with little association with boats or boatbuilding, but from an early age he shared a love of woodworking and then of boats with his father. His father had grown up in New England and before moving to New Mexico in the 1970s had worked as a carpenter at South Street Seaport and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. When he moved west, he continued working with wood but, says Dylan, “mostly doing carpentry and shop displays; work that didn’t satisfy his creative side.”
Photographs by Dylan Spaulding
There is an old adage among boatbuilders that you can never have too many clamps and when it came to fitting the outwales and inwales on his Northeaster Dory, Dylan proved the saying true, using a combination of long bar clamps and individual spring clamps. The puzzle joints—visible in the starboard strakes—are standard in CLC kits; they are easy to align, and require minimal clamping pressure during assembly.
When Dylan was in third grade, the family moved to Essex, England, to live on a 31′ 6″ Maurice Griffiths–designed Golden Hind his parents had bought there. For a year, the four of them—Dylan, his mother, father, and 15-year-old brother—sailed the cutter up and down England’s East Coast, across the English Channel, north to Copenhagen, and, for the winter, to northern Holland to tie up alongside a sailing barge in a canal. “My brother hated being cooped up on a boat with us, and my mother, who was a New Mexico native and had no prior sailing experience, had had ideas of Mediterranean cruising, not Baltic winters. In retrospect, I realize my father also had very little experience. It was before the digital age, and our only source of weather forecasts was the crackly BBC radio broadcasts; navigation was all dead-reckoning and paper; and we had an analog depthsounder on which the needle went round—and round—and if you didn’t know how many rotations it had done you couldn’t be sure if you were about to hit bottom or were in deep water. We frequently ran aground.” For eight-year-old Dylan, the year on that wooden boat in Europe was “a formative adventure.”
Once construction was complete, Dylan turned the boat over to paint the hull and fit a bronze half-round strip to protect the skeg when beaching.
Some five years after their return to New Mexico, when Dylan was 13, he and his father decided to build a Rushton Wee Lassie. The building process had been documented in a 1991 article by Mac McCarthy published in WoodenBoat magazine, and they had found a table of offsets in Atwood Manley’s book, Rushton and His Times in American Canoeing. Dylan lofted the patterns for the molds, and he and his father built the canoe of strip-planked cedar. “I spent much of my eighth-grade spring break gluing cedar strips together,” recalls Dylan. “To this day, the smell of freshly sawn cedar takes me back to my dad’s shop and that project.” Dylan still owns the canoe. It hangs in his garage, above his own boatbuilding workspace.
A few years after they built the canoe, father and son tried their hands at some stitch-and-glue construction and built a Cape Charles Sea Kayak, referencing two more articles in WoodenBoat magazine. When finished, they used the boats together, forging memories far beyond the workshop. “One of the memorable trips,” says Dylan, “was to the upper lakes of Glacier National Park, where my father and I floated silently, the lake to ourselves, watching bald eagles in the trees, and camping.”
On launching day in November 2024, Dylan’s son—who had not been born when Dylan embarked on the building project—was proud to be PETRICHOR’s first passenger.
Twenty years later, in 2015, Dylan’s father passed away from cancer. Almost immediately Dylan decided to build another boat. “It felt like something I needed to do, partly in his memory.” He wanted to build something more substantial than a canoe or kayak, but remembered the enjoyment gleaned from a small boat. “I wanted to sail, but also recalled how great it was to cartop a lightweight boat and travel to locations farther from home,” he says.
He settled on the Chesapeake Light Craft (CLC) Northeaster Dory. Although it would need to be transported by trailer rather than on top of a car, Dylan believed the design ticked the rest of his boxes: it would be suitable for use on the various bodies of water within a few hours’ drive of his home in northern California, and was large enough for “serious boat camping and bigger water” but light for its size and capacity. He ordered a bare-hull kit from CLC.
During the years spent on the project there were periods when Dylan was unable to work on the hull itself. He used those times to pay attention to the details and to learn new skills: metalwork so he could fashion his own hardware; marquetry so he could add complementary padauk inlays in the thwarts and mast partner; and sparmaking.
“I hadn’t done any real woodworking since I was a teenager, so I decided to assemble the hull from the kit but make the rest from scratch to allow room for customization and creativity, and to challenge and develop my skills. I started out with very few tools, but finished with the equivalent of a simple woodshop crammed into a single-car garage.” Much of the work, he says, spilled out into the driveway, “to the amusement and confusion of our neighborhood.”
For the most part, when fitting out the bare hull, Dylan followed CLC’s design—spacered inwales, balanced lug rig, daggerboard and rudder assembly—but added his own touches to suit his taste and to give the boat traditional appeal. “In a way, stitch-and-glue felt like cheating, because the CLC kits go together so easily, even for beginners. I wanted to reacquaint myself with the skills my dad had taught me as a child but also to learn hand-tool skills that I hadn’t gotten from him. It led me to overthink at times and render some parts of the project more elaborately than they needed to be. For instance, I didn’t like how the CLC outwales were simply rounded off at the bow, so instead I brought them together with a compound miter joint.” He installed wooden belaying pins for the lugsail’s halyard and downhaul, wrapped the tiller with decorative knotwork, leathered the mast collar, and used bronze cleats where cleats were necessary. His spars came out of a single spruce pole—“salvaged from a San Francisco fireman’s ladder and gifted by a friend.”
To achieve a more traditional look, Dylan fashioned silicon-bronze-cheeked blocks, handworked anti-chafing leather parts, and used Duckworks’ Raid Braid for the running rigging; elsewhere he stained three-strand synthetic line to simulate manila rope.
Inspired by correspondents on CLC’s online forum, and by articles in Small Boats, he added sliding side seats to create a sleeping platform. The seats can also be removed so that, following designer John Harris’s advice, Dylan can sit on the floor to steer; he has yet to decide whether he prefers the seats or the floor. He added extra tiedowns for dry bags, stained synthetic line for his painter and anchor rode, made his own bronze-cheeked blocks, and fashioned a leather bailer as described by Ben Fuller.
Dylan began building his Northeaster Dory in 2017, but it would be 2024 before he was finished. Life, it seems, rather than lack of skills, was the prime delayer in the project. “I enjoyed the building, but I couldn’t always find uninterrupted blocks of time to work on it. I got married, we purchased our first home and had a child, I changed jobs, and then, like everyone else, waded through the pandemic.” At times, he says, the slow pace was frustrating, but it was also good to have the project in times of stress—“coming back to the boat was always a relief.” In the beginning, he reflects, it was “somewhat daunting to take on a project of this magnitude without my woodworking father behind me,” and when he found himself adjusting to fatherhood in his own right, building the boat seemed all the more poignant. And, says Dylan, when he wasn’t physically working on the boat, he was mentally planning next steps. “Building the finicky parts from scratch required honing my skills, learning many new techniques, and mastering tools my father had managed, one by one as they became necessary.”
Courtesy of David Leonard
PETRICHOR and Dylan making the most of a gentle breeze at the start of their first summer together.
The boat was launched in Sacramento, California, in November 2024. Dylan’s son, who had grown up enough to help with some of the final sanding, was proud to be the boat’s first passenger. The aroma of wood, glue, and paint no longer hangs in the garage, but when Dylan came to name the dory, it was another scent from childhood that came to mind. “Growing up in the desert, the scent of earth after rain brings me a sense of relief; this build did that too. The scientific name for that scent is Petrichor—it seemed appropriate.”
Jenny Bennett is editor of Small Boats.
Do you have a boat with an interesting story? Please email us. We’d like to hear about it and share it with other Small Boats readers.
When I arrived in Maine 30 years ago, I realized one is never far from water: dozens of rivers, thousands of ponds and lakes, and more than 3,000 miles of coastline beckon the small boater. After sampling kayaking, canoeing, and sailing, I finally settled on sailboats as my primary form of waterborne conveyance, challenge, and fun. But over the years, as my bones and joints (particularly my knees) became creakier, I realized that land-based fitness options were fading, and I should look for an on-water alternative. It was time to try rowing.
There are many production rowboats available, so I had plenty of choices. My most important criteria were seaworthiness and durability: I wanted to take the boat out on the ocean and be able to handle some swell and chop, but I also wanted to land on rocky shores without worrying about banging up gelcoat or epoxy. The boat needed to be big enough to handle sufficient gear for a week of not-too-rugged camping, and a sliding seat would be great both for a full-body workout and because the power generated would allow me to travel lengthy distances despite having a heavier boat. After a good deal of research, the Whitehall Spirit Tango 17 seemed like the perfect boat for me, and I purchased one in 2020.
Photographs by the author
The Tango 17’s lines—narrow beam, fine entry, deep skeg—help to give it excellent performance under oar, and despite such slenderness I’ve also found that there’s more than enough space on board for me and all my gear when I’m camp-cruising.
Modern construction with traditional heritage
The lines of the Tango 17 reflect the traditional Whitehall boats that inspired it. Beginning in the 1820s, Whitehalls were the water taxis of New York City where both speed and seaworthiness were valued. Like its classic forebears, the Tango 17 features a fine entry, a steep stem, and a shallow full-length keel that ends in a slightly raked wineglass transom. The thermoformed copolymer hull is molded to mimic traditional lapstrake construction and the overall result is an easily driven, seaworthy boat that is also beautiful. My Tango 17 almost always draws curious onlookers and compliments at a dock or boat ramp.
Manufactured by Whitehall Rowing & Sail in Victoria, British Columbia, the Tango 17 comes in at an even 17′ overall with a waterline length of 16′ 5″, and a beam of 3′ 10″. It has an overall height of 26″, hull depth of 18″, draft of 6″, and displaces 200 lbs when empty. Whitehall Rowing & Sail makes a 14′ version called the Solo 14, with a single rowing station, but I wanted to be able to row with another person and to carry more gear when camping solo (the published carrying capacity of 800 lbs allows for more than enough food and equipment).
With two people rowing, we managed to settle into an easy stroke that propelled the boat at a comfortable 4.65 knots. In a sprint, we reached 5.09 knots—even with our modicum of rowing skill.
The hull’s copolymer plastic, an almost maintenance-free material, requires no painting, waxing, or other treatment. The manufacturer describes it as being very tough—my boat has banged up against enough things to verify that this is, indeed, the case—and an optional reinforced keel with stainless-steel keel strip is also offered. The trade-off for such tough material is weight: the Tango 17’s 200 lbs is hefty compared to some other similarly sized fiberglass or wooden boats. However, with only 46″ of beam and the traditional full keel, it can still cut through the water at a decent speed. The boat’s weight means that it is far from cartoppable, and it takes two fit adults to lift it from the ground onto a trailer, but it is easily launched and recovered using, for example, a Trailex SUT-350 trailer. I use a small truck to tow my boat and trailer, but the combination could easily be pulled by a considerably smaller vehicle.
The biggest contributor to speed and distance covered is the Tango 17’s sliding-seat gear. Plastic, ergonomically shaped seats mount on rails affixed to molded supports; the plastic stretchers can be adjusted to accommodate the height, fitness, and shoe-size of the rower; hook-and-loop straps hold the rower’s feet to the stretchers. The gated oarlocks are outrigger mounted, with a pin-to-pin width of 63″. Carbon-fiber sculling oars are highly recommended for the Tango 17, and I opted for the 9′ 6″ oars with hatchet-style blades. The first time I used them, I was amazed at the power they can generate with so little weight—each oar weighs only 1.43 lbs.
When rowing solo and with no gear on board, I like to use the forward rowing position and balance the boat’s fore-and-aft trim with two or three 5-gallon buckets of water.
The boat includes many well-conceived details: the sliding seats can be removed and replaced by two fixed seats that snap into place on two molded risers; when not in use the seats stow flush to the floor beneath the sliding seats. The cockpit floor, decks, and fixed seats have generous nonskid patches. Small brackets—four on each side—are screwed to the interior face of the hull to hold the plastic battens that support the (optional) boat cover. There are recessed mooring eyes in both bow and stern. An easily accessed plugged drain hole in the center of the boat facilitates cleaning and ensures that water does not collect in the boat if left upright and uncovered. Numerous small mushroom cleats and tie-downs—suitable for up to 3⁄8″ line—are placed inside the boat beneath the gunwales and on the small bow and stern decks; I would prefer these to be slightly bigger to accept thicker lines, but Whitehall Rowing & Sailing does offer suitably sized fenders and dock lines as optional extras. Finally, there is an optional transom motor mount for an outboard motor of up to 25 lbs in weight.
The only significant modification that I’ve made to my Tango 17 is to build a stowable sleeping deck. The mounts for the sliding seats obstruct the usable floor space and would seem to preclude sleeping on the Tango 17, but about 3″ beneath the inwale is a 2″-wide lip, wide enough and strong enough to support a sleeping platform made of 1×6 tongue-and-groove pine boards held together by shock cord. With the sleeping deck so high in the boat, I was concerned that stability would be an issue, but it is not so. The boat’s initial stability is certainly a little low (though it’s not nearly as tippy as a canoe, kayak, or racing shell), but it firms up nicely after 10° or 15°, and stability has never been a problem for me while sleeping on board. The 6′ platform sits flush with the 2′-deep stern deck, creating an 8′-long sleeping space. I use a one-person backpacking tent and have a single board several feet forward of the sleeping deck to serve as a table. While I have rowed with the deck in place, it raises the center of gravity and noticeably decreases stability while under way, so I don’t make it a practice; it folds and stows easily.
The Tango 17 fits the Trailex SUT-250 trailer well, and although the boat is not light—to load it onto the trailer on land requires two fit adults—retrieving and launching on my own is straightforward.
The Tango 17 performance
The Tango 17 performs well. Last summer I found myself in a heavy chop combined with a 3’ swell: the boat handled it well, rising and falling gracefully with the waves and, with more than enough freeboard to weather the chop from any direction, did not take on any water. The hull tracks beautifully in flat or choppy water. The boat’s double-hull construction gives it positive flotation when swamped or capsized and, while I’ve not swamped it—unintentionally or otherwise—I have re-entered from the water by climbing over the side when the boat has been both fully laden and almost empty.
To measure speed, a friend and I conducted time trials on a local pond. Heading into a wind of about 12 knots with a very slight chop, the two of us (reasonably fit but with only a modicum of rowing skill) sprinted for 200 yards at 5.09 knots, close to the manufacturer’s claimed top speed of 5.5 knots, while a stretch of comfortable rowing at an all-day pace only dropped us down to 4.65 knots. For one person with gear, we measured the sprint at 4.21 knots, and the comfortable rowing at 3.78 knots. With no wind, I’ve been able to solo row a 4-mile passage at 4.17 knots. When I row by myself and without significant gear, I balance the boat fore-and-aft by using the forward rowing position and placing two or three 5-gallon buckets of water in the stern.
The Tango 17 checked a lot of my boxes: sliding seats for a full-body workout; two rowing stations so I can row solo or with a companion; built-in flotation for safety; rugged hull materials for beach landing; plenty of room for all my gear when camp-cruising; and the sweet lines of the classic Whitehalls that inspired its design.
With its long-straight keel, maneuverability is not a forte of the Tango 17, and the 9′ 6″ oars are not immediately graceful for the novice rower, but I have found that with practice, I can effectively work the oars to turn the boat in not much more than its own length. Furthermore, on a trip in 2024 along Maine’s Bagaduce River, well-laden with gear and quite often rowing against wind and tide, I was happy with the boat’s pace—the speed and confidence generated by the Tango 17 make it a joy to row in a wide variety of conditions.
I will never forget my first outing in the Tango 17. After an hour of rowing, I hopped out into the shallows of a local pond, fully expecting the usual soreness that comes with middle age and decades of pushing my body hard. I was amazed: no pain, no aches, just the satisfying sense of having accomplished a great workout. Since then, I’ve had many beautiful days and nights on the water, happy in the knowledge that I’m in my Tango 17, a safe, fun, and capable boat.
Davis Taylor lives in Bar Harbor, Maine, where he has sailed and rowed for the past 30 years. He enjoys being on any kind of boat, but has definitely found that the smaller the boat, the more it gets used and enjoyed. You can read about his adventures camp-cruising in his Tango 17, AURELIUS, in “The Bagaduce River by Rowboat.”
The Tango 17 is available from Whitehall Rowing & Sail of Victoria, British Columbia; price before options $18,193 CAD/$12,995 USD.
Is there a boat you’d like to know more about? Have you built one that you think other Small Boats readers would enjoy? Please email us your suggestions.
In the 1970s boatbuilders used polyester resins to build fast racing canoes and very light recreational ones—it was not unusual for a modern canoe to weigh about half of the then-common wood-and-canvas canoes and the ubiquitous Grumman aluminum canoes. As the decade unfolded, boatbuilding materials and techniques developed fast, nowhere more so than in the art of cedar-strip building. In 1975 came David Hazen’s newsprint booklet and plan set, The Stripper’s Guide to Canoe-Building, and a year later Gil Gilpatrick’s Building a Strip Canoe was published. But it was the Gougeon brothers’ development of user-friendly, wood-compatible epoxy, along with their seminal book, The Gougeon Brothers on Boat Construction, also published in 1979, that propelled strip building into the mainstream of amateur boatbuilding. Small companies providing strip-planked boats, strip-building manuals, canoe plans, and kits began to appear.
In 1983, Ted Moores of Bear Mountain Boats produced a canoe kit for home builders and published Canoecraft—a comprehensive guide to building fine strip-planked canoes. A year later in Bristol, New Hampshire, Michael Vermouth founded Newfound Woodworks. To begin with, Vermouth’s focus was on the manufacture of custom doors, windows, cabinets, and furniture. But, when he came upon Ted Moores’s book and built two canoes from accompanying plans, he moved out of furniture making and into boatbuilding. As interest in strip building grew, Vermouth began milling cedar strips for amateur builders and for other suppliers like Bear Mountain Boats. Then he started selling epoxy, fiberglass, ash for gunwales, before ultimately deciding to supply full boatbuilding kits to people who “wanted to build their own boat but didn’t have all the millwork equipment necessary to produce quality strips, gunwales, decks, stems, etc.”
Photographs by Jenny Bennett
Even at 79 years old, I can comfortably carry, launch, and recover the Otter by myself.
Forty years later, Newfound Woodworks—now owned and run by Rose Woodyard and Alan Mann—continues to sell quality milled cedar strips, epoxy, fiberglass, building tools, plans, instructional books and CDs, and complete kits for nine canoes, sixteen kayaks, and nine rowboats. Among the canoes, the second smallest is the 11′ 9″ Otter designed by Hans Friedel of Sweden, who has also designed four of Newfound Woodworks’ kayaks.
The Otter’s design
For several years, I have admired the Newfound Woodworks booth at the annual WoodenBoat Show in Mystic, Connecticut. Rose and Alan always have several of their completed boats on display, and I have been struck by the quality of their workmanship; indeed, they have received the award for Best in Show, Professionally Built Manually Powered Boat for the past six years in a row. So, when I was invited to try out the Otter at the 2025 show, I jumped at the chance.
Thanks to the Otter’s generous beam, boarding from a floating dock is relatively easy—even for a less nimble paddler. From here, I picked up one of the paddles to use as a stabilizing bridge to the dock, and turned through 90° to sit on the canoe’s seat.
The Otter is a solo canoe measuring 11′ 9″ × 32 1⁄2″ and weighing just 35 lbs. It has a load capacity of 340 lbs, so is well-suited for larger paddlers. The ’midship depth is a little more than 11 1⁄3″ and the boat’s sheer rises at both ends to a height of 17 1⁄8″—high enough to give a pleasing appearance, but not so high that a paddler will be badly affected by wind. With 1″ of rocker on the hull’s modest length, the Otter spins easily.
The canoe is available as a complete kit, which includes plans, construction notes, mold forms, construction pictures, coved-and-beaded 6′–10′ northern white cedar strips, full-length western red cedar strips, aspen strips for accents, ash outwales and inwales, ash thwart, cane-and-ash seat, seat cleats and hardware, ash stem, cedar deck material, fiberglass, epoxy, epoxy-application tools, and varnish. You can also buy just the plans, or the plans and the strips and complete your own outfitting.
The seat is hung from the gunwale in traditional canoe style, and I was able to kneel in front of it, resting my sit bones on its forward edge and tucking my feet beneath.
The morning of my trial paddle was calm. Alan and I walked the canoe from the booth to the float via a narrow walkway. Although the two of us worked together, the boat is so small and light that one person could easily carry it slung on a shoulder. Together we lowered the boat into the water. We were mindful that it was a display boat and didn’t want to risk damaging it, but, again, I could have easily put it in by myself, picking it up by one of the gunwales amidships.
The Otter’s relatively generous beam lends a stability that allows a less nimble paddler (at almost 80, I am one of these) to board easily while bridging a paddle to a float or to the land. A paddler could also straddle the canoe in the stern and then drop into place on the caned seat.
While I was paddling from the seat, a single-blade paddle gave me good control of the boat. I did notice a difference in performance when using either the big-bladed or the smaller paddle—the latter required less correction when running straight. Nevertheless, the canoe was responsive and maneuverable with either paddle.
The seat is hung from the gunwales in traditional canoe fashion, which allows for paddling while seated or while kneeling with sit bones braced against the forward edge of the seat. Other small solo canoes, including the two Wee Lassies in the Newfound lineup, have no space for kneeling because their low seats are fixed to the bottom of the hull; in such boats only double-bladed paddles are used for propulsion.
Otter has quite a flat bottom and felt pretty steady when I got in. When I leaned, her firm bilge came into play, making it difficult to put the gunwale into the water. I was happier kneeling because I felt more attached to the canoe and could control heel easily.
Sitting high on the seat, I tried the Otter with my Greenland-style double-bladed paddle. Its performance was impressive for a canoe so small—with only a modicum of effort I was able to hit 4 knots and could turn it almost 90° with just a single stroke.
Kneeling and seated paddling
I had with me a couple of single-bladed paddles: a 63″-long Wabanaki-style paddle with a 29″ × 6 3⁄4″ Beavertail blade; a 58″-long small Beavertail with a 26″ × 5″ blade; and a double-bladed take-apart Greenland-style paddle measuring 113″ with 35″ × 3 1⁄2″ blades. I first tried the boat from a kneeling position, leaning back against the forward edge of the seat and paddling with a single blade. Rose and Alan suggest that the canoe might require a small external keel to improve tracking with lighter loads, so I was surprised by how easy it was to keep it running straight with a modest J stroke. The breeze was quite light so I was unable to judge the effect of wind on the canoe, but I could easily push it along at about 3 knots. The real fun, however, was in taking advantage of its maneuverability. As the old saying goes: the Otter would turn on a dime and give you change. Otter is a dancer; if I had good freestyle technique, I’m sure I could have done some fancy turns with the gunwale just above water. Kneeling did let me easily heel the boat to help in the turns, although unlike when solo-paddling larger canoes—either solo or tandem—I didn’t need to heel the canoe to get in a decent stroke when going either straight or turning.
Next, I sat up on the seat and continued to single-blade. I’m not a big fan of using canoe seats other than in a traditional wood-and-canvas canoe where there are some ribs on which to brace my heels. In a smooth-finished boat such as the strip-built Otter and molded composite canoes, there are no such ribs, and I missed having even those small edges against which to brace. Were I to build an Otter, I might build-in a little heel brace. Nevertheless, I single-paddled from the seat for a while and found the Otter as responsive as before.
The open gunwale makes it easy to drain any accumulated water.
I could easily paddle with either blade, but I found the longer, big-bladed Wabanaki paddle overpowered the canoe a little, needing a bigger correction J to run straight. The smaller paddle was much more satisfactory whether doing a J or various underwater recovery strokes.
Double-blade versus single-blade performance
I then put together my double blade. Single-blade techniques require a steering element that shortens the time through which propulsion can be applied, so I wasn’t surprised that I could now keep the canoe running somewhere above 3 knots. What did surprise me, however, was that I was able to hit 4 knots by leaning into the stroke a little. Such speed shouldn’t be possible in a boat this short, but there is enough volume in the ends to keep it from squatting. When it came to maneuvering, I was gratified to find that, with the long double-bladed paddle, I was able to turn almost 90° with a single stroke.
Returning to the dock to meet up with Alan, I noticed that despite my best efforts there was some water in the boat; it had no doubt dripped from the paddle. What little there was I could have sponged out, but with the open-gunwale construction, it would be easily drained once the boat was on land. As we lifted the canoe out, I realized that had I wished to leave it in the water, there was nowhere to attach a bow or stern line. Were the boat mine, I would drill small holes into the decks to take painters—a minor addition to a sweet boat.
The Otter is light enough for a solo carry, roomy enough for one person and their gear or even a small passenger, and sweet enough for easy overnight trips on isolated ponds or quiet creeks.
The Otter would be an ideal little canoe for poking up creeks, marshes, and estuaries; dropping a fishing line on a calm lakeside evening or morning; or for carrying into a remote pond like the pack canoes of a century or more ago. I greatly appreciated being able to choose between sitting or kneeling and with the generous carrying capacity, the Otter could easily handle a light overnight pack or a calm dog or child.
Ben Fuller, curator emeritus 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: kayaks, canoes, a skiff, a ducker, and a sail-and-oar boat.
The Otter solo canoe is available as a complete kit from Newfound Woodworks, $2,250. Plans with full-sized multiple drawing sheets that can be contact-cemented to 1⁄2″ MDF and then cut to size are also available, $110.
Is there a boat you’d like to know more about? Have you built one that you think other Small Boats readers would enjoy? Please email us your suggestions.
Some things I was able to imagine: I imagined that training for the race would be a bonding opportunity for me and my 38-year-old son Ben; I imagined a fine-lined rowboat slicing through lumpy seas and skimming over flat water; I imagined a test of physical and mental endurance; I imagined that, at the age of 69, rowing 70 miles would be unpleasant and painful.
What I was not able to imagine was the fire in my palms, the thickness in my thighs, the blaring in my back. Nor did I foresee the anticipated relief of the final approach to the finish turning into the most grueling leg of the race.
In the hours before the race, Ben and I had focused on rigging each piece of gear. Nineteen family members and friends had gathered on a pebbly beach, bubbling with laughter, their faces lit with excitement. Surrounding us, nearly 100 human-powered boats were organizing for the starting horn that would announce the 48-hour period in which they had to complete the 70-mile course. We had made it; we were part of the 2025 SEVENTY48.
The long road to Tacoma
I had first thought of taking part in the SEVENTY48 when my father and I attended the Port Townsend Wooden Boat Festival in 2019. He and I were building a wooden gaff cutter at the time, but when I heard about the second annual SEVENTY48—a time-limited race from Tacoma, Washington, to Port Townsend, Washington; 70 miles within 48 hours—I was captivated. There were only two barriers between me and the start line: I didn’t know how to row, and I had no boat in which to learn. But I was hooked.
Janine Herbertson
This model, at a scale of 1:4, was the last in a series of development models that enabled me to visualize the design and refine the lines. Thin wooden battens helped to produce fair curves, and the station molds generated patterns for the full-sized molds. My father, Gary (left), was interested in the process and always happy to discuss the pros and cons.
In my mind I ran rowing simulations of quartering into the waves, or feeling them rolling in off the beam, or surfing down their faces. I saw ripples, rollers, breakers. I imagined the worst conditions in which a boat could possibly be rowed, and how a rockered hull with full bilges would bob over the waves. I envisioned a long boat rowing through glassy conditions, and how the water would split open at the bow, gurgle along the sides, then heal together as the stern passed by. A boat design slowly came together in my mind, and I looked for it among the many plans offered online. Established boats did include some of the features I had visualized, but none of them had everything. I would have to design and build my own.
I fantasized for four years and then, eventually, spent several months drawing lines and building increasingly large models until, at last, I had what I considered the perfect boat for the occasion: a 22′ rowing wherry strip-planked in 1⁄4″ poplar, and sheathed with 6-oz fiberglass cloth set in epoxy both inside and out. It had high fore and stern decks, a plywood coaming, accessible flotation compartments fore and aft, and a breakaway skeg. It was built for two rowers, but could be used for solo rowing during training. I installed Piantedosi RowWing rigs, which have seats that remain fixed while the outriggers and stretchers slide—they promised a powerful rowing stroke without causing the boat to pitch out of trim.
Samantha Stettler
Ben, left, and I coated the 1⁄8″ plywood decks in 6-oz fiberglass cloth set in WEST Systems epoxy. The hull’s fiberglass-wrapped monocoque skin distributes loads without the need of frames other than four bulkheads—two in the bow, two in the stern. These enclose airtight flotation compartments in both ends, accessible by waterproof deck hatches. During the race, we used these compartments to store tools and spare parts.
We launched OTTER in Lake Mendocino, the closest body of water to my home in Ukiah in Northern California. Ben and I were exuberant as we climbed aboard. But instead of rowing, our oars clashed as if in some aquatic sword fight. We couldn’t even row away from shore. We each tried to row on our own, only to prove that neither of us could manage the 9′ 6″ oars in their sliding riggers. We had had no idea that rowing would be so challenging.
We persevered. After six practice sessions I thought, “I will eventually learn how to do this.” After 15 sessions I realized, “I’m starting to get this.” Then came Ben’s unexpected heart surgery, a devastating setback, but eventually we would be grateful for another year of training.
At last, we were in Tacoma and felt ready. Ben and I stowed all of our gear for hydration, navigation, safety, and foul weather. Then six of us lifted OTTER off her stands and into the cold water. Ben and I stepped aboard.
Ben, rowing stroke, gave the command, and we nosed our way toward the race fleet. It felt like the end of a long migration, finally settling in with the gaggle of boats to which we belonged. A canoe slid by with more than a dozen young women singing as they paddled; near us was a decked catamaran with four people seated on an elongated bike frame ready to peddle their way to Port Townsend. Racers with backpacks stood casually on paddleboards. Kayak paddles flashed like dragonfly wings. Rowboats held position in the gentle current.
The shouts and cheers of onlookers grew louder, climaxing with the final countdown to the 7 p.m. starting horn. We were off. The waterway burst into a frenzy of paddling, pedaling, and pulling as the motley flotilla surged toward the open water of Tacoma’s Commencement Bay.
The 2025 race
Ben and I leaned into our oars. Each pull accompanied one complete exhalation, each recovery stroke a full inhalation. Despite the cool of the evening, my skin prickled with sweat. We found our rhythm quickly, and pulled with more vigor than on most of our training rows. We planned to spend the first hour in Zone 3 cardio (70–80% of MHR—maximum heart rate), and in our excitement we easily locked into that level of effort. We used chest-strap heart-rate monitors that displayed on our separate smartphones, Ben’s mounted in the navigation console, mine attached to my rowing rig.
Mark Cole
The 2025 SEVENTY48 race hosted a strong field of 99 teams, of which 72 finished. The weather was calmer than it has been some years, but it was also hot. The winning boat, a Carbonology Triple Surfski paddled by Rich Long, Rob Pelkey, and Dave Jensen (seen here at center bottom), finished the 70-mile race in 10 hours, 9 minutes. The last finisher was Taylor Harper rowing a Northeaster Dory, who came home in 44 hours and 33 minutes.
An hour brought us near Owen Beach, the first checkpoint where all boats were required to pass between an anchored powerboat and the close shore. Supporters rang cowbells and cheered us on. We rounded the checkpoint and headed into the broad waters beyond. The sun disappeared into wooded hills. Only a handful of boats were visible ahead or behind. Ben and I dropped into Zone 2 cardio (60–70% MHR) and settled in for the long haul.
Dusk and the rising moon accompanied us into Colvos Passage. In the moonlight we could easily see both the shores of Vashon Island to our starboard and the Kitsap Peninsula a little less than a mile away to port. In the 14-mile-long, 1-mile-wide passage there was an eerie quiet. Reflections of the lights on shore stretched across the water in bright parallel lines. Our narrow wake murmured quietly away. Behind us in the shiny water we dragged a long, narrow V dotted with two pairs of widening rings created by our oars, a beaded necklace that stretched out in the moonlight as far as we could see.
From his aft position, Ben consulted the route-plan spreadsheet mounted on OTTER’s navigation console. Illuminated with red lights, the plan detailed the buoys we would encounter, the bearing to each one, the color and timing of their flashing lights, and our anticipated time of arrival at these waypoints at three different boat speeds. The console also held our VHF radio, compass, binoculars, and the phone that displayed both our GPS location and Ben’s heart rate. Ben frequently twisted around in his seat to look forward and make decisions about our course. Then he could use our forward-view mirror to maintain that course. Navigation in the unfamiliar waters challenged us throughout the night.
Roger Siebert
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As we left the confines of Colvos Passage and pulled out into the 6-mile-wide expanse of Puget Sound, a brightly lit ferry bore down upon us. Our course put us directly in its path, so we backed up and waited. We believed our radar reflector would light us up as a vessel to be avoided, but we were not about to test the theory. That encounter was the first of six ferry routes that brought confusing dangers through the night.
We passed Blake Island to port at 11:55 p.m. We had rowed without ceasing for almost five hours. To maintain the rhythm of rowing, we had established a protocol that would give us each a specified time in which to attend to our personal needs. On each hour and half hour Ben would call out the time, and I would ship my oars. I could drink 4 oz of water mixed with maltodextrin and electrolytes, sip some more water or coffee, pee, pull on a warm layer of clothing…do whatever I needed in three to five minutes. Then I rejoined Ben for a few strokes, before he shipped his oars to do what he needed. Thus, we kept the boat moving without interruption all night.
Beyond Blake Island
On our next break, Ben asked me to check the tracker app. Each SEVENTY48 crew rents a tracker from the race organizers, Northwest Maritime, which shows every boat’s position on an app or web browser. Our supporters on shore could follow us in real time and we could keep track of our competitors. I duly checked the app and discovered that only 13 boats had rounded Blake Island before us. Our route plan showed that our pace to Blake Island had been 5 knots.
We headed into more open water, crossing to the southern tip of Bainbridge Island, the one-third waypoint for the course.
Basin Herbertson
OTTER can be rigged for single or double rowing, whether training or racing. Here she is rigged as a single for competition, complete with navigation console. On the mast are a front-view mirror, nighttime running lights, a radar reflector, and a video-camera mount.
From my bow seat, I looked east to the lights of Seattle. Towering buildings, covered in shiny gold scales, were topped by bands of colored lights: red, blue, purple. I watched as the crown of one of the buildings waxed and waned from red to blue to red. The 605′-tall Space Needle stood majestically alone, its slender tower and flying-saucer-like top sparkling in the darkness. The dense play of light in the surrounding blackness captivated me. Then, as I watched, the lights of Seattle began to turn off. Skyscraper after skyscraper shut down, blackness relentlessly devoured the cityscape. Was I witnessing the apocalypse? Incredulous, I watched the entire city fall into utter blackness. Perhaps I was hallucinating from sleep deprivation and fatigue. Then the southernmost skyscraper winked back on, then another, and another. As the city lit up once more, I realized there had been no apocalypse: a dark cargo ship had passed between our little boat and the far shore.
Relieved, I looked to the west. The moon was dropping into the hills of Kitsap Peninsula. The tops of pine trees, silhouetted by the bright disk, looked like the teeth of a sawblade cutting toward the south, chewing the bottom of the moon smaller and smaller. From the shore to our boat the last direct light of the moon slithered like a snake across the black water. Impulsively I gushed out loud, “I am so in love with life right now!” Through all the planning and construction, the hours of training and practicing technique, I had never imagined such inky beauty.
As we came up on Bainbridge Island, our next milestone was the course’s halfway point. Yet we seemed to be making little progress. Half-hour blocks ticked by like a metronome. We could see the shores of Bainbridge going by, so we knew we were moving, but reaching the midpoint of the row became defined by physical discomfort and emotional discouragement. By the time we reached the 35-mile mark just after 4 a.m., our average speed had dropped to 4.4 knots. We were tired, but the hardest miles were yet to come.
Leece Hillegas
For the most part I trained solo on Lake Mendocino in California. After repeated speed trials at various stroke rates and cardio zones, I learned that, as a single, OTTER’s sweet spot is 4.5 knots as the fastest speed for the most easily sustained effort. Rowing harder and harder increases the speed by less and less. This was a crucial realization in understanding endurance racing. When rowed as a double the sweet spot is almost 1 knot faster.
After each half-hour break, my palms were hot as I regripped the oar handles. Every muscle in my back chain—traps, lats, glutes, hamstrings, calves—complained about the demands being inflicted on them. My lower back, pivoting back and forth upon the pelvis, became rusty. Where the sit bones of my pelvis pushed into my seat, skin chafed from a pendulum of abrasion. Ben and I had anticipated that physical pain and mental strain would be our companions in the boat, but I was unprepared for the actual sensations.
Each stroke became an irritation. Twenty-two times per minute, our muscles were stretched then contracted. Thirteen hundred times an hour, we inhaled deep breaths to oxygenate the blood coursing through our lungs.
My attention turned inward. A symphony of sensations accompanied each part of the stroke, playing an endlessly repeating chorus. Feathering the oar blades tightened the forearms. Dipping them into the water tensed the upper arms. Loading the blades with the weight of the boat inflamed the back. Pushing off the footplates felt like performing a standing broad jump with stiff and swollen legs. Vague discomfort coalesced into a constellation of local pains.
Basin Herbertson
The navigation console is lined with hook-and-loop fasteners so that most of the instruments can be rearranged for easy use. Shown here are, from left to right: phone for heart-rate readouts, handheld GPS, VHF radio, compass, and the route-plan spreadsheet. The wrap-around roof protects the equipment from spray, rain, and glare. Not clearly visible here are the red LED lights that illuminate the console, as well as red lights in the cockpit for nighttime gear management. When I designed the console I concentrated on reducing windage as much as possible.
My world collapsed into a small bubble that contained the rhythmic sound of oars slipping into water, then back out, dripping. The splashes bracketed the shush-shush of the riggers rolling back and forth in their tracks. My field of vision narrowed, filled by Ben’s back.
Rowing 70 miles is obviously a physical feat; it is at least as much an emotional challenge. The mind cannot actually understand what it means to row for so long, so one’s emotions swirl into confusion and dismay. Blocking time into half-hour chunks helped to stem the bedlam of thoughts and feelings while allowing us to keep the boat moving.
Our simple strategy was captured by our motto, “Stay in the boat and keep rowing.” For the first half of the race, that plan had clearly worked: miles ticked by; landmarks were sighted, made, and left behind. But in the second half, our minds and hearts became less able to perceive such progress. Stroke after interminable stroke, pull after unrelenting pull, breath after endless breath, the two-thirds location near Point No Point receded ahead of us like a mirage. No matter how many repetitions we put in, it seemed to grow no closer. Our effort and pain seemed pointless, and the name of the landmark took on a grim irony.
Samantha Stettler
Before launching OTTER for the race, we sat her in folding boat stands and got her ready to go. Ben stepped the mast in its tabernacle while I attached the SEVENTY48 burgee to the stern-mounted staff. Someone asked me if the flags had a function crucial to the race, to which I replied, “Of course! They’re festive! If you’re going to be looking at the back of the boat for hours on end, it helps to have something delightful to look at.”
Daylight over the Sound
It began as a hint of gray in the black sky. Then, in the east, sheets of low clouds gradually took on hues of salmon, dusty rose, and peach. The colors dropped into the waters below, until sky and water gleamed. I joked to Ben, “I’ve pulled all-nighters before, but I’ve never before pulled all night.” The lifting of the dark inspired a sense of optimism. We kept rowing.
Finally, Point No Point was abeam. I expected a surge of relief. Instead, anticlimactically, we simply rounded the point and headed into the largest body of most exposed water yet. We had been rowing hard without stopping for more than 11 hours, averaging almost 4.8 miles per hour over 47 miles. I could not imagine rowing half as far again.
Our next destination was the Port Townsend Shipping Canal, an engineered channel between the mainland and Indian Island. If we arrived early enough, we would be carried by a 4-knot current through the length of the cut and out into the bay that held the finish line.
As daylight gained in strength, we could see the two-person rowboat that the tracker app identified as our companion through the night. Since leaving Tacoma, they had been just ahead of us. During each half hour we nearly caught up to them. But during our adjustment periods, with only one of us rowing, they would pull ahead again. Their taunting presence provided incentive to keep our adjustment breaks as short as possible.
Samantha Stettler
Family and friends helped to splash OTTER minutes before the race started. During training I would launch OTTER on my own from her trailer, or Ben and I would carry her to the water. But, when the boat was fully burdened with race gear, we needed a small group of willing helpers to get her into the water—entering into the spirit of the day, they all wore headbands crocheted by my spouse, Leece, in the HerbertSons team colors.
The morning was fresh, wind conditions light, the water easy to row. Ben’s competitive nature kicked in. With enthusiasm in his voice, he proposed that we use the next couple of hours to lean in hard and overtake our competition. He suggested that we both skip our next adjustment period, and pull harder through the full hour; I leaned in. My heart rate climbed, and I began to sweat in the cool morning. Working harder was somehow a welcome distraction to the pulsing pain. Our world collapsed even tighter; no more sightseeing; my universe consisted of a single stroke, the one I was in.
After an hour, it became clear that our move had inspired our competitors to pull harder as well, but to our surprise and delight, we judged we were on a more efficient course. We were cutting more sharply toward Indian Island, and the current was gradually slotting us into the right approach. Instead, they had aimed for the canal, and the current had taken them farther off course. We were rowing faster and straighter. Ben implored us to “empty our tanks” since the ride home after the cut would be a breeze. We pressed into our oars. Facing backwards, the rowers in the other boat could see every stroke of our surge, encouraging them to even greater effort. Both boats peaked at their maximum speeds, and held it. What Ben and I had begun in Tacoma as a survival event, became a race.
Despite our strenuous efforts, we entered the canal behind them. To our confusion and astonishment, the current was streaming against us…fiercely. We had arrived later than I had projected, and the current in the channel boiled. We hugged the shore to port, our blades nearly hitting dry land. To make progress, we had to ramp up to even more effort than the race pace of the past couple of hours. The banks of the cut slowly crept by. We were barely making way.
Samantha Stettler
Ben and I took our first strokes toward the fleet of human-powered boats gathering at the start line. Six years of dreaming and two years of building and training had led us to this spot at this moment—the blast of the starting air horn and the waving of a green flag were about to change the imagining into reality.
A canoe with a dozen paddlers entered the canal near the other bank, singing as they passed us by. When a jumble of large rocks forced us into the current, we struck out for that other shore as well. The waters spiraled and snaked as we crossed. My mind was as jumbled as the water. Where was the free ride I’d expected? Why was the current flowing against us? Why did we have to keep fighting so hard when we were so tired?
The situation on the other shore was no better. My hands burned, and I knew that blisters were erupting on my palms and fingers. My legs were thick, heavy, and hot. My back begged me to stop, but as we passed beneath the bridge and the canal finally opened to the bay, there was no respite. The current remained strong against us. Our fight increased as we encountered the first strong winds of the trip, also against us. Building across the fetch of Port Townsend Bay, waves smashed into our hull, splashed up, and sprayed onto my back.
A wave on one side of the boat would swallow an oar blade and hold it down. I would punch down on that oar handle to free the blade from the water’s grip. As I struggled with that oar, the other might angle down and down into a trough, unable to find water at all. The next stroke could be the opposite…or not. The rhythm of rowing vanished. Each stroke was unpredictable.
Janine Herbertson
As OTTER’s bow ground onto the pebble beach at the race finish, Ben threw his arms exuberantly into the air. I barely had enough energy to ship the oars, and was unable to stand upright as I struggled to get out of the boat.
Whenever we aimed for the finish line, the waves came from abeam and washed over the gunwale. Water sloshed in the bottom of the boat, adding to our load. Our only option was to head away from the finish line, quartering into the wind. Heading up was drier, but took us farther off course. We kept easing back toward our destination until we took on water, then headed away to reduce the influx. After 45 minutes, I looked back at the shore we had been trying to leave and said to Ben, “I don’t think we’re making any progress.”
He replied, “We are…but it’s so slow.”
“Do you have any ideas of what we can do differently?”
He paused for a long moment, then replied, “Nope. Keep rowing.”
Perhaps delirium tempered the pain. Perhaps not. It actually no longer mattered. We could see the final shore…miles away. Our only respite would come when we touched the bow to the land. We pushed with our legs. We pivoted back on our seats. We pulled with our arms. We fought the oars out of the confused seas. We gasped for air.
At last, we could see a crowd on shore. We heard cheers and cowbells. We straightened our course for the beach. A loudspeaker called our name: Team HerbertSons. Another loud cheer. OTTER’s nose ground noisily into the gravel. Ben raised his hands in the air. I shipped my oars. I lifted a leg out of the boat and struggled to raise the other leg over the gunwale. I moved to stand, but couldn’t. I tried to straighten my back, but couldn’t. Ben grabbed me as I staggered.
Samantha Stettler
In the weeks before the race, Leece wisely observed, “Regardless of what happens, you will be talking about this race for the rest of your lives.” We finished 16th overall, and fifth out of the 45 rowboats. Our goal had always been to finish, and our team motto had been: “Stay in the boat, and keep rowing.” In the end we kept OTTER underway, nonstop, for 16 1⁄2 hours.
Someone thrust a signboard in our hands: 16th place overall; 16 1⁄2 hours. Volunteers in yellow vests swarmed about us. I tried to walk out of the water to ring the finish bell on shore, but my legs wouldn’t move. A friend carried the bell to me to ring. My wife waded in. I leaned on her, dragged my heavy legs, and shuffled onto land.
The medic asked me if I was dizzy. No. The medic asked if I was hydrated. Yes. She pinched the skin on the back of my hand. She pressed her fingers into my wrist to feel my pulse. Strong. She asked if I was dizzy. No.
Dry gravel. I sat down and cried on my wife’s shoulder. My entire body began to tremble uncontrollably. The shaking wouldn’t stop. The medic asked if I was dizzy. No. She took my pulse. Strong.
Ben sat down next to me. I cried on his shoulder. We’d done it. We had rowed some 13,800 strokes without stopping. We had completed the SEVENTY48. Some things I had imagined. But this? This had been unimaginable.
Basin Herbertson is a wellness and vitality coach at CoachBasin.com, helping people get past somewhere they feel stuck. He documented the design and build of OTTER in “OTTER: An open-water endurance rowboat.” After the ordeal of the SEVENTY48, it would take him a week to think clearly again, three weeks to heal the blisters on his palms, and a month before he recovered his physical energy. While he is gratified and satisfied to have met the challenge, he keeps shaking his head, and saying, “Seventy miles is too long to row.” Ben says that if he does the race again, he wants to be facing forward. Basin and his father finished building their Cape Cutter 19 in 2020, sailing it in the San Francisco Bay, Tomales Bay, Lake Tahoe, and Puget Sound.
For more SEVENTY48 adventures see “SEVENTY48” and “TAMO.”
If you have an interesting story to tell about your adventures with a small boat, please email us a brief outline and a few photos.
When I was building my Haven 12 1⁄2, one of the big questions that loomed over the much-anticipated launching day was: “How do I carry the spars while I’m trailering the boat to the launch ramp?”
Ballentine’s Boat Shop in Cataumet, Massachusetts, builders of the Doughdish (the fiberglass version of the Herreshoff 12 1⁄2), makes spar carriers for that boat. They gave me permission to share my spar carrier build inspired by their design.
My boat has four spars: mast, boom, gaff, and jib club. The 4′ 8″ jib club can be transported behind the seat of my truck, but the others must go in the boat.
Photographs by the author
The stern deck stand is considerably larger than the foredeck stand. In part this is because it supports all three of HEY JUDE’s principal spars, but also because the stern deck is several inches lower than the foredeck. Note the carved groove in the foredeck-stand foot, which goes under the deck cleat, and the large-diameter hole in the stern-deck stand, which accommodates the 12 1⁄2’s tiller.
Designing and building a DIY spar carrier
For my custom spar carrier, I built two vertical stands—one for the foredeck, one for the after deck. Each is a piece of 1⁄2″ plywood with semicircular cutouts in the top edge and multiple drilled holes for tying the spars to the stand and the stand to the boat. (For the 12 1⁄2, the after stand also features a hole for the tiller, which passes through it.)
When designing spar carriers, it’s handy if you can use the boat’s existing hardware to support them. On my boat, I determined that the forward stand could slide under and be anchored by the after horn of the deck cleat, while the after stand would line up with my tiller tie-off pad-eyes on either side of the deck.
All drawings from sketches by the author
To calculate the required height for the stands a string is run stem to stern, clearing all items such as the cockpit coaming and tiller. The string shows the position of the bottom of the largest-diameter spar.
When determining the height of each stand, all the spars must rest above any part of the boat. In my case, the bottom edge of the mast (the longest and largest-diameter of the spars) had to clear the coaming, stem head, and transom. I clamped pieces of scrap wood to the stem and transom and stretched a length of string between them. Measuring from the string down to the decks gave me the desired height-above-deck of the bottom of the mast. To this I added one half of the mast’s diameter (the amount of spar that would rest in the stand) plus 1⁄4″ for additional depth and thus support. This gave me the overall height of each stand. In the 12 1⁄2, the foredeck is higher than the afterdeck, so the forward stand is 9 3⁄8″ tall (plus 1⁄8″ foam glued to the bottom of the base), while the after stand is 14″ tall (plus 1⁄4″ foam—extra to accommodate the greater weight carried).
While the measurements in this, and subsequent, drawings are suitable for the Haven 12 1⁄2, the plan can be adapted for other boats.
To determine the overall width of the stands—including their bases—two factors come into play: the size and number of the spars to be carried, and how each stand will be supported. In my case, the forward stand would support the mast and boom and be held down and stabilized by the deck cleat, thus requiring no additional support other than tie-downs to prevent it sliding aft. The after stand would have no deck cleat to anchor it, and would support all three spars (the forward end of the gaff rests on the cockpit sole) so would require a more substantial base to stabilize it.
The stands would be cut out of 1⁄2″ marine plywood. To find the width of the top edge of each carrier, I established the diameters of the spars’ holding cups and spaced them 1 1⁄2″ to 2″ apart. This gave me 14″ for the after stand, and 11″ for the forward stand.
I started with the foredeck stand, the simpler of the two, which I had determined would be 9 3⁄8″ top to bottom and 11″ wide at the top. To give it a wide, stable stance, I made the base 14″ wide. The bottom of the plywood would slot into a dado cut into a solid piece of 2 x 4 Douglas fir which, to accommodate the slight crown in the deck, would need a shallow arc in the bottom, rising to 1⁄16″ in the middle.
After I cut out the plywood trapezoid, I drew the cups by placing my compass point 1⁄4″ below the top of the plywood, drawing a semicircle below that, and extending each side of the arc straight up to the top. I then cut the spar cups into the top edge using the bandsaw’s 3⁄8″ blade, and drilled out the 1⁄2″-diameter holes for the tie-downs.
Next, I cut a groove into the Douglas fir, which would form the base of the stand. Using a tablesaw, I cut a 3⁄4″-deep groove, making repeated cuts to slowly widen it so that the plywood fit snugly. (Do not assume that plywood advertised as 1⁄2″ is that exact thickness—mine measured 0.570″.)
When making a spar carrier it’s useful if you can employ existing hardware on the boat. On my 12 ½ I use the tiller tie-down pad-eyes on the stern deck and here, on the foredeck, I use the deck cleat to tie down both the stand itself and the boom. I also drilled some extra holes in the forward stand for additional tie-downs that I’ll use if a long highway trip is in our future.
Because I was using the deck cleat to locate the stand, I next chiseled out a channel in the top of the fir so that it could slide under the horn of the cleat.
I glued the plywood into the groove of the base with epoxy. I rounded all the edges and sanded everything using a piece of sandpaper wrapped around a scrap of dowel to sand out the inside of the tie-down holes.
I finished everything with epoxy—paying particular attention to soak the plywood edges—and several coats of marine varnish.
Finally, I glued 1⁄8-thick closed-cell-foam padding to the bottom of the base to protect the boat deck, and glued some leather strips into the spar cups.
With the foredeck stand complete, I turned my attention to the after stand. I cut out the 1⁄2″ plywood face to the desired dimensions: 18 1⁄2″ × 14″. I then glued and screwed one of the longer sides between two 1 3⁄8″-square × 18 1⁄2″ pieces of dimensional lumber. When the glue had cured, I glued and screwed the whole assembly into two 1 1⁄2″ × 1 3⁄8″ x 9″-long Douglas-fir feet, into which I had precut 3⁄4″-deep × 3 1⁄4″ recesses.
I cut the spar cups and drilled for the tie-downs as before, marked up and cut the tiller hole, and again coated the assembly with epoxy and several coats of marine varnish. I protected the bottom of the stand with 1⁄4″ closed-cell foam.
Having all of HEY JUDE’s spars supported and stable in their custom carrier has simplified the set-up for trailering.
Each stand needs at least four tie-down locations: side to side and fore and aft. I use 1″ strapping with quickly adjustable Double D rings and snaphooks wherever possible.
The spars are tied into the cups by lacing two strands of 1⁄8″ cord up and over the spars and down through holes in the stand, crossing on the top of the spars as they go. I have drilled extra holes in each stand in case I want to use more or different tie-downs.
Simple to make of inexpensive materials, the spar carrier has worked well through two-plus seasons of semi-local day-sailing.
Noank is a village in southeast Connecticut that looks out over Fishers Island Sound and the Mystic River. In the 19th century it was a major shipbuilding center, and about 700 wooden sailing ships came down the ways in shipyards in this picturesque little town. Noank is also the name given to an 18′ 2″ pulling boat designed by Nick Schade, whose small-boat shop is about a mile, as the gull flies, from the village. He is well known for his line of Guillemot kayaks, strip-built in wood, then ’glassed, varnished, and made show-room pretty.
photographs by the author
The seat support rail is designed for the Piantedosi sliding seat rowing rig. Under each deck is a sealed compartment for dry storage and flotation. The manual includes instructions for making the hatches from plywood.
The Noank, also strip-built, is his first boat with a sliding seat. It is a half-decked recreational boat, beamy at 36″, with generous freeboard, and designed for exposed, choppy water. Schade also intends this to be a light and fast camp-cruiser, so the bow and stern have large, dry compartments for camping gear.
Like Schade’s other designs, this is a pretty boat, such is the judgment of five of us, all local rowers, who took it out for a spin. Tom Sanford, Janis Mink, Biddle Morris, Tom Tobin, and I are all members of Mystic River Rowing, and collectively, we have about 140 years of experience rowing in boats with sliding seats. All of us have seat-time in both recreational and racing boats, and most have taught sculling using boats similar to the Noank. Biddle has done hundreds of miles of distance rowing-camping and is our go-to guy on open-water rowing.
With the rowing rig occupying the space along the centerline, the rower has to get aboard with a foot planted slightly off to one side.
Beyond good looks, what does the Noank offer? How well will it handle in the afternoon southerly that’s common to Fishers Island Sound, the place the designer had in mind when he went to his drawing board? How is its calm-water performance? Does it track well? Turn easily? Is it slow or will it go? Is it fragile? Would it be hard to build? The short answer is that the Noank does well what it set out to do. It is fun to row, forgiving, and tougher than it looks.
The specifications call for planking of 3/16″ x 3/4″ cedar strips, shaped over forms cut from 1/2″ MDF or plywood and spaced at 12″ intervals on a strongback. The stripped hull is sheathed inside and out with 4-oz fiberglass cloth set in epoxy, and the ’glass is doubled on the bottom. Built to the designed specifications, this will be a strong, tough boat. The high crown of the decking helps stiffen the hull without adding much weight.
The Noank was designed with the Piantedosi rowing rig and conventional sculls in mind. For rowers new to sculling, the 6″ overlap of the oar handles will take some getting used to.
Schade notes that the Noank could be built without the decks and bulkheads if a lighter boat for protected water is the goal. The reverse transom keeps the waterline length almost the same as the overall length for speed’s sake. He says, “I really like the arched reverse transom, but it is a bit complicated. You could just have a flat vertical transom without changing the performance significantly.” A paper template, wrapped around the stern, indicates where it is to be cut to accommodate the curved transom panel. The stern is planked extra-long to make modifications possible.
The seat-support rail is designed to fit a Piantadosi rowing rig and adds significant strength to the hull. It is a wooden box beam 3-1/2″ x 4″ x 8′ 5″, with cutouts to reduce weight and provide drainage and ’glassed inside and out for rigidity. The anodized aluminum monorail of the rowing rig is held to the seat-support rail by two machine screws that are removable without tools. The rig weighs 22 lbs, and it can be put in the boat or taken out in less than a minute. It is designed to be rowed with racing sculls, which have a standard length of 284 to 290 cm (around 9′6″)
In a sprint, the Noank will do about 6 knots.
When completed, the Noank should come in around 53 lbs and all up, with rowing rig, weigh 75 lbs. For those of us who are not power lifters, loading a boat of this weight and girth onto a cartop carrier would be a two-person task. If it is to be beach-launched solo, a dolly or trailer is in order.
Getting in and out of wide rowing wherries can be awkward—for some it’s a long reach to get their weight planted over the centerline. The complication in getting onboard Noank is that you can’t put a foot on the centerline—the seat-support rail is in the way. Most of us just put a foot up against the box beam, held onto the oars, and accepted a quick heel angle as we shifted our weight onto the inboard leg. There is enough static stability in the Noank for this maneuver and for a rower to exit sideways, swinging both legs over the side to stand up in shallow water. The boat heeled sharply, but did not bury its rail. We tried the “Look Ma, no hands” routine while seated, letting go of the oar handles, and while this will result in a quick swim in most shells, the Noank only wobbled and did not flip. If you lashed the oar handles together in the middle of this boat—they overlap by 6″, the standard for sculling boats—the boat could look after itself while you eat lunch or take pictures.
The Noank would put beginning scullers on an easy learning curve. We would expect a novice to feel comfortable by the second or third lesson. That is largely because of the boat’s inherent dynamic stability: It wants to run on an even keel and if it is rocking side to side as it moves along, this is the rower’s fault for not sitting up straight and keeping the oar handles level. With its long skeg, Noank tracks straight, but is still easy to turn. In a moderate crosswind, a rower should have no problem dialing in a crab angle and maintaining a compass course.
Hobby-horsing can be a significant issue for most boats with sliding seats. The rower’s weight is two or three times the weight of the boat and rowing rig, and with that much mass moving back and forth, around 2’ with each stroke, the bow and stern want to bob up and down, killing speed. The goal is to keep the boat running level, and to that end this hull is designed with little rocker in the keel (only about 1”) and an almost uniformly rounded cross-sectional shape throughout the long cockpit of the boat. That provides needed buoyancy under the rower at both ends of the slide. Another speed killer, wetted surface, is kept in check by narrowing the beam at the waterline. The Noank has a beam of 36″ at the rail amidships; at the waterline it is 23”. The narrow waterline and arc cross section cuts down the area of skin subject to friction as it moves through the water. It also reduces lateral stability, but the flared sides above the waterline give the Noank an abundance of reserve stability when heeled.
Scullers like to talk about speed. None will admit that their own boat is a slowpoke, and many of us tend to boast a bit, claiming speeds too good to believe—“stretchers,” as Mark Twain called them. For the Noank, our numbers come from an impartial GPS during speed trials on a light-wind day with calm seas and no current. It takes a few pulls to get the boat going, but once up to speed the boat carries and glides well. This is a 4-5-6 boat: In the hands of an experienced sculler, rowing leisurely at a pace that can be held indefinitely, it will run at 4 knots. To reach 5 knots calls for rowing at a racing pace that’s sustainable over a 2,000-meter course. And 6 knots calls for a sprint, a “Power Ten” in crew parlance, and holding that speed for any distance would involve serious pain. The Noank moves as well as could be expected for a displacement hull with its 17.7′ waterline length. Once the Noank exceeds its theoretical maximum speed of 5.63 knots, even super-athletes are going struggle to make it move faster for very long. We found nothing to complain about in the Noank’s speed curve.
Building a Noank will call for time and patience, requirements for any high-quality, strip-built boat, whether the builder starts with plans or a kit. Both are available for the Noank. The finished product will require a reasonable amount of maintenance, but the construction is sturdy, and unless the boat is abused or neglected, it should outlive its builder. The five of us rowers agreed that the Noank is an all-round performer that rates well in its class. Tom Tobin even bought the plans and intends to build one.
Carl Kaufmann trained to be a naval architect and marine engineer, but a career in journalism paid the bills for five decades. He has always had a second career: making things out of wood. Most of his time has been spent building boats from scratch, 10 in all. His current family fleet ranges from a 12-ton, 40’ yawl down to a 34-lb cedar shell. For variety’s sake, he made some mandolins and acoustic guitars. His home is on Block Island, off the coast of Rhode Island, but he spends a lot of time at his winter address in Mystic, Connecticut. He has a workshop in each place, so he is never at a loss for something to do in retirement.
In my 40-plus years of working in boatyards in Florida, radical changes have occurred in the tools and materials used. When I started out, most painting was done with a brush, red lead was the primer of choice, the cordless screwdriver was a brace fitted with a screwdriver bit, and most of the fastenings were slotted silicon-bronze screws. However, some things have remained constant, and not least among them is the countersink made by the W.L. Fuller Company of Warwick, Rhode Island.
Photographs by the author
During my more than four decades of boatbuilding I have purchased myriad countersinks and drill bits from W.L. Fuller, not because they break or wear out and need to be replaced, but because I have needed many different sizes. From the oldest to the newest, the quality of the tools has been of consistently high quality.
In 1930, Warren Fuller Sr. set up a boatbuilding shop in his car dealership. When he encountered wood that split as he applied wood screws, he created a tool to save time and heartache. “He took to the grinding wheel,” says granddaughter Debbie Fuller, “and invented the four-fluted countersink.” Fifteen years later, Warren was joined by his son, Warren Jr., who established W.L. Fuller, Inc. and introduced the company’s first catalog. Today the company makes more than 450 tools including a dizzying array of specialized tools for drilling holes. But its most famous tools are still tapered drill bits with the adjustable countersinks that made its name. These effective tools have been developed and improved over the years and are now offered in a wide range of sizes and sets, but they continue to be of the same high quality that Warren Fuller Sr. would recognize. The company buys U.S.-made steel drill bits and reshapes them for different purposes, perfects them to work in wood, plastic, and metal, and makes the carbon-steel countersinks to go with them.
The plug cutters in any W.L. Fuller set are as high quality as the countersinks and will, in my experience, get almost as much use. If you let the tines cut to their full depth, the cutter will round over the ends of the plugs, as seen here, making it easier to insert them into the countersink holes.
While bits and countersinks can be purchased individually, more typically they are sold in sets such as the No. 6, for use with wood screw sizes #5 through #9; or the No. 8, which will fulfill the needs of most small-boat projects. It includes five tapered drill bits and matching countersinks for screw sizes #6, #8, #10, #12, and #14, as well as two plug cutters (sizes 3⁄8″ and 1⁄2″), matching stop collars to control depth, and a 3⁄32″ hex key all packaged in a sturdy Fuller-made cherry box to protect your investment. The quality is unbeatable and, as fourth-generation family employee Lisa Fuller says, “The only issue we have is, you buy one of our sets, you don’t have to buy it again.” The tools do, indeed, last a lifetime—I have had many of my Fuller countersinks and plug cutters for 40 years. They can be resharpened, and Fuller offers a resharpening service for all their tools. The only items that don’t stay around forever are the hex keys…they can and do vanish into thin air.
When drilling with a countersink it’s important to match the right bit and countersink with the screw. Here the pilot holes for a #8 bronze wood screw are drilled out with a C8 countersink and the 11⁄64″ bit that fits into it.
The countersink usually match the screw size: a #8 screw, for example, uses the 11⁄64″ drill bit with the C8 countersink. When drilling/countersinking for a traditional wood screw the tapered drill bit works well, giving the proper clearance hole and the correct pilot hole for the fastening. However, among today’s common fastenings is the stainless-steel self-tapping screw, which has neither solid shank nor taper in the solid shaft; indeed, even some bronze wood screws have no taper. While this does not necessarily mean that a tapered drill bit will not work—in many cases it will work perfectly—it’s important to do a few tests to find what works best. For example, you might use the C8 countersink with its 11⁄64″ tapered drill bit, but if fastening a bronze wood screw into a spruce frame, I would set the drill bit depth 1⁄8″ short to ensure the threads fully engage; in an oak frame I would set the depth a little long to avoid over-stressing the screw, or step up to a C9 countersink with its 3⁄16″ drill bit…in the shop, it is a matter of trial and error.
As well as the tapered drill bits with countersinks, the No. 8 set also includes two stop collars and two plug cutters, each in 3⁄8″ and 1⁄2″. The stop collars may be the least used items, but there will be times when you will be glad they are available whether setting screw heads flush at the wood surface, or countersinking them to be plugged. Conversely, the plug cutters (or bung cutters) will be used a good deal, but do require a drill press. These four-pronged cutters allow you to make straight-sided plugs out of scraps from your workpiece so that they match the grain and color of your work.
Isaac Robbins/WoodenBoat Publications
W.L. Fuller’s No. 8 countersink set will suit many small-boat building projects. Matching the quality of the tools are the American-made cherry boxes in which the sets are sold.
After 95 years in the marketplace, W.L. Fuller remains a family-owned and -operated business. As if to emphasize the consistency of its history, the company’s trademark color remains the distinctive orange established by Warren Fuller Sr. during the Second World War—in an effort to save money, Warren found a good deal on orange paint for his small V-bottomed plywood boats. When visiting the Fuller booth at The WoodenBoat Show, at Mystic Seaport, Connecticut, I was greeted by Debbie Fuller. Her pride in the family company and the quality of their products is infectious. Today, W.L. Fuller, Inc. has a 50-page catalog featuring the company’s own tools and other quality brands, all made in the U.S. And, if you call to purchase a set or seek advice, chances are you’ll be talking to a member of the family.
A lifelong resident of Florida’s Gulf Coast, Michael Jones spent his career as a boat carpenter working on the full spectrum of yachts from traditional to high-end luxury cruisers to sportfishing boats. Past president of the Traditional Small Craft Association, he is a collector of small craft and is, he says, “still boat crazy after all these years.”
For prices and to see the entire range of drills and countersinks, go to the W.L. Fuller website. The No. 8 set is also available from The WoodenBoat Store for $169.
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.
Not all small boats have built-in flotation, and its absence can lead to trouble in the event of a swamping. Even in a boat that does have sealed compartments there is the possibility of a leak or an ill-fitting access hatch. But if there is additional flotation in place it will limit the amount of water coming in, improve buoyancy, increase the chance of self-rescue, and reduce the amount of bailing.
Photographs by the authors
Two NRS Rodeo Split Stern Float Bags laid side by side fit the stern compartment of our Penobscot 14 very well. Wherever you stow the bags, it is important that they are firmly secured; if not, during a swamping they will float away. Here, the bags will be held down by a removable seat panel, which will be tied down with the cord seen here and a second cord anchored to the cleat mounted on the bulkhead.
When we built our Penobscot 14 we decided we wanted some extra flotation that could be easily installed and just as easily removed, and decided to try some Northwest River Supplies (NRS) float bags.
NRS was founded by Bill Parks in 1972, and in 2014 was sold to its employees. Today, the company continues to be employee owned and offers excellent customer service while furthering Bill’s mission to help “people pursue passions on the water.” Among the many products NRS offers is a range of float bags designed primarily for kayaks and canoes. Some are built of 10-gauge urethane, which NRS says will neither leak nor delaminate, while others are 70-denier urethane-coated nylon, which offers resistance to abrasion and UV rays. All have a lifetime warranty.
The NRS Rodeo Split Stern Float Bags are made of 10-gauge urethane with welded seams. Each corner has a D-ring attached by a loop of webbing sewn into the bag’s flanges.
For our Penobscot we chose a pair of Rodeo Split Stern Float Bags. These are 10-gauge urethane wedge-shaped bags designed to fit on either side of support pillars typical in short freestyle kayaks. Fully inflated, each bag measures 28″ L × 9″ D × 13″ W, and 3″ W at tip. When deflated the bag is small enough to fit through a 5″ deck plate opening. The inflation/deflation tube is 20″ long, so the bag can be placed into its compartment and then inflated. The inflation air valve closes securely. The ease with which the bag can be inflated and deflated makes installing and removing them from tight spaces relatively easy.
We keep our Penobscot 14 on a trailer and always remove the bags after outings to allow free movement of air in the boat’s compartments, and so we can check the bags for proper inflation—testing that they stay inflated for at least 24 hours. Each bag has, on its three corners, D-rings attached by UV-resistant nylon webbing straps so that it can be secured inside a compartment or under a thwart.
Thanks to the 20″-long inflation tube, a Float Bag can be installed in a tight place before being inflated from without. If we have gear to carry in the compartment, we put it in first and then inflate the float bag over it. This keeps the gear’s weight where it belongs—down low and centered.
So impressed have we been with the float bags that we are now measuring our other boats to see what sizes they can accommodate. Our Drascombe Lugger, for example, could have a bag strapped to either side of the centerboard trunk and, while the bags can be shared from boat to boat, we plan to purchase dedicated bags for each one.
Audrey and Kent Lewis sail, row, paddle, and motor the Tidewater Region of southeast Virginia. Their adventures are logged at smallboatrestoration.blogspot.com.
NRS Float bags are available in multiple sizes, singly or in sets. Find the range, along with accessories, on their website. A pair of Rodeo Split Stern Float Bags is $79.95 (price includes shipping).
Bill Griffin’s first boating memory is of paddling a wooden canoe on a New York lake as a young child. The first family-owned boat, he says, was a 17′ aluminum Grumman paddling and sailing canoe. It was followed by Sunfish dinghies, larger daysailers, and still larger cruising sailboats. One after another they inspired in Bill a love of boats and boating that eventually led him into a career in the marine industry, for many years at a marine hardware store in Annapolis and more recently as a rep for a marine paint manufacturer. As Bill puts it, his work life now consists of “calling on boatyards, retailers, and builders, talking boats, and getting paid to do it.”
For all his experience, however, Bill had never built a boat for himself. He had helped his friend and neighbor, Charlie Flanagan, to restore a 1935 Herreshoff 12 1⁄2 and a 1973 Beetle Cat and on both occasions, he brought his professional expertise to the table, advising Charlie on the best paints to use and how to apply them.
Bill Griffin
Once Bill and Charlie had built the box beam—laid atop an aluminum ladder on two leveled horses—they set up the building molds over which they would plank up the hull.
He also helped Charlie to build a Chesapeake Light Craft (CLC) Lighthouse Tender, which introduced him to the world of kit building. Then, after Bill saw a Nick Schade–designed kayak at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum and subsequently read Schade’s book, Building Strip-Planked Boats, the seeds were sown—it was time to build. He ordered a CLC kit for Nick Schade’s strip-planked 12′ canoe, Nymph. He chose the Nymph, Bill says, because he wanted a canoe, wanted to build strip-plank, likes to use a double-blade paddle, and was intrigued by the prospect of paddling a canoe that weighs just 25 lbs.
So began what Bill has come to see as a series of lessons learned.
Bill Griffin
Prior to planking, Bill had carefully mapped out the order in which the strips would be used, so establishing the hull’s ultimate color-and-pattern scheme. He had also laminated the four stems—two inner, set in place before planking began, and two outer. Finally, Bill and Charlie covered the outer edges of the molds with masking tape so the planks wouldn’t be unintentionally stuck to the molds.
Lesson 1: A project of this size should be tackled in small step-by-step increments. “It’s overwhelming if you look down the road at all that is to come,” Bill says. “It’s important to tackle one challenge at a time.”
Lesson 2: Find a good place to work. Building a boat, says Bill, “always seems to take longer than expected, so you need a suitable workspace that won’t be needed for other things; you don’t want to be moving the boat while it’s being built.”
Bill Griffin
The outer stem would be glued and clamped into place. The gap seen here was reduced to almost nothing and what remained was filled with thickened epoxy.
Bill talked to Charlie, who “has a sheltered dirt-floor workshop where a project can be undisturbed for months. With the space, inevitably, came Charlie, as a willing helper and collaborator. Despite his years of restoring and building boats, Charlie had never done any strip building and was eager to be involved.
In August 2023, when both Bill and Charlie had a week of vacation time, the two friends started work. They reread Nick Schade’s book, went to CLC to pick up the parts for the boat, and built a plywood box beam to serve as a building platform. “It was tricky to get it level on the uneven ground,” says Bill, “so in the end we leveled some horses, laid an aluminum ladder across them, and placed the beam on top of that.”
The kit from CLC included building notes, western red and Alaska yellow cedar bead-and-cove strips (as well as a few in walnut), mahogany for the rails and decks, spruce for the thwarts, and precut molds. Over the course of their week off, as well as setting up the box-beam strongback and molds, Bill and Charlie glued up and placed the inner stems, and laid out the strips to figure out how they looked next to each other and to pick out the places in the hull where they’d look best. “We took our time and sketched out the hull’s color scheme.”
Bill Griffin
The hull was lifted off the molds and carried out into the yard. The amount of cleaning and sanding that would be needed was daunting, but Bill was excited by the very light weight of the hull.
After the flurry of the first week, the project moved steadily but slowly with Bill and Charlie only able to build during weekends, and not every week. They applied strips carefully, a few at a time, stapling them to the forms, which they had masked with tape so they wouldn’t inadvertently glue the strips to them. As they worked, they figured out how to cut the scarf joints and how best to staple the strips, often supplementing the staples with packing tape.
Soon, Bill says, they came to Lesson 3: Sometimes the next step just doesn’t make sense. “When we got to the sharp turn to the tumblehome in Nymph’s topsides, we were met with a complex bevel, and we spent time figuring out how to fashion the required shape on the bandsaw. Our method—which we applied time and again when things were complicated—was to read the directions a few times, then just try something. If it didn’t work out, we’d start again, and try another method. This project taught me a new level of patience.”
Charlie Flanagan
Applying the ’glass and epoxy was an exacting task, especially in the hull’s interior where Bill struggled to cut the cloth so that it didn’t pucker in the ends.
The tumblehome bevels mastered, planking the rest of the hull went smoothly. But the next head-scratching step came when it was time to shape the external stems. They deliberated, discussed, tried out some ideas, and sought advice from experienced builders. In the end, Bill says, “I followed my own process and shaped them on a stationary belt sander. The satisfaction I felt from successfully shaping them to fit and look good was one of the best parts of the whole experience.”
Another highlight came when they lifted the glued-up hull off the molds. “It seemed as light as a feather,” recalls Bill, “I knew it would be fun to paddle.”
Lesson 4: Some steps in any boatbuilding project are tedious. The first hint of tedium, Bill says, came when they were closing in the bottom of the canoe. It required a lot of cutting joints and persuading strips to bend and stay put in ways they were not inclined to do. But it was the sanding that truly brought home Lesson 4. “Sanding the inside and the outside of the hull, unavoidably calls for a lot of hand-sanding,” Bill says. “I can’t imagine anyone enjoys a lot of hand-sanding.” As they smoothed, Lesson 5 came to the fore: Be judicious in how much wood glue you use when attaching strips. “Most of the sanding we did,” says Bill somewhat ruefully, “was to remove hardened excess glue.”
Bill Griffin
Once the boat was moved inside to the family laundry room (note the dryer at right) space became tight, but there was still much to do to. When fitting the gunwales Bill and Charlie (seen here) used every clamp they could find.
Before ’glassing the boat, they carefully looked over the hull for any gaps between strips. When a gap was found, they masked around it and filled it with thickened epoxy; when it had cured, they reached for the sandpaper again.
The build called for ’glass sheathing both inside and out. Bill says ’glassing the outside was a good deal easier than the inside. On the outside, “the cloth naturally drapes over the hull. Inside is a challenge because you have to figure out how to cut the cloth to fit it into the ends without puckers or wrinkles. We didn’t get them all out; I know where they are…I just hope no one else will notice!”
Charlie Flanagan
On a mild December day Bill paddled the canoe for the first time. It was a low-key launching, but for Bill, a day long anticipated.
In early November 2023, with the outside temperatures dropping fast, they moved the ’glassed hull into Charlie’s family laundry room where, for several weeks, accessing the washer and dryer meant squeezing by the canoe. By then, says Bill, the canoe looked almost finished, but… Lesson 6: Almost finished isn’t finished. Now came the installation of the gunwales and inwales, the seat, the thwarts, the decks… “These were significant pieces,” says Bill. “They might seem like afterthoughts, but they’re among the first things a viewer sees.” For the rails and decks Bill decided on mahogany, rounding the edges on a table router, and treating them with great care as “though they were parts of a piece of furniture.” It was all tied up in the experience, says Bill. “I really enjoyed taking boxes of wood from CLC and fashioning them into a thing of beauty and function. I didn’t design the boat, but I did have an impact as to how she turned out, looks, and performs.”
Charlie Flanagan
Weighing only 25 lbs and measuring 10′ end to end, the Nymph can be easily lifted and carried by one person.
They finished up in December and, on an unseasonably warm Saturday, they launched the canoe in Duvall Creek on South River, Annapolis. “It looked tiny in the water, but it was stable and seaworthy. I got in and paddled around for a while, savoring the joy of accomplishment.”
Even before the canoe was launched it had been noticed by others. A nearby art space was sponsoring a two-month show of local arts and crafts, and Bill was invited to exhibit the canoe. He did so with pride, and at the show’s January opening he delighted in talking to people about the project. Whether it’s an exhibit in an art show or being used in the water, says Bill, a wooden boat is an “instant conversation starter.” The Nymph would be on display for the next two months.
Bill Griffin
After a short taste of saltwater, the Nymph would be pulled out, dried off, and taken to a nearby art space to be part of a local arts and crafts exhibit for the next couple of months.
The final lesson Bill learned from building his canoe, he says, is that boat projects are best when you have someone to collaborate with. “Many times, Charlie and I discussed how to proceed and even though we’d have different opinions, we’d come to conclusions, and they usually worked. And for extra help, I’d reach out to the staff at CLC, as well as Nick Schade, and always received good counsel. I now have a boat that moves beautifully through the water, but I ended up with so much more. Building the Nymph yielded a lot of challenges, a lot of satisfaction, and a great social experience of collaboration.”
Jenny Bennett is editor of Small Boats.
Do you have a boat with an interesting story? Please email us. We’d like to hear about it and share it with other Small Boats readers.
Mist is a cozy pocket cruiser that combines simple sheet-plywood construction with more than a touch of elegance.
Designer Karl Stambaugh has gone out of his way to ensure that this plywood pocket cruiser doesn’t look like a plywood boat. He drew the stem to stand proud, as it would on a conventionally planked hull. Solid, coved sheerstrakes add to the illusion, as does the severe rounding-over specified for the chines. And the curved, raked transom isn’t exactly standard fare for sheet-plywood boats. In all, this is a handsome little cruiser.
Structural details impart a traditional appearance to this simple plywood hull.
In some ways, Mist awakens old memories of the plywood sloops that filled the pages of Popular Whatever magazines in the years following World War II. Down below, the designer made no attempt to cram in coffin-like quarter berths or an enclosed head. (There is no such thing as privacy aboard a 20′ boat in any case.) Mist’s arrangement is simple and traditional, and it works fine. The relatively-wide cabin sole survives the intrusion of the long centerboard trunk (part of which hides under the bridge deck).
Mist offers good deck space and a self-bailing cockpit.
Mist’s cockpit offers comfortable lounging space, but this will be slightly degraded if you build the optional outboard motorwell. You might consider hanging a removable bracket to the transom or after deck. Better yet, investigate the mysteries of the yuloh (an efficient, curved sculling oar).
Transverse frames and plywood sheathing result in a stiff hull.
With her handsome style, and easily stepped mast (mounted in a tabernacle so that it can pivot up and clown for trailering or low bridges), Mist might be the ideal trailerable cruiser.
Rounded-over chines rely upon ’glass and epoxy to protect plywood edges.
Plans for the 19′ 6″ Sloop Mist design contain six sheets: general information, lines and offsets, construction drawings, construction details, surfaces, and sail plans (gaff-rigged sloop and optional gunter-rigged sloop). WoodenBoat Plan No. 107, $90.00.
Snug accommodations survive the intrusion of a necessarily large centerboard trunk.
19′ 6″ Sloop Mist Design Details
DESCRIPTION
Hull type: V-bottomed, centerboard boat
Rig: Gaff- or gunter-rigged sloop
Construction: Plywood planking over sawn frames
Headroom/ cabin (between beams): About 4′ 2″
Featured in WoodenBoat No. 107
IInboard-powered mahogany runabouts on the water again, and on the increase, after near-extinction in a fiberglass marketplace. Even so, given the new wave of restorations and reproductions, this 16-footer by Zimmer and Hacker remains unique.
The Gentleman’s Runabout is a low-power, moderate-speed inboard runabout for protected waters.
John Hacker was one of this country’s great names in the design and development of pleasure and racing powerboats. Nelson Zimmer, who was informally associated with Hacker after World War II, has to date designed three other small craft for WoodenBoat’s catalog of plans.
The runabout presented here is according to Zimmer, “based on the creative genius of the late John L. Hacker.” She is not an easy boat to build; but then, no runabout worthy of the name ever was, which is why these boats continue to spark interest and hold value.
The Gent’s Runabout is designed for sawn frames and batten-seam planking.
Her construction is conventional for a craft of this type: batten-seam mahogany planking over sawn frames. This is a method that holds up well over time and keeps a dry-sailed boat dry in the water, without the need to wait for swelling to close up her seams.
The Gentleman’s lines: considerable shape for a hard-chined hull.
This is a runabout by an earlier, more elegant, definition of the term: a pleasure boat for gentle men and women. The Zimmer-Hacker craft can take two people out not just for a spin, but for an experience. Powerboating may have become faster than this, but not better. She can do 30 mph max; thus, she is more like a two-seat country roadster of the period than a pounding offshore racer of the present. Strict limitations have been placed on the power plant so that the hull strength will not be exceeded.
Nelson Zimmer draws details with care.
Nelson Zimmer is noted for his attention to detail; in that regard, this homage to Hacker is Zimmer at his best. For example, as a clear aid to construction, he has drawn sections of each of the building-frame stations; and in the interest of authenticity, he has provided measured drawings for the boat’s custom hardware and fittings.
Here, then, is a little beauty deserving of the phrase “for the discerning yachtsman.” And, we might add, “for the discriminating craftsman.”
Please note: the Westerbeke 26G engine specified in the plans is no longer manufactured. Alternatives are to select a similar size from a salvage yard, or with a light-weight Yanmar diesel. You might even try biodiesel for fuel, to save your olfactories.
Five sheets of plans for the Gentleman’s Runabout design include profile and deck arrangement, lines and offsets, construction plan, construction sections, and assorted fittings. WoodenBoat Plan No. 76. $120.00.
Batten-seam construction: strong, tight, and labor-intensive.
Nelson Zimmer designed his Utility Launch to shuttle people between towns and fishing camps in Canada’s North Woods. Like the Gentleman’s Runabout, the Utility Launch might not reach the speeds of modern powerboats. But Zimmer designed her with “an able hull, one which could cope with the chop from a fresh breeze or glide silently through the water to avoid disturbing the fishing grounds.”
One of the unceasing pleasures of working at Small Boats is meeting people who design, build, use, or simply love small boats. Through any given year I meet them individually in myriad places: at launching ramps, on the water, in boatyards, at gas stops on the highway, even in grocery stores far from lake, stream, or ocean. And then, from time to time, I meet many of them en masse, in one place. This past weekend was one of those latter occasions. For three days I crisscrossed Mystic Seaport Museum’s grounds and docks enjoying the company of boating enthusiasts—both amateur and professional—and soaking up the atmosphere of the 2025 WoodenBoat Show.
Photographs by the author
Ben Fuller’s boating kit: paddles, hat, PFD, and unseen but nestling within the traditional basket, a high-tech Maptattoo marine GPS
Rose Woodyard and Alan Mann of Newfound Woodworks brought a selection of their strip-planked canoes to the show and, for the sixth year in a row, won Best in Show in the Professionally Built Manually Powered Boat category.
On the water there were extraordinary yachts whose pristine varnish and high-gloss topsides gleamed in the Connecticut sun, while between them meandered the modest, unsung prams and dories, tenders and skiffs.
No matter what boat you come to the show in, sometimes the best way to get around is in a humble working skiff with a sculling oar.
AWOOGA, a Candu-EZ mini-tugboat with a light-blue hull was built by Adam Riso of Clinton, Connecticut. He was inspired in 2020 when he saw TOOT-TOOT at the show. Back at Mystic again, TOOT-TOOT, with the dark-blue hull, was built by Mike Magnant of Middleboro, Massachusetts.
On land, massive restoration projects in the Henry B. DuPont Preservation Shipyard contrasted with the exquisite craftsmanship of intricate strip-planked canoes and fine-lined daysailers. And spread out across the Village Green in the midst of it all were the amateur boatbuilders who came together to display their work in the “I Built/Restored it Myself” area. Among them, two 14′ mini tugboats sat not far from two 6′ 4″ Cape Cod Frosty sailing dinghies, which stood across from a modified Selway Fisher 14′ 6″ fantail electric launch, a Shellback Dinghy, a 14′ whitewater dory designed to run through the Grand Canyon, and a restored lateen-rigged Sailin’ Surfboard built in 1960 from plans published in the July 1958 issue of Boys’ Life magazine.
Jay Beauchemin built HEY JUDE from Richard Kolin’s 12′ Heidi design. He stretched the length to 14′ but kept the beam to the original 3′ 10 3⁄4″.
One of the Seaport’s Beetle Cats makes its way back to the boathouse. Beyond her, at the dock with her spritsail raised, is SANDY FORD, a 13′ 3″ × 5′ 11″ Woods Hole spritsail catboat.
And then there were the people: friends meeting friends; curious visitors chatting with knowledgeable exhibitors; delighted children sharing amazements with equally delighted parents. Newcomers savored words of wisdom from old hands: Roger Barnes—famed small-boat cruising sailor and author—shared small-boat cruising tips and anecdotes with a dinghy sailor yet to adventure out for an overnight onboard. Ben Fuller—frequent Small Boats contributor and one-time director of the traditional boat program at Mystic—discussed how to effectively reef a spritsail with Jay Beauchemin who finished the build of HEY JUDE in time for the show but not in time to go sailing. And Joe, a museum volunteer of many years, patiently and calmly directed from the dock as a new sailor at the helm of one of the museum’s Beetle Cats attempted to come alongside under sail—too fast, too slow, just right.
Justine and John Diamond built LARK, a 15′ strip-planked canoe designed by Bear Mountain Boats, from plans they bought in 2022. Newcomers to boatbuilding, they built her in reverse, starting with the paddles, then the seats, the gunwales, the inlay-design strips, and finally the hull. Added to their lack of boatbuilding experience, John had only ever once been in a canoe and had no idea if he’d even enjoy it once launched. “We built it on a lark,” says Justine.
During the WoodenBoat Show weekend, the Village Green at Mystic Seaport Museum is home to the “I Built/Restored it Myself” display.
To all who visited, I hope you had as much fun as I did; to everyone I failed to connect with, my apologies; to anyone unable to go this year but thinking of it for next…do it, you won’t regret it.
In the early summer of 1984, when I was 20, I had a summer job directing a children’s sailing program operated from a tiny beach community in Gloucester, Massachusetts. My daily commute consisted of a 15-mile highway sprint in my 1975 Ford Granada to a marina in Gloucester, where my dog and I would board a 13′ Boston Whaler and drive it the few miles north to the mouth of the Annisquam River. There, I’d take a hard turn to port and run along the white-sand beach for a mile to rendezvous with a fleet of O’Day Widgeons and a group of eager students. It was an idyllic situation that lulled me into complacency on the day of my first commute.
The weather was calm and clear. The 1960s-vintage Whaler was fitted with a freshly overhauled 25-hp electric-start Evinrude, which fired right up. I idled out of the slip and into the river, overconfident in the intuition honed from a life-so-far in boats. Clearing the no-wake zone, I brought the boat up on plane and kicked back for the glass-smooth ride to the river’s mouth. The “river” is actually a canal connecting Ipswich Bay with Massachusetts Bay; it makes some hard twists and turns, and I elected to follow its natural trend, paying little heed to navigation aids.
Jenny Bennett
When first launched in 1958, the 13′ Boston Whaler, designed by C. Raymond Hunt, was a breakthrough boat in both its design and construction. Hulls are a sandwich of foam and fiberglass—a durable and unsinkable structure.
I scooted along a wide arcing turn and noticed a flock of seagulls floating ahead of me. As I drew closer, they stood up. Before I could react, the Whaler, at nearly full throttle, came to a skidding halt. The motor stalled. All was quiet. The gulls looked at me quizzically. I looked back at them, and then over the side, where I observed ripples of fine sand just a few inches below the surface. Off to starboard, I spied the green can clearly marking a turn in the channel that curved away from the route I’d been following. I furtively scanned the area for onlookers. Mercifully, there were none. I stepped out of the boat, pushed it off the sandbar, and checked the motor for damage. It was fine, save for a little paint off the propeller. The hull was undamaged, too. I patted the dog on the head and pulled slowly away, munching on a big serving of humble pie, firm hand on the wheel, the giggling gulls laughing behind me.
I confess this lapse in judgement not for absolution, but rather as a testimonial to the bombproof durability of the 13′ Boston Whaler—the flagship “unsinkable” boat that launched a legendary company and which, though introduced in 1958, is still among the most coveted small powerboats on the New England used-boat market.
Jenny Bennett
Early Boston Whalers were offered in two models: the Standard, in which the operator sat on an aft thwart to control a tiller-steered outboard motor, and the Sport (shown), which featured a small ’midship console and three thwarts.
Origins of the Unsinkable Boston Whaler
In 1916, Albert Hickman, a restless and unbridled innovator in powerboats, developed and patented a hull form he named the Hickman Sea Sled. Writing in WoodenBoat in 1991, David Seidman said that the boat “looked like someone had taken a perfectly normal V-bottomed boat and cut it down the centerline, then reassembled it so the original sides looked like they were in the center and the centerlines were on the sides. Sort of like putting your shoes on the wrong feet. The boat had a tunnel forward in the shape of an inverted V that flattened as it went aft. This was enclosed by two outward-turning bows that seemed to be pulling the boat apart right down the middle.”
Liz Duffy
The Boston Whaler was inspired by the Hickman Sea Sled, a wooden boat first built in 1916 in a range of sizes up to 70′. Sea Sleds essentially melded two hulls, like a catamaran, forming a tunnel along the centerline. The Boston Whaler incorporated a third, centerline hull, which eased the outboard-motor propeller cavitation that had challenged operators of the Sea Sleds.
In 1928, Hickman developed a 13′ Sea Sled that won the 260-mile Boston to New York Race. He also developed a 78′ version of the boat that was built by Graves Yacht Yard in Marblehead, Massachusetts, for the Army Air Corps. The small-craft historian John Gardner worked at Graves during the construction of the behemoth Army Air Corps Sea Sled, and recalled its construction as akin to building a giant plywood box.
Three decades later, with World War II in the rear-view mirror, a Marblehead-based builder named Dick Fisher sought a design in which to test his newly conceived foam-cored fiberglass construction technique. Fisher was a nephew and protégé of the yacht designer Frank C. Paine, a legend in racing-sailboat design in Marblehead. Fisher had graduated from Harvard in the 1930s and gone on to co-found a company that manufactured electrical products. Boats were his passion, however, and he’d made early experiments in building lightweight balsa craft, which were of limited utility due to that wood’s softness. Later, in the early 1950s, he lit on the idea of building boats of polyurethane foam—a new invention at the time. While this foam was soft and vulnerable like balsa, he reasoned that it could be sandwiched in a fiberglass shell to produce a hard, unsinkable hull.
Jenny Bennett
Early Boston Whalers have proven to be quite durable and are often the chase boat of choice for many sailing programs. Aftermarket rubrails sometimes replace the hard-rubber original ones. However, one must be cautious not to allow water into the foam-sandwich hull when drilling new holes in the boat. Well-preserved or restored early boats often fetch high prices; for people willing to invest some labor, there are bargains to be found in well-worn hulls.
Fisher tested his theory in a small daysailer, and later struck a royalty deal with Albert Hickman to build Sea Sleds using the method. Hickman, however, sought increased control over the arrangement as negotiations progressed, which ultimately killed the deal. So, Fisher turned to C. Raymond Hunt, whose vast design output includes both the Concordia yawl—one of the most enduringly popular traditional wooden cruising sailboats ever designed—and the deep-V hull, which revolutionized both offshore powerboat racing and recreational boating.
Fisher’s testing showed that the Sea Sled hull generated a mixture of air and water that caused a centerline outboard-motor propeller to cavitate. So, Hunt developed a new form with a centerline “hull” in place of Hickman’s tunnel; this hull, flattened aft, fed clean water to the propeller. While the overall form of the boat, with its maximum beam carried all the way forward and aft, resembled the Hickman Sea Sled in plan and profile views, its underwater details were sufficiently different so as not to infringe on Hickman’s patent. The Fisher-Hunt creation, built in a foam-and-fiberglass sandwich with a distinctive blue interior, was unveiled as the 13′ Boston Whaler in 1958.
Jenny Bennett
The old and the new: An early 13′ Boston Whaler rests alongside a late-model peer. Aside from the obvious difference in interior color, the later boat has a modified hull shape—a more rounded bow, an easing of the chine profile forward—and molded interior components rather than the wooden ones introduced in 1958.
The Whaler’s construction was unique for its time, and became a trademarked process called Unibond. The hull and an interior liner were laid in fiberglass, separately but concurrently. While still curing, they were clamped together, with a resulting void between them. Into this void, at the bow, was injected polyurethane foam, which traveled aft under pressure, expanded, and emerged through a relief hole in the stern, confirming the filling of all voids. The whole deal—polyurethane and fiberglass—cured into one solid piece.
Three years after the Boston Whaler’s introduction, in 1961, Life magazine ran an article on the design, and featured a photograph of Dick Fisher sitting calmly in the stern of one of the boats, while in front of him a pit saw was apparently cutting the hull in half. A subsequent photograph showed Fisher motoring along, dry-shod, in the sawed-off stern section. The article was titled “The Unsinkable Legend.” The visual message was powerful; sales of the boat went through the roof, and variations on the theme of that original story have appeared in Whaler advertising over the years.
A Perfect Harbor Tender
Boston Whaler has been through many chapters and owners since its founding. It remains a solid company building a range of high-quality boats. The classic 13-footer with blue interior remained in production until 1971. The following year, desert tan was introduced for the interior (along with modifications to the hull and liner), and from 1994 to 2000, when production ended, the interiors were white—although 1998 saw a limited-edition model with the original blue interior.
Benjamin Mendlowitz
The versatile 13′ Boston Whaler offers nimble speed when it’s needed, and great load-carrying capacity for larger-vessel support. The boat will carry six average-sized adults on its three thwarts—or fewer people and a load of gear.
My own history of drama in Whalers came full circle a few years ago. For several years I operated a small charter company with a 46′ sloop out of Castine, Maine. On the boat’s very first charter, I received a call from the captain about 15 minutes after they had left the float. The steering was disabled. Did I have any insights? Could I get out to the boat in short order? I was on shore. My dinghy is a 13′ oar-powered peapod, and it does just about everything I want it to. But to get from the harbor to the stranded boat quickly required something else.
I hailed a friend who had a 13′ Whaler at the town landing. Three of us jumped into his boat and scooted out to the mouth of the harbor—a journey that would have taken an hour or so in the peapod, and would have been cramped and slow going with three grown men aboard. In the capacious Whaler it took just a few comfortable minutes. (The steering issue turned out to be an accidental engagement of the autopilot, which was resolved before we arrived.) That brief ride reminded me of the timeless utility of the 13′ Boston Whaler.
At harbor speeds, the boats can carry a load of gear or people; they maintain reasonable if somewhat sluggish maneuverability at displacement speeds. The directional reverse of the outboard motor allows easy handling in close quarters. The boats plane quickly, and steering is nimble when they do. With a 25-hp outboard—the standard for a 13-footer—the top speed is about 26 mph. With the upper limit of 40 hp, the top speed increases to over 30 mph. At those upper speeds, every wavelet is felt by the occupants; larger waves will launch the boat clean out of the water.
Liz Duffy
The 13′ Boston Whaler carries its near-maximum beam all the way to the bow and stern, offering great stability along the length of the boat. Stepping directly aboard in the bow would be perilous in a conventional sharp-bowed boat such as a peapod.
I am still a devoted rower, and I still own a 13′ peapod. My mooring is 3⁄4 mile from the town dock. On a good day, it takes me 20 minutes to row out to it in my peapod; in a foul tide it can take 40 minutes or more. With three adults aboard it’s a safe option, but a chore; six adults is out of the question. By contrast, the 13′ Boston Whaler is rated to carry six adults, perhaps not in ultimate comfort, but certainly safely in calm conditions. As a multipurpose harbor tender that takes up less space in the driveway than a small car, it’s hard to beat. And practicality aside, the 13′ Boston Whaler is a perfect vehicle for a spontaneous island picnic or a joyride to the mouth of the harbor on a warm July evening.
Matthew P. Murphy is editor of WoodenBoat magazine and founder of Small Boats magazine.
Based on the author’s empirical research, there is always a 13′ Boston Whaler for sale somewhere in New England on Facebook Marketplace. Prices for serviceable boats range from $2,500 to over $10,000. Hull weight is critical in assessing the condition of these boats; overweight hulls have likely been breached, and are waterlogged—a non-fatal condition that requires careful and thorough drying of the interior foam and subsequent fiberglass work.
LOA: 13′ 4″
Beam: 5′ 5″
Draft: 6″
Weight: about 275 lbs originally
Power: 9–40 hp
Capacity: 6 people
Is there a boat you’d like to know more about? Have you built one that you think other Small Boats readers would enjoy? Please email us your suggestions.
For some time now my family has spent summer weekends at a camp on a small lake in northern Massachusetts where we’ve kept a ski boat and fishing boat at the dock. On Sunday mornings, early risers shove off with rods and gear to enjoy the sunrise on the water, and in hopes of reeling in some fish for lunch. For years, the boat we fished from was a 16-footer pushed about with an outboard. It was a cold metal hull, a slug to row, and though we tried to tiptoe from aluminum dock to aluminum boat and shove off quietly, the clamor of feet and oars and tackle boxes banging against the hull reverberated around the lake like so many discordant church bells clanging.
Desiring a more pleasant (and neighborly) Sunday morning experience, we needed a new boat—one designed for rowing that would comfortably seat three and occasionally accommodate up to five adult fisherfolk, could be loaded quietly, and could withstand pounding while moored at the dock. This last was a must: on weekdays, the relatively shallow 150-acre lake is dimpled by landing loons and ducks and rippled by fish splashing, but the hot weekends of summer bring out an armada of skiers and wakeboarders, and dockside boats can get thrashed, bucking about like wild broncos. I have two smaller, lightly built wooden rowboats, but we needed a larger, sturdy workboat. I found what I was looking for in John Gardner’s The Dory Book in which he described a “substantial row boat for fishing and general recreational use…a sturdy craft, built for rough treatment.” This was it! A Lowell Dory Skiff!
Photographs by the author
The boat weighs about 130 lbs and can be easily lifted onto a trailer where, thanks to its flat bottom, it sits upright. As designed, without floorboards, the frames serve well as foot braces for rowers.
At 14′ 9″ long and 52″ abeam the Lowell Dory Skiff was as big a boat as I could build in my small shop. I made space for lofting. The whole “recipe” for the boat’s construction is presented on a single 8 1⁄2″ × 11″ book page. The details include a table of offsets and a list of required fastenings and lumber. I had all the wood I needed at hand. The drawings call for 7⁄8″ oak for bottom cross cleats, sawn frames, bent frames (5⁄8″ × 7⁄8″), skeg, and gunwale, 7⁄8″ white pine for bottom and thwarts, and enough white cedar for 9⁄16″ planking. Copper rivets are specified for fastening the bent frames and laps (as I was building the boat specifically for a freshwater lake, I decided that stainless-steel screws and nails would suffice for fastenings).
Though The Dory Book (comprehensively illustrated by Sam Manning) is the preeminent primer on dory construction, some previous experience would certainly help carry a builder through this project with less head-scratching. Nonetheless, with the masterful information in the book’s Part 2, “How to Build a Dory” near at hand, and a desire to draw a good line and cut to it, anyone with time and care can build a good boat the first time around.
Although not shown in Gardner’s design, I made red-cedar floorboards to protect the bottom and to facilitate movement around the boat. The cedar rubrails replaced the designed rope gunwale fender—they are less of a snagging hazard for fishhooks, and have stood up well to being knocked against the dock.
Building the Lowell Dory Skiff
Using four 10″-wide pine boards for the bottom gave me the middle seam as a centerline as indicated in the drawings. Before clamping up and screwing in the cleats, I planed seam bevels. These would be luted and caulked before I painted the bottom. The sawn oak frames came next. For each, I assembled the bottom and two side parts with pairs of 1⁄8″ brass splice plates (the plans call for 3⁄32″ bronze) epoxied and riveted at the dog legs; I cut the frame corners at the angle between the bottom and garboards to create limber holes. Finally, I got out a white-oak inner stem and pine transom—with red-oak cheeks—beveled each, and set up my ladder frame.
I’ve learned to build lapstrake boats upside down. It allows me to plank solo using clench nails. I set up and screwed-in the assembled dory frames at their appropriate stations on the bottom, being mindful to place them on the correct side of the station mark. Every wood-to-wood connection got a smattering of bedding compound. Then, lifting this “skeleton,” I clamped each cross spall to its respective station on the ladder frame. Securing each cross spall to the ladder frame’s cross cleats formed the bottom’s rocker without the need for weights or overhead shores. After the stem and transom were centered and plumbed, everything got squared and braced. The frame bevels were fine-tuned, and planking commenced.
For a solo rower, the central thwart is comfortable and provides perfect hull trim.
Following Gardner’s concise list of steps for planking—“Laying out, lining, and spiling; Getting out, splicing, and beveling; Hanging and fastening”—I worked my way through the first four strakes. I got out planks from 8′ to 10′ boards of 9⁄16″ white cedar. Each plank had one epoxied scarf joint for appropriate length. I nailed the garboards to the bottom with 3″ #12 stainless-steel ring-shank nails and fastened subsequent plank laps with 7⁄8″ clench nails spaced approximately 3″ apart. In addition to the sawn frames to which I screw-fastened the planks, there were also steam-bent frames that would later be riveted to the planking, and I noted this spacing. Before screwing the planks to the stem and transom I laid a bead of adhesive sealant. For strength and looks I chose red oak for the sheerstrake. Turning the hull upright at this stage allowed me to rivet this final plank using #14 copper nails and burrs and gave me a better look at the sweep of the sheer.
After riveting the steam-bent frames I got out and fitted the false stem, breasthook and knees, and made a plywood pattern of the long, curving gunwale. The gunwale itself is made of three lengths of red oak scarfed with epoxy. I spaced the joints to fall under the placement of the oarlock pads. I fashioned rubrails from the cedar planking offcuts and fastened them with screws; the plans show a rope bumper, but we worried that this would snare too many fishhooks. Instead of the outboard motor pad indicated on Gardner’s drawings, I opted for a sternpost to stiffen the transom and keel. I also cut a sculling notch. I followed Gardner’s interior plan for thwarts and wraparound stern bench, all of which are bright-finished white pine.
The Lowell Dory Skiff Performance
What a joy it is to step down into the Lowell Dory Skiff. There’s no need to land dead-center, for while it’s a lively craft, it’s quite stable, and with its 18″ interior depth you feel safe and secure once you’re settled in.
With a passenger seated in the stern, the rower moves forward to the bow rowing station to maintain good trim. Here, the seat and sheer are a little higher, making the angle of entry for the oars slightly steeper, but the stroke is still efficient.
There are two rowing stations with enough room for paired rowing. The center thwart is a comfortably ergonomic 13 1⁄2″ above the bottom (the forward seat is 15″ above). The skiff’s frames are usefully employed as foot braces. In keeping with the workboat heritage, we use 8′ ash oars. A single rower seated on the center thwart can get the hull to move easily with a few strokes and maintain a steady pace with little drag. The skiff’s rockered bottom and moderate skeg afford both maneuverability and an easy glide. And thanks to the two rowing stations, it’s easy to adjust the hull trim when two or more people are aboard.
Our Lowell dory weighs 130 lbs and—with two strong people—can be lifted on or off its trailer when the need arises, and readily rolled upside down to attend to the bottom. The wide, flat gunwales provide a good handhold when lifting. We slide the boat off and onto its trailer at the beginning and end of the summer season from a sloping shore; when it gets rained-on dockside, we use a hand pump and sponge to drain the bilge. The robust sheer has nicely weathered the hard knocks of summer weekends. The cedar rubrails have become worn in places, but if the need eventually arises, replacing them will be simple.
Tina DeVries
The rowing stations are well spaced for double rowing. With two people at the oars, the dory picks up good speed and travels smoothly through calm waters.
It may be my imagination, but in the years since the Lowell Dory Skiff became our Sunday-morning fishing boat, we seem to be getting more good-natured nods from our neighbors at the lake. Maybe some of them have been getting more uninterrupted sleep. These days they even come by with family and guests to get a closer look at the handsome boat at our dock—like so many traditional wooden rowboats, the Lowell Dory Skiff, a good solid workboat, has considerable charm.
Tom DeVries enjoys learning a little bit more about the boatbuilders’ craft with each design he works on. A Finger Lakes Trout Boat might be next…there’s still some wood in the shed.
Lowell Dory Skiff Particulars
LOA: 14′ 9″
Beam: 4′ 6 3⁄8″
The Dory Book by John Gardner is available from The WoodenBoat Store, $29.95.
Is there a boat you’d like to know more about? Have you built one that you think other Small Boats readers would enjoy? Please email us your suggestions.
"Non, absolument pas!” The French woman’s crossed arms and set jaw conveyed little room for negotiation. As immobile as the granite walls of the lock she controlled, this graying lockkeeper in shapeless dress and old leather shoes was not going to allow two tourists in a kayak to pass. “Non.”
Photographs by the author
Still dressed in our travel clothes, we were happy to have the kayak fully assembled and ready to launch in the Yonne River. We were tired but excited to be heading off on our leisurely exploration of the Canal du Nivernais. Little did we know we were destined to be thwarted in our plans by the very first lockkeeper.
The warm afternoon sun and flat water promised perfect paddling. We had launched in high spirits only a quarter of an hour before. Now, her rejection deflated us. Taking a stroke here and there to maintain position, just downstream of the Batardeau Lock on the Yonne River, I was making no headway in my schoolboy French. So much for our letter to the Office National de la Navigation in Paris. We had inquired diligently about regulations. Monsieur Viannay’s reply had assured us all would be well, and the rules brochure he enclosed said nothing about kayaks in locks. This veteran lockkeeper had her own interpretation. “Non.”
The Batardeau Lock was the first of dozens of locks we had anticipated in a languid three-week summer cruise through Burgundy and Nivernais. The lure had been quaint villages and majestic chateaux, punctuated by romantic camping in sunflower fields or under the towpaths’ trees, all fueled by fabulous Burgundian food and wine, amidst the region’s rich history.
Dejected and beat, our 36-hour day was catching up to us. It had begun with a transatlantic flight from New York to Paris, then a taxi from Orly Airport to the Austerlitz Station, and two trains south to Auxerre, capital of the Yonne department and fourth largest city in Burgundy, where we had assembled our folding double kayak on the banks of the Yonne River. Weighing just 75 lbs, our 17′ Aerius II Klepper packed into two durable green canvas bags. One held the skin, seats, sprayskirts, and miscellaneous frame parts. The other, shaped like a golf bag, held longer frame pieces and the two-part paddles. The longest piece measured 4′ 3″. For overseas travel, we simply checked the bags on commercial flights as oversize baggage.
Now, tails between legs, we reversed course and headed back toward Auxerre. I sat aft, controlling the rudder with foot pedals. Molly had the bow seat. Experienced paddlers, we were proud of our blade work, tight and in unison. Over Molly’s head I could see the majestic Cathedral of Saint Etienne with its Gothic flying buttresses. Framed by trees along each side of the river, it grew closer with every stroke.
“We’re not in Kansas anymore!” Despite being rejected by the keeper of the Batardeau Lock, the view as we paddled back toward the cathedral of St-Etienne in Auxerre lifted our spirits.
Along the city’s waterfront, pleasure canal cruisers (squat, low-powered houseboats) were moored in a row. Péniches, the standard 38.5m-long motorized commercial barges, passed by in the channel; a few historic ones had been tastefully converted into luxury hotel barges. Beyond them sprawled medieval Auxerre. Thwarted by an unhelpful lockkeeper, we were, even so, in France, surrounded by picture-postcard scenery. All would be well.
I was coming off 10 years of knocking about the North Atlantic and Caribbean Sea in big traditional schooners where stunning voyages were always marked by higher highs and lower lows. The thought of a boat trip abroad with no squalls or gales, no wind against tide, no threatening shoals, when the toughest decision might be the choice between Chablis and Chardonnay, had real appeal.
Young and in love in an old French town, we nevertheless needed sleep. A river’s-edge clump of trees and brush would suffice, we hoped, to hide our boat. Rather than disassembling, packing, and lugging the boat with us as we went in search of a bed, we locked it to a tree and took the risk. Near Auxerre’s clocktower, above what had been a gate in the medieval city wall, we found a two-star pension with rooms for 84 francs ($13). It was 1987; neither the Euro nor the internet yet existed.
Auxerre to Canal de Bourgogne
Next morning, drinking coffee near a statue of Saint Nicholas, patron saint of watermen, we changed the plan. We had researched and intended to paddle Canal du Nivernais, supposedly one of the loveliest canals in France, which began in Auxerre, and appropriated the Yonne River as it proceeded south.
Roger Siebert
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Now, hoping for more understanding lockkeepers, we decided to paddle north on the Yonne toward Canal de Bourgogne. Part of the waterway route connecting the Mediterranean Sea and the English Channel, the Yonne flows into the Seine, which then flows through Paris. We knew little about Canal de Bourgogne, but it was meant to be charming.
The first lock on the Yonne lay only 500 yards away. No lockkeeper appeared as we landed along the bulkhead, unsure of our reception. Portaging might be the answer. Our as-yet-untested Bavarian bootswagen (boat cart) proved itself straight away. Molly pulled the camping gear out of the kayak’s forward section, piling it amidships. We placed the stern over the cart and secured it with straps. This allowed me to heft the bow and push the well-balanced rig easily along the path. We had only 125′ to go; it seemed like a snap.
And so it was, until relaunching time. On the far side of the lock, the water level was 4′ lower. To launch, I perched on a toehold along the top of the sloping lock wall. Heaving together, we launched with a splash. As the boat plunged, I tried to check its momentum with the bow line, and promptly tore the forward eye from the canvas deck. Damn! Lesson learned, from then on, we used our tightly rolled foam sleeping pads as rollers, and took the weight with a strap while relaunching.
The next lockkeeper, an older man, talked on the telephone as we approached. He ignored us. We portaged. A couple fished intently near the lock, without a glance in our direction. No one seemed to care about us or our kayak.
When portaging—as here, early on in the trip while we were still on the Yonne River—I found it easier to push the kayak ahead of me rather than pull it behind. With all our gear moved into the cockpit, the bow became light enough for me to tip the boat back onto the cart and start wheeling.
Intervals between locks were short, no more than a mile or two. We would just get going and then need to stop. A very young woman had charge of the third lock of the day, at Boisseaux. We smiled and waved, but made no attempt to lock through. These Yonne River locks were big. In such a tiny boat it might have been insulting to request an opening. A chatty fisherman offered help, which we accepted, and though the portage was the longest so far—several hundred yards—all worked well. Again, until the relaunch. The drop was simply too far to slide the kayak into the water, even with the rollers, and we didn’t dare pitch it over the edge. We unloaded it entirely, rigged a strap as a sling aft, and attached a bow line forward, right around the boat, before lowering; it worked.
On we paddled with barely a breeze, the summer sun warming the bare skin on our arms and legs. Mallards dabbled along the river’s edges. A cheerful young couple with a six-month-old baby, to whom Molly paid a great deal of attention, staffed the next lock, on the outskirts of Monéteau. When I requested drinking water the man smiled broadly, then insisted that we empty all of our water bottles in exchange for his water—better water, fresher water! A bedraggled 24′ fiberglass sloop whose rig was long gone hove into sight, going our way. It needed to lock through, so we joined them. Finally! Locking was far easier than portaging.
Central Burgundy was our kind of place, a kingdom of waterways where the past was never more than a stone’s throw away. A pastoral landscape that bundled old-fashioned human ingenuity, such as cast-iron lock gear, with remnants of nature. And we liked our teamwork, being dependent on each other. We swung together, feeling a new energy. Paddling north under the bridge carrying the Paris–Lyon A6 highway, with cars and trucks whizzing overhead, modernity intruded, but only briefly. Spirits rising, we paddled on, past the shallow Serein River flowing into the Yonne from the right. Shortly before the road bridge linking the villages of Bassou and Bonnard, a lovely wooden punt lay moored along the bank in water so still it perfectly mirrored the boat. Venerable with age, but well-kept, the little craft’s pumpkin-colored sheerstrake set off its dark green hull; it rode quietly, almost timelessly, a serene scene worthy of Claude Monet.
Nearby, a gentle stretch of level bank presented itself between the waterway and a farmer’s field. It was time to call it a day. A good one, we thought: almost 13 miles with seven locks, two of which we had paddled through.
Our first night’s canal-side campsite amid the tall grass and Queen Anne’s lace beneath the trees was typical of most of our overnight resting spots.
Tall grass and Queen Anne’s lace made a natural cushion for our tent, pitched near a row of old poplar trees, sentinels guarding the canal. It looked tranquil. Boat traffic stopped at night, so we would be undisturbed. Out came the food bag. Voilà! A bottle of Beaujolais would pair nicely with the Époisses, a pungent Burgundian cheese. There were fresh green beans to steam on our camp stove, and slices of Charolais beef in butcher’s paper. My vegetarian paddling partner passed on the beef, but happily tucked into the baguette. It was the perfect end to a fine day.
Of Péniches and a World War
From the tent door next morning we watched the mist rising off the water, filtering the early light. Packing up to the chattering of blackcaps and chaffinches, we discussed the locks: The engineering and ingenuity were impressive; their history intriguing. By frequently interrupting our paddling we would avoid “paddler’s elbow” and wrist problems, but the hassles were real. We had not realized how many locks we would have to portage. Getting out of the boat and stretching a bit was satisfying, but a kayak loaded with camping gear is cumbersome. Steep banks and sloping lock walls had to be negotiated; it compromised the charm.
Transiting our final lock on the Yonne, near its confluence with the Armançon River, we paddled through Laroche-Saint-Cydroine. The town marked the beginning of the Canal de Bourgogne, which stretched 150 miles ahead. If we wanted a goal, there was a 2-mile-long tunnel in Pouilly-en-Auxois 96 miles away along the canal. Carved through solid rock 1,837′ above sea level, it went through a mountain, and to reach it required climbing that mountain—in our boat! I suddenly itched to try.
A former competitive rower, I thought that with determination and luck climbing to Pouilly-en-Auxois might be possible. Molly considered our choices: a slow exploration of Burgundian charms or paddling hellbent uphill for 96 miles, through 102 locks. It was, she said, a no-brainer. And I couldn’t argue. Slow and steady won the day.
This was one of the last commercial péniches still hauling freight on the canals. At one time, a massive fleet existed, all built to conform to the locks’ dimensions. Horse-drawn barges were outlawed in 1970, and the towpaths quickly became the domain of walkers and cyclists.
Miles later, in Brienon-sur-Armançon, we watched grain loading from a modern silo into a stout old péniche, one of the last vessels using this canal commercially. For centuries péniches carried grain, firewood, building materials, timber pit props for mines, and other bulk cargoes crucial to pre-modern France. Built to specifications, one peniche filled an entire lock. Back in the day, some péniches even had a stable aboard (or at least a stall) for their draft animals. But the future was elbowing its way on to the canal. Seventeen years before our trip, horse-drawn barges were outlawed—they impeded motorized vessels—and the towpaths became the domain of walkers and cyclists.
We camped by the canal every night and rarely hauled the kayak. There was no traffic on the canal after dark, and besides, the serene pace at which all canal boats traveled meant there were no troubling wakes—we would pick a place to stop, drive in two tent pegs, one for the bow line, the other astern, and tie up. That was it.
With each passing day we locked through more frequently. As we approached each lock we held back, exchanging pleasantries with the crews of entering powerboats. Once they were settled, we paddled in, tying up to the lock wall, or (with permission) simply hanging on to the rail of a boat as the lock filled and we all rose. Lockkeepers, whom we occasionally tipped, took no special notice of us so long as we went through in the company of motorized pleasure boats.
Charmed by huge fields of sunflowers, sweet villages and imposing estates, and by the wonderful wines, we lost track of the days until one morning when we arrived at the first lock of the day and found it closed. Wednesdays were keepers’ day off. Sufficiently adept now at portaging, this was no hardship for us, but hire-boat crews had to amuse themselves otherwise for a day. We landed, stretched, and scoped out the portage as several older men approached in the sunshine.
Our boat cart worked well, but when offered assistance I was never too proud to accept.
Determining that we were Americans, one fellow boldly asked, “Were your fathers in the war?” (They meant, of course, World War II.)
“Yes,” we replied.
“Then we will carry your boat!”
They insisted. It would have been churlish to refuse. Their appreciation for America’s intervention in the war some 40 years earlier, was still very real.
Cafés, Restaurants, and Boulangeries
Taking our time and pausing at cafés was a happy alternative to sprinting for a distant mountain tunnel. It seemed that rural French folk spent a lot of time in local cafés. They smoked unfiltered Gauloises, drank coffee and kir—two measures white wine, one measure Cassis de Dijon—chatted, and argued. They were joined by cats and dogs: fashionably attired elderly ladies brought cats on leashes; dogs lay docilely at their masters’ feet; other dogs came and went through the open door.
And the café crowds welcomed the silly Americans—warmly, at times.
“You are doing what?”
“We are kayaking the canal to Dijon.”
We provoked laughter and protestations; were offered free drinks or occasionally just shrugs. Temporarily being the center of attention was fine, and memories of the first day’s lockkeeper receded.
We grew to like bivouacking in the wilds along that civilized canal. On the outskirts of Saint-Florentin, however, we pitched our tent in a bona fide campground. Saint-Florentin was the biggest city we had seen since Auxerre, though with only 4,000 inhabitants it presented more as a town. People had lived here a long time. We strolled compact streets under the imposing church, built over several centuries throughout the late Medieval and early Renaissance periods. Two- and three-story homes and shops roofed in brown tiles prevailed, with plenty of trees and flowers.
In Saint-Florentin we came across this rendering of the town’s municipal logo. It was easily 20′ by 40′, re-created in flowering annuals.
On a steep bank of grass, next to an ancient tower, gardeners had planted a rendering of the town logo with red, yellow, purple, and white annuals in bloom. Easily 20′ by 40′, weed-free and precise, it conveyed local pride. Burgundians connected to place in ways we could not fathom. As visitors whose siblings and cousins and aunts and uncles were scattered to the winds back in the United States, we found those rooted inter-generational connections intriguing.
Next morning, insistent roosters greeted the day. I liked the French vernacular for rooster, rendered in English since the Middle Ages as “chanticleer,” literally to sing clearly, from chanter (to sing.) We went in search of café au lait and fresh pastries. On past trips, kayak-camping in Chesapeake Bay, we had been quite content without nice china cups of café au lait. And the 10-day Klepper tour we would make the following summer among Maine’s spruce-clad islands was stunning without fresh pastry. But why do without when Burgundy extended its bounty?
Cozy lockkeepers’ cottages, with well-raked gravel in the dooryard, flowers in profusion, and pollarded poplars were the norm—homes that seemed to scale as if they had always been there. Lockkeepers occasionally offered fresh eggs or vegetables for sale. Some had rabbits in hutches, not as pets, but destined for the pot. No one hurried, the welcome was genuine.
The locks had vertical granite walls and iron mooring posts. A boat heading upstream would enter through the open downstream doors. Ahead of it the closed upstream doors held back canal waters whose surface was higher, sometimes 6′ higher. After the boat was securely tied, the lockkeeper closed the lower doors, then opened a valve to flood the lock, raising its water level to that in the canal ahead. With the downstream doors remaining closed, the upstream ones were opened, and the boat proceeded. All of the gear was operated manually by the lockkeeper, sometimes assisted by boat operators.
For the most part we were given warm welcomes by the locals—none more so than the excited greeting extended by this group of children with whom Molly quickly made friends.
Of Children and Bureaucrats
Stopping along the towpath in one town we were immediately befriended, even swarmed, by a bunch of children six to eight years old. There were no adults in sight, this was their domain, and they had the run of it. The girls wanted to touch Molly’s long light-brown hair. One boy posed on the path, holding my paddle upright and saluting. Full of questions and laughter, they told us that kayakers were not a typical sight.
Straddling the canal ahead, the town of Tonnerre appeared, about the size of Saint-Florentin, but much older. Bronze Age burials preceding the Romans have been uncovered here. Two thousand years ago the Romans called this spot Tornodorum. It oozed antiquity. We could see small houses roofed in thin stone; others with rusty-red roof tiles. As we approached Lock 95 a female lockkeeper, about the age of our mothers, stood near the gate.
Her harangue made the chilly reception of day one seem mild. No, we were not going through the lock! No, we were not going to portage around the lock! I remonstrated, telling her that we had transited about 30 locks so far, paddling or portaging without incident. It did not matter! We could not do this! Our very presence affronted her. She did not care a whit about our welcoming letter from the national office. I asked if I might speak to her supervisor. Through the torrent that followed I determined that the Chef Subdivisionnaire had an office in city hall and would be there later that afternoon. We thanked her, turned back downstream, found a place to leave the boat, and walked into town.
The lockkeepers’ cottages were typically small and neat, with abundant floral displays and well-trimmed lawns. The locks themselves were faced with granite-block walls and often equipped with centuries-old iron mooring bollards, as seen here.
Late in the day, we found the supervisor in his office. About my age, he listened, smiled, asked a few questions, then invited us to his home in two hours to meet his wife and kids and have a drink. “Merci, monsieur. That would be very nice.”
The magical hours we spent in the supervisor’s family garden were to be some of the most memorable of the trip. As crickets chirped and birds settled in to roost, the kids overcame their shyness, befriended by Molly’s smile. Monsieur’s wife served appetizers. He poured wine. They could not have been more gracious. Conversation rolled on, a hybrid of French and English. Mentioning nothing about the keeper at Lock 95, he pointed out that what we were doing was not “conventional.” He did not say it was forbidden.
I repeated that we had transited nearly 30 locks so far without incident; then elaborated. Molly and I had done a lot of sailing and kayak touring. I was a professional seaman, a licensed master mariner who had commanded grandes goélettes (big schooners) in the Atlantic and Caribbean. His eyes widened. I knew that the Tall Ships reference was my ace. People always thought it was romantic.
I extolled the glories of overseas France—Martinique, Guadeloupe, Saint Martin, and Saint Barts in the Caribbean; Saint Pierre and Miquelon in the North Atlantic, near Newfoundland. Had I been to those places, he wanted to know? “Yes, monsieur.” All of them. He knew very few people who had seen those far-flung outposts. As a patriotic Frenchman he was proud of overseas France, and this laughing American sitting in his garden brought those romantic territories closer to home.
When our passage through a lock coincided with one or more powerboats going our way, we would make the most of the company and pass through unchallenged by the lockkeeper. At such times we would always hang back and let the much-larger boats enter the lock ahead of us.
The wine went around. Madame put the children to bed and still we talked, with Molly asking about his career on the canal. He was a functionary in the Ministry of the Environment in charge of that section, he said, a secure government job on which to raise a family.
We left with his promise that if we came to City Hall in the morning, he would issue a permit. He was true to his word.
Next morning, the woman at Lock 95 did not make eye contact. She looked at the permit, and stamped our newly issued passage card. We tipped her 10 francs (about $1.50). Effectively a “Get Out of Jail Free” card, our new customized permit meant no more obstructive lockkeepers.
From a Burgundy Chateau to a Dentist
Five miles beyond Tonnerre, the size and grandeur of the Château de Tanlay surprised us. It is considered the finest great house in Burgundy. Accessed by a bridge over a moat, the sumptuous limestone buildings were constructed in fits and starts between 1555 and 1649. Cylindrical towers on the main house set off the corners of a grand courtyard, all luxury and elegance. One wall on the grounds consisted of a row of shell-headed niches, each easily 25′ tall, flanked by classic pillars.
Tradesmen on scaffolding were working on several stonework sections and the slate roof. I speculated that repairs never ceased; that these men could be the great-great-great-grandsons of masons who had built the chateau. Men from 400 years earlier, who might not have been honored with gravestones, but whose creation endured.
Johann Klepper of Rosenheim, Germany, began marketing collapsible kayaks in 1907, capitalizing on the lure of waterways inaccessible with conventional wooden boats. Sales boomed. By the 1980s, his brilliant design had evolved into a one-piece skin with a Hypalon rubber bottom and canvas deck. Using snap-lock fittings, paddlers could assemble the varnished hardwood skeleton of the boat, and slip it into the skin. My favorite step was the final one, inflating the sponsons that ran the length of the boat, one on each side. Inflation, by mouth, stretched the skin tautly over the frame. Total assembly time: about 15 minutes.
Still ascending the Armançon Valley, we occasionally swam and splashed and fished in the nearby Armançon River, whose waters were clean, cleaner than those of the canal they fed. Though I cast with a light spinning rod, I never landed a fish.
Days slipped by on placid summer waters; there was never much wind. One afternoon, however, a fresh following breeze inspired us to rig Molly’s jacket as a spinnaker. She trimmed, I steered, and we scooted. Pastures of grazing Charolais cattle, wooded stretches, and open fields slipped by effortlessly, punctuated by villages and farms. Secluded campsites were always plentiful, bird life abundant, and the night sky an awning overhead. Life was easy, with simple pleasures.
But the day before we arrived in Buffon—a village I wanted to visit because of the correspondence between the 18th-century naturalist Comte de Buffon and Thomas Jefferson—Molly mentioned a toothache. She never complained, not just on this trip, but in life as a whole. By Buffon, she hurt. During a quick visit to the estate and workrooms of the Comte, we learned that 4 1⁄2 miles ahead, beyond the villages of Saint-Remy and Blaisy, the town of Montbard had a dentist. We double-timed it.
The provincial examination room was not quite a museum, but close. The antiquated dental chair, a bulky porcelain spit-basin, and old-fashioned implements would have been familiar in our grandparents’ youth. For the first time in weeks, we would have preferred a place where the past was not so present. The genial dentist spoke no English. I hoped he had good training. Dictionary in hand, I scrambled to translate.
On most days there was little or no wind, but one afternoon a fresh breeze picked up. Molly’s rain jacket made an effective, if rudimentary, sail, and for a while the paddles were put aside and nature propelled us on our way.
Her situation was rare, he said. The root of her tooth was growing sideways through the gum; he would need to do a root canal.
Molly was firm: “Get pain killers and antibiotics,” she said, “and ask him to stabilize it. No root canal until we’re back in the 20th century.” By the time we left, she was loopy with pain and pills. I tucked her into a nearby hotel and went to retrieve our boat.
We had paddled for more than two weeks, transiting 60 locks and about 80 miles; it had been a pastoral idyll, hassles and all. There were no regrets. But now the paddling was done. I disassembled and packed the Klepper, marveling again at its design, and wheeled it to the hotel on our boat cart.
Work on the 150-mile-long Canal de Bourgogne was started in 1774 and completed in 1832. It links the Yonne River at Migennes to the Saône at Saint-Jean de Losne, and at its highest point at Pouilly-en-Auxois passes through a 2-mile-long tunnel. Once a busy commercial thoroughfare, by the late 20th century the waterway was quiet, and much of the time we had it all to ourselves.
By the time we boarded the train to Dijon next day, Molly’s pills had kicked in and she had reverted to her noncomplaining self. She was up for more adventure, and there would be time for a wonderful tour and wine tasting at Château du Clos Vougeot on the Côte d’Or, and sightseeing in Dijon. But, we agreed, days later as we waited to board the flight back to New York, the real treasures of Burgundy and Nivernais were best accessed by paddling on ancient canals, where charms awaited around every bend.
Jeff Bolster has been afloat in everything from single kayaks to 300-ton schooners, exploring far-flung corners of the North Atlantic, the Caribbean, and the South Pacific. Inspired by a lifetime afloat, his books include Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail and The Mortal Sea: Fishing the Atlantic in the Age of Sail. He lives with his wife, Molly, in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
French Canals in 2025
I have been asked if one might do a similar trip today. An internet search for the Fédération Française de Canoë Kayak suggests that while canoeing and kayaking are thriving on French rivers as never before, such craft are generally not allowed to pass through locks. Portaging around locks is permitted. Some canal locks, however, appear to be surrounded by thick woods or brush, which would make the hauling and relaunching of a kayak challenging. But rural France is still replete with picturesque villages, vineyards, chateaux, and natural scenes, charmingly presented from the vantage point of a kayak, and intrepid adventurers seeking those charms might do better to investigate paddling rivers such as the Dordogne, the Allier, or the Loire, rather than the canals.—Jeff Bolster
If you have an interesting story to tell about your adventures with a small boat, please email us a brief outline and a few photos.
Wood encapsulation is an almost universal principle in modern boatbuilding. As amateur builders, we feel reassured when our labor of love can be encased in a protective plastic barrier. It just seems wrong to spend hundreds of hours building a boat out of wood only to toss it into water like a sponge into the sink—yet ancient boatbuilding techniques worked with, not against, water absorption.
For seafaring boats of the Pacific Northwest, the enemy is rain rather than salt water. With approximately 80″ of rain per year, freshwater pooling in wooden boats is a microbe haven whereas salt water, in this relatively cool climate, is inherently a preservative. Here, unless a wooden boat is hauled into a shop, it will be bathed in rain or water vapor for eight to nine months per year, and tarping it can spell disaster. Coverings wrapped tightly over the gunwales trap humidity like a greenhouse, promoting new cracks in the wood and fungal stains across the brightwork, under the varnish.
To Coat or Not to Coat
It’s natural to assume that paint or varnish, or especially a few coats of epoxy, will waterproof wood. And to an extent, this approach does work for lightly used pleasure boats. Full encapsulation is inherent in a stitch-and-glue boat where plywood planking has fiberglass-and-epoxy protection inside and out. But for the traditional plywood-on-frame design, ’glassing an interior is unrealistic, and a boatbuilder will struggle to apply a barrier that penetrates all the cracks and crevices created by extensive and awkward framing joints. Once a boat is complete and in use, a proliferation of unseen dings, scratches, rubs, and pokes will perforate a coating of paint, varnish, or epoxy-varnish.
Photographs by the author
Applying water-barrier protection such as ’glass and epoxy to a complicated interior structure is not always practical. For working boats like this Pacific City dory, applying boat soup on an annual basis is an affordable and long-lasting approach. The bilges of KAPETAN, seen here, were treated when new and have been re-treated annually for the past 10 years.
In the Pacific Northwest, many ply-on-frame boats are built of fir marine plywood on fir framing. The materials are easy to work, widely available, and more or less affordable. But fir is soft, and a varnish- or paint-over-epoxy coating is vulnerable due to the softer underlying wood matrix that provides less support to the thin barrier layer. The day-to-day grind will, one way or another, penetrate the coating and, once entrance points are created, water creeps in and under.
Untreated, Douglas fir is rot resistant and can withstand countless cycles of absorption and drying. But around a small puncture a barrier coat will trap water and prevent normal cycles of evaporation.
“Poison It and Oil It”
The life of an Oregon beach-launched semi-dory (or drift boat, on Oregon’s coast-range rivers) is about as hard as it gets, and traditional-boat owners in the region long ago gravitated to a simple approach to preserving the life of their craft: “Don’t paint it, don’t epoxy it, don’t varnish it—poison it and oil it.”
Ideally, the treatment is first applied to bare wood surfaces, when the boat is new, but it can be applied whenever there is bare, untreated wood to be protected.
An important trick when applying boat soup is to warm the boat so that the oil retains its low viscosity, reaching into nooks and crannies, and penetrating deep into the plywood to achieve maximum saturation. A warm sunny day can often provide enough heat to make a significant difference.
Since an oil-and-wood matrix can, by itself, be a beneficial environment for some microorganisms, the local prescription is first to saturate a boat’s interior plywood and framing with an antimicrobial/antifungal preservative—to “poison it.” I use the iodine-based (iodopropynl butylcarbamate, IPBC) Woodlife Classic Clear. Next, once the wood is completely dry, the boat is warmed in the sun or a heated shop to prepare it for oiling. (The warmer wood temperature will help to maintain the oil’s lower viscosity as it penetrates, and also create a temperature gradient that pulls the oil inward.)
Now the boat is ready for the “boat soup” to be applied.
What’s in the Soup?
Boat soup refers to a variety of recipes that include oils and turpentine. In my region, it is commonly a mix approximating 45% turpentine, 45% raw linseed oil, and 10% pine tar and/or tung oil, or similar. Raw linseed oil penetrates far better than boiled, which tends to cure like a varnish, an outcome fundamentally at odds with the goal of oiling plywood. Pine tar promotes a darkening of the plywood over time until, after decades of use, it is essentially black, while tung oil only accentuates the wood grain’s natural color. The boat soup has a low viscosity allowing it to penetrate beyond the surface grain to provide protection while still allowing the wood to breathe.
How to Apply the Boat Soup
Typically, the mix is applied with a large brush. Working on bare wood, a dory owner may apply several coats, requiring two gallons or more for a new 22′ dory’s interior. After this first multi-coat application, the grain begins to fill, and thereafter usually requires only one coat per season.
In damp conditions, such as those experienced in the Pacific Northwest where annual rainfall on the coast can exceed 80″, wrapping a wooden boat in a waterproof tarpaulin can trap humidity in the boat’s interior. To avoid this, it is often better simply to leave the boat uncovered and tilted so that rainwater flows out through an open drain plug.
Does It Hold Up?
Of the oiled Pacific dories I have examined, interior plywood that has been treated with boat soup generally looks remarkably clean for its age, with limited or no checking. In contrast, plywood surfaces that have been painted, varnished, or even epoxy-coated, show significant checking. My assumption is that low viscosity, non-curing boat soup allows the plywood to go through countless temperature and moisture cycles more evenly, in a way that supports the stability of the plywood’s surface layer, and thus mitigates checking. Some local dorymen have suggested that the quality of the plywood also plays a significant role. True AA marine fir plywood would seem to be a thing of the past, and most modern AB plywood does seem to check more easily. Nevertheless, boats whose wood has been saturated with numerous coats of soup early, show significantly less checking and any checking that does appear, appears later in life.
As I enter my sixth season in the Pacific City Dory fishery, my appreciation for this low-tech approach to wood protection has only grown—for its simplicity, its aesthetics, and its longevity. Scores of 50-year-old Pacific City Dories are still in regular use with beautiful, oiled plywood interiors—a tried and tested local adaptation to a challenging environment.
John Goodell is a museum director and wildlife biologist. In 2019 he built his boat, TSHAWYTCHA, a 23′ Glen-L Hunky Dory. He oiled her interior when new, and has continued to renew the oil treatment every year since. He has worked TSHAWYTCHA in the Pacific City Fishing Dory fleet since her launching.
You can share your tips and tricks of the trade with other Small Boats readers by sending us an email.
"Best colors—standard goods since 1846… We custom match an endless selection of classic, as well as modern, colors in a variety of finishes. We have always handcrafted all of our marine paint … premium ingredients and small, handmade batches.” When you see such words on a website, you know you’re in the right place to find a quality boat finish. And, indeed, for the past 179 years, the Kirby family has been mixing some of the world’s finest marine paints, all handmade in small batches. Today, the George Kirby Jr. Paint Company (Kirby’s for short) is run by George Kirby IV (seventh generation) and his wife, Shari, who continue to offer great products and exceptional technical assistance and customer service from their facility in New Bedford, Massachusetts.
Audrey and I came across Kirby’s Marine Topside Hull and Deck Paint about 10 years ago when we were in search of a custom color for a special paint scheme for our Sunfish. George mixed up an international-orange color with just the right amount of red, blue, and yellow pigments, and also sent us a color-chip card of Kirby’s traditional colors.
Kirby’s Topside paints come in three levels of sheen—gloss, semigloss, low-luster—and three sizes—gallon, quart, and pint. They are described by George as “old school” paints blended from alkyd resin, titanium dioxide, zinc oxide, talc, mineral spirits, and bentonite. Thicker than most modern one-part marine topside paints, which have considerably more solvent, Kirby’s Topside is user-friendly, but if you’re new to the product it can take a coat or two to get used to the viscosity.
Photographs by the author
When rolling and tipping, we thin the paint with conditioner to keep a wet leading edge. Here we’re applying the first coat of low-luster Maynard Bray Off White—one of Kirby’s many custom colors made available to all customers—over a single coat of Kirby’s white marine primer.
Applying Kirby’s Topside Paint
Topside can be brushed, rolled, or sprayed on wood, metal, and fiberglass that is properly prepared, dry, and clean. On most of our boats we apply a single coat of Kirby’s White Marine Primer as a bridge coat to ensure proper adhesion, unless we are going over an old coat of Kirby paint, in which case only a light scuff with 120-grit sandpaper is in order. The paint is easy to sand and, if properly hardened, does not clog the paper.
The Kirby gloss paints have fewer solids than the low-luster and, as a result, are typically thinner, but in any of the three available sheens, the opacity is excellent. A fine uniform color finish that completely hides the substrate can usually be achieved with two coats of Topside over one coat of Primer, although if you thin the paint—as we do to get the best viscosity to match specific brushes or roller covers—you may need three. When rolling and tipping we use a 9:1 mix of paint to Kirby’s Conditioner and find that the paint self-levels to a smooth finish with rarely a run or sag; where there are flaws, they are typically due to application error rather than any problem with the paint. A well-applied coat will cure in about 24 hours if temperatures are in the low 70s and humidity is moderate.
The paint has a durable finish. On the Kirby website one happy customer writes that they have not needed to repaint their kayak for 10 years, and we, too, have at least one boat that was painted a decade ago and still looks good. Of course, longevity will vary according to use—a boat on a swinging mooring, exposed to the weather year-round, will need to be repainted sooner than our boats that are stored on land and under cover when not in use. One high-profile customer, the 114′ Sailing School Vessel ERNESTINA-MORRISSEY, was painted three years ago and is still looking shipshape after continuous exposure to the harsh maritime elements of New Bedford, Massachusetts.
Whether standard, existing-custom, or new-custom colors, Kirby paints can be ordered in pints, quarts, or gallons. The conditioner, described by Kirby as a “special, pre-blended solution of thinning agents formulated to control the consistency and flow of paint,” can be ordered in half-pints, pints, and quarts. The Skipper Bahamas Blue seen here, was custom-made for Audrey; the board behind the cans has two coats of the low-luster (satin) finish.
Topside paint is available in 67 standard colors but can be custom-made to just about any color. We recently created Skipper Bahamas Blue for our Bahamian dinghy—having found a color we liked in a range of interior house paints, we sent George the RGB color numbers from that paint’s card and he went to work. Kirby accepts orders for as little as a single pint—popular among modelmakers—and in most cases George will mix the paint the day he receives the order, and ship it the next business day. George keeps records of orders so custom colors can be matched for reordering later.
With nearly two centuries of service behind the company, the depth of knowledge at Kirby’s is second to none. Whether you call seeking advice on how to prepare a surface, apply a paint, or retouch a finish, George is there to help. He can advise on paint, prep tools, or the best brush-and-roller system for any given project. And, while Kirby’s does offer a variety of tools, brushes, and rollers at very competitive prices, there is no hard sell when you call.
Whether you’re looking for that perfect pint of a premium custom color for your historic model, or a couple of quarts for your sailboat, kayak, canoe, or rowboat, give Kirby’s a call—George or Shari will be happy to help.
Kent and Audrey “Skipper” Lewis love the smell of Kirby marine paint and pine tar soap. Their adventures are logged at smallboatrestoration.blogspot.com.
Kirby’s Marine Topside Hull and Deck paints are available in gallons, quarts, and pints, $122.99, $47.99, and $29.99 respectively. Shipping is free on paint orders over $150 within the contiguous U.S.
It’s well known that meals taste better outdoors. For many of the same reasons—fresh air, heightened senses, and reduced stress among them—taking a shower at the end of a day’s cruising, whether at anchor or in camp, is much more enjoyable and restorative than showering at home. As I get older, and perhaps wiser, I have become less eager to make miles and more interested in being comfortable while afloat or ashore. Flextail, the company that makes an air pump that quickly inflates my thickest and most comfortable sleeping pads, has made a submersible water pump that is at the heart of my new system for taking a shower anywhere I might cruise.
Photographs by the author
The Max Shower has three parts—pump, showerhead, and hose—with quick-release connections that make the system easier to pack. While this photograph was taken on a sandy beach, it’s best to keep the system out of sand and dirt to minimize the chances of clogging the water outlet holes.
Flextail’s Max Shower pump measures 4 3⁄4″ × 3 1⁄8″ × 1 5⁄8″ and weighs 11 oz. The hose is 7′ 3″ long, and the showerhead is 2 7⁄8″ across and 3 3⁄4″ front to back and has a folding clip so that the shower can be hung and used hands-free. A 7.4V, 2500mAh battery supplies the power and is recharged via an included type-C USB cable. Fully charged, the battery should power the pump for 70 minutes on high flow or 110 minutes on low.
Flextail’s website specifies the Max Shower’s flow rate as between 2.2 and 3 liters (0.58 and 0.79 gallons) per minute. (The manual included with the device specifies 6–10L/min 1.36–2.27gal/min, which is evidently incorrect.) With the showerhead positioned at the same level as the pump, I measured 2.97 liters (0.78 gallons) per minute on low flow and 3.3 liters (0.87 gallons) per minute on high flow. Typical domestic showerheads deliver a maximum of 6.8 liters (1.8 gallons) per minute. The Max Shower’s rate of flow diminishes the higher the showerhead is above the pump, and while it doesn’t provide the pressure one expects at home, it delivers plenty of satisfying flow for bathing.
The pump is waterproof—its motor, switch, and charging port are rated IPX7—and operates by being fully immersed. I use a collapsible bucket as the reservoir. The pop-up shower tent I use is as much for retaining warmth as it is for privacy.
The Max Shower web page notes the water outlet holes in the showerhead have a diameter of 0.012″, which produce “a strong and invigorating water flow for a truly refreshing and enjoyable shower experience.” While this is true, the holes can get clogged and reduce that flow. The pump’s intake has a stainless-steel-mesh filter, but its openings are about 0.05″ wide, and can allow the passage of particles large enough to block the water outlet holes. The Max Shower is still functional even if some streams are blocked; clogged holes are quickly evident because they either deflect a stream or block it. With the showerhead disconnected, I was able to clear most of the grit by blowing air through a soda straw at the face of the showerhead, or poking the grit back through the holes with a needle, and then flushing it out of the housing with a strong faucet stream. While the showerhead can be disassembled by unscrewing the ring that holds it together, it’s not a good way to remedy clogged outlet holes—it’s difficult to put the head back together so that the interior parts are aligned to provide the proper flow of water.
The Max Shower can be used for more than showers: it can wash dirt off feet, children, dogs, and gear, to mention but a few. While the manual doesn’t specify if the Max Shower can be used with salt as well as fresh water, when queried, Flextail replied it can but they recommend rinsing the system with fresh water after use with salt water.
A pop-up shower tent and a collapsible 2.6-gallon bucket complete my shower system. The shower tent serves not only for privacy but also to retain the warmth provided by the shower spray and eliminate any chilling breeze. With the bucket filled with warm water, heated by camp stove or campfire, there’s more than enough for two thorough showers if you stop and restart the flow between soaping and rinsing. The water can be turned off by either closing the valve on the showerhead or switching off the pump. Using the whole bucketful for one shower is a soothing indulgence.
At the end of a long day on the water, the Max Shower can make the difference between collapsing into bed feeling worn out, or turning in happy, relaxed, and restored.
Christopher Cunningham is editor at large of Small Boats.
The Max Shower is available from Flextail for $56.99 and from online and retail outdoor equipment retailers.
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.
Of all human senses, it is said that smell is the most evocative: the unexpected waft of perfume that brings back the long-missed presence of a loved one, the subtle odor of mustiness that transports you to a little-used summer camp of childhood, the lingering hint of newly baked bread that recalls a grandmother’s kitchen…. For Dylan Spaulding, the smell of fresh-cut cedar carries him straight back to childhood memories of his father.
Dylan grew up in rural New Mexico, a state with little association with boats or boatbuilding, but from an early age he shared a love of woodworking and then of boats with his father. His father had grown up in New England and before moving to New Mexico in the 1970s had worked as a carpenter at South Street Seaport and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. When he moved west, he continued working with wood but, says Dylan, “mostly doing carpentry and shop displays; work that didn’t satisfy his creative side.”
Photographs by Dylan Spaulding
There is an old adage among boatbuilders that you can never have too many clamps and when it came to fitting the outwales and inwales on his Northeaster Dory, Dylan proved the saying true, using a combination of long bar clamps and individual spring clamps. The puzzle joints—visible in the starboard strakes—are standard in CLC kits; they are easy to align, and require minimal clamping pressure during assembly.
When Dylan was in third grade, the family moved to Essex, England, to live on a 31′ 6″ Maurice Griffiths–designed Golden Hind his parents had bought there. For a year, the four of them—Dylan, his mother, father, and 15-year-old brother—sailed the cutter up and down England’s East Coast, across the English Channel, north to Copenhagen, and, for the winter, to northern Holland to tie up alongside a sailing barge in a canal. “My brother hated being cooped up on a boat with us, and my mother, who was a New Mexico native and had no prior sailing experience, had had ideas of Mediterranean cruising, not Baltic winters. In retrospect, I realize my father also had very little experience. It was before the digital age, and our only source of weather forecasts was the crackly BBC radio broadcasts; navigation was all dead-reckoning and paper; and we had an analog depthsounder on which the needle went round—and round—and if you didn’t know how many rotations it had done you couldn’t be sure if you were about to hit bottom or were in deep water. We frequently ran aground.” For eight-year-old Dylan, the year on that wooden boat in Europe was “a formative adventure.”
Once construction was complete, Dylan turned the boat over to paint the hull and fit a bronze half-round strip to protect the skeg when beaching.
Some five years after their return to New Mexico, when Dylan was 13, he and his father decided to build a Rushton Wee Lassie. The building process had been documented in a 1991 article by Mac McCarthy published in WoodenBoat magazine, and they had found a table of offsets in Atwood Manley’s book, Rushton and His Times in American Canoeing. Dylan lofted the patterns for the molds, and he and his father built the canoe of strip-planked cedar. “I spent much of my eighth-grade spring break gluing cedar strips together,” recalls Dylan. “To this day, the smell of freshly sawn cedar takes me back to my dad’s shop and that project.” Dylan still owns the canoe. It hangs in his garage, above his own boatbuilding workspace.
A few years after they built the canoe, father and son tried their hands at some stitch-and-glue construction and built a Cape Charles Sea Kayak, referencing two more articles in WoodenBoat magazine. When finished, they used the boats together, forging memories far beyond the workshop. “One of the memorable trips,” says Dylan, “was to the upper lakes of Glacier National Park, where my father and I floated silently, the lake to ourselves, watching bald eagles in the trees, and camping.”
On launching day in November 2024, Dylan’s son—who had not been born when Dylan embarked on the building project—was proud to be PETRICHOR’s first passenger.
Twenty years later, in 2015, Dylan’s father passed away from cancer. Almost immediately Dylan decided to build another boat. “It felt like something I needed to do, partly in his memory.” He wanted to build something more substantial than a canoe or kayak, but remembered the enjoyment gleaned from a small boat. “I wanted to sail, but also recalled how great it was to cartop a lightweight boat and travel to locations farther from home,” he says.
He settled on the Chesapeake Light Craft (CLC) Northeaster Dory. Although it would need to be transported by trailer rather than on top of a car, Dylan believed the design ticked the rest of his boxes: it would be suitable for use on the various bodies of water within a few hours’ drive of his home in northern California, and was large enough for “serious boat camping and bigger water” but light for its size and capacity. He ordered a bare-hull kit from CLC.
During the years spent on the project there were periods when Dylan was unable to work on the hull itself. He used those times to pay attention to the details and to learn new skills: metalwork so he could fashion his own hardware; marquetry so he could add complementary padauk inlays in the thwarts and mast partner; and sparmaking.
“I hadn’t done any real woodworking since I was a teenager, so I decided to assemble the hull from the kit but make the rest from scratch to allow room for customization and creativity, and to challenge and develop my skills. I started out with very few tools, but finished with the equivalent of a simple woodshop crammed into a single-car garage.” Much of the work, he says, spilled out into the driveway, “to the amusement and confusion of our neighborhood.”
For the most part, when fitting out the bare hull, Dylan followed CLC’s design—spacered inwales, balanced lug rig, daggerboard and rudder assembly—but added his own touches to suit his taste and to give the boat traditional appeal. “In a way, stitch-and-glue felt like cheating, because the CLC kits go together so easily, even for beginners. I wanted to reacquaint myself with the skills my dad had taught me as a child but also to learn hand-tool skills that I hadn’t gotten from him. It led me to overthink at times and render some parts of the project more elaborately than they needed to be. For instance, I didn’t like how the CLC outwales were simply rounded off at the bow, so instead I brought them together with a compound miter joint.” He installed wooden belaying pins for the lugsail’s halyard and downhaul, wrapped the tiller with decorative knotwork, leathered the mast collar, and used bronze cleats where cleats were necessary. His spars came out of a single spruce pole—“salvaged from a San Francisco fireman’s ladder and gifted by a friend.”
To achieve a more traditional look, Dylan fashioned silicon-bronze-cheeked blocks, handworked anti-chafing leather parts, and used Duckworks’ Raid Braid for the running rigging; elsewhere he stained three-strand synthetic line to simulate manila rope.
Inspired by correspondents on CLC’s online forum, and by articles in Small Boats, he added sliding side seats to create a sleeping platform. The seats can also be removed so that, following designer John Harris’s advice, Dylan can sit on the floor to steer; he has yet to decide whether he prefers the seats or the floor. He added extra tiedowns for dry bags, stained synthetic line for his painter and anchor rode, made his own bronze-cheeked blocks, and fashioned a leather bailer as described by Ben Fuller.
Dylan began building his Northeaster Dory in 2017, but it would be 2024 before he was finished. Life, it seems, rather than lack of skills, was the prime delayer in the project. “I enjoyed the building, but I couldn’t always find uninterrupted blocks of time to work on it. I got married, we purchased our first home and had a child, I changed jobs, and then, like everyone else, waded through the pandemic.” At times, he says, the slow pace was frustrating, but it was also good to have the project in times of stress—“coming back to the boat was always a relief.” In the beginning, he reflects, it was “somewhat daunting to take on a project of this magnitude without my woodworking father behind me,” and when he found himself adjusting to fatherhood in his own right, building the boat seemed all the more poignant. And, says Dylan, when he wasn’t physically working on the boat, he was mentally planning next steps. “Building the finicky parts from scratch required honing my skills, learning many new techniques, and mastering tools my father had managed, one by one as they became necessary.”
Courtesy of David Leonard
PETRICHOR and Dylan making the most of a gentle breeze at the start of their first summer together.
The boat was launched in Sacramento, California, in November 2024. Dylan’s son, who had grown up enough to help with some of the final sanding, was proud to be the boat’s first passenger. The aroma of wood, glue, and paint no longer hangs in the garage, but when Dylan came to name the dory, it was another scent from childhood that came to mind. “Growing up in the desert, the scent of earth after rain brings me a sense of relief; this build did that too. The scientific name for that scent is Petrichor—it seemed appropriate.”
Jenny Bennett is editor of Small Boats.
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The 11′ 6″ Guillemot design (pronounced gilly-mot) is a shorter cousin to the 15′ 2″ Tammie Norrie. Designer Iain Oughtred drew this robust little boat along the lines of a nineteenth-century ship’s boat or large yacht tender. He tells us, “She floats on her designed waterline with three adults aboard, and can carry a load of gear as well…. Two [adults] plus two children might be a comfortable maximum for pottering about.”
This hull shows a slight hollow at the forefoot. The lines then flow smoothly through particularly firm bilges in the mid-section. Finally they sweep up easily to a nice wineglass transom. This is a burdensome yet shapely hull. Compared to many dinghies, Guillemot has flatter floors, firmer bilges, and more carrying capacity. The designer explains that, while she might not prove so fast as some other tenders, this boat will be “a lot steadier in the water and less flighty.” He notes that she will perform well whether rowing or sailing, and “can happily take a light outboard motor as well.”
Guillemot’s drawings include three sail plans: a standing lug, a balance lug, and a sloop. The boomless standing lug will be the simplest to build and to set up. It might be considered as auxiliary propulsion for a boat that will be driven primarily by oars.
The balance lug offers fine all-around performance and more precise control of sail set. You can vary the amount of twist in the sail by adjusting where the boom and yard secure to mast. Farther aft along the boom and farther up the yard will result in less twist. In light air you can ease up on the main downhaul, which will give fuller shape to the sail. When it breezes on, tighten the downhaul. The resulting “flatter” sail will make for a safer and better handling boat.
The more complex sloop rig might be a good choice for builders who plan to set aside oar and outboard in favor of sailing exclusively.
Guillemot’s hull will go together in glued-lapstrake fashion with high-quality plywood strakes and epoxy. The well-detailed six-sheet plans set includes full-sized patterns for the stem and all molds. For builders who prefer working with solid cedar strakes and bent-oak frames, the designer includes specifications for traditional lapstrake construction.
When drawing this good little boat, Oughtred successfully combined robust stability and pleasant appearance in a small package. Guillemot will earn her keep along most any waterfront.
LOA: 11′ 6″
Beam: 4′ 5″
Draft:
–(cb up) 7″
–(cb down) 2′ 8″
Weight about 140 lbs
Sail area:
–balanced lug 64 sq ft
–standing lug 55 sq ft
–sloop 72 sq ft
Completed Guillemot Images
The mast for the gunter sloop rig is supported by shrouds and a forestay, not a mast partner.
The sloop rig here carries 72 sq ft of sail. The plans include options for single sails: a balanced lug rig, with boom, carrying 64 sq ft of sail; and a standing lug, loose footed, carrying 55 sq ft.
Inspired by the workboats of Brittany, France, François Vivier designed Beg-Meil as a safe and seaworthy daysailer. She can be singlehanded even in windy conditions.
The latest design by French small-craft designer François Vivier (see WoodenBoat No. 212) is called Beg-Meil, a name that derives from a famous fishing village in Brittany, a region whose historic work-boats have deeply inspired the designer over the years. The design is not completely new—it inherits the same hull lines and dimensions of Vivier’s earlier Ilur, of 1988—but it fulfills a very different purpose.
Ilur was designed as an elegant and seaworthy day-sailing and rowing boat, inspired by the traditional lines of small fishing boats of Brittany. The design has proven to be Vivier’s most popular. Nearly a thousand plans have been sold, some of them for use in places as far-flung as lakes in the Alps and islands in the Pacific. Her generous freeboard makes her very able in choppy seas, and her seaworthiness has been demonstrated by some tremendous passages (which the designer does not recommend!) along Brittany’s coastline, which is renowned for rough seas. With 55 gallons of built-in flotation, the boat is unsinkable—but it is still an open boat, without any decking.
Beg-Meil, instead of merely copying Ilur, builds on the earlier design’s concepts of safe and seaworthy sailing but takes them a bit further. To begin with, the new design’s half-decks make it less prone than Ilur to taking on water in rough seas. At the same time, the volume of built-in flotation has been increased to a hefty 100 gallons. The flotation is divided between one water-tight compartment at the stern and a second one at the bow, which leaves room forward of the mast for a locker.
Greater sailing safety was also Vivier’s objective in reconfiguring the centerboard. Instead of the light laminated plywood centerboard of Ilur, Beg-Meil uses a 97-lb steel plate that functions effectively as ballast, not only increasing the boat’s stiffness and stability under sail but also improving her windward sailing abilities.
François Vivier
The designer has the amateur builder in mind. An option for full-sized mold patterns in the plans set allows the builder to bypass lofting, the otherwise necessary task of drawing the plans out full-sized.
The Ilur sail plan, honing closely to her Brittany roots, has always been a variation on traditional lug sails common in France: standing lug (without a boom) or balance lug (with a boom), sometimes in combination with a jib. The standing-lug version became very popular because of its simplicity and efficiency: it has one freestanding mast, one halyard, and only one sheet to handle.
There is no boom nor standing rigging to take care of when sailing with a family or going fishing, although a whisker pole is useful when running downwind. In comparison, Beg-Meil’s sail plan is a gaff sloop rig, and although it offers greater sail area it has a bowsprit and standing rigging supporting its mast, taking it further away from her distant French working-boat origins. The boat has a more “yachty” appearance in comparison with her elder sister. As usual, the penalty for this luxury comes with greater weight—110 lbs more than the earlier design. The free-standing mast of the lug rig also has the advantage of being easily struck to lessen windage under oars—an option not available to the gaff rig, with its shrouds and forestay.
As with most of Vivier’s designs, Beg-Meil, like Ilur, was designed with amateur construction in mind. Both call for either strip-planking or glued-lapstrake plywood construction, in either case with the extensive use of epoxy throughout. Structurally, however, instead of following traditional practice of having steam-bent or laminated frames, Beg-Meil’s planking is glued over plywood bulkheads. Since it is designed to be quite full, the hull has convex outboard surfaces throughout, with no hollows in the forefoot or in her run. This shape makes the planking work comparatively simple, requiring only moderate twist in the planks or strips during installation.
François Vivier
With a high-peaked gaff rig, Beg-Meil looks and handles more like a small yacht than like the workboats that helped inspire her hull design.
To avoid the intricacies of lofting—that task of drawing out the hull lines full-sized, which can sometimes prove daunting to amateurs—Vivier’s plans offer optional full-sized patterns, computer-drawn on very stable polyester sheets. These address critically important shapes, such as the forms of the stem, transom, bulkheads, and many other structural parts, including their bevels. For the plywood-lapstrake version, extremely accurate profiles of every strake are also
drawn out full-size, leaving enough length so that their ends can be trimmed during final installation.
Vivier was one of the founders of Le Chasse-Marée, and that French maritime magazine’s catalog has been carrying his building plans for more than 20 years. He has himself built boats to several of his own designs in order to fully understand the needs and limits of amateur builders. Because of their limited experience, these builders often need more technical and practical information than professionals. By building the boats, Vivier has learned to refine his plans and supplement them with numerous detailed drawings and instructions—for example, details on building the centerboard trunk. Various additional resources, such as a chronological guide, a list of materials and fittings, and step-by-step instruction booklets, help guide beginners safely through to launching day. Vivier also offers help, advice, and consultation by telephone or e-mail without charge.
François Vivier
Hull framing consists entirely of athwartships bulkheads made of plywood. The shallow cutouts alongside the centerboard trunk allow oar stowage below the floorboards.
Beg-Meil is among a number of Vivier designs also available in kit form. The suppliers are various, including Icarai and Grand-Largue in France; in the United States, the supplier is Clint Chase Boat Builder in Portland, Maine; and in Australia, it is South Pacific Boat Company. All kit parts are cut out of marine plywood panels by computer numerically controlled (CNC) routing machines. In addition to plywood pieces, kits can be shipped (based on the individual builder’s preference) either with or without the necessary solid-wood pieces, epoxy resin, sails, and fittings. Plans and instructions sheets have to be ordered separately. The pieces are marked—for example, specifying the plank overlap in the case of lapstrake construction—or they have specific joining systems to aid positioning and alignment. Some scarf joints, however, have to be made on site. Epoxy and paint quantity calculations are based on average estimates. Substitutions for such things as the type of wood used can be made on request.
François Vivier
The “yacht” influence in Beg-Meil’s rig can certainly be taken through her appointments and finishes—which in this instance are far from her workboat roots.
On the water, Beg-Meil inherits all of Ilur’s seakeeping abilities. She’s an excellent choice as a family boat for sailing a few miles for an island picnic or for crossing a bay under oars when the wind dies. She is light enough to be launched and recovered effortlessly from any launching ramp.
She is easy to sail, even singlehanded. Instead of reefing the jib with reef nettles, a roller-furler could be fitted, and the transom can accommodate a small outboard motor if desired. Purists will certainly favor rowing or sculling, and a pair of oars can be stored under the floorboards on each side of the cockpit. The centerboard’s span helps the boat point well to windward when sailing closehauled, and the board lowers easily on a pivot to adjust to any point of sail. Instead of using a steel plate—which is simple but not too hydrodynamically efficient because a flat plate provides little additional lift—the rudder and centerboard both could be given foil cross-sectional shapes. The much higher lift of centerboards so shaped provides better maneuver-ability under sail, more speed in high wind, and less drag in light air.
François Vivier
Beg-Meil sails well on all points of sail, and her rig is easy to reef when the wind pipes up.
Beg-Meil is a perfect companion for all-around navigation. The design promises an affordable little yacht that will still please the eye of a traditionalist. Bronze fittings and varnished coamings may distance her from the working boats of her inspiration, but finished out that way she will have a lot of appeal to anyone with an eye for a boat.
With a generous flotation in chambers, a steel centerboard in effect adding ballast, and ample freeboard, Beg-Meil is intended as a safe and seaworthy all-around daysailer.
François Vivier
The seafaring traditions of Brittany are attractively echoed in the design, but her construction, materials, and performance are all modern.
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The double-ended jolles of Denmark and koster boats of Sweden inspired the hull form of the glued-lapstrake plywood Deer Isle Koster Boat, designed by Bruce Elfstrom to be a safe and enticing daysailer for his daughters on Deer Isle, Maine.
Norwegian faerings, those centuries-old, slender, four-oared fishing boats that are fast under oars and surprisingly nimble under sail, have provided a wealth of inspiration for numerous modern small-craft designers. Built lightly using plywood glued-lapstrake construction, designs based on the historical type have proved to be excellent trailerable daysailers that sail well and handle beautifully under oars. They are also beautiful to look at. But there’s no reason why translating the Scandinavian inspiration should stop with faerings.
I think Bruce Elfstrom of East Haddam, Connecticut, is on to something when he looks to the jolles of Denmark (see MARCUS NOER, from Small Boats Annual 2009) and double-enders, such as the koster type from Sweden, for more ideas about how workboat types with generations of success behind them can be reinterpreted for modern uses and construction techniques. This branch of the family may well go on to its own phenomenal success.
Elfstrom is a novice as a designer, but his affair with wooden boats started long ago on Deer Isle, Maine, where his family has long had a summer place. Half Norwegian and half Swedish, he grew up mostly on Deer Isle after running there at the age of 15 to find peace after having lived for four years in Beirut, Lebanon, where his mother worked first as a journalist and later as a United Nations diplomat during that country’s civil war.
Boats became an integral part of the life that Elfstrom found on Deer Isle. Later, he went on to restore a 34′ cutter, and he found himself believing in the process enough to found the Wooden Boat Rescue Foundation, which puts endangered old boats in the hands of those hoping to save them.
Adventure, too, has been part of Elfstrom’s life—he runs a company that leads advanced four-wheel-drive backcountry adventure treks in places like Mongolia, Labrador, and Iceland, and trains drivers (among them Navy Seals) in the finer arts of handling vehicles in rough terrain. So he took notice when “Raids”—a new type of small-craft event involving weeklong series of races for self-contained sail-and-oars boats along scenic coastlines or through archipelagoes—started in Europe (see WoodenBoat No. 187).
He recognized the potential instantly. He has been a regular at the annual Small Reach Regatta in Maine, and soon he was designing his own faering-inspired boats, seeking a fusion of new and old technologies. The first was the NorseWater 19. The second was Raider 18, a slender, glued-lapstrake plywood boat outfitted for trekking.
Tom Jackson
Watertight compartments under the sternsheets not only provide flotation with the hatches locked shut but also provide dry stowage when camp-cruising.
But back at the family place, his daughters, Petra, 14, and Oaklea, 12, began to put Elfstrom in mind of something other than an on-the-edge raceboat that would be safe and yet fun for them. Once again, he found a gap between the performance he wanted and the appearance of the boats he found available, and once again he looked to Scandinavia to find a bridge between function and form.
“I love them,” he said of the boats of that region. “They’re just in my blood. I’ve always loved the stern of a double-ender.
“They outgrew their Optimist dinghies real quick,” Elfstrom said of his daughters. “Oaklea, at 5′10″—you should have seen her in an Opti. She was like a spider in a jar. She didn’t get that she’s grown, like, 3′.”
Designing and Building the Deer Isle Koster Boat
For what became known as the Deer Isle Koster Boat, Elfstrom had in mind a hull form that would be safe and stable and a rig that would be simple and provide an adequate but safe amount of power.
This boat, he thought, needed to be something that the girls would find enjoyable for daysailing, captivating for adventuring as they gained confidence, and attractive enough to keep them interested for many years to come. If they find themselves more daring as they gain years and experience, perhaps the rig could be expanded later.
The resulting boat has a bit of everything in its lineage. “It’s like that Raider boat fused with a jolle, a koster, with a bit of Beetle Cat mixed in,” Elfstrom said. That’s a faering, a beamy double-ender, a large coasting double-ender, and a small New England catboat. At 14′ long, the resulting fusion has an ample beam of 6′, but draws only 5″ with the centerboard up, and about 4′ with the centerboard down.
Tom Jackson
A broad and burdensome hull can still have shallow draft, and the koster boat is readily put ashore.
Too committed to his own business to take the time to build them himself, he ordered a pair from builder Eric Friberg of Bellingham, Washington, whose work he had seen in the WoodenBoat Launchings section, and the test sails came in August 2010. “The underwater profile is more along the lines of a racing dinghy,” Elfstrom said. “It’s kind of a planing hull,” and in its second outing, the boat comfortably made more than 7 knots with the breeze steady at 15 knots and gusting to 20.
The boat has a long foredeck, short afterdeck, and modest sidedecks, with a low-profile coaming. The mast is stepped through the foredeck, which keeps the construction simple. Below the foredeck, a bulkhead with a fitted hatch is installed forward of the mast to provide ample dry storage and built-in flotation. More flotation chambers are situated aft and to the sides below the sternsheets and side seats, doubling as additional dry storage accessed through gasketed hatches.
Tom Jackson
The shaped bronze-rod mainsheet traveler has the distinctive curvature used in Danish jolles.
Some details, notably the high oarlock pads and the curvaceous bronze-rod horse traveler, are taken directly from the jolle type of Denmark. The boat has no exterior keel, instead being strengthened by an inner keelson, but it has a short skeg. The centerboard and rudder are both weighted and will kick up should the boat ground out. With her shallow draft, the boat beaches easily and at about 350 lbs all-up, she’ll be comparatively easy to manhandle up the shore if need be. Elfstrom designed the floorboards to remove and fit between the seats to make a large sleeping platform for adventure cruising.
The rig is not Scandinavian—it’s a balance-lug with a small jib. It’s easy to handle, easy to reef, easy to strike, and easy to stow. The jib is set on a small roller-furler, making it easy to strike from the cockpit. The lug yard hoists on a leathered bronze ring with a hook welded to it. All of the rigging gear is simple. The masts require no stays, so if the boat were trailered it would be quick to set up at the boat ramp ahead of launching or afloat afterward. The hull has no ballast, relying instead on its great beam, crew weight to weather, and conservative sail area to keep her on her feet.
I sailed with Elfstrom—and neither of us is as lithe as a 14-year-old girl—and found the boat stable and responsive in conditions ranging from light air to puffs of up to 10 knots or so. She remained steady as we shifted crew weight, which speaks well of her stability. The boat came about handily and seemed weatherly and responsive. Elfstrom says that he can walk on the foredeck without danger of destabilizing the boat, and the cockpit is uncommonly roomy and comfortable for a 14-footer, giving the sense of being in a much larger boat.
Tom Jackson
A kick-up rudder makes easy work of venturing into shallows.
Elfstrom considers the two boats he had built for his daughters to be prototypes. The planking lines are still being finalized: One boat is built with nine planks per side, the other ten. Some pieces, such as belaying pins and the lines, he selected because they were off-the-shelf and time was running short for the season. The tillers ended up too short. The hulls are built with 6mm okoume plywood covered with Dynel set in epoxy, and they are decked with 3⁄8″ meranti plywood.
Some elements of the initial design and construction were chosen deliberately to keep costs under control. Elfstrom intends to revise and perfect these details— together with finalizing the placement of such things as cam cleats. He and boatbuilder Clint Chase of Portland, Maine, are working to finalize plans and they hope by early 2011 to develop a prototype kit, something that Chase has been doing with his own designs. An experienced builder working from lines could make his own judgments about such things as lining off for planking—which is critical to get right in a boat of this type—or deciding the proportions of the coaming, but a novice might be well advised to await the promise of a kit.
As for the boats themselves, however, their worth is already being proven by Elfstrom’s daughters. “I wanted them to have a big deck to jump off of, climb up on, swim off of—to go out and just Swallows and Amazons stuff,” he said. The side decks are wide enough to sit on, the coaming low enough so it doesn’t interfere with the comfort of sitting that way or hiking out when need be. The cockpit side seats are comfortable, too, and wide enough to grow into—“They can use this boat when they’re 40.”
Plans and kits for the Deer Isle Koster are available Chase Small Craft.
Deer Isle Koster Particulars
LOA: 14′
LWL: 12′ 6″
Beam: 5′ 10″
Draft:
–board up: 5″
–board down 3′
Weight
bare hull: 175 lbs
with rig: 250 lbs
Sail area: 121 sq ft
–main: 101 sq ft
–jib: 20 sq ft
Bruce Elfstrom
The Deer Isle Koster Boat’s designer, Bruce Elfstrom, an amateur with an eye for small-craft design, describes the design as a fusion of Swedish koster boats, Danish jolles, and modern lightweight “Raid” boats, “with a little Beetle cat thrown in.” Some details have been altered—for example, the rudder profile has changed from the one shown in the rendering.
Bruce Elfstrom
Elfstrom worked up his lines in DELFTship software after sketching profiles freehand. (Atypically, these body sections are shown full-width, with forward sections on the left and after sections on the right.)
Check Out These Other Faering Designs
The faerings of western Scandinavia have inspired designs from the likes of Clint Chase, Iain Oughtred, and Joel White. If you like the look of these handsome double-enders, here are a few other articles you might enjoy, including a boat built by one of our readers.
Photographs by the author
