Mersea Island, tucked into England’s Essex coast about 50 miles east northeast of London, is only truly an island twice a day, when the high tide covers the causeway that connects it to the mainland. There’s open water to the island’s southeast side at the junction of the Colne and Blackwater estuaries, and to the northwest mile after mile of tidal salt marsh with a wealth of wild waterfowl. This is the spiritual home of the Milgate duck punt.
The village of West Mersea occupies the southwest quadrant of the island, and has always lived by whatever the water and marshes could provide, so boats have long been an essential part of daily life. One of the many local businesses was a boatyard once owned by William Wyatt, who, as well as repairing the local fishing smacks and yachts, was also the local punt builder of choice. John Milgate, born in a cottage called Smugglers’ Way, just a few yards from Wyatt’s punt shed, started work at the yard at the age of 13, just after the Second World War. His retirement, 55 years later in 2001, didn’t stop him working on boats; he simply carried on in his own shed at home. The restoration of his 1892 smack, PURITAN OF COLCHESTER, was always going to be a lengthy job, so John wanted a simple, inexpensive boat to get him onto the water quickly, whenever the mood took him. He decided he needed a duck punt.
Gill Moon
Setting the leeward chine deep in the water gives the hull lateral resistance for windward work.
The problem at that time was that no one in West Mersea was building them anymore, so he’d have to come up with his own design, as well as rethink the construction process. The original shape had evolved over the best part of a century and a half, but construction techniques and materials had moved on radically. Many punts were home-built by eye, resulting in a lot of variation. Since many wildfowlers had to contend with shallow pockets, as well as shallow water, they built their punts out of whatever affordable materials happened to be available, and did the building as well as they could. The professionals, though, set higher standards, having good reason to build commissioned punts properly. No one wanted to lie in freezing bilgewater during a hard winter’s night on the marsh, so there was a penalty to pay for a leaky boat. The rule was that if a new punt leaked, its owner was due an amount of beer equal to the water the boat let in.
Professional builders also tended to evolve styles of their own, and the 1919 punt in the Mersea Museum shows that of William Wyatt. Milgate’s study of it revealed a slightly longer hull than some of its contemporaries, but the same 3′ beam. It was built solidly with 9″ × 3⁄4″ planks and 2 3⁄4″ of rocker in her otherwise flat bottom. A sheerstrake is clench-nailed onto the side, resulting in a couple of inches more freeboard than in punts from other parts of England’s east coast; this is probably because unlike many of those, it’s an open boat. The other obvious difference is that it isn’t quite double-ended, sporting a small triangular transom above the waterline. The short extended nose at the breasthook has a groove to take the punt-gun barrel. The matte gray finish was no surprise—there’d been plenty of Admiralty-surplus paint available in 1919. Not only was it inexpensive, it was also ideal for making stealthy progress among the mud banks, while stalking highly suspicious ducks. Powder and shot were expensive, so to have a chance of making a profitable bag, getting to within 70 yards of a flock to assure hitting the target was essential.
Marc Davies
Having just come about, the punt sailor has dropped his steering oar over the new leeward rail. There is no accommodation for seating other than the cockpit sole.
Milgate’s plan was, in the spirit of both the amateur and professional punt builders, to make his new boat as quick and economical to build as possible, while retaining the William Wyatt aesthetic. The 17′ length of the museum’s boat would have been wasteful in terms of plywood, so the new design was shortened to 15′ 8 3⁄4″, with a beam of 32 1⁄2″. Milgate’s punt is built with just three sheets of 10mm (3⁄8″) plywood, using softwood frames in place of the original oak.
The Milgate duck punt could hardly be simpler to build, and architect Mies Van der Rohe, with his guiding principle that “Less is more,” would certainly have approved. There’s no daggerboard, rudder, or decks. It’s just a sleek, flat-bottomed sharpie that’s not quite double-ended. Instead of building the bottom first, adding the stem and sternposts, side panels, and finally the frames, the Milgate design is built upside down on a jig, starting with the side panels. The result of using ply and softwood is that the boat usually comes out rather lighter than a 19th- or 20th-century version, at around 140 lbs, and lighter still if you opt for a stitch-and-glue version. The build isn’t a long process, and many Milgate punt builders are convinced that the majority of the time is taken up by painting.
Marc Davies
Punts built to the Milgate plans may appear to have two lapped strakes, but each side is made of a single plywood panel. A kerf about 28″ long allows the upper part of the panel to flare to meet the transom. The lap is created by a false sheer strake applied over the side panel.
The fitting-out is equally straightforward. Floorboards are essential unless you’re partial to lying on the frames and soaking up bilgewater. A couple of tholepins, or preferably, in my view, oarlocks for the steering oar are a must-have. A punt rows very well too, so budget for a pair of oars—you can even use the same oarlocks. When it comes to the sailing rig, most West Mersea duck punts use cast-offs from Optimist dinghy racers. The sails you see with the enduringly cool logo of a duck made up of a D and a P are custom-made by Gowan Ocean Sails, about 50 yards from the old Wyatt punt shed. The shed is now part of the facilities owned by the Dabchicks Sailing Club, founded in 1911 by William Wyatt and other West Mersea sailors.
So, now that it’s built, what exactly have we got? Getting to and around the marshes, while occasionally eluding unexpected game keepers, required an adaptable boat that was light to handle ashore, quick to launch, easy to push over mud, and comfortable being sailed, poled, paddled, or rowed. The Milgate Duck Punt is all of these things, as well as a good weight carrier in the bargain; it’ll comfortably take a couple of adults and a fair amount of gear.
Once aboard a duck punt, several things are immediately apparent; the first is just how stable she is, with her flat bottom and low crew position. Next comes the discovery of just how few inches of water are needed to sail her off the beach. Once afloat, a shift of weight to engage the leeward chine and the punt can go to windward. There’s no need to find water deep enough for a centerboard or rudder. Once you’re off the beach, you’ll also discover that the duck punt is no slouch under sail, either.
Marc Davies
Martin “Lurch” Blackmore makes himself comfortable on the floorboards as he works to weather.
Steering becomes progressively more intuitive, as you get a feel for shifting your weight forward to initiate a gentle luff or aft to bear away, with more major adjustments being done with the short steering oar—usually referred to as a paddle. While this might sound like a case of coarse and fine adjustments, the reality is that you’ll soon be using both methods pretty much at the same time. It’s a bit like steering a bicycle on a winding road by leaning while turning the handlebars. The paddle is key when tacking. Four good strokes, the total allowed under the racing rules, should be more than enough to get the bow around before switching the paddle to the new leeward side for steering.
Duck punts are sailed with the helmsman lying down. There have been experiments with various types of backrest; according to Milgate, the most exotic of these was also the cause of the only recorded capsize. They are usually pretty comfortable for recumbent sailing, and taller skippers, like Martin “Lurch” Blackmore who sails No 10, POINTYBIRD, often stretch out with a leg draped over the side.
Gill Moon
In the hands of a skilled sailor, a duck punt can take on a stiff breeze.
The Milgate punts can stand up to a bit of weather. In over 20 knots of breeze they’ll be absolutely flying, but still nowhere near the ragged edge. They’re quite maneuverable as well. The close racing in the tight spaces along the foreshore shows that with a bit of practice, the rudder and centerboard won’t be missed.
Aside from breaking out the oars if the wind dies or taking a punt out for a leisurely row on an evening tide after dusk, duck punts are also rowed quite seriously. The West Mersea Town Regatta, an annual event first held in 1838, includes rowing events for duck punts rowed as singles or as pairs.
The duck punt can do anything you’re likely to ask of it in and around thin water. It’s easy, quick, and above all inexpensive to build; the plans are free, and the build itself can be done for about $150. All these things helped convince my wife that I’ve got to have one. The only problem is convincing her that I also need to keep those more complicated and expensive boats that lurk in our garage.
Marc Fovargue-Davies is a Research Associate at the University of London’s Centre for Corporate Governance & Ethics. More importantly, he also works with Adrian Donovan, (who built, among others, his Morbic 12, CADFAEL, as well as a particularly fine pair of Whitehall skiffs), and the International Boatbuilding Training College at Lowestoft, England. Marc regularly contributes to both Water Craft and Classic Sailor.
The French love sailing, but the big and expensive racing and cruising yachts often get all of the attention. Two years ago I got together with a group of friends and we organized a new event, called Challenge Naviguer Léger, Sailing Light Challenge, an unsupported, 100-mile tour along France’s Bay of Biscay coast in small boats under sail and oar.
This year’s participants and I arrived at the Corps de Garde harbor near Charron, and waited with our gear-laden boats for the ebb tide to give us a favorable current down the Sevre River to its mouth at Aiguillon Bay. Almost all of the 15 boats being launched for the journey were open boats rigged for oar and sail. I wasn’t sailing; I’d be shepherding the fleet aboard our safety boat, a 17′ rigid inflatable boat (RIB) with a 50-hp outboard.
The waters of the Charente Maritime, located on the French Atlantic coast halfway between Britanny and Basque territory, are mostly shallow, and for the next four days, the tides would set a strict schedule for our travels. A lot of the stops we’d make were on shores that are inaccessible during low tides. Some of the marinas in the area even have locks to keep them from running dry as the ebb pulls the water back a mile or more from shore. While our route was protected from the Atlantic Ocean by Ré and Oléron islands, each about 16 miles long, the waters between them, Breton Strait and the Strait of Antioche, can be quite choppy.
photographs by the author
The 2016 Challenge began on the tidal reaches of the Sèvre River, which winds to the sea through the farmlands of Marans on the west coast of France.
When the high slack tide brought the Sèvre River to a standstill, we launched the boats. Carried by the quickening flow of the ebb we followed twists and turns of the river and dodged dozens of idle oyster barges anchored midstream. The wind was blowing from the east, as it usually does in the morning, so everyone had their sails set, taking advantage of the cool air that was sweeping across the farmlands to the Atlantic Ocean 24 miles to the west. We reached the buoy marking the mouth of the river and entered Aiguillon Bay, a 4-mile-wide apostrophe of shallow water tucked into the coast. At low tide it would be a vast expanse of mud, with the river’s channel through it widening as it approaches Breton Strait.
We set a course southwest for the Isle of Ré, about 11 miles away. The difference in speed between the boats spread the fleet out as we traversed Aiguillon Bay. LILI and EMJO 2, the two largest boats of the fleet, each 20′ long, were the first to first pass the concrete navigational tower at the mouth of the river channel, 3-1/2 nautical miles from shore. WHIMBREL, a Wayfarer dinghy, and FOXY LADY, an ultralight coastal trekker prototype, followed closely behind. This group of four would cross the finish line first every day of the challenge. The rest of the fleet, fanned out on their separate tacks, passed the tower one by one.
Roger Siebert
Charente Maritime
As we approached Ré’s east coast, we began to make out two streaks of tightly packed buildings with whitewashed walls and terra-cotta tile roofs—the towns of La Flotte and Rivedoux—separated by cream-colored, banded cliffs beneath verdant forests and farmlands. We veered south along the island’s east coast toward Sablanceaux Beach at the island’s easternmost extremity. The Ré bridge, a scalloped line of arched concrete spans, sweeps up from the island there and links it to the mainland with a 2-mile-long colonnade of eight-sided piers.
We stopped, as planned, at Sablanceaux to regroup, but the swell from the northeast waves came tumbling across the shallows. I was tempted to beach my boat but decided to anchor a few yards out from the breaking waves. The waves were not big enough to make landing dangerous, so several other boats did go ashore.
About an hour later, when we were ready to depart, the increasing swell made getting off the beach much more difficult for many of the boats. WHIMBREL and TOURNEPIERRE, an Ilur designed by François Vivier, both got through the shore-break, but sand and seashells churned up by the waves jammed their centerboards. With a lot of jostling, Emmanuel managed get TOURNEPIERRE’s board down again; WHIMBREL’s board remained jammed in spite of Stéphane’s best efforts. I took him in tow behind the RIB and our fleet set sail, passed under the bridge, and headed south toward the Isle of Oléron.
In the straits, the chop can make crossings a rough and wet ride.
Nearly 3/4 mile beyond the Isle of Ré we passed the Chauveau lighthouse, a round red-and-white tower at the edge of the tide flats; the waves became steeper and whitecaps streaked across the Strait of Antioche. The northwest wind, as usual here for a summer day, was building and could easily reach 15 to 20 knots. For most of the boats in the fleet, it was time to put in a reef for the 10-mile crossing to Oléron. Our course for the last but longest leg of the day was a close reach, taking the waves on the starboard bow, and many of the boats were shipping a lot of water. Most of us had to do some bailing but we all had drybags and watertight compartments to keep our gear dry. The fleet stayed much closer together than it had in the light morning winds, keeping an eye on each other and making good progress toward a harbor located on a sparsely populated part of the north coast of Oléron.
After four hours of sailing, we were all wet with spray and tired but the fleet had made the crossing without incident and we arrived together just offshore from the harbor. The surf on the shore was much too high to make landfall on the beach as we had planned, so we had to make our way into the harbor. Its entrance channel was well marked by green and red buoys but quite narrow. On either side the water was quite shallow and glowing in the tawny light reflected off the sandy bottom. The channel takes a sharp, almost 90-degree curve to the west and led us between stone breakwaters set just 60′ apart. Having made the turn, the fleet was head-to-wind but had no room for tacking, so everyone had to switch quickly from sails to oars. All the while, the waves around us were crashing on the large rocks at the harbor entrance.
The transition to oars was effortless for ATYPIK, Pierre’s Chester yawl that he had modified by installing a small sailboard rig with a rotating carbon-fiber mast, and outriggers with gated locks. It took him no time at all to get the sail wrapped snugly around the mast, and because he kept the oars in locks while he was sailing, he just had to swing the blades swung out of the bow to start rowing. Others with more conventional rigs had halyards to let go, sails to drop, and oars to retrieve—no easy task when sailing alone.
About 100 yards in from the ends of the breakwaters we reached the opening that leads to the harbor’s floating docks. We rowed through the gap, and over a wall submerged by the high tide. During the low tide the wall blocks the way in and out of the harbor, but holds back enough water to keep the boats afloat. Our flotilla found a safe berth for the boats and we hauled our camping gear across the parking lot to a lawn bordered by the beach on one side and a four-tiered, white house that looked like a the superstructure of a mid 20th-century ocean liner on the other. With our tents set up, we were soon asleep.
In a dead calm of the morning, the fleet rowed out the Douhet harbor channel on a high tide. As the tide ebbs here, the water in the channel will drop and expose a wall, submerged here, that will retain enough water in the harbor to keep the boats in the background afloat.
On Friday morning, we woke to a grey sky and light drizzle and made quick work of breakfast and packing our camping gear. At 8 a.m., the first boats left the dock, rowed through the gap in the breakwater and headed out through the channel. A light westerly breeze helped us sail downwind across Maleconche Cove where closely spaced 50-yard-long rows of wire oyster cages were suspended from shore-side pilings for nearly two miles. Oystering is one of the main fisheries in the region and oyster farms such as this one create a landscape in the intertidal zones equivalent to a farmland’s fields and furrows.
It took more than 60 years to build the Boyard fortress, and it was never used for the military purpose it was intended for.
As we rounded Saumonards point to starboard, we could see Boyard fortress perched on the horizon to port. The four-story stone fort sits on a shoal halfway between Oléron and the Isle of Aix. Construction of the 220′ by 100′ oval fort was begun in 1801 during the reign of Napoleon Bonaparte, but by the time it was finished in 1837, the range of cannons had increased and the fort was no longer needed guard the 3-mile-wide straight between the two islands.
The tidal current was slowly but surely building up, bringing out a lot of bass fishermen in small motorboats. Our fleet was widely spread among oyster beds that outline most of the region’s coastline. We sailed along the passage between Oléron and the mainland from one navigational marker to an other; each three-tiered concrete tower had its name painted on it in tall, black, block letters: ARCEAU, LAMOUROUX, and JULIARD.
The current running northward against us grew stronger as we approached the narrowest part of the strait between Oléron and the mainland peninsula of Bourcefranc-le-Chapus. Before we were brought to a standstill we all anchored along La Mortanne bank, a sandbar bordering the deep-water channel on its south side and surrounded everywhere else by rows of oyster cages. To the west of us, a mile away on Oléron, was the Citadel of the Château d’Oléron, a 17th-century fortification with two sharp-edged bastions jutting into the strait like the bows of ships.
Charente Maritime waters are the most important place in Europe for oyster and mussel farming.
While we waited for the current to subside and reverse with the turn of the tide, I had a good long lunch as the ebb uncovered the oyster cages. As soon as the cages broke the surface, oystermen began harvesting the oysters and loading them onto aluminum outboard-powered barges. The heavily laden boats then skimmed along at 20 knots back to the harbor at Château d’Oléron.
When the slack arrived we pulled our anchors aboard. During the two hours we had spent waiting at the bank, what had been a light breeze was now blowing harder, around 15 knots and gusting to 20. Just as we were setting sail, PLÉNITUDE, a 16′ sharpie, was just rounding La Mortanne bank a full two hours after the fleet front runners had arrived. By far the slowest boat of the group, especially sailing upwind, PLÉNITUDE was always struggling to finish the legs in time to take advantage of the tides.
With the tide and a Force-5 wind behind us, we flew along a muddy channel dodging oyster beds, steel stakes, and oyster barges. We rounded Fort Louvois, a small horseshoe-shaped fortress with its toe poking out into the strait and a single tower rising at its back. It was built for Louis XIV in the late 17th century and sits on an island a quarter mile beyond a narrow peninsula on the mainland side. Soon after leaving the fort astern we passed under the slightly curved, concrete girders of the 1-3/4-mile-long Orléon bridge.
Now privately owned, the Louvois fortress was built at the end of the 17th century as part of a coastal defense system devised by Vauban, a famous military engineer working for King Louis XIV.
With a strong wind and current pushing us along at a good clip, we needed to turn east from the main channel into the mouth of the Seudre River, and we’d get only one chance to find the river channel make our turn at its entrance. If we were to miss it, turning back against wind and tide would be close to impossible.
We were able to make the turn with the fleet intact and sailed east under the bridge spanning the mouth of the Seudre. The river runs in a nearly straight line to the southeast, so with the wind and the current again at our sterns, we made good speed covering the 8 miles toward the channel that would lead us to the village of Mornac. I knew from previous trips that the entrance was narrow and very difficult to find. I looked very closely at all of the channels dividing the riverbank to starboard and fortunately, a sign—MORNAC—had been nailed to the top of two pilings crossed in a tall X. Just a few boat lengths in from the sign, the wind was gone and the waters were quite still. The fleet furled sails and took to the oars in a channel so narrow that blades often simultaneously touched the muddy banks both sides.
A sign guided the fleet into the tiny Mornac channel. Sails soon came down and the oars went out.
We looped through two oxbow bends, passed a long row of oyster shacks perched on stilts along the channel’s south bank, and nearly a mile in, arrived at Mornac, an old village of homes and shops with whitewashed stucco walls. The harbor was scarcely large enough to accommodate our fleet. Although we take pride in being self-sufficient, our Challenge rule of autonomy is meant to be broken now and again so we all sat down to a good meal at the local restaurant to recover from the strain of the day.
After dinner I put my tent on a small grass field on top of a channel bank. A steady western wind was blowing all night long, and I knew it would make our exit along the Seudre River quite difficult.
Early in the morning, I woke to an unwelcome Force-4 wind. We left Mornac and when we emerged from the little channel, the 100-yard wide stretch of the Seudre was waiting for us with an unpleasant 8 miles of choppy conditions and headwinds.
Once again, the varying windward abilities of our boats made a huge difference in our progress. Some set sail and tacked downriver, others chose to row against the wind to the river mouth. The fleet was soon spread all along the length of the Seudre, with PLÉNITUDE, as usual, trailing behind and gradually diminishing in the distance.
Near the mouth of Seudre river, the fleet regrouped at the large launch ramp at the little riverside village of La Cayenne.
A mile shy of the bridge at the river mouth we stopped at the harbor in the little village of La Cayenne to bring the fleet together. The westerly was now a mild Force 3, which would make our four-mile course to the south end of Oléron easier.
Emmanuel, a professional boatbuilder, had fitted a jiffy reefing system on his Grand Skerry. Here the fleet is beating toward the bridge spanning the mouth of the Seudre river. The bridge in the far distance connects Oléron Island to the mainland.
Together and under way once more, we zigzagged through acres of oyster beds and steel stakes to a sand bank situated at the 3/4-mile-wide mouth of Maumusson strait between Oléron and the mainland, waiting for the rising tide before sailing northeast to the entrance to a channel that would lead us to Gatseau beach. Turning west into the channel put us on a beam reach, a welcome relief after spending the whole morning working to windward. The beach, cradled in a cove surrounded by a forest of maritime pines, gave us plenty of room for the fleet to pull ashore. An hour later, after a good lunch and a rest, it was time to launch the boats, just as PLÉNITUDE, under her red sail, was arriving at the beach. Unfortunately for Jean-Bernard, builder, designer, and skipper of the boat, we had a schedule to keep us working with the tides and there was no time for him to come ashore. He brought PLÉNITUDE about and followed the fleet as we headed northeast on our way to Brouage, an old village on the mainland.
We passed back under the Oléron bridge and then rounded Fort Louvois once again to head east. The northwesterly wind was building up again as the day wore on. The frontrunners of the fleet were moving at a good pace across the waters of the Marennes-Oléron Basin and quickly closed in on the lone red buoy that shows the Brouage channel entrance. Beyond it, the only navigation marks along the path we had to follow were made of slender tree trunks, driven into the bottom and rising only a few feet above water level. We had to take care to keep at the right distance from the markers because water around is quite shallow even at high tide, barely deep enough for centerboards. The 2-1/2-mile-long channel is a large stretch of muddy water on a strange twisting course up to the coast, even heading back out to sea before finally reaching land.
At low tide, the Brouage channel is surrounded by soft slippery mud. It meanders meanders for 2 1/2 miles from the deep water of the Marennes-Oléron Basin and then winds another 1 3/4 miles to the village of Brouage.
Running the 25-yard wide waterway with the wind and being helped by a strong fair tidal stream, we sped by oystermen’s huts and dozens of docks, all on the right bank of the channel. The low land did little to shield us from the wind and we were going too fast for such a narrow stretch of water with small working boats moored very close by on the starboard side. Sails came down and the fleet took to the oars for the last 1-1/2 miles of the day. Brouage’s tiny harbor, if it could be called that, is nothing more than a long sloped bank along a road. We ran all of the boats aground there, side by side; the channel would empty completely at low tide and leave a bottom exposed, entirely covered by a thick layer of sticky mud. That evening, with official permission from the town, we set up our tents nearby on the grounds of an old oyster farm.
During 14th century, Brouage was an important commercial harbor with more than 200 ships moored around it. The sea has long since retreated, leaving the fortress town over 1-1/2 miles inland.
The next morning, while we were waiting for the tide to rise, I took a 15-minute walk around the fortified village of Brouage, which was established in 1555 and was the birthplace of Samuel Champlain, founder of Quebec City in Canada. The village is surrounded by ramparts built between 1569 and 1575 to protect the wealth accumulated by the local salt industry. During the 17th century, sea level began to lower, leaving the fortress like a stone ship lost in the salt marshes.
Sections of the Marennes-Oléron Basin coast are fringed with carrelets, fishing shacks equipped with nets and winches. The nets are lowered into the water, left on the bottom for a while, and then raised quickly to catch any fish that have gathered over them.
At 9:30 a.m. we started the last leg of the Sailing Light Challenge by rowing 1 1/2 miles back out to the Marennes-Oléron Basin. The tide was in, but the channel across the muddy shoals was still the only place deep enough for the fleet to sail. Some boats short-tacked into the wind between the tree-trunk markers in a channel only 20 yards wide. For boats with poor windward abilities and slow to come about it was hard work; the few boats being rowed also made slow progress.
The northwest wind was light at first, but as usual, slowly and surely it built up, as the sun warmed the land, pulling air in from the Atlantic. Waves grew as the wind strengthened and by late afternoon our boats were pounding upwind in a very choppy sea and Force-4 to Force-5 breeze. It was time to reef and to have a quick hand on the tiller if we were going to reach our final destination, the marina at La Rochelle.
On board YOUKOU LILI, Jean-Michel learned about prudent reefing the hard way. Ten miles into the last day’s passage he capsized just off the north coast of the Isle of Aix when he was carrying too much sail and a wave bigger and steeper than the rest knocked him over near a huge field of mussel aquaculture lines and floats. He climbed onto the daggerboard, righted his boat, and got back aboard into a hull full of water, but the bucket he needed for bailing had only been trapped under the thwart, not tethered, and was now gone. A small hand bailer was all he had to empty endless gallons of water. While he was bailing, another big wave capsized YOUKOU LILI; Jean-Michel climbed on the daggerboard again, but his mast lacked flotation and his sails were partially submerged. Jean-Michel put more pressure on the daggerboard. Unfortunately it was made of plywood and not as strong as one made of solid timber, and it broke off flush with the hull. Jean-Michel dropped into the water and his boat rolled upside down. As it wallowed in the 4′ swell, the mast and its partner broke. He retrieved his anchor and set it to keep the boat from drifting into the mussel field. With his boat stabilized, he climbed on the inverted hull and shot several flares to attract attention of the boaters around him. A powerboater nearby saw the signal, brought him on board and took him to La Rochelle marina, 9 miles to the north. I retrieved the YOUKOU LILI, righted and bailed her, then towed her to the marina.
Jean-Bernard was also fighting in the chop and trying to drive PLÉNITUDE upwind, taking a route closer to the mainland, just off the town of Angoulins. He hoped to find a safe haven there but missed the entrance of Angoulin’s haven, a small harbor on the peninsula that extends west from town. A strong gust broke his lugsail’s yard, so he dropped the sail, took the oars, and headed for shore. He landed on a small sand beach backed by Angoulin’s cliffs and pulled PLÉNITUDE ashore. For him, the Sailing Light Challenge was finished. He found a safe place to leave his boat until he could bring his car and trailer from the Corps de Garde launch ramp. The rest of the fleet made it safely to La Rochelle, and we gathered in the La Rochelle marina.
All of us were enthusiastic about the cruise, both for the times we enjoyed and the times that gave us things to think about and improve upon. We decided upon some new standards for next year. The boats must meet minimum standards for speed to make it easier for the group to keep together; gear and flotation must be securely stowed to provide a better measure of safety in the event of a capsize. Small boats are still the best means of traveling the French coast and there are more bays, forts, villages, and channels for us to explore. The Glenan archipelago in South Brittany and the Chausey Islands in Normandy are beautiful playgrounds we’re considering for the next Sailing Light Challenge.
Jean-Yves Poirier is a dedicated amateur boatbuilder with 19 boats to his credit and a freelance writer working in France. He is a frequent contributor to WoodenBoat’s sister publication, Professional Boatbuilder.
If you have an interesting story to tell about your adventures with a small wooden boat, please email us a brief outline and a few photos.
I have always liked sailing in light air. Ghosting along close to shore on a quiet evening feels like magic, especially in a small boat. But light-air sailing, though relaxing, is surprisingly challenging. In moderate winds, any boat competently handled can attain hull speed, but light wind requires sharp skills and careful attention to detail to get the most out of what’s available. Sail shape and trim make a big difference, and having a little extra canvas adds a sharp arrow to the quiver.
photographs by the author
The placement of a melonseed skiff’s mast so far forward rules out setting the topsail while afloat. Boats that have the mast set farther aft offer the sailer better footing and stability and may not have to be rigged while ashore.
My two melonseed skiffs, like most of their type, have small, simple rigs. The single 62-sq-ft spritsail is easy to set and moves the boat along nicely in most conditions. It takes very little to make a melonseed go, but to make things more interesting in faint wind, I tweaked the rig to accommodate a topsail. This complicates the setup, but that’s sort of the point–it offers something fun to tinker with when conditions are calm and less demanding.
When my boats were still under construction, I contacted Stuart Hopkins of Dabbler Sails with the idea of a topsail and he found the proposal intriguing. He agreed to help with design challenges and to make the sails. His suggestions were instrumental in coming up with a solution that works well.
The sails themselves are small and, according to Stuart, relatively easy to make because they require very little draft.* The difficulty is in establishing final dimensions to enable the sail to set well. The topsail needs to overlap the top of the mainsail near the mast to maintain clean airflow but requires a gap at the aft end, near the tip of the sprit, to allow room for sheeting adjustments. My original drawings did not account for either of these details. In fact, when assessing the photos of our first attempt when it was installed on the boat, Stuart decided it did not meet his exacting standards, so we made further adjustments and tried again. The second try nailed it. The topsail is permanently laced to a long, 1-1/2”-thick yard of Douglas fir, so it flies like a flag on a thin pole. On a small boat such as a melonseed, with the mast far forward, there’s no easy way to raise or douse sail while afloat, so rigging is done at the ramp before launch and the topsail is only used when conditions are mild and predictable.
The sail and yard are raised together as a unit. The halyard is lashed to the yard above its midpoint, runs through a bee hole at the top of the mast, then down to a cleat near the deck. The point on the yard where the halyard attaches can be adjusted until proper set is achieved. The foot of the yard is then lashed to the mast, which keeps the whole assembly upright.
For sheeting the topsail, a lightweight line runs from a grommet at the topsail clew, through a bee hole at the tip of the sprit, then down the length of the sprit to the mast. I tension the sheet until the sail looks right, then just tie it off to the sprit. A small cleat here would be handy.
A topsail for a sprit-rigged main requires a sheet led through a beehole in the sprit (upper left inset), a halyard for the yard (upper right), and a lashing to hold the foot of the yard to the mast (lower right). The topsail sheet is tied off around the lower end of the sprit (lower right).
Getting a good set of the sail required a lot of trial and error. All the component parts of the assembly—mainsail, topsail, spars, and lines—are surprisingly interdependent. Small adjustments anywhere in the rig affect the other parts. For example, I found that tightening the snotter of the mainsail’s sprit boom is important when using the topsail, as this adds tension along the whole leech, from the top of the sprit to the mainsail’s clew. This detail helps reduce twist, which will first appear at the top of the rig. If you don’t tension the boom, the top of the sail will still flutter and luff while the bottom is sheeted in too far, which simply makes the boat heel and reduces efficiency.
The topsail only increases the sail area by about 25 percent, but it does so high on the rig where it counts most. It also extends the length of the luff, where the most power is derived when going upwind.
The actual performance enhancement is marginal, given the effort that was involved. However, when the topsail is set well it definitely improves the aesthetics, adding a nice traditional look to an already classic design. And it makes you feel like the boat is going faster, whether it is or not. Often, that’s all it takes to bring a big smile.
*The Sailmaker’Apprentice recommends that a topsail be “quite flat” with only a slight curve in the luff, a slight hollow centered in the foot—about 1″ per 6′ of length—and a straight leech. For a look at another topsail, check out this month’s From the Editor—Ed.
BarryLong is a writer, photographer and media arts professional from the Chesapeake Bay region, where he sails his two of Melonseed skiffs. He keeps a blog at eyeinhand.com
You can share your tricks of the trade with other Small Boats Monthly readers by sending us an email.
A pin that’s included with the WeatherMeter provides the option of connecting the device to the phone so they can be handled as a single unit.
The smaller your boat, the greater the bearing of weather on your travels. With a VHF radio or a dedicated weather radio, one can get reports from weather stations in the area and forecasts for what’s likely to come, but it’s still good to keep an eye on the conditions in the immediate vicinity. The WeatherMeter from WeatherFlow collects then provides data via smartphone, giving boaters an accurate and objective record of what’s going on in a given location.
From left: The display as data is being recorded, the report at the end of an observation, the complete record, and the collected history of all saved observations.
TheWeatherMeter packs an anemometer, a thermometer, a barometer, a magnetometer, and a hygrometer into a device is about the size of a Roma tomato, only flatter, and uses Bluetooth technology to feed its readings to a smartphone. There are five windows on the opening screen of the phone app, showing some of the current readings from the device—temperature, pressure, humidity, and wind direction and speed (momentary, average, lull, and gust). There are also 13 calculations each window can display, including dew point and wind chill. The settings for the meter include all of the units of measurements commonly used. Wind speeds, for example, can be displayed in miles per hour, feet per minute, knots, kilometers per hour, meters per second, and Beaufort numbers.
The unit is powered by a replaceable CR2450 lithium button cell that will last for 300 to 500 hours depending on usage. The blue silicone covering peels off to provide access to the battery compartment. The on-off switch has a flashing light to indicate when the unit has been turned on or off and the smartphone will also indicate if it is powered up.
The Bluetooth connection has a range of about 75′ when the phone and the WeatherMeter were separated. The wireless connection makes it possible to protect the phone in a waterproof case.
The base has a 1/4 x 20 threaded insert that accepts a fitting for a lanyard or a dummy 3.5 mm audio jack to connect the meter to the smartphone (the data connection remains via Bluetooth). While it’s handy to have the two connected, in wet weather the phone can be protected in a waterproof case and the WeatherMeter, rated as splashproof (an international Ingress Protection rating of IP44), can fend for itself rain and spray.
In order to determine the direction of the wind, the WeatherMeter uses its magnetometer to indicate the orientation of the device when it’s aimed at the wind while taking a reading. Facing the wind is fairly intuitive for some, but a telltale could be attached to the bottom of the unit if a visual aid were needed. The product specifications claim that the unit’s anemometer will record wind speeds from 0.4 to 110 knots, but I found that the display never kicked in with anything under 1.2 knots while I was walking indoors. I didn’t think that was a significant flaw—if the wind is under 1.2 knots, I won’t be sailing.
The readings get stored so it’s easy to see trends in the weather such as a falling barometer or a change in wind direction or strength. Scrolling through the time- and date-stamped entries allows a quick assessment of changes in wind speed and direction, temperature, pressure, and relative humidity. A tap on each record brings up the data selected for the meter’s main display, and tapping “More” gives the full list of the data collected during a single observation.
“Wind & Weather” is the app that makes the WeatherMeter work with your phone. Another app, “WindAlert,” connects to a map of the world (satellite view, street map, or terrain map) and a global network of weather stations.
The WeatherMeter is a compact and inexpensive device that provides data that leads to a more objective observation and better understanding of weather conditions and patterns.
Christopher Cunningham is the editor of Small Boats Monthly.
The WeatherMeter, with case, is available direct from WeatherFlow for $79.95 and at the time of publication from Amazon for $67.72 and West Marine for $39.95. The instructions and specifications for the WeatherMeter are available online.
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.
Everything about your day trip has gone wrong—you’re wet, cold, and far from your haulout—but if you’ve packed a bivy bag, your day has just gotten a bit brighter. The Exped BivyBag Duo UL, made of silicon-coated ripstop nylon, is similar to a large poncho and in seconds it can get you and a friend out of the wind and rain. Weighing in at about 10 oz, and only 4″ x 6″ when packed, the BivyBag is compact enough to easily carry, even aboard the smallest boat.
photographs courtesy of the author
As the name suggests, the Bivibag Duo can be used for a bivouac, in tent fashion for one, or as a double emergency sleeping bag for two.
Removing the BivyBag from its storage sack takes just seconds—quick deployment is a must for any piece of emergency gear. The bag itself is shaped like a giant T-shirt, with a 56″-wide opening at the hem and three smaller openings at the other the top. Each of the four openings is equipped with a drawstring and toggle to adjust or close it. The neck opening is wide enough to pull on like a turtleneck, leaving one’s head free, or it may be worn over the head as a hood. My arms easily fit through the two smaller arm openings, even when I was wearing a shirt, fleece sweater, and jacket.
The Exped BivyBag’s fabric is thin, but it easily sheds water. The fabric isn’t breathable, and so on a rainy day, the inside of the bag was somewhat clammy; but on a cold day the impermeable fabric holds heat in addition to moisture. Despite the thinness of the fabric, I found that the bag provided a noticeable insulating effect. With an air temperature of 48 degrees F and under cloudy skies, the temperature inside the bag rose nearly 8 degrees in about 15 minutes.
When worn as a poncho, the BivyBag is long enough to come down past my feet (I am 6′1″). To keep from tripping on it, I fashioned a belt out of a piece of webbing. While I’m sitting I can pull my feet inside and close the bottom of the bag with the included drawstring.
In a worst-case scenario, the bivy bag can be fashioned into a temporary—albeit floppy—tent by tying it between a few trees, its openings cinched to eliminate drafts but allow enough airflow for comfortable breathing. In less dire conditions, the bag can be a discreet covering for changing clothes in a public location, such as a beach or dock, or for privacy using a camp privy.
In punishing conditions, it can be tempting to hurry on to escape the elements, a course of action that might lead to hasty decisions. The bivy bag helps prevent that scenario. If the wind is blowing hard during a rainstorm, and you need to consult a chart or unroll a dry bag, pull out the Exped BivyBag and you’ll be surrounded by relative calm and a dry place to work. It creates not only an instant shelter but also the peace and presence of mind that comes along with a measure of comfort, allowing for the thoughtful decision making that is essential to any successful outing.
Bruce Bateau sails and rows traditional boats with a modern twist in Portland, Oregon. His stories and adventures can be found at his web site, Terrapin Tales.
The BivyBag Duo is available from Exped’s retailers for around $125 (prices vary by retailer).
Is there a product that might be useful for boatbuilding, cruising or shore-side camping that you’d like us to review? Please email your suggestions.
The post at the stern supports two mirrors; the larger one at top provides a good view forward, and the wide-angle mirror below it takes in a broader view. Mirrors are common fixtures on rowing boats used in races in Finland.
Tim Murfitt of Norwich, England, has been puttering with small boats, mostly power boats, for more than 40 years and grew weary of their speed and noise. He thought taking to the water with a pair of oars would be a good change of direction for his boating, and although his only experience with rowing was on dry ground with a rowing machine, he felt confident that he’d enjoy rowing. He wasn’t so sure that his wife would. Walking was Wendy’s preferred exercise and she wasn’t comfortable around boats or water.
Tim Murfitt
The garage wasn’t long enough to house the building of the 21′ 4″ boat, so Tim built an extension for the boatshop bay.
Tim wanted the option of rowing with someone as well as by himself, and it wasn’t likely that whomever he rowed with would have much experience, so the boat had to be stable and forgiving, and easy for novices to adapt to. And while he had turned away from fast powerboats, he still wanted his rowing boat to be fast and easily driven. Narrow racing shells and trainers were out—they’d restrict his rowing to protected waters and he’d miss touring nearby coastal estuaries, which can get a bit choppy when the easterlies hit England’s east coast. The boat had to have some sea-keeping abilities and still be light enough to car-top.
Tim Murfitt
The Savo 650 kit arrives in two boxes and includes parts for the oars.
Tim didn’t find any ready-made boats on the market that met his practical requirements and standards of beauty, so he expanded his search to kit boats. Most of the offerings were hard-chine, stitch-and-glue boats, and not to his liking.
Tim Murfitt
With the sheerstrake yet to go, the Savo 650 shows its shallow-V bottom.
His meandering search led him to the Puuvenepiste web site. When he saw the Savo 650 he knew instantly it was what he had been seeking. The 21’4” lapstrake boat, designed by Ruud van Veelen, had performed well in races on Finland’s inland waters.
Tim Murfitt
After the planking was completed, the hull was lifted and suspended by cords so the stringers and molds could be dismantled. The strongback remained to support and align the hull when it was set right-side up for the remainder of the construction.
Unfortunately, Puuvenepiste didn’t offer the Savo 650 as a kit, so Tim kept daydreaming and visited the web site often. He went to the site one day and saw that a kit was now being offered. He got on the phone to Finland and ordered it. He’d be the first amateur builder to produce a Savo 650.
Tim Murfitt
The continuous rails make it easy to switch from two rowing stations to one and back again. The bow occupies the garage extension.
His garage wasn’t long enough for the boat, and after the kit arrived he added a temporary 10’ extension to his garage. The boat is built over molds on a strongback, as opposed to assembling pieces by the stitch-and-glue method. The result is a truly fair hull lighter than a stitch-and-glue equivalent that requires filets and fiberglass tape. Like many first-time builders, Tim thought putting the hull together would be the hardest and most time-consuming part of the job, but when he got to the painting and varnishing he discovered that the work was challenging and perfection was unattainable. Varnish ran and paint collected dust. He had to find a level of finish that was good enough and leave it at that.
Tim Murfitt
Getting the boat out of the shop required dismantling the garage extension.
Tim Murfitt
The oarlocks, typical of those used in Finland, are pivoting pins that fit in holes in the oars. The arrangement doesn’t allow the oars to be feathered.
After six months of work he had the boat, a cart, and a cover ready to go. The side of the garage extension was removed and, with the help of a few friends, the boat emerged. Tim launched the boat at the beginning of this summer and christened it SULKAVA, after the town in Finland that hosts the country’s biggest rowing race. Over the summer and fall Tim rowed 90 miles on his own, 20 with rowing partners, and to his delight, 130 miles with Wendy. Switching SULKAVA from solo to double takes just a few minutes.
He has done all of his rowing to date on the waters of the Norfolk Broads, a network of lakes and streams that flow into the North Sea on England’s easternmost point of land. There is a speed limit for power boats of 4 mph on the rivers and 6 mph on the lakes. The good side of that is that the powerboats keep their wakes down, but the bad side is that they often block SULKAVA’s way and slow her down. She cruises easily at 5 mph, and Tim, a 160-pound, 59-year-old, can keep up a good 6 mph rowing solo if he goes at it hard and steady. SULKAVA has hit 8 mph when rowed flat-out.
Mark Wilson-North
SULKAVA does well just as well as a single as a double. Tim and Wendy do their rowing in Norfolk Broads, a network of rivers and lakes on the easternmost coast of England.
The Murfitts’ car can carry the 100-lb boat on its roof racks, but it takes the help of another strong back to get it loaded and unloaded. A trailer is in the works this winter and next year Tim and Wendy will head for more distant horizons.
Kits for the Savo 650 and other Puuvenepiste boats are available from Puuvenepiste in Finland and Swanson Boat Company in the US.
The 21′ Gokstad faering I built in 1987 wasn’t a boat I could bring myself to paint or slather with boat soup that would turn black with age. The straight-grained, knot-free Douglas fir I used for the planks and sculpted stems deserved to be seen, so I varnished the whole boat inside and out. That may not have been the wisest choice for a boat built to row up the Inside Passage from Washington to Alaska, but I managed to get it through the 1,000-mile trip with only two scratches.
The boat was only hauled ashore once or twice, so it was almost always afloat, day and night for eight weeks, long enough for a few barnacles to start growing below the waterline. To keep the varnish intact I had to be very careful with my anchoring, especially in waters where the tides could fall up to 20′ between the highs and lows. I didn’t want to wake up, as John Hartmann did in his Deer Isle adventure, to something going bump in the night and gouging the brightwork bottom.
Many of the coves along the northern British Columbia coast and the Alaskan panhandle were narrow, rocky, and steep-sided, so anchoring or dragging the boat ashore were out of the question. That’s when one of the variations on the Pythagorean mooring system that Hartmann describes, came in handy.
Keeping a bright-finished hull of the rocks was the main challenge camp-cruising the Inside Passage.
The most challenging cove was a notch in the west side of one of the Copeland Islands north of Lund, British Columbia. The water in the cove was clear, so I could see the bottom—all rocks except for one small patch of sand. I measured the depth of the water over the sand, checked the tide tables, and figured the boat might go aground in the early morning, but not by much. With lines running ashore from each end of the boat, I managed to scramble around the rocky flanks of the cove and get the boat strung up right over the sand. I left enough slack in the lines to let the boat drop with the tide, but not so much that the boat would wander off target. I was worried about the lines getting snagged on the bottom so I clove-hitched splits of yellow-cedar driftwood in to keep them floating on the surface. Hoping for the best, I retired to the camp for the night.
In the morning the boat was afloat on the newly rising tide. I cast off the lines and brought her ashore to load up the camping gear. Before leaving the cove I paddled to the middle and took a look over the side at the patch of sand. Running right down the middle of it was a shallow groove where the keel had gently come to rest. The varnish had survived the night unscathed.
Ron Rantilla’s Odyssey 165 is an unusual rowboat for touring and exercise. It is specifically for use with his FrontRower, a drop-in forward-facing rowing system. With the oars fully supported by the rowing rig, there’s no need to make the boat wide enough to provide a workable span for conventional oarlocks, or stout enough to take the strain of rowing on the gunwales. The Odyssey has the proportions of a canoe, offers the same view over the bow, and is similarly efficient converting effort into forward progress.
The FrontRower occupies a fair bit of space in the middle of the boat, but the ends have plenty of room for gear and I could easily imagine taking extended cruises. With one’s legs taking on the lion’s share of powering the oars, covering long distances with a heavily laden boat would save the hands, shoulders, and back wear and tear. There would also be a benefit in being able to keep the boat moving with legs alone while looking at charts or GPS, taking photos, and keeping well hydrated and fed.
photographs and video by the author
Each oar comes apart at a joint just outboard of the hand grips, and it is easy enough to assemble and disassemble the oars while afloat.
Let’s take a look at the FrontRower. With all of its wooden struts and cords, it looks like a fancy trebuchet; it won’t hurl a rower out of the seat but it will hurl the rower and the boat forward. The inboard ends of the aluminum oar shafts are anchored to pivots at the top of the FrontRower. The brackets the shafts are mounted to bear against a slick plastic plate and the bolts holding the ends are pulled downward by springs underneath the plate. The arrangement holds the oar blades out of the water between strokes. Eyebolts on the looms are attached to cords that have springs at the other end that pull the oar blades forward during the recovery phase. Other attachment points are for handles to add arm power to the stroke. Attached to the handles are cords leading aft to pulleys, then forward to the swinging foot pedals. It all looks very complex, but it works like a charm.
Despite all of the moving parts in the FrontRower, the action is quite smooth and without any ticks, clicks, or apparent friction. The only sound it makes is the hum of braided line running through pulleys.
I’m quite particular about rowing style and wouldn’t expect a contraption like this to row with anything approaching elegance, but the FrontRower has beautiful blade work with the same grace and economy of effort as the Thames Waterman stroke I was taught by my father. The handgrips and the pedal cords are attached to the loom at an angle that brings the blades off the feather at the moment power is applied at the catch. The blades flip directly into the water without being squared beforehand. At the release, cords attached at an angle on the forward sides of the looms, rotate the blades while they are still immersed; the water moving past the blades helps rotate and lift them. It’s a lovely thing to watch.
The Odyssey is fastest with both arms and legs powering the stroke. The hands need to be used to speed the recovery.
At the finish of the stroke the blades come off the feather quickly and stay low. Note that the trim of the boat here is the same as it is at the catch.
The FrontRower can be powered by legs, arms, or both. Switching between arms and legs gives each set of muscles a break and all the while the boat keeps moving. Using both arms and legs doesn’t require any unusual coordination—it’s very much like rowing with a sliding seat—and like sliding-seat rowing, can really burn calories in a sprint. It’s a great full-body exercise.
The seat is adjustable to accommodate different leg lengths. Getting it set in the right position is critical. I started out with the seat too far forward and felt quite bunched up, especially with my arms, and unable to put on the power. Moving the seat back a few inches made a world of difference.
The padded seat and mesh backrest are quite comfortable and remained so for the duration of my morning outing. The backrest keeps the lower back in a fixed position, so my layback was limited to the range of motion of the shoulders and upper back, but the principal source of power comes from the legs, and the backrest is required to lock the hips in place. Restricting the layback minimizes the weight shift, a good thing for forward-facing rowing. With conventional rowing the weight shifts toward the bow during the layback at the end of the drive, and then when weight shifts toward the stern at the recovery, it pulls the boat forward. With forward-facing rowing the weight shift works the other way around, pulling the boat backward during the recovery. With the FrontRower the legs are engaged in rowing, and as they extend forward during the drive and layback, they nearly eliminate the effects of the upper-body weight shift.
The handgrips are padded and have snaphooks to clip into fittings on the looms. The grips are vertical and have plenty of play, so I could adjust their angle for comfort. It’s easier on the wrists to pull vertical grips than horizontal ones and with the FrontRower grips the wrists don’t have to bend constantly to follow the changing angle of the oar during the stroke. To back the oars, take hold of the looms directly at their padded grips. It’s easy to put the blades on and off the feather manually and hold or back water to maneuver in tight quarters.
At the catch the blades are close to the water and will come off the feather and bury themselves as soon as the pressure is applied at the beginning of the drive. Here the boat is being rowed with the feet only.
With my GPS recording speed, I rowed with my arms and logged 3 knots at a relaxed pace, 4 knots at an exercise pace, and peaked at 4-3/4 knots in a short sprint. Rowing with my legs I also did 3 knots at a relaxed pace, but that was the end of the legs-only trial. The springs that pull the oars through the recovery couldn’t work any faster. With both arms and legs powering the stroke (and the arms hastening the recovery), I clocked 4 knots at a relaxed pace, 5 knots at an exercise pace, and in a short sprint did 5.75 knots, beating the 5.36 knot hull speed listed on the Odyssey web page.
I had calm conditions while I was rowing the Odyssey, so I couldn’t evaluate how well the boat and rowing rig would take on wind and waves. The designer notes that his hulls “are great for flat water rivers, lakes, and bays, where they can handle reasonable chop and wakes from motor boats. They are not suitable for extreme conditions: whitewater rapids, heavy surf, breaking waves, high winds.” I’d agree with drawing the line at those challenging conditions. For very rough water I prefer sitting on a thwart to have my whole spine free to keep myself upright over a rolling boat, and having my hands on conventional oars so I can control where the blades are.
The greatest beam is not at the sheer, but at the chine below it, so a guard is added to protect the hull.
The Odyssey’s stitch-and-glue plywood hull has a flat bottom with no rocker. The bottom can be constructed from a single layer of plywood, or as a sandwich of plywood around a foam core. The foam core provides built-in flotation and stiffens the hull, making framing unnecessary. The lower planks flare outward above the waterline to provide stability. At the stern, they meet to give the hull a double-ended waterline below the reverse-rake transom. The sheerstrake has a pronounced tumblehome and provides clearance for the oars angling down from the apex of the FrontRower. The chine between the strakes has an unusual curve, rising upward at the stern but veering subtly downward to the bow, according to the designer, “following the wave curve.”
The plans provide full-sized patterns for the stem, breasthook, and quarter knees. Offsets are provided for the bottom and planks. The instructions cover making the foam-core bottom as well as the stitch-and-glue assembly of the rest of the hull. The kit includes all of the wooden parts for the boat, including plantation-grown okoume plywood in CNC router-cut panels with wavy finger-joints to align them accurately for full-length planks.
The Odyssey 165 and the FrontRower make an appealing combination of an easily driven hull and a powerful, ergonomic propulsion system, well suited for exercise, leisure days on the water, and extended cruising.
Christopher Cunningham is the editor of Small Boats Monthly.
Seaford skiffs first appeared in the shallow marshes around the New York town of Seaford, Long Island, in the early 1870s. They are an evolutionary product of skiffs commonly used by local baymen for hunting waterfowl, digging clams, and fishing. Boatbuilder Samuel Gritman is credited as the primary originator of the Seaford type, but other builders such as Paul Ketcham of Amityville, and Charles and Sidney Verity of Seaford, built many and contributed their own modifications to the design from its inception through the 1950s.
The Seaford type very closely resembles the melonseed skiff, which was native to the marshes and estuaries of New Jersey. Both types were designed to work thin waters and sit upright on their bottoms when beached, but also be seaworthy enough to be safe in open water or in unforgiving winter conditions. The region around Seaford was a popular destination for recreational waterfowl hunters from New York City, and the cockpit of the Seaford skiff was designed to carry two people, most often a paying sport hunter and his local bayman guide. According to Barry Thomas’s article in the Log of Mystic Seaport from the summer of 1974, the skiffs were also very popular with the “market” hunters who were kept busy through the late 1800s “supplying hat manufacturers with birds’ breasts and wings to adorn ladies’ hats,” which, sadly, led to the extinction of several native species.
Evelyn Ansel
Seaford skiffs are handsome, classic little boats that will surely turn heads wherever they go. The rig and tiller are all easily stowed aboard and the light, shallow hulls are easily trailered. Launching or hauling on the beach requires little more than a pair of rollers and maybe an extra set of hands.
Seaford skiffs range in length from 12′ to about 15′6″ and carry a simple unstayed rig with a sprit and boom with roughly 66 sq ft of canvas. They traditionally carried a more conservative rig in winter, and a larger summer rig to catch the breeze on hot, still days. Today’s recreational sailors typically prefer the larger summer rig. Seaford skiffs are fine for their length with a beam seldom greater than 4′ 6″. This makes them easy to row or pole, and they track very well, almost to a fault. The hulls are very shallow and draw only about 8″ with the centerboard up.
They have a very low profile, purportedly for low visibility when hunting. A cambered, canvased deck provides a versatile platform that, in addition to keeping the cockpit occupants happily dry, could be used to secure the rig, oars, decoys, ducks, or marsh-grass camouflage. The cockpit is protected by a high coaming and is only partially divided by the centerboard trunk, leaving just enough room for two to sit shoulder-to-shoulder while sailing. A raked transom helps lift the stern in a following sea, making for a more comfortable ride downwind.
Both Seaford skiffs and melonseeds are far shapelier gunning boats than their cousin, the sneakbox. Like the sneakbox, Seaford skiffs are traditionally carvel planked to provide a smooth hull for stealth—guides believe that the sound of waves hitting the laps of a clinker-built hull might spook the intended prey. They are built from the plank-keel up, but can be built upside down if that’s preferred.
The plank keel, cut from a single board and as wide as 12″ to 14″ amidships, may be the most difficult piece of stock to source for traditional construction. It can be built up, in the fashion of a dory bottom, with two or three pieces of lumber. Laminating stock for the stem and substituting steambent oak frames for the traditional sawn frames, would also make acquisition of materials easier for the modern builder.
Evelyn Ansel
In light air, the Seaford skiff requires deft handling and precise timing when tacking to keep it moving briskly.
The hollow forward and the tuck running up to the transom both require skill to execute the carvel planking. The garboard’s run up to the transom is complicated by the extreme angles between it and the plank keel on one edge and the first broadstrake on the other. The garboards create a hollow space aft of the cockpit along the centerline known as a box keel. The carvel planking and the complex shape may be a little advanced for a first-time builder, but adapting the plans for lapstrake, glued-lap plywood, or even strip-plank construction would simplify the project.
Seaford skiffs are a delight to sail. They are light and easily trailerable, and can be brought up the beach upright on rollers. Their stability and simple rig make them extremely accessible to novices, and they are great boats for introducing kids to the water. They are perfect for exploring shallow coastlines and all those little islands and inlets inaccessible on foot.
The skiffs were always outfitted for rowing. The low deck, as well as the coaming, required tall oarlocks that are not so common now as they were when the skiffs in the collection at Mystic were built. One could build up pads for the sockets to get the necessary height for standard oarlocks. Outfitted with a seat that can be removed to clear the cockpit for sailing, the skiffs make smart little rowboats that track very well. The skiffs were also sculled and poled.
Sharon Brown
Barry Thomas, a Mystic Seaport boatbuilder who took part in building the Helen Packer, takes to the oars using a pair of tall oarlocks that keep the oars clear of the coaming. Boats similar to Seaford skiffs—sneakboxes and melonseed skiffs—were equipped with removable boxes that served as seats for rowing as well as for storage of small items. While none of the Seaford skiffs in the Mystic Seaport collection had such boxes present when the boats were acquired, the boxes were likely what were used for rowing.
The small cockpit is ideal for an adult and one child, or even two children if they’re small enough to tuck up next to the centerboard. Two adults will fit comfortably in cooler weather when being huddled together for warmth is welcome, but rubbing elbows can be miserably sticky in really muggy weather. On hot days a Seaford skiff is best enjoyed solo when the breeze can wrap around you, and you have your legs athwartships and your back against the coaming. Because the best place to sit when winds are light is the bottom of the boat, the floorboards are an important feature for keeping you out of the bilge.
Evelyn Ansel
For sailing, the floorboards provide seating; a removable seat was used for rowing. This skiff’s oarlock sockets are made from pipe and extend down to a cleat spanning a pair of frames. The arrangement accommodates the strain imposed by the tall oarlocks. The decked-over forward area makes for a great place to stow a cooler, a beach towel, a pair of binoculars, and a paddle.
The skiffs like a good breeze, and require precise timing and weight shifts to tack smartly in light air. Imprecision here will reveal a tendency to wallow, though this is often operator error on the part of those more accustomed to sailing modern dinghies. As Sharon Brown, longtime head of Mystic Seaport’s boat livery and former assistant to John Gardner, neatly stated, traditional wooden boats sail best when given the “opportunity to breathe. Don’t head up too high and don’t sheet in too tight. Keep a way on.”
HELEN PACKER, the Seaford skiff in Mystic Seaport Museum’s livery, is one of the most popular boats in the fleet. She was built by Barry Thomas and volunteers at the John Gardner Small Boatshop at the Mystic museum in the mid-1990s. Thomas studied the Ketcham-built skiff in the museum’s collection as well as several extant Verity-built models. Thomas also consulted with builder Paul Ketcham Jr. and his wife Carol, who provided measurements and a pattern for the keel.
Launched in 1998, and sailing every season since, HELEN PACKER has afforded thousands of visitors the chance to explore Mystic, Connecticut, from the water. She was the first boat that I ever singlehanded as a late-blooming and cautious sailor at 14 years old. I couldn’t ask for a sweeter start. With the sail already bent on the mast, rigging the boat was a simple matter, and the only line to adjust was the snotter that tensioned the sprit. The mainsheet was daisy-chained around the furled sail, and the whole rig could be carried easily by any of the Seaport volunteers, who ranged in age from 13 to 83. All that was required to sail off the dock was to install the rudder and put the centerboard down. The entire rigging process takes under five minutes.
Evelyn Ansel
The rig is quite simple. The sheet is hitched and whipped to the boom and the notched ladder on the mast allows you to adjust the angle of the sprit.
With their long and narrow hulls, Seaford skiffs trim and handle best with the sailor’s weight forward as possible, so we were all taught to sit with our backs against the coaming to weather, one knee just brushing the after end of the centerboard trunk, and with feet propping us up on the downwind side. Because there are no thwarts, sailors must have a good range of motion in their knees, and be comfortable sitting on the floorboards. The boats are extremely stable, and in my five summers working at Mystic’s boat livery, I only rarely encountered a breeze fresh enough that I felt I needed to hike out to weather. I never saw HELEN PACKER capsize either, although visitors, volunteers, and staff eagerly took her out in all conditions. Despite her stability, she’s still lively and exciting to sail, and easy to handle even for a young teen in a gust with the sheet just tucked behind a purposefully placed cleat on the coaming.
The design is ideally suited for inquisitive sailors young and old to explore those tempting spots that always seem just out of reach from land; this is a perfect cruiser for those among us who will always prefer to look closer rather than go far, from the miniature worlds of rocky tidepools to the rich ecosystems of marshes and intertidal zones.
Evelyn Ansel is an archivist and documentation specialist based in Providence, Rhode Island. She grew up in a family of boatbuilders and librarians, and makes a living working at a little of both. She currently splits her time between the Hart Nautical Collection at the MIT Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the Herreshoff Museum of Bristol, RI. Her work in maritime heritage preservation has taken her across the world from the Gulf of Mexico to the Baltic. She serves on the board of the Apprenticeshop of Rockland, Maine, and is a frequent freelance contributor to WoodenBoat magazine.
She wishes to thank Sharon Brown, the champion of small craft at the Mystic Seaport Museum’s boat livery. During her decades-long tenure, tens of thousands of visitors, volunteers, and staff were introduced to the joys of traditional small craft on the Mystic River. Sharon deserves much credit for instilling a sense of pride and inspiring delight in our small-craft heritage in countless folks of all ages.
It was a very gentle bump. I’d been sleeping comfortably at anchor after a long day on the water, but I was wide-awake in an instant. A few seconds later it came again—a firm nudge from below interrupting the soft, easy motion of my boat—and this time WAXWING stopped moving. I was aground. I checked my watch—3:30 in the morning, still an hour and a half to go before low tide.
I was quickly out of my sleeping bag and up at the bow, rolling back the boom tent to make room to work. There was no moon out, and in the pitch dark I tentatively stepped out of the boat, probing for the bottom with a bare foot. I slipped up to my thighs into the bracing, 60-degree water and found firm footing on a sandy bottom. With my weight out of WAXWING she floated again, her keel lifting just above the boulder beneath it. A gentle shove freed her and I hopped back aboard. Standing in the bow, I pulled the anchor rode and chain in as quietly as I could and stowed the anchor at my feet.
I reached under the boom tent, fished out one of my oars, and sculled WAXWING in a lazy half circle out to deeper water. The blade slicing through the water stirred up cascades of phosphorescence, which gleamed like fireworks across the inky black water. A dozen yards to starboard, a soft glow penetrated the murk; Rob slid back a corner of his boom tent, and the bright light of his LED lantern appeared. “Everything all right, John?” “No worries,” I called back cheerfully, “We’re just having a little adventure.” When I’m sleeping aboard my boat, being awakened by something that goes bump in the night is never just a good night’s sleep spoiled; it’s an experience.
John Hartmann
WAXWING (top) and SLIPPER, loaded with gear prior to departure, wait at the dock in Herrick Bay, pointing southeast toward the islands that separate Blue Hill Bay and Jericho Bay. Summer mornings here are usually calm; winds develop as the day wears on and the sun warms the land enough to generate on onshore breeze.
Rob and I had started our adventure on the heels of the Small Reach Regatta, a gathering of mostly wooden, mostly owner-built small boats. The fleet had moored in Herrick Bay, a half-mile wide inlet between Flye Point and Naskeag Point near WoodenBoat’s campus in Brooklin, Maine. After the event, he and I had left our boats anchored there for a day of provisioning. Our plan was to circumnavigate Deer Isle under sail and oars.
John Hartmann
The Ilur has a voluminous cockpit with room enough to carry gear for a multi-day trip. The blue duffel holds a bedroll, the green bucket is for bailing and collecting trash, a clear dry bag holds clothes, and the white bucket is the loo. The gray chests with red lids are kitchen and larder, the yellow soft cooler is ice chest for cold drinks and fresh foods, and the green cooler holds a five-gallon container of drinking water.
When we returned the next morning, Rob made preparations aboard SLIPPER, his 16′8″ Herreshoff Coquina, and I stowed a small mountain of gear in WAXWING, my 14′8″ yawl-rigged, François Vivier-designed Ilur. I made sure everything was secure and out of the way so I could freely move about in the cockpit, and we shoved off by mid-morning.
The tide would be in our favor until late afternoon; the wind, building out of the east, appeared as little cat’s-paws dancing on the water. The breeze swirled toward us across the bay, cooled our sun-warmed faces for a moment, then gamboled away. SLIPPER and WAXWING ghosted along side by side as the dark blue-green water slid lazily past. I got the rig set and shifted my weight to leeward to settle the boat over on its bilge to reduce the hull’s wetted surface and eke out a little more speed. Weaving among and around floating mats and broad bands of bronze-colored seaweed, we stayed well off Flye Point, where I could see, even now just past high tide, the telltale curdling of water washing over the barely submerged mile-long boulder field strewn between the point and Flye Island.
We were covering ground slowly—little more than 1 mph according to my GPS. At this speed, we would likely make it only as far as the east end of the Deer Isle Thorofare before the tides turned against us. Breaking out the oars, I began rowing gently while WAXWING’s big, fully battened, standing-lug mainsail took advantage of the bit of wind we had. With the tide coaxing us along, the combination of sailing and rowing nudged our speed up to almost 3 1/2 mph.
Off the Naskeag Point side of Herrick Bay, a broad-winged osprey vaulted from the top of a tall spruce, sailed out over the water, and pulled up momentarily to hover, eyeing the water before winging away. Rob and I row-sailed for a bit; the wind finally freshened and we shipped our oars.
John Hartmann
As Rob passed the ISAAC H. EVANS in the Deer Isle Thorofare, the schooner was sailing against the tide and getting a motor assist from the yawl boat astern. Built in 1886 for harvesting oysters along the coast of New Jersey, she now works out of Rockland, Maine, and sails the coast as part of the Maine Windjammer fleet.
By noon, we’d crossed the southern end of the Eggemoggin Reach, and rounded Stinson Neck, the southeastern tip of Deer Isle. Our course turned from due south toward southwest as Deer Isle Thorofare opened ahead of us; tide and wind now swept us along as the miles unfolded. From this vantage point, the shoreline of Deer Isle at the eastern end of the Thorofare is corrugated with peninsulas and islets. A sprawling archipelago of small islands between Deer Isle and Isle au Haut studded the steely blue waters as far as we could see.
The Thorofare is a very busy waterway along the southern coast of Deer Isle. As Rob and I sailed along, a group of five large schooners was heading up the passage together, working against the tide with sails set and yawlboats nudging them along. Toward the western end of the Thorofare, we ducked out of the main passage and headed south again, threading our way through numerous islets, nameless shoals, and sand bars on the way to George Head Island, an uninhabited islet scarcely a third of a mile long set in the heart of the archipelago.
John Hartmann
The cove at George Head Island provides a protected anchorage until the tide covers the sand spit leading off to the left to Little George Head Island. Merchant Island and Isle au Haut Bay lie in the distance to the south.
We slipped into the cove on the east end of George Head in late afternoon, a short while before the low tide. A large sandbar extends from the northeast corner of the island, and another curves out from the southeast corner to reach its smaller sibling, Little George Head Island. The bars form a well-protected cove at all but high tide. Now, nearing low slack, both islands were fringed with a broad band of exposed, weed-covered cobble and boulders. In the shelter of the cove, the scent of the exposed intertidal was pungent but pleasant.
We would be sleeping aboard our boats, and with overnight winds expected from the southwest, we decided to anchor on the Stonington side of the northernmost bar, to be in the lee of George Head’s densely wooded eastern shore. By the time Rob and I had set our anchors for the night, it was not long past low tide, so I let out enough extra rode to have adequate scope for the midnight high. As we slept the wind and tide nudged WAXWING over a large boulder in the small hours of the morning, and the rippled sea and ebbing tide soon had it bumping against her hull.
John Hartmann
With the boom tent up and after thwart stowed, WAXWING is ready for the night. The boom tent is a minimalist affair, very wind- and rain-resistant, but open at its ends. If protection from insects is needed, a 4’ x 6’ foot piece of no-see-um netting draped over the sleeper’s head is put to use.
Once WAXWING was safely anchored in deeper water, I settled down to try to get another hour or two of sleep, but it was nearly 4 a.m., and the fleet of lobsterboats that operates out of Stonington hustled toward the 50-yard-wide channel between the George Head bar and St. Helena Island. I could hear the roar of the big diesel engines even as the boats powered out of Stonington Harbor, and the din reverberated through the cluster of small rocky islands around us. The fleet approached and funneled through the gap only a couple of hundred yards from us. After the first few thundered past, I gave up on the idea of any more shuteye, and stowed my bedroll just as day was beginning to break.
John Hartmann
While SLIPPER and WAXWING were rafted up for breakfast, the low tide uncovered the boulder garden on the north side of George Head Island. One of the boulders in the area knocked against WAXWING’s bottom in the middle of the night, requiring a bit of wading to get her over deep water.
Rob was up too, so I hauled anchor, sculled over to his boat, and rafted up for breakfast. I dug out my old brass Svea stove, an ancient and trustworthy traveling companion, along with my Bialetti espresso pot. The yellow flames from the fuel I’d dribbled into the primer hollow at the base of the stove flickered up and before long the little stove’s blue flame was making a roar of its own, Lilliputian compared to the big lobsterboats, but much more welcome. Breakfast was homemade granola, fresh Maine blueberries, and a piping-hot latte. Although Rob tends toward minimalist camping and frugal dining, no doubt habits fostered by years of sea kayaking, I sail a type of boat that was once meant to carry fishermen and a boat full of fish safely back to port every night. She is a weatherly little packhorse, and I happily take advantage of her capacity, routinely stuffing her with provisions enough to take care of three or four sailors on outings of as many days. Rob cheerfully tolerates my sybaritic tendencies, and made no objection to the foamed latte as I handed it across.
WAXWING and SLIPPER bobbed gently in the cove as the rising sun sent spears of gold up through breaks in the clouds. The water was glassy calm, and the dawn reflected in a great shimmering column of light. I was sleep-deprived and salt-crusted, but this was still heaven on earth. Arctic terns cried, wheeled, hovered, and dove along the bar. One hungry bird splashed down less than a dozen feet from us, then surfaced and wheeled away with a wriggling 3″ sand eel dangling from its orange beak.
Sipping our coffee, we listened to the weather forecast, looked over our charts, and considered the tides as we discussed the day ahead. We’d have light and variable morning winds, and afternoon winds to 10 mph. Low tide was fast approaching; our intended destination would be Butter Island, 11 miles up East Penobscot Bay. If we waited till midday, there would be wind for reaching, but we’d also lose a favorable tide, and progress would be iffy. We separated the boats, Rob weighed anchor, and we set out rowing north-northwest.
East Penobscot Bay was dead calm, disturbed only by the eddies swirling off the tips of our oars. Striking out into the wider waters between Deer Isle and North Haven Island, we made our course toward Eagle, Butter, and Great Spruce Head, a trio of mile-long islands in the middle of a cluster of smaller islands near the top of the bay. It was still early, and except for a few lobsterboats rumbling off in the distance, we had the eastern bay to ourselves.
After a bit of rowing, Rob and I were well offshore, but not entirely alone. A succession of seals followed us for about a minute at a time, staying 20 or 30 yards off our sterns, with their great, dark eyes fixed on us.
John Hartmann
For the long row north to Eagle Island, Penobscot Bay was glassy calm.
Rob and I took a break, put on sunscreen, and snacked on granola bars and fruit. The tide carried us up the Bay and past the tip of Eagle Island. The water was glassy smooth from Deer Isle 2-1/2 miles to the northeast, the same distance to North Haven in the southwest. Over WAXWING’s transom, the sky met the open Atlantic beyond Isle au Haut Bay. We took to the oars again, pulled for Butter Island, and by late morning came ashore on the broad crescent of Nubble Beach on its eastern shore just before high tide.
We had the whole afternoon ahead of us, so we put the boats at anchor to keep them afloat through the falling tide cycle, and set off to explore the island. It is a mile long and a half mile wide, its shoreline scalloped with beaches. We walked a trail through shaded woods to the 150′-high summit of Montserrat Hill, where we could see the upper end of Eggemoggin Reach 7 miles to the north, and the undulating ridgeline of the Camden Hills 15 miles to the west across West Penobscot Bay. There is a polished granite bench at the summit, a memorial to Thomas Cabot who bought Butter Island in the 1940s to preserve it for the people of Maine. Engraved on its thick curved edge is a line for Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses”: “Come, my friends, ‘tis not too late to seek a newer world.” From the bench we had a clear view down to the beach, where SLIPPER and WAXWING were riding quietly at their shared mooring, with plenty of water beneath them in the receding tide. A schooner worked its way up the East Penobscot Bay, and thunderheads piled up over the mainland.
John Hartmann
The view from Montserrat Hill took in WAXWING and SLIPPER anchored next to The Nubble, a rock outcropping at the easternmost point of Butter Island. Tides are commonly 10′ to 12′ along this part of the Maine coast. The boats are on a modified Pythagorean mooring to keep them afloat and off the beach, but easily retrievable.
We made our way back to the beach; it had been a full day, and we turned in after an early supper for a sound sleep anchored off Nubble Beach.
Following breakfast the next morning, we set out north-northwest, rowing in the calm until we were about halfway between Bradbury and Pickering islands. The waking winds, coming from the southeast, hinted of a useful breeze. Rob and I set our sails to catch whatever breezes might help us, and then got back to rowing to speed us on our way. Not far off, pods of harbor porpoises surfaced, swimming in ever-tightening circles as they corralled small fish for their morning meal. The sound of their quick breaths carried across the water to us in the stillness of the morning.
John Hartmann
In a light breeze Rob row-sailed toward Pumpkin Island and the top of the Eggemoggin Reach. Sail-assisted rowing made it possible to cover mileage more effectively when sail alone would have been too slow to keep the pair on schedule to make good use of the tidal currents around Penobscot Bay.
We rounded Pumpkin Island, a low islet scarcely large than a football field, skirted in bare granite with a squat cylindrical lighthouse attached to the keeper’s house at its center. At the head of Eggemoggin Reach, the winds steadied, so we stowed the oars and sailed southeast down the Reach toward the suspension bridge that links Little Deer Isle to the mainland. The breeze was now coming from the east-southeast, so we had to work to windward. The winds were still light, and the going was slow. I tacked back and forth below the bridge, looking up at the catenary curves of the main cables, the thick green girders beneath the roadway, and the delicate looking web of criss-crossed suspension cables between them. The tide had come to its high slack about the time I passed under the bridge, tacking back and forth between the Deer Isle causeway on one side, and a red nun on the other.
Rob was five or six hundred yards ahead of me in SLIPPER, and all of a sudden he was away like a rabbit, coursing down the Reach carried by an ebb tide flowing south to Jericho Bay. It dawned on me that where I was sailing the water was flowing north out of the Reach on an outgoing tide. I had not yet passed the tidal watershed! I was barely holding my own, tacking repeatedly from nun to causeway and back again and again. With the wind on my nose, and the strengthening ebb against me, I had no choice but to drop the rig and start rowing—with grim determination. After a half mile the rowing seemed easier, and I could see that the shoreline was slipping by a bit faster. I shipped the oars, hoisted sail, and with more than a little relief I was under way again, now keeping pace with Rob and SLIPPER.
John Hartmann
The Deer Isle bridge, spanning 200’ at a height of 85′ above the water, opened in 1939. It was built to a design similar to Washington’s Tacoma Narrows bridge, which famously collapsed in 1940 due to wind-induced oscillations. The Deer Isle bridge was also damaged by oscillations in strong winds and extensively modified in 1943.
The day was warming up, and the onshore breeze was coming alive; the winds continued to freshen as the afternoon grew hotter. Before long I had to sheet the mizzen in tight, heave to, and tie a reef in the main. Down through the southern end of the Reach, Rob and I had some pretty spirited sailing, and we were both up and down on the rail for the next three or four miles, our two boats punching forward on blue-gray water generously flecked with white caps.
Around the outside of Hog Island at the tip of Naskeag Point, we met the 65′ schooner ISAAC H. EVANS, returning from Mt. Desert Island. With a magnificent spread of canvas driving her, she fairly swept up the Reach, soaring past us with a hiss of water foaming along her sides, a picture of power and grace.
Gabrielle McDermit
With three miles left to go, WAXWING stopped at a sheltered beach on Sellers Island.
Soon we were rounding Devils Head at the end of Hog Island, and broad-reaching for Sellers Island, a wooded islet surrounded by boulders on all but its north side. I could see my wife Gabrielle on the beach, waving. She and our young friend Erika had been aboard WAXWING for the Small Reach Regatta earlier in the week, and today had sailed a small pram the half mile from Naskeag Harbor out to Sellers’s semicircle of white sand, hoping to meet up with us as we left the Reach. Seeing Gabrielle waiting for me on the island’s boulder-studded outer shore made me feel like a 19th-century ship captain returning safe from sea after a long voyage.
Rob and I landed on the beach, and after a break to stretch our legs, Gabrielle joined Rob in SLIPPER, Erika hopped aboard WAXWING, and we took the pram in tow. It was early evening, and the onshore breeze was dying away with the setting of the sun. Gabrielle rowed SLIPPER around the point and up Herrick Bay toward the takeout, but there was still enough wind for WAXWING’s large and powerful rig, so Erika and I hoisted sail, and she skippered WAXWING back to the mooring.
We left the boats anchored and would haul them out the next morning. Rob and I paused at the top of the dock looking back at SLIPPER and WAXWING, both riding quietly at anchor in the last light of the day. There was more to Tennyson’s poem than the line inscribed in the bench atop Montserrat Hill on Butter Island. In another passage he expressed the lure that draws me to explore the coast in a small boat and the touch of sadness I feel at the journey’s end:
I am a part of all I’ve met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams that untravelled world whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!
John Hartmann lives in central Vermont. He built his Ilur dinghy, WAXWING, to sail the 1000 Islands region of the St. Lawrence River, Lake Champlain, and along the coast of Maine. He details the Pythagorean mooring system he used at Nubble beach in the Technique article in this issue.
François Vivier’s Ilur
Christophe Matson
The yawl configuration is one of four options for the Ilur’s sailing rig.
The Ilur is a modern interpretation of the coastal inshore fishing boats that worked the Bay of Biscay in the age of sail and is naval architect François Vivier’s best-selling sail-and-oar design. Many hundreds have been built in Europe. The Ilur was an evolution of an earlier Vivier design, the Aber, with greater length, beam, and freeboard to make her a better choice for work in big water. The Ilur is available as plans and full-size Mylar patterns and as a CNC kit. I bought a kit from Clint Chase of Chase Small Craft, one of Vivier’s partners. The kit uses an egg-crate system of interlocking transverse and longitudinal bulkheads to ensure a rigid building jig. An additional advantage of this construction technique is that once the hull is flipped after planking, most of the interior furniture is already built into the boat. The egg-crate system not only provides a highly accurate building jig, but also yields an enormously strong and stiff hull. There are four different rig options: the boomless standing lug, a balanced lug, a lug sloop, and most recently, a lug yawl. I found the lug yawl an ideal rig for dinghy cruising, as it allows the boat to self tend when heaved to for reefing in open water, or if the skipper needs to go forward for any reason.
—JH
Ilur Particulars:
[table]
LOA/14′8″
LWL/13′5″
Beam/5′7″
Draft, board up/10″
Draft, board down/2′10″
Weight including rig, anchor, and oars/400 lbs (approximate)
Sail area/130–150 sq ft, depending on rig
[/table]
If you have an interesting story to tell about your adventures with a small wooden boat, please email us a brief outline and a few photos.
I first read about the Pythagorean mooring technique in Roger Barnes’s delightful and informative book, The Dinghy Cruising Companion, when it was published in 2014. It is a simple and clever way to anchor a small boat without using a clothesline loop or outhaul setup. As described, a Pythagorean mooring, named after geometry’s theorem of right triangles, is most useful in settings where tidal range is modest and where there is fairly deep water close to a shoreline.
The basic technique, as illustrated in Barnes’s book, involves dropping an anchor in deep water with enough slack in the rode to let you paddle the boat straight to shore—one leg of the right triangle. After you step ashore, you pull the slack out of the rode and make it fast to the bow. A long warp is then tied to the bow and its other end walked along the shore—the other leg of the triangle—until the boat is offshore along the “hypotenuse” formed by the rode and warp. The warp is secured ashore and the boat is kept snug in deep water.
Over the past few boating seasons, I have experimented with variations on this conventional setup on shorelines that aren’t straight and in anchorages with fairly large tidal ranges. Maine’s Penobscot Bay has tides of 10′ to 12′, which can create challenges for boaters who wish to come ashore without getting stranded by a falling tide, or don’t want to deal with waves that would pound a boat on the beach during a rising tide. I use a modification of the Pythagorean system to make a convenient anchorage where a promontory projects from a long sweep of sandy beach.
photographs by the author
Using the angle created by a beach and a promontory, the system can get the boats in water deeper than it is where the anchor is set.
I set the anchor beyond the point where underwater vegetation on the bottom indicates the low-water mark, then bring the boat into the beach near the base of the promontory. All I have to do to pull the boat into deep water is walk the warp out the point far enough to keep my boat, and often one rafted up with it, afloat despite the impressive amount of beach exposed by the low tides. With enough anchor line, I could just as easily set the anchor on dry ground above the high-water mark, letting the hypotenuse extend from the beach to the point.
When I find myself in an area where numerous small islands and a rocky shoreline offer a multitude of small pocket coves, no anchor is needed. I simply tie off one end of a warp to a tree or rock, scull into the cove to the approximate desired resting place for the boat, and secure the line to the stem. I then bring the boat back to shore, and walk the free end of the warp around to the other side of the cove, haul the boat into position, and then secure the warp on shore.
Lines spanning the mouth of a small cove can keep a boat safely away from the rocks.
The Pythagorean technique offers a convenient, adaptable, and effective way to moor a boat offshore with minimal extra gear. In addition to my 200′ anchor rode of 3/8″ three-strand nylon, I have a 300′ warp of 5/16″ three-strand nylon. You should give some thought to whether tidal currents may change while the boat is set out, so that you can avoid having the boat swing in a way that it becomes entangled on the line it is tethered to.
John Hartmann lives in central Vermont. He built his Ilur dinghy, WAXWING, to sail the 1000 Islands region of the St. Lawrence River, Lake Champlain, and along the coast of Maine. His article, “Maine Island Idyll,” appears in this issue.
You can share your tricks of the trade with other Small Boats Monthly readers by sending us an email.
The backs of the gloves are open to keep them cool, light, and less restrictive.
When I first saw the CrewStop rowing gloves, I thought they looked like well-made, orthopedic rehab devices. The backs of the gloves resemble athletic tape, and this is a good point: the CrewStop gloves are an effective alternative to taping. Each glove captures three fingers with two bands of elastic, providing an uninhibited range of motion while minimizing friction and heat at customary pressure points on the hands.
Dale McKinnon
The silicone applied to the palm provides a good grip on an oar handle, even if it is wet.
The gloves were designed by and for competitive rowers and scullers, so I wondered how they would stand up to the demands of expedition and open-water rowing. I row in a saltwater coastal environment where my gear has to hold up to sand, gravel, or crushed-shell beaches. On landings I often climb up on rocks or rusty ladders, but these gloves aren’t meant for that kind of rough work. They are very snug, and don’t lend themselves to quick removal, but I can quickly slip leather work gloves over them before I drive the bow of my boat onto a gravel beach and hop out with painter in hand to tug the boat ashore.
SBM photo
The pinky is subject to less pressure than the other fingers so it is left bare.
My hands are often wet from rain or wind-driven spray while boating, so I dipped my hands in the water to soak the CrewStop gloves and went for a row. The palms have a pattern of silicone that gave me a sure grip on the oars even while wet. The leather-like palm material has a one-way stretch oriented across the hand so it doesn’t bunch up when wrapped around the oar handle. The material softened when wet, and even though I began to feel a hot spot near the fleshy skin between thumb and palm after rowing for 30 minutes, the gloves protected my hands everywhere else.
It makes good sense for rowers of any sort to take good care of their hands. These gloves are well designed and constructed to protect hands not yet toughened up for rowing. They can bring an end to the old-fashioned reliance on working through pain and possible infection from blisters to build calluses. The CrewStops are an intelligent solution for occasional rowers, rowers ramping up their training for a race, or rowers getting back on the water after taking time off. I’ll use them over the winter on my ergometer and in the spring on the boat to gradually develop the calluses I’ll need for my rowing season.
Dale McKinnon began rowing in 2002 at the age of 57 and in 2004 rowed solo from Ketchikan, Alaska, to her home town, Bellingham, Washington. In 2005 she rowed from Ketchikan to Juneau. Her previous articles for Small Boats Monthly include rowing the Columbia River and the Columbia River estuary, how to row rough water, and reviews of NewGrips rowing gloves, Exped sleeping pads, and the Devlin Duckling 17.
The sculler’s version of the gloves (grip texture for both hands) shown here are available for $37.50 from The CrewStop.
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.
This summer I ran over a submerged object while I was out sailing my 18′ sail-and-oar boat. The centerboard, held down by a bungee, kicked up, dropped back down, and suffered no damage. The pivoting blade of my rudder was held in place by a downhaul in a jam cleat, not by a bungee, so when it kicked up, the stopper knot on the end of the downhaul pulled through its hole at the edge of the rudder blade. The blade stayed up and I no longer had rudder control. I had to stop, take the rudder apart, reinsert the downhaul, and add whipping to fatten the end to keep it from pulling though again. While I avoided major damage, it could have been worse if I’d had a more robust attachment for the downhaul.
Alex Zimmerman
With the cleat mounted on a rudderhead, the downhaul line isn’t at quite the right angle entering the cleat but the system still works.
Clearly I’m not the first person to run into this problem, because the folks at Clamcleat in the U.K. have developed an auto-release jam cleat. The aluminum cleat accommodates lines from 3/16″ to 1/4″ in diameter and is mounted in an acetal thermoplastic base with a pivot pin. On the bottom of the cleat is a small double-sided cam that snaps underneath a couple of tabs inside a plastic base. When a tug on the line applies a sufficient upward force against the tabs, the cleat capsizes, releasing the line. The cam adjusts the force required for release and, according to Duckworks, a U.S. retailer for Clamcleats, can be set anywhere between 50 and 520 lbs.
The recommended installation would have the line pulling directly in line with the cleat, and mounting the cleat on a conventional tiller would achieve that. My boat has a push-pull tiller preventing that kind of installation, so I mounted the cleat on the rudder head. The downhaul enters the cleat at an angle of 16 degrees below horizontal, and while that’s not ideal—it increases the force needed to release the cleat—I thought it might work anyway.
SBM
For the cleat to work as designed, the line should enter the cleat parallel to the base. This cleat is installed on the centerboard trunk of a Whitehall.
SBM
The tripped cleat shows the disk that engages tabs on the inside of the base. The tabs on the disk are stops to limit the range of its rotation.
There are two questions to be considered with this cleat: Will it keep the rudder in place while sailing in reasonable conditions? Will it release before a collision or grounding does significant damage to the rudder or boat?
To answer the first question, I took the boat out and sailed it in moderate conditions at up to 4 knots, and checked the force on the downhaul line by holding it. There was no more than 10 lbs of pull, well below the cleat’s release point.
To test the release without actually running aground, I clamped the rudder in the vise and set the downhaul in the auto-release cleat. With the cam at its lowest setting, I gave the rudder blade a good sharp tug with a force I estimated at about 75-100 lbs, and the cleat popped up and released the downhaul.
It seems to me the ideal setting for the auto-release would be the least amount of force needed to pop the cleat when an inadvertent force is applied (such as grounding your rudder blade) but enough to hold the rudder blade down against the forces pushing it back while you are underway. For my boat, I think this setting will work just fine. I suspect the lowest setting will also work fine with most small boats, but the adjustment is there and a little experimentation will tell you what works for your boat.
This clever piece of gear works as advertised. Though I am using it for a rudder, it would work equally well for a centerboard or a leeboard. It’s a keeper, and I will have a little more peace of mind next time I am out sailing.
Alex Zimmerman is a semi-retired mechanical technologist and former executive. His first boat was an abandoned Chestnut canoe that he fixed up as a teenager and paddled on the waterways of eastern Manitoba and northwestern Ontario. He started his professional career as a maritime engineer in the Canadian Navy, and that triggered his interest in sailing. He didn’t get back into boatbuilding until he moved back to Vancouver Island in the ’90s, where he built a number of sea kayaks that he used to explore the coast. In the early 2000s, he built his first sail-and-oar boat and he completed his latest in June of this year. He says he can stop building boats any time.
The Pilot 19 is designed with a pilothouse, and Haynes started building his boat that way, but after he bumped his head a few times on the frame that supported the roof, he decided to keep the cockpit open. The result has worked well for family outings.
Joe Haynes grew up in Detroit with three brothers and two sisters. Their father, once a tight end for the University of Michigan football team and later an Army sergeant who stormed beaches in the Pacific during World War II, was a very athletic man, but in spite of his best efforts to get his kids involved in sports, none of them showed any interest.
The family moved to Algonac, Michigan, a small town tucked in a bend of the St. Clair River, which flows from Lake Huron to Lake Erie and separates the state of Michigan from the province of Ontario. Surrounded by water, the kids gravitated to boats. The first boat in the family was a derelict wooden boat Joe and his twin brother fished out of the river near their home. They patched the leaks with tar and used the boat to explore the river upstream and down.
Haynes, a CAD designer, had the plywood panels cut on a CNC machine.
Joe’s dad was quick to pick up on his kids’ interest and bought a used outboard skiff for them to use. He also started to build a boat in the garage but never finished it. Years later, he told Joe he gave up because the kids kept taking his tools and losing them
Haynes called in some extra hands for the rollover.
Joe grew up, married Janet Maria Mayea, and with her raised three children in Algonac. He was steeped in the tradition of wooden boats: Algonac is the home of Chris-Craft, Joe’s brothers owned Chris-Craft cruisers built in the 1940s, and his father-in-law, Herbert Mayea, was a second-generation owner of Mayea Boat Works, maker of Mays-Craft boats. Over the years Joe restored a 1959 Century Resorter ski boat, an old 12′ row boat, a 14′ skiff, and he built a 16′ outboard-powered dory.
The grandkids wasted no time in occupying the cabin, bringing their dolls and light sabers with them.
Joe’s kids grew up on the water, and there was always a boat in the family. They’d go out fishing or swimming and would often cruise the islands on the St. Clair River flats on the edge of Lake St. Clair. When Joe’s six grandkids came into the picture, he wanted to give them the same experience he’d had and had given his kids, so he decided to build a boat from scratch.
Armed with a sword and wearing a sock-monkey hat as a helmet, a grandson stands ready to defend the fort.
Joe ordered plans for Jacques Mertens’s Pilot 19 from Bateau.com. A CAD designer, he did a digital build before starting work on the 18′ 11″ x 7′ 8″ boat. He made a few changes, most notably foregoing the pilothouse the boat was designed with. He preferred a more open cockpit and built the boat with just a windshield. With the design modified to suit, Joe turned from his computer, keyboard, and mouse to plywood, fiberglass, and epoxy. Some of his father’s tools that he and his siblings hadn’t lost were part of the project.
The construction is stitch-and-glue with an egg-crate system of interlocking bulkheads and stringers reinforcing the hull. The plans are designed to make for a quick build, but Joe took his time, calling on Mertens and the Bateau forum to help him through any rough patches. Even while the boat was under construction in his garage, it was already serving one of Joe’s purposes: luring the grandkids to visit. They made the boat their fort.
Not long after launching JANET MARIA, Haynes was back in his garage workshop. He’s now building a Mertens-designed 10′ pram.
It took Joe five years to finish the boat; even before it was launched it was already a fixture in the family. JANET MARIA, named after Joe’s wife, is now afloat and frequents the St. Clair River, Lake St. Clair, and the Detroit River. The boat will stay on a plane at just 12 mph, and with two people aboard, the 90-hp outboard will take them up to 35 mph.
Three generations of the Haynes family enjoy fishing, cruising, swimming, tubing, and getting together with friends aboard the boat. Moored on a canal just behind the house, she still serves as the grandkids’ fort.
Have you recently launched a boat? Please email us. We’d like to hear about it and share your story with other Small Boats Monthly readers.
I started building boats in 1978, and only once was I able to collect enough crooks for a boat, a New York Whitehall. Its breasthook is apple, the six thwart knees and the bookmatched pair of quarter knees are cherry, and the transom knee is Alaskan yellow cedar. I think they’re easy on the eyes, and even though the boat is now 32 years old, the knees are as good as new. Crooks of sufficient size were hard to find, difficult to season without checks, and awkward to saw into workable stock. In other boats I’ve made straight-grained, laminated, and steam-bent knees, but none took a nice shape as well as the ones I made from crooks.
Back in February, Ben Fuller and I were corresponding about a variety of ideas for articles, and he wrote, as an aside to a comment on boom jaws: “And don’t get me started about clunky, short-toed fat knees.” When I was looking at knees in the small boats at the Wooden Boat Festival in Port Townsend this past September, I saw a lot of short-toed knees and thought it was time to get Ben “started” and have him write an article. While most of the knees at the festival were one-piece, straight-grained knees, one boat had some very nicely shaped half-lapped knees, but the joints that showed—vertical on one face, horizontal on the other—didn’t look right. I had a boatbuilder friend take a look at them, and he agreed that the shapes were good but the glue lines spoiled the effect.
These knees are very nicely shaped, but the curves can’t compete with the rectilinear filler blocks and seams.
I made some sketches of other ways to make knees using straight-grained lumber, and thought that an angled joint would look much better. The easiest way to join two pieces in a mitered corner would be with a spline. I had made two-piece breasthooks with splined joints, and they’ve held up well over the years. The method should work just as well on knees.
I don’t have a boat in the works, so I made up some knees that could fit boats that I’ve already built, but they would be objets d’art at best. I made one in breasthook fashion with table-sawn kerfs running parallel to the angled miter edges. That worked, but left the spline exposed.
I then cut kerfs perpendicular to the miter edges, cutting about 1/2″ shy of what would become the curved edge of the knee. That was the way to go. The first mitered-and-splined test pieces were joined at a right angle, and when I cut the knee to shape to fit the slightly obtuse angle of the boat, the miter wound up well above where the knee would meet the thwart. I changed the angle of the miter to a 98-degree angle to match the flare of the side at the thwart, and then, by using slightly oversized stock, I would be able to arrange the template for the knee to put the miter angle where I wanted it as well as fine-tune the run of the grain in the ends of the knee.
The kerfs cut at a right angle to the miter joint are quite deep. That increases the gluing area, which I think will make the joint quite stable. When I need knees for the next boat I build, I’ll make them this way, mitered and blind-splined.
Kerfs cut parallel to the miter joint will leave the spline visible after the knee is shaped.
I initially made a business-card template for just the upright leg, not a pattern for the whole knee. The left edge and the bottom fit the contours of the lapstrake planks and the thwart.
I started by making right-angled blanks for knees and cutting the toes before tracing the planking contours from the template on the upright. That approach didn’t give me the best run of grain on the upright nor control over the location of the miter joint.
Two early versions of splined knees had the miter joint higher than I had wanted and had poor color matches despite having each knees sections cut from the same piece of wood.
For my next trails I used the business-card template to make a full pattern for the knee. The pencil lines show the direction I want the grain to run in the finished knee. I set the bevel gauge to record the angle between the line, in this case 98 degrees.
By making two cuts and “wasting” the triangle, I can get a better match of grain and color. When I made a singe cut and flipped on piece to get the angle, the color should have looked the same, but the angle the grain takes at the surface catches the light in different ways. Flipping one piece gave the wood a different look that was quite evident at the joint.
With oversized stock I could adjust the pattern to get choose the best run of the grain and the location of the miter joint that looked best.
I used a shop-made tenon-cutting jig to cut the kerfs for the splines. It straddles and slides along the rip fence. Cutting off the corners of the two pieces being sawn removes wood that doesn’t need to be run through the saw. I have two blades stacked on the saw arbor to cut a 1/4″ kerf.
I set the depth of cut to fall short of what would eventually be the inside face of the knee.
Oversize blanks provide extra wood to make notches for a clamp to squeeze directly across the joint without slipping. The spline has a little more wood sawn off so the clamp won’t bear against it, preventing the clamp from squeezing the joint closed tight.
A large clamp squeezes the miter joint tight and two small clamps squeeze the wood tight against the spline.
The finished knee has a close match of grain and a good placement of the miter joint.
If you tend to take yourself too seriously, here’s a boat that can fix that. Paul Elkins’s Little Miss Sally is an electric micro-boat for which whimsy is as essential to its operation as its 12-volt battery. I first saw the boat on a YouTube video. In it, Paul slides her out of the back of his pick-up truck. A man with a horseshoe moustache, sunglasses, and a camo cowboy hat says: “That’s baaad. You gonna ride that thing? Sweeet!” The video has over a million views. That was my first hint that the boat might have a broad appeal.
Paul has invented and designed lots of things: several boats, bicycle camper trailers, micro shelters, and odd things such as paint-can stilts. He describes himself as a “conceptual artist”; he’s more interested in exploring ideas and creating things than capitalizing on them. Most of Paul’s creations get little more than a photo on his website or a video on YouTube, and then he’s off to the next idea. Little Miss Sally is one of 10 creations for which he has drawn plans.
The boat is roughly 8′ long, 30″ wide, and 14″ deep. While the 42-page instruction manual gives detailed dimensions for all of the pieces, the exact overall dimensions aren’t listed. They’re not really necessary, and the focus of much of Paul’s work is just on getting things done. His full list of materials and tools, measured drawings, and step-by-step instructions and photographs will make it easy for a novice to put the boat together. If you have even a modest background in woodworking, you might be able to get the boat assembled in a weekend and be ready for wiring and paint or varnish.
photographs and video by the author
At the launch ramp, Elkins sets the 12-volt deep-cycle battery behind the angled panel that serves as a backrest. The trolling motor’s shaft has been shortened and its controls moved to the dash panel forward of the wheel.
Little Miss Sally has a scow-like hull of 1/4″ mahogany marine plywood. The vertical side panels are sprung around the transom, the bulkheads that define the cockpit, and a horizontal wedge-shaped bow piece. Intermediate framing reinforces the sides and decks. The bottom panel is wrapped in a continuous sweeping curve from the bottom of the transom to the forward end of the sheerline. The one-piece plywood deck, the bottom, and the sides are all nailed to 3/4″-square longitudinals.
The hull’s deep rocker and the weight of the 12-v battery give the boat good stability.
The plans include an optional profile in which the bottom runs straight aft from the lowest point of the hull to a deeper transom. Paul’s suggestion is that the alternate hull “might go a little faster and carry a little more weight.” A few of the Little Miss Sally builders who have pictures of their boats on Paul’s site appear to have chosen this deeper stern, but without any additional weight aft, the extra displacement merely lifts the stern, pitching the bow down. The boat may still perform satisfactorily, but it looks out of trim and the otherwise jaunty sheerline suffers. It’s an 8′ boat. It’s not going to go fast or carry a lot of cargo, so you’ll be better off sticking with the original design.
The cockpit was a comfortable fit for the reviewer’s 6′ frame and his size-13 shoes.
The pine cockpit coaming sweeps up to form the superstructure; its roof is surrounded by a fiddle rail to keep lunch and sunglasses from slipping overboard. The instrument panel has an amp-meter, a switch for running lights, a horn, and a dial control for the electric motor. The adjacent compartment has room for day-trip sundries. The wooden wheel turns on a length of steel tubing with the steering lines wrapped around it.
Little Miss Sally’s outboard motor is a modified 32-lb-thrust trolling motor. The shaft is shortened and the controls, with a bit of extra wire, are moved to the instrument panel. A steering bar, its ends angled back about 45 degrees, is secured to the motor shaft with stainless-steel hose clamps. A deep-cycle 12-volt battery occupies the space under the aft deck, just behind the cockpit.
While the plans call only for a block of foam for flotation in the bow, the stern compartment should also be fitted with foam, leaving only space for the battery, to support the stern in the event of a swamping.
The exterior gets a layer of fiberglass and epoxy before the skids that protect the bottom are fastened in place and the finish is applied.
The weight of the boat without the battery and motor aboard is about 65 lbs, so it’s not too heavy to cartop if you’re strong enough to make the lift or have a way to raise to it one end at a time. Readying the boat for launch takes just a few minutes. These are the steps to getting underway: the motor must be pinned to its mount and plugged in; the rudder lines must be clipped to the yoke; and the battery must be put in place through a hinged panel in the aft bulkhead. The plans don’t specify a line to tilt the motor up for launching and landing, but it would be easy enough to rig one.
Getting aboard Little Miss Sally is a bit like getting into a kayak, except the weight of the 12-volt battery gives the boat a lot more stability. I had no trouble climbing aboard or exiting at a high dock, a task that isn’t easy with a kayak. Once I planted myself in the cockpit, the boat felt rock-solid; the deep rocker of the bottom put my weight down low. With my 215 lbs aboard, Little Miss Sally had more than 6″ of freeboard, but the boat doesn’t have Coast Guard rating for a safe load, and should be used with caution, and only on calm, protected waters
You’ll need a two-piece kayak paddle for backup propulsion; there’s room in the cockpit for it. Slats kept me off the bottom, so the seat of my pants would have stayed dry if any water had splashed aboard. The aft bulkhead, angled at 75 degrees, makes a comfortable backrest, and in spite of the boat’s small size the accommodations didn’t feel at all cramped. With my elbows resting on the low coaming, I felt as if I were driving a convertible sports car with the windows and the top down for a sunny day.
The hull is made of two sheets of 1/4″ plywood and about 25 board feet of lumber.
At full throttle I made a GPS-measured 3 knots. Paul thought he may have made a mistake when he rewired the boat for our outing, and the motor wasn’t getting up to full power. Judging by the sound of the motor, I’d be inclined to agree with him. I have a similar trolling motor, and it has more oomph and makes more of a whine when running wide open. Paul estimated the top speed somewhere between 4 and 5 knots. I was quite content with making 3 knots. Being so close to the water on all sides exaggerates the sensation of speed.
The water on the lake was scuffed only by a light breeze, so I had a pretty smooth ride. Little Miss Sally just bobbed over the boat wakes I encountered. A boat as short as this one tends to follow the contours of waves, rather than plow through them as a longer boat would, and even if a wave did spill over the bow, the superstructure would keep the water from getting to the cockpit.
Elkins’s micro-boat provides a comfortable seat for watching the panorama of protected waterways unfold.
The little steering wheel does its job well. My hand dwarfed it, and along with the push-button electric horn it made me feel as if I were riding one of those coin-operated kiddie rides at the entrances to department stores (but without even a hint of embarrassment).
I didn’t have a chance to run the boat long enough to work through the battery’s charge, but Paul reports taking leisurely outings of 6 to 7 miles aboard Little Miss Sally and spending a whole afternoon, up to 6 hours, with frequent stops to enjoy the sights on Lake Union and other sheltered waters in Western Washington.
After I returned Little Miss Sally to the launch ramp, Paul took her back out to enjoy the rest of the afternoon. A man working with a utility crew, dressed in a Day-Glo orange vest and a hard hat, approached me at the top of the launch ramp and asked about the boat. He said he was planning on getting his first boat and needed something that wouldn’t take up a lot of room at home. He thought Little Miss Sally would be just the thing for lake fishing, and would offer an economical way for him to get out on the water without a whole lot of fuss. There’s nothing silly about that.
Little Miss Sally Particulars
[table]
Length/8′
Beam/30″
Weight (without battery)/65 lbs
[/table]
Plans for the Little Miss Sally are available from Paul Elkins. The 42-page downloadable PDF manual with dimensioned drawings costs $20.00.
Is there a boat you’d like to know more about? Have you built one that you think other Small Boats Monthly readers would enjoy? Please email us!
Flint is a 14′ 10″ open boat Ross Lillistone originally designed for Eddie Guy, who lived on an island in Moreton Bay, Australia, and traveled between the island and the mainland by rowboat. Eddie was disappointed with the boat he had been using and asked Ross to design one better suited to the task. The Flint is designed primarily as a rowboat, and moves quickly and easily under oars. It’s designed to track well even in a crosswind, to handle chop without pounding, and to handle longer voyages under the power of a small outboard. It has ample freeboard forward and a sharp, flared-V forefoot with more curvature than seems possible from plywood. The bottom fills out to a shallow V amidships and rises just enough aft to give the waterline the clean exit of a double-ender.
Flint was designed to reach displacement speed with ease, and it takes very little indeed to move it well: one pair of oars, the tiniest of outboards, or a small sail. Although it can exceed theoretical hull speed by at least a knot, it’s not designed to plane. Any outboard much more powerful than 2 hp would be overkill and would, in fact, throw the trim off and distort the waterline that normally makes it so effortless to drive. (After Lillistone received a number of requests for a boat along the lines of Flint but which could take advantage of more horsepower, he designed Fleet, similar to Flint in most respects, but with a fuller stern that can support a heavier outboard and readily rise to a plane.)
Some of Flint’s earlier builders experimented with a variety of sails, and the boat handled them so well that Ross returned to the drawing board and ultimately offered three sail rigs with the plans. The rigs include a 55.7-sq-ft balance lug, a 64.5-sq-ft gaff cat, and a gaff knockabout sloop with a 54-sq-ft main and a 10.5-sq-ft jib.
photographs and video by the author
The bottom panels have quite a bit of twist in them, but good marine plywood will take the strain and provide fair and symmetrical curves. Cable ties rather than copper wire held the panels together until epoxy bonded the joints.
It was Flint’s versatility that attracted me. Like many boaters, I wanted an “everything” boat that I could row, motor, or sail. I wanted to snorkel from the boat, explore the shallowest of inlets, and take camping trips with my wife and enough provisions for several days of crisscrossing the waterways between beaches. I also wanted to try my hand at fishing and so had that in mind when looking at plans. All that had to be in a safe boat that I could build myself, and would fit in my garage. Out of all the designs I looked at, Flint seemed most able to fit the bill.
Flint’s plans are available in either metric or imperial units and include all the drawings and specifications necessary to build the boat with or without the sailing option. The plans included dimensions for spars and sails for all three rigs, and plans for both 7′ and 7.5′ oars. The instructions are thorough and clear enough for a first-time builder like me. If a builder has questions, Lillistone is generally accessible via his website, his blog, or a Facebook group discussion page.
The boat is capable of carrying up to four people can be built as a rowing boat to weigh less than 100 lbs, light enough to cartop on midsize to larger vehicles.
The balance lug rig, carrying 55.7 sq ft of sail, is the most modest of the Flint sail plans. The gaff cat and the gaff sloop rigs both carry 64.5 sq ft.
I chose to build the balanced-lug version, which uses only one sail and an unstayed mast that can be stepped or unstepped in moments. This balanced-lug rig’s mast partner is designed as part of a foredeck and a bulkhead. This configuration eliminates the forward rowing station but the enclosed compartment increases the built-in flotation by another couple of hundred pounds. The configuration for the gaff rig has a forward rowing station and a lower buoyancy compartment.
Flint can be built without the sailing option using just four sheets of 1⁄4″ plywood and about 20 bd ft of dimensional lumber. Adding the sailing option requires a fifth sheet of plywood and another 15 bd ft of lumber for the spars. The construction method is stitch-and-glue and does not require a strongback. To get the correct curvature into the twist at the forefoot, the plywood should be marine-grade and high quality. For dimensional lumber I used Douglas fir.
Pairs of the plywood sheets are scarfed together before drawing and cutting the side and bottom panels. Flint’s hull panels, main bulkheads, and transom went together more smoothly than I thought they would. I was concerned about that twist going into the plywood at the forefoot as planned, so much so that I waited until after that step to announce to family and friends that I was building a boat. But I followed Ross’s guidelines and instructions, and everything came together exactly as the instructions said it should. The pieces didn’t go together quickly, mind you. They required snugging down the cables ties a bit here, a bit over there, then a bit here again, methodically drawing the bulkheads down into the bottom panels to pry them apart and twist and creak that forefoot into shape. Stitching the boat together took hours with only me at the task, but it was a smooth and pleasing process. Seeing the boat rise out of two dimensions into three in a single day was extraordinarily satisfying.
Although I spent about 18 months of weekends building my Flint, other builders report having completed theirs in as little as two months. I used primarily hand tools; made my own oars, spars, belaying pins, rope-stropped blocks, and a jam cleat; and sewed up the sail from a Sailrite kit, all of which contributed significantly to my construction time.
Flint’s stability is about what I’d expected for a hard-chined lightweight boat with a displacement-type hull. If I’m the only significant weight on board, she’ll dip to whichever side I move to, gaining some stability once that side fully engages with the water. I’m familiar with this sort of motion, so it’s not disconcerting. When I put my 175 lbs fully onto a gunwale, the boat will ship water over that side, but it’s easy to move around in the boat as long as I keep a hand planted somewhere for balance.
The configuration for the balance lug rig, seen here, has one rowing station. The gaff rig configuration has a second forward rowing station forward and a low flotation tank instead of a foredeck.
The Flint has three watertight buoyancy compartments that, by my rough calculations, add somewhere around 400 lbs of positive flotation. In capsize drills with the sail in place, the Flint does not want to turn completely turtle. My Flint rides low enough on its side that the spars lie flat instead of driving tip-first beneath the water and allowing the boat to capsize further. During my capsize test, after I had the spars and sail flat on the water, I put my weight on the tip of the mainmast, and although that did push the yard and most of the mast beneath the water’s surface, the Flint still didn’t turn turtle.
It takes little effort to reenter after a capsize by rolling in sideways over the gunwale, and the cockpit does ship quite a bit of water with that reentry, but if you’ve gone overboard in a capsize, there will already be some water aboard. With only me aboard, I can swamp the Flint only so much and any water higher than the daggerboard trunk will flow out through the slot, leaving only about 3 cu ft to bail out. It can be completely swamped and still move under oars.
The Flint’s sharp entry keeps it moving smoothly through a chop and its skeg helps it hold a course in a crosswind.
Under oars I can do just under 3 knots at a sustained pace and almost 4 knots at peak effort. An experienced oarsman should easily be able to add another knot to each of those figures. I sometimes use a 30-lb-thrust trolling motor for auxiliary power, which pushes her at just over 3 knots. Ross reports a 2-hp outboard gets to 3 1⁄2 knots on idle and more than 6 knots using at about half-throttle with four people aboard.
The Flint can manage more power than the 32-lb thrust trolling motor shown here, and while a 2-hp outboard will push a loaded Flint around to 6 knots, the boat doesn’t have a flat run meant for planing.
The balanced lug rig is simple to sail and provides plenty of power. It’ll push the Flint at 4 or 5 knots easily, and I’ve had it surge up to 7 knots on a run single-reefed in 20-knot gusts. The boat points to within 50 degrees of the wind and sails well on all points, even when reefed. The helm stays almost perfectly balanced. When sailing close to the wind in stronger wind and chop, whoever’s on the main thwart will catch some spray, but she is otherwise a dry sailer.
I transport my Flint on a trailer, and launching and retrieval are easy, even when I’m by myself. When I’m setting it up for sailing it takes less than half an hour to rig the boat. It typically takes longer because the boat draws admirers wherever we go, and I get to chatting about her.
I’m extremely pleased with my Flint. It comes as close to an “everything” boat as I can imagine. Although it’s usually true that a jack-of-all-trades is the master of none, Flint seems to me to be an exception. It’s master of a couple and a praiseworthy jack of the rest.
Roger Siebert is an editor in Austin, Texas. He rows and sails his Flint on local lakes, and recently trailered it to a few of his favorite places on the Florida coast. This was his first time building a boat.
The mid-1990s were a mixed time for me. I had a fine house, a great job, a beautiful wife, and two lovely children—but I was boatless. My wife and I had sold our 32′ double-ender after our first child was born and we hadn’t found anything within our price range to take its place. So when yacht designer Nigel Irens was looking for guinea pigs to build a kit boat he and Ed Burnett had created, I jumped at the chance. It might not have been the oceangoing vessel I dreamed of owning, but it would at least get me back on the water. It would also mark a small personal milestone since, despite working as a journeyman shipwright for several years, I had never built a boat from scratch.
Salty Dog Media
June, 1997. Midway through building the skiff at the Lewes Rowing Club shed, just outside Brighton. That’s my oldest son Sam, then 5 years old (now 24, and quite a bit bigger than me), who helped with the build.
The Western Skiff, as Nigel called his new design, was a slender 14′ dinghy intended for rowing; it had a small lug rig to use as auxiliary power and an elegantly raked transom to discourage the use of an outboard. The kit—seven sheets of plywood for the boat and two sheets of MDF for the jig, all precut and ready to assemble, along with several gallons of epoxy and various interesting-looking powders—arrived in Cornwall where we were on holiday. My children—Zennor, 8, and Sam, 5—and I had great fun assembling the jig, using wedges to lock tenons in place. Getting the planks fair proved a bit trickier, but I managed to get the basic structure assembled in time to put it on a trailer and drive the 300 miles back to our home just outside Brighton, in East Sussex.
Salty Dog Media
September, 1997. We launched the skiff at Seaford Beach in East Sussex. It was an exhilarating first sail. I sat in the bottom of the boat, as the designer had recommended, to keep my weight low. The first outing couldn’t have been better—apart from nearly breaking a friend’s leg when a big wave dumped the skiff in his lap.
It took all my spare time plus two weeks’ holiday spread over four months to complete the skiff, but finally in July 1997 we launched her in the azure waters off Seaford beach. There was a brisk onshore breeze blowing, which created a small surf, and within minutes the boat was flung into the lap of a friend who had come to help launch her. The boat still bears a scar from that incident, as no doubt does he. But that breeze also showed me how fast the skiff could go under sail; I had an exhilarating couple of hours tacking up and down the 2-mile-long beach. As you might expect of a dinghy primarily designed for rowing, she was extremely tender under sail, and even with her modest 61-sq-ft balanced lugsail, she would capsize in a thrice if you didn’t ease the sheet in time. But that was all part of the excitement, and I immediately felt very comfortable with the boat, as if we had struck a personal rapport.
Nic Compton
September, 2009. My wife-to-be Anna and I took a rare foray off Brighton beach with our daughter Betty, who was about 4 weeks old when this picture was taken. We had repainted the skiff black and varnished the thwarts, which had previously had been just oiled, for a slightly ironic piratical look. The trouble was that no one got the joke.
After the initial sail off Seaford, I kept her on a trailer at a rowing club on the river Ouse, in Sussex, with occasional trips rowing upriver to Hamsey or sailing downriver to Newhaven. My kids loved those forays upstream, and their evident pride as they steered the boat past familiar landmarks made me glad I could pass on a tiny piece of my boating life to them. On the downstream trips, I learned to “shoot” the bridges by lowering the mast on the approach and raising it on the other side. The one time I forgot, the almighty crash of wooden spar against stone wall made sure I never forgot again. Miraculously there was no damage.
Despite being only 14′ long, the skiff could be a sociable boat, and the 90-minute trip to Newhaven was an opportunity to cement friendships. On one occasion a friend astonished me by pulling a flask and china cups out of his rucksack and proceeding to pour us both a cup of tea. It doesn’t get much more English than that.
Over the years, I tried giving the skiff a proper name. First she was HARA, Greek for joy and the name of a favorite haunt when I was child growing up in Greece. Then I decided to go ultra-traditional and named her SALLY, after my mother. But somehow neither name stuck, and I’ve always simply referred to her as “the skiff.” It’s taken me nearly 20 years to realize that I don’t need to force a name onto her and that “the skiff” is perfectly good, full of romantic connotations and richly evocative in its own right.
Nic Compton
July 2015. Two days after we moved to Devon we rowed to the Maltsters Pub, once the haunt of UK celebrity chef Keith Floyd. My son Sol was just 5 days shy of his 4th birthday.
Three years after the skiff was launched, I was divorced and living alone on an old 12-ton cutter in nearby Newhaven. Between the heaps of scrap metal and the depressing housing estates, I had a small oasis in the muddy creek where I moored my yacht. Here, the skiff was moored alongside and when I came home from work, if the tide was up, I went for long rows, lit up by the lights of the ferry terminal. In the summer, friends visited and we would sail upstream and bathe in the river. After sitting in front of a computer all week, the skiff provided true solace.
Anna Compton
July 2015. As we were heading down the exquisite Bow Creek on the River Dart, just a mile or so away from our new home, I started teaching Sol to row. The skiff has been a perfect way for me to pass on my love of boating to my kids.
After eight years living on my own up a muddy creek, I decided to sell my cutter and buy a flat in trendy Brighton. For a while, I kept the skiff on the beach, with a plywood cover to keep intruders out, and launched her for the occasional row or sail. But Brighton is a better place for partying than boating, and I have to admit the skiff entered into a period of neglect as I made the most of being a bachelor again. When I discovered part of the plywood lid had been ripped off and used for a beach fire, I decided to put her back on her trailer and keep her, for want of anywhere better, in a friend’s garden. Over the next few years, I parked her wherever I could and, as the cover I’d put over the boat deteriorated, the neglect deepened and so did my guilt.
Nic Compton
October, 2015. It rained solidly for a month after we moved and, as our house hadn’t been lived in for more than a year, it was extremely cold. Sol and I made weekly trips with the skiff to collect firewood.
Then I met my Anna and two years later we had a lovely daughter—Betty, now aged 7—and then a lovely son—Sol, now 5—and the skiff fell further down my list of priorities. Soon after meeting Anna, in the first flush of optimism, we made one half-hearted attempt at cutting out some of the rot and repainting her, but sailing from Brighton was just too little return for so much effort. As the bills piled up, I thought about selling the skiff, but I always had a feeling that our circumstances might change, and that somehow she might become the ideal boat once again. Or, to put it another way, I always knew that if the skiff didn’t have a place in my life, that probably meant I was probably not leading the right life, and when the balance was redressed she would regain her rightful place.
Nic Compton
October, 2015. The firewood we gathered was mostly the local oak which had “seasoned” while floating in the river. Once it had dried out it burned perfectly.
Not everyone shared my despair. Our neighbors told us that far from finding the sodden hulk parked opposite their front door a nuisance, they enjoyed having her there and thought she added character to the neighborhood. Another friend expressed the same sentiment when I parked the skiff in her front drive where it became an object of curiosity for visitors, who could always be sure of finding “the house with the boat outside” in a row of nearly identical modern houses. Even in her deteriorated state, it seemed, the skiff could still bring pleasure, and I couldn’t help feeling a glimmer of pride.
Eventually Anna and I could take city life no more, and in July 2015 we upped sticks and moved to a beautiful village on the River Dart, in Devon. Straightaway, we launched the skiff in the tidal estuary that flowed within sight of our bedroom. She proved an ideal boat for exploring our new environment, and for the first six months we went out almost every week, either rowing to nearby pubs or collecting driftwood off the nearby beaches to chop up into firewood. The only limitation was that, while most of the other families we met had boats with outboards and could happily nip up and down the river at almost any state of the tide, we were limited by how far we could row, which, with two adults, two children, and (eventually) a dog on board, wasn’t all that far.
We left the skiff on the jetty that autumn, and by winter’s end she looked in a very sorry state. The rot at the ends of the thwarts had spread because the drainage channels there had a tendency to get blocked up. And when I turned her over I found gribbles had wormed their way into the keel.
The skiff, to my eyes, was still the exciting lightweight rowing dinghy, the legendary Nigel Irens design that I had built with my own hands all those years before. She had stood by me in good times and bad, and still gave me a thrill riding the little wave that built up on the stern quarter when the wind clashed with the outgoing tide. But to most other people she must have just looked like a sad old wreck.
Nic Compton
March, 2016. My poor neglected skiff. Nearly 19 years after being launched, the fore and aft thwarts were rotted away where the drains at either end got blocked. The damage spread into neighboring bits of plywood.
I decided to take her out for a major overhaul, and began to think the unthinkable. What if we fitted an outboard on her, in spite of the transom meant to prevent that? The very idea had always been an anathema to me, but I began to see that if we put a well through the aft buoyancy tank, it needn’t be intrusive or detract from her performance under sail and oar. I consulted with Nigel and, to my surprise, he was very relaxed about the idea. He agreed that a well was the way to go, and even suggested the outboard could be positioned on the centerline if I were to cut out the aft end of the keel.
The refurbishment, as often happens, turned out to be more extensive than I had expected. I replaced both the forward and the aft thwarts, and cut out and patched new sections of planking and bulkheads where the moisture had spread into the plywood. I repainted inside and out and made a couple of important upgrades for her new life on the river: a rope fender around the bulwarks to protect her when coming alongside docks and brass strips on the keel and bilges to take the brunt of being dragged up and down beaches. The overall effect was pretty dramatic and made me look at her with renewed affection—like when the one you love dresses up for a party and you see her as if for the first time again.
Nic Compton
April, 2016. I fitted a new thwart made from some locally sourced Douglas fir. I made the drains much bigger this time and sealed the thwart’s end grain with epoxy. I built the plywood outboard well to the side of the centerline.
As for the outboard well, I couldn’t bring myself to cut the keel and instead made the smallest well possible directly next to it on the starboard side. The well itself was made out of 12mm marine ply, with three layers on the forward side, lapped over the new stern thwart to spread the load of the outboard. I shaped the hole through the hull to the dimensions of the propeller and skeg, and used the cutout to make a lid to close the hole while under oar or sail.
Zennor Compton
June, 2016. We were constantly dragged the boat up and down shingle beaches, so fitting a brass keel band was an absolute necessity and one of the best things I’ve done for the boat’s longevity. The outboard well’s aperture is shaped for the motor’s lower unit and propeller. I kept the cut-out to make a lid which fits into the hole from the inside; it reduces the drag and noise while I’m rowing.
We relaunched the skiff at the beginning of June of this year, and the effects were immediate and dramatic: “A life-changer,” as my neighbor put it. The outboard conversion was a great success, performing far better than I had expected. Even laden down with the whole family, including dog and picnic, she nipped along at quarter-throttle under her new 3.5-hp engine.
Zennor Compton
June, 2016. During the trials with the new engine, it was obvious that the tilt was wrong and pushed the bow up. I had made the outboard well parallel with the aft bulkhead, but it clearly not vertical. I’ve since added a couple of wooden shims to adjust the angle. I’ve also borrowed an outboard extension so I can sit on the middle thwart and put my weight farther forward. The 3.5-hp outboard was bigger than we needed; a smaller, lighter 2.5 hp would have provided plenty of power.
The river suddenly opened up to us. Before, we had been confined to rowing only a mile or two upstream or downstream; we now had the run of the whole river, and beyond. Using the tide to our advantage we sped 4 miles upriver to Totnes in half an hour and 5 miles downriver to Dartmouth in 40 minutes. For the first time since coming to the village, we headed out to the open sea to explore the spectacular Mew Rock, now just an hour away. Even more importantly, perhaps, the skiff has embedded us in the local community, allowing us to join social events on the river that would have been out of reach before.
Zennor Compton
June, 2016. Sol got dressed up for our first trip with the reborn skiff after restoration. We launched from a shingle beach just around the corner from our home.
The skiff is still a joy to row, and the outboard, quite unexpectedly, has made her even more so. Because the skiff is so light, Nigel always used to recommend carrying a couple of jerry cans of water as ballast to give the boat more momentum when I was rowing alone. Now, the outboard does that job. When not in use, it fits snugly next to the centerboard case and provides the ideal extra weight in just the right place.
Zennor Compton
July, 2016. The skiff is ideal for outings with Sol, Betty and our dog, Winnie. Any more than that, the ride gets a bit wet.
In due course, I intend to rerig the skiff to teach my kids to sail, so she still has potential waiting to be unlocked. But, in the meantime, there’s no doubt that the outboard has breathed new life into old bones and brought the skiff back into our lives as a much-loved member of the family. And it’s not just in my head this time, as friends and strangers now tell me how good she looks, and one person even asked to buy her. Although few had noticed what an amazing boat she was all along—after all, what’s a coat of paint?—I can’t help but feel immensely proud of her.
Zennor Compton
July, 2016. With a lid covering the outboard hole and the outboard itself providing ballast forward, the skiff rows better than ever. Just outside Dartmouth we usually see ten or twelve seals whenever we go to the Mew Stone.
Since I built the skiff, I’ve owned three yachts, ranging from 25′ to 36′. But while the bigger boats have come and gone, the skiff has remained constant, and my appreciation of her has deepened. And, in unexpected ways, she has acted as a kind of compass, pointing me to the kind of life I want to lead.
Nic Compton is a freelance writer/photographer who grew up sailing dinghies in Greece. He has written about boats and the sea for more than 20 years and has published 12 nautical books, including a biography of the designer Iain Oughtred. He currently lives on the River Dart in Devon, U.K., and owns two boats designed by Nigel Irens.
If you have an interesting story to tell about your adventures with a small wooden boat, please email us a brief outline and a few photos.
Boats have several places where two surfaces come together at an angle, and special pieces—breasthooks and knees—are used join them together and add strength. Breasthooks are V-shaped blocks at the acute angle at the bow and, on double-enders, at the stern as well. Knees are supports closer to a right angle, and on open boats they’re most often quarter knees joining gunwales to a transom or seat knees supporting the topsides at the thwarts.
Christopher Cunningham
Short, blunt-toed knees, like this one in a Davis boat, are quite common. Devoting a little more time and thought to knees will give them a lighter, more elegant appearance.
Knees and breasthooks made of solid blocks of straight-grained wood can be serviceable, but if the toes (the knee’s extremities) are fattened up too much to make up for the weakness of the cross-grain there, they don’t do much for a boat’s appearance. Pieces made from grown crooks are stronger because the grain runs with the loads, and much handsomer because they didn’t need to be bulky. Indeed, when carefully shaped they elevate the boat’s structure from “good enough” to art.
Christopher Cunningham
This apple-crook breasthook is in a New York Whitehall built in 1983. Well cured before it was installed, it hasn’t checked or separated from the surrounding structure.
Christopher Cunningham
The grain in the Whitehall’s bookmatched fruitwood quarter knees not only follows the angle between the transom and the sheerstrake, it curves into the transom at the ends of the toes.
In former days when open boats commonly went alongside larger boats, seat knees were essential to the boat’s structure and were sometimes massive, keeping the sides from being stove in. Tenders and ship’s boats typically had two seat knees at each end of a thwart. With today’s light, glued-lapstrake construction they can be equally important in reinforcing the structure.
Christopher Cunningham
This fruitwood crook in the New York Whitehall braces a thwart that serves as mast partner. The toe is slender enough for rivets to be used to make the attachment.
The traditional thwart knee was a marvel of simple joinery. The part that supports the sheer plank was often carefully locked into the gunwale structure. Some were set on top of the thwart, either parallel to its edge or at an angle to it. Their toes might have decorative points cut at their ends. Others were fastened to the vertical edge of a thwart and carefully shaped in a show of lightness and elegance.L-shaped grown crooks were prized pieces of wood, but as they became scarce, many boatbuilders who built substantial numbers of boats went to metal knees. Today it is hard for most boatbuilders to find grown stock needed for traditional knees. Aside from requiring the trees to harvest, the crooks have to be cured without developing splits and sawn into flat pieces prior to shaping.
Ben Fuller
The cross grain shows up clearly in this knee but it was made out of stock wide enough to give it a nice shape. The knees in the author’s Antonio Dias-designed Harrier are screwed to the seats from underneath.
In knees sawn from straight-grained stock, the toes are often blunt and thick, their length limited by the width of the stock used and their height, making up for weak cross-grain, requiring screw-fastening from underneath the thwart. It doesn’t have to be that way. With laminations and reliable glued joints, it isn’t hard to recapture the look and strength of natural knees. Steam-bent knees can provide a sweeping curve and slender toes, but they require blocking to provide the support of a solid knee. Stock can be created by laminating thin strips of wood; knees can be built with half-lapped or splined pieces much the way that today’s builders emulate the natural crooks once used on dory frames.
Ben Fuller
Steam-bent knees backed by a block of matching wood are every bit as functional and attractive as those made from a grown crook.
Christopher Cunningham
This mitered knee for a lapstrake boat has a broad spline running across the angled jolt. For details on making this type of knee, see this month’s From the Editor column.
Looking at these details on boats from an earlier time will train your eye. Spend the same kind of time on these details that you do on the rest of the boat; they’re what you’ll see every day. When master boatbuilder Joe Liener used to encourage novice boatbuilders to make parts like knees and breasthooks a little lighter, he wasn’t talking about trimming a few ounces of wood. It was his way of encouraging boatbuilders to consider grace and beauty in the work they do.
Ben Fuller, curator of the Penobscot Marine Museum in Searsport, Maine, has been messing about in small boats for a very long time. He is owned by a dozen or more boats ranging from an International Canoe to a faering.
A Gallery of Breasthooks and Knees
Christopher Cunningham
This wherry built by Cooper and Sons in Shrewsbury, England, in the late 1800s has a breasthook made of a single piece of straight-grained wood. The inner edge is scribed with a decorative groove.
Christopher Cunningham
The quarter knees in the Shrewsbury wherry have exceptionally long toes.
Christopher Cunningham
The wherry’s passenger seat has slender knees with long, elegant toes.
Christopher Cunningham
Thwart knees are occasionally built into the edge of the thwart they support. This knee in the wherry is cut from a crook and becomes a frame head.
Christopher Cunningham
This laminated mahogany knee in a Chamberlain gunning dory is wide enough to provide strength without a filler block backing it.
Christopher Cunningham
This breasthook in a Hvalsoe 13 is curved along its forward edge and set apart from the stem. This makes fitting easier, avoids an area that tends to weather poorly, and offers a convenient place to anchor a painter. The two halves of the breasthook are held together by epoxy alone, and while the joint has held up well for over 20 years, keeping the varnish in good shape will assure the bond doesn’t fail.
Christopher Cunningham
The grain of the crook used for this 1982 Whitehall’s breasthook is clearly visible.
Ben Fuller/Penobscot Maritime Museum collection
These double knees are from a tender built in the mid-coast area of Maine in the 1930s. The boat is as nice as anything turned out by the more highly regarded boatbuilders of Massachusetts or Rhode Island.
Ben Fuller/Penobscot Maritime Museum collection
Pointed toes add a distinctive touch to LITTLE ELVA, a 16′ captain’s gig built in 1881 by a carpenter aboard the Downeaster sailing ship CORA. The gig was built along the lines of a workboat, but intended for pleasure outings and given some fancy woodwork.
Ben Fuller/Penobscot Maritime Museum collection
LITTLE ELVA’s dainty quarter knees were let into the inwales and a cleat across the transom.
Ben Fuller/Penobscot Maritime Museum collection
The LITTLE ELVA breasthook was also let into the inwales.
Ben Fuller/Penobscot Maritime Museum collection
The quarter knees and breasthook in this Lawley-built tender are bronze and well suited for a boat built in great numbers.
Ben Fuller/Penobscot Maritime Museum collection
When Lawley switched to metal breasthooks and quarterknees, the tenders still had nicely shaped wooden thwart knees. Eventually these too were done in bronze.
Ben Fuller/Penobscot Maritime Museum collection
This thwart knee on one of the small rowboats built in Vinalhaven, Maine, is a good example the of fine work that was just another day in the shop for the boatbuilder.
Ben Fuller/Penobscot Maritime Museum collection
The ordinary Vinalhaven rowboats were built with an eye toward lightness and interesting curves.
Ben Fuller/Penobscot Maritime Museum collection
Elegance was once the norm even on working peapods. The builders didn’t think about it, they just did it.
You can share your tricks of the trade with other Small Boats Monthly readers by sending us an email.
Liquid detergents go to work faster than powdered varieties. Bodywash and shampoo will also work. If you still see suds through the window after 30 seconds of washing, you can use less detergent for subsequent washings.
The Scrubba wash bag first came to my attention through an online cruising forum that has occasional posts about laundry gadgets, and it struck me as an innovative solution to a backcountry traveling problem: dirty clothes.
The Scrubba is essentially a dry bag, but instead of keeping water out, it keeps water, detergent, and dirty laundry in. It has a clear panel for seeing what’s going on, a flexible textured washboard panel inside, and a valve to let air out. It’s well made. All of the seams are consistently and cleanly done, the stitching is top-notch, the buckle is sturdy, and the whole thing weighs just 5 ounces. Folded, it’s quite compact— smaller than a sandwich—which is particularly valuable for camp-cruising in small boats where space is limited. The Scrubba can serve as a dry bag when it’s not being used for laundry.
SBM
If you turn the Scrubba inside out, as you would to dry it after use, you can see the interior washboard surface.
The instructions are printed on the bag as simple drawings, and two fill lines with illustrations showing the size of awash load: a small load is one shirt, one pair of unmentionables, and a pair of socks; a large load is double that. Put clothing and a gallon or more of water to the appropriate fill line, add a small amount of detergent, close the bag by folding the top down and buckling it, and then release most of the air through the valve. Then work the bag by hand, rubbing the clothes across the interior washboard as if you were kneading bread dough. Washing for 3 minutes is recommended for a “machine-quality wash” and 30 seconds is for a “quick traveler wash.” After washing, pour the dirty water out, and repeat of the wash process without soap for the rinse cycle. Following the rinse wring out the water and line-dry.
SBM
The washboard surface is made up of small molded urethane knobs.
I washed some galley towels as a good first test. They were a little greasy and had a bit of salt water in them, so they weren’t drying. The wash cycle created some very satisfyingly dingy wash water. For the next batch I washed my mostly cotton leggings with a skirt attached (kind of bulky), my really sweaty technical T-shirt I had been wearing while gardening, and a few cleaning rags. For this larger load that filled the Scrubba to the upper fill line. I kept an eye on things through the window to make they all came in contact with the washboard.
Everything came out nice and fresh, and I came away with a really positive feeling about the Scrubba. The process was easy, and I wasn’t put off by its small capacity compared to a washing machine—camp-cruising demands smaller loads done more frequently. I would recommend the Scrubba to any traveler who needs to do laundry. It goes beyond being a nifty piece of gear, as getting salt water and bacteria out of clothing can make for a healthier, happier excursion.
Anne Bryant, WoodenBoat’s associate editor, lives aboard MIMI ROSE, a 32′ wooden cutter.
The Scrubba is available from selected retailers as well as direct from the manufacturer for $55. It can be purchased as a Wash and Dry Kit for $99.95, which includes a microfiber drying towel, a clothesline, inflatable hangers, and a carrying case.
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.
Gaco oarlocks apply the mechanics of racing oarlocks to recreational rowing.
I had been curious about Gaco oarlocks for a long time, and finally decided to buy a pair to see how well they work. Instead of rotating in the socket like a normal oarlock, the Gaco’s molded copolymer cradle for the oar rotates around the pin. That’s how locks on racing shells work, and it eliminates the kind of wear that leads to a sloppy fit for conventional oarlocks. I rowed my sneakbox from Pittsburgh to Cedar Key, Florida, using conventional bronze oarlocks, and after two-and-a-half months of rowing the pins and sockets had worn considerably, even though I greased them every day, often more than once a day. As a consequence, the locks developed a lot of play, my catch wasn’t as crisp as it should have been, and the rowing was noisy.
Whatever wear there is in a Gaco lock is likely to occur much more slowly. The pin of a standard lock acts as a lever against the sides of the socket, and the pressure at the top of the socket and pin can be more than double the pressure applied by the loom against the horn; the place where the pressure is highest is also where friction occurs. The Gaco lock separates the pressure and the friction: The bottom of the pin still pries in the socket, but the friction occurs at the top of the pin directly forward of the oar and is spread over a much broader area.
I’ve never been a fan of circular oarlocks that are fixed to the oars. When the oars are shipped, the locks have to come with them, so I needed to change the way I handled the oars. Instead of taking hold of the looms to set them in the locks as I’ve been accustomed to, I grab the locks instead and the oars come along as I set the pins in the sockets. My other complaint about round oarlocks is the damage they do when they slide down the loom and hit the roots of the blade. On my spoon-bladed oars that’s a particularly difficult area to carve, and it looks good only if dings left by the oarlock aren’t spoiling the lines. The Gaco locks, at 6 oz each, are a bit lighter metal equivalents, and the plastic isn’t as apt to leave a mark.
The locks open to be installed on oars. Sleeves installed over the pins adapt them to fit standard oarlock sockets.
The Gaco oarlocks fit oars up to 2 1/4″ in diameter (leathers included). You open the top of the lock by inserting a screwdriver in a slot to release the gate, making it possible to put the locks on oars with collars in addition to leathers. The Gacos are kinder to oar leathers than standard locks are. The bearing surface of a #1 bronze oarlock is about 1/2″ wide and has a radius of 7/16″, so the pressure on the leather is quite concentrated. The Gaco’s bearing surface is 1 3/4″ wide and almost flat. That should keep leathers from getting compressed and make them last longer. The vertical axis of the Gaco’s oval shape allows for the movement of the oar as the blade moves up and down during the stroke, and the horizontal axis is short to eliminate the slop of looms sliding back and forth.
In my rowing trials the Gacos worked well. They were quiet and smooth. A short lanyard and hitch-pin clip was included with each lock. The clip is can be inserted in the hole at the bottom of the pin to keep the lock in the socket, but the boat I used for testing had too much depth in the oarlock pad and the inwale to allow me to do that. I doubt I’d use it anyway. If a wave hits an oar blade hard enough to pop the lock out of the socket, I’d rather have that happen than have the handle driven down hard against my leg.
I quickly warmed up to the Gaco locks. They’re inexpensive and do their job well. While I was rowing I wasn’t aware of them at all, and that’s the best compliment I can offer any oarlock.
Christopher Cunningham is the editor of Small Boats Monthly.
Gaco oarlocks are made in Australia and available direct from the manufacturer: $25 for the plain version, or $29 for the version reviewed here with the lanyard and clip.
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.
Richard and two students roll MISSY D alongside ANDREA McCOY (center) and GLOBAL EXPLORER (right).
On a hot summer day in 1995, JoAnn Tschaen, a social worker, visited a family with seven children, down on their luck and living in a run-down tenement in the north end of New Bedford, a Massachusetts coastal town 10 miles east of the Rhode Island border. For these kids, the cooling breezes of Buzzards Bay were a world away; Tschaen set out to change that and find a way to get these kids and others like them involved in boating. Three years later, the Community Boating Center (CBC) was established. The Center is now situated on the shore of Clarks Cove on New Bedford’s south end. It has its own pier, floating docks, and a fleet of about 100 boats, ranging from a 7′9″ Optimist dinghy to a 23′ Sonar, a one-design keelboat.
Richard Feeny looks on as two young students fasten a side plank to the transom.
The young builders enjoyed painting and came up with some brilliant color schemes.
Education, whether in teaching life values or STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics), has always been at the center of the Center’s mission. Sailing was initially the means of engaging kids, but boatbuilding soon followed. The CBC is using the Building to Teach program created by Joe Youcha, a former director at the Alexandria Seaport Foundation and a contributor of many articles published in WoodenBoat magazine. Joe was also part of the team that created the Bevin’s Skiff, the boat used in the Building to Teach program.
The boat launch party was a celebration of youth and determination.
GLOBAL EXPLORER was built by students from New Bedford’s Global Learning Charter Public School.
The kids at the CBC took part in that program and built three Bevin’s Skiffs, christened MISSY D, ANDREA McCOY and GLOBAL EXPLORER. As a warm-up to the full-sized project, many of the kids built scale models of the skiffs. “They love the measuring, drawing and cutting, and problem-solving. They are captivated by it,” says Richard Feeny, CBC’s Education Coordinator. Under his direction, the students began building three of the 12’ skiffs. They picked up tools, some for the first time in their lives, and went to work with marine plywood, fir, white oak, bronze boat nails, caulk, and paint. They used a few screws, but, according to Richard, “it’s a lot more fun to swing a hammer than turn a screwdriver.” Driving bronze boat nails also provides more opportunities for problem-solving. One swing of the hammer can bend a nail. Was the pilot hole too small? Can the nail be straightened and driven home? Does it need to be pulled and replaced?
MISSY DENNISON, MISSY D for short, was built by students from the Dennison Memorial Youth Center.
The goal for the kids is to aim for better than 1/8″ accuracy. The relatively relaxed standard allows the kids to keep the project moving and prevents frustration from getting in the way. Polysulfide caulk makes up for any gaps and makes the boats serviceable.
Students from the Andrea McCoy Recreation Center built ANDREA McCOY. McCoy. a New Bedford resident, was among the talented young amateur boxers killed in a 1980 plane crash in Poland. This skiff is equipped with a daggerboard trunk and a mast step and will eventually be sailed.
MISSY D, GLOBAL EXPLORER, and ANDREA McCOY were carried to the CBC dock and launched on an unseasonably cold and windy day. The excursions the kids took were short but represented the culmination of months of work. For Richard the launching was “magic. They built these things from scratch, and now they’re cruising around the harbor. They get in a boat and look back at the city, and there’s a perspective shift—and you don’t know where it will take them.’’
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I made the cabin strong enough for me to crawl over it. But while I could get to the foredeck for anchoring, tending to the mainsail was awkward. The cabin was better suited to motoring.
In 2004, my kids, then 14 and 11, and I decided a Caledonia yawl was the boat we needed for cruising. While I was building the hull I revised the plans to make the interior as comfortable as possible for them.
When I was about their age, my father took me and my older sister backpacking every summer. He liked to keep things simple, and the only camping shelter we ever had was a big piece of Visqueen, 4mm black plastic sheeting. On a sunny day it provided shade, but radiated its own sweltering heat; on a stormy day it let the wind and rain fly through. I thought I could do better by my kids, so I made a removable plywood cabin for the yawl.
When the boat was finished, we did one island-hopping cruise with the cabin in place, and that convinced me to replace the cabin with a collapsible dodger that wouldn’t block my way to the mainmast and foredeck like the cabin did. The cabin sat in the side yard for a decade getting mossy.
The forward compartment is compact but cozy and well sheltered from wind and rain.
I’d never slept under the cabin, and this year I wanted to give that a try and to see how it fared as a pilothouse while underway. I cleaned it up and drilled a few holes in the back wall for a steering line and a kill-switch cord. I made a two-armed rudder yoke to replace the one-armed Norwegian tiller arrangement, but that had a rather ungainly look to it. I realized that I could use the one-armed tiller by putting the boomkin in place and running the steering line through the pulley normally used for the mizzen sheet. That arrangement worked well for steering in the cabin, and I could keep the tiller pole in place to steering in the usual manner in the cockpit.
With the sun peeking through the morning clouds, ALISON is ready for motoring east across Puget Sound.
On a cool, overcast Saturday afternoon in August I launched on the west side of Puget Sound, just north of downtown Seattle and motored the 6 miles across the sound to Bainbridge Island. The cabin was a cozy place for motoring—out of the wind and somewhat isolated from the noise of the outboard. The boat required little help holding a course, so all I had to do was sit back and keep any eye out for vessel traffic.
I spent a quiet night anchored at Port Madison, a mile-long dog-legged inlet at the north end of Bainbridge. The forecast was for showers overnight, and although they didn’t materialize, I would have enjoyed listening to the rain on the cabin roof. It’s a pleasant sound when you’re under something more substantial than a flapping plastic tarp. I woke at dawn and rowed out of the inlet to make a quiet exit, then started the motor and retreated to the cabin for the crossing back home.
The cabin is back in the yard again, and while I don’t know when I might use it again, I can’t see parting with it. There may be a time when I can go out with it, listen to the rain, and fall asleep warm and dry.
Clint Chase designed the Compass Skiff for the Compass Project, a Biddeford, Maine, nonprofit that works with kids. “We needed a really small, easy-to-build boat for a weekend boatbuilding festival we do every summer,” he said. “I came up with this little outboard skiff that would be easy and quick to build, stable and safe for kids on the water. It will get on plane with a 6-hp outboard; it’s a lot of fun.”
Powered by a 3.5- to 6-hp outboard, the Compass Skiffs is well suited to rivers, lakes, and other protected waters. It could also serve as a tender or lightweight excursion boat. For such a small boat, it has a high bow and a lot of freeboard and can handle the chop in an exposed anchorage. With a draft of just 3″ (with the motor up), you could do some serious gunkholing with this little vessel. A slot in the aft bulkhead provides a place to keep a paddle handy for maneuvering in close quarters, and a pair of 7.5′ oars can serve for quiet exploration or as a backup in case the motor dies. There is no skeg to help the skiff track well for rowing, but Chase notes “the boat is very light so using oars will be no problem.”
photographs by the author except as noted
The simple interior arrangements keep the skiff light and quick to build. Floorboards would be an easy addition to make to keep gear dry.
At 9′6″ long and with a beam 4′1″, it would seem the diminutive skiff would have trouble carrying the 6′4″ designer, yet the Compass Skiff has plenty of room for someone as tall as Clint, along with gear and even two small passengers. Weighing just 100 lbs, it can be easily transported with a light trailer or, with sound roof racks, by cartop. The Compass Skiff is available as plans and in a variety of kit options for do-it-yourself boatbuilders. A complete kit can be put together over a weekend and then be ready for paint and varnish.
At full speed the skiff made tight turns with ease.
The complete kit includes hardwood keel members, spruce chinelogs and stem, white pine thwarts, and easy-to-bend ash rubrails. The false stem is supplied in either ash or mahogany. The panels for the sides, bottom, and transom are computer-cut from 9-mm okoume marine plywood. The finger-jointed sides come together with a bit of epoxy in about 30 minutes. When they glue has cured the sides are assembled around two short ring frames, one in each end, and a ’midship frame using a tab-and-lock system of assembly that eliminates the need for a strongback. Tabs on the sides of the frames fit snugly in slots routed in the side panels, and after they are inserted, wedges slipped through holes in the tabs bring the sides up tight against the bulkheads. The sides of the forward frame are cut with a slight arc to accommodate the subtle compound curve the plywood sides take approaching the stem. The middle frame is squeezed by the side panels and doesn’t require the holes and wedges, though there are tabs and slots for accurate placement. The tabs are sawn off after the hull has been glued together.
courtesy of Chase Small Craft
Bulkhead tabs are inserted in mortices in the side panels (left), and those with tabs with slots are locked in place with wedges (center). Note the finger joints used to join plywood panels. The tabs are sawn flush after the epoxy has cured (right). The tabs at right are for the center bulkhead and don’t require the slots and wedges.
The forward ends of the side panels are screwed and glued to the beveled spruce stem, and the aft ends to a 3/4″-thick transom laminated with two layers of plywood. After the chine logs are installed and planed flat with a block plane, the bottom is screwed and glued in place. The epoxy-and-fiberglass kit includes fiberglass tape to protect the outside of the chine. After the assembly of the hull, the breasthook, stern quarter knees, short seat risers, seats, and oarlocks are installed.
With the bow heavily loaded the Compass skiff curled up an impressive wake, but kept the occupants dry.
When I saw the Compass Skiff arrive on a trailer at the town landing in Saco, Maine, just across the Saco River from Clint’s shop in Biddeford, the boat seemed dwarfed by the trailer, Clint’s small car, and even his two kids. The words that slipped out of my mouth were, “Cute boat,” but he seemed to agree. “It is cute,” he said.
On the afternoon we tested the Compass Skiff, the wind on the river was blowing steadily at 12 to 15 knots. We were on a body of water that is normally protected, but the wind was coming straight down the river valley and kicking up a 6–10″ chop. I envisioned a wet test ride.
We used a 1950s-vintage 7.5-hp Johnson outboard for our trials. Clint did a quick solo test. The borrowed engine was heavier and had more horsepower than he intended for the boat, and its weight, combined with Clint’s weight and that of the fuel tank, meant the stern sank heavily and the bow stood high in the air.
I took a turn at the helm, also solo, and had the same problem. We needed to get the helmsman’s weight farther forward. Clint ducked into a waterside thicket of trees and grabbed a fallen branch of about four feet long. He tied the stick to the throttle as an improvised tiller extension. Now, riding from the middle seat, Clint was able to keep the bow down and get on plane. Clint recommends using an outboard with no more than 6 hp and with the lighter weight of today’s motors, and with the ability to adjust their angle to the transom, it should be easier to achieve the ideal trim. A proper tiller extension will make it easier to keep a tight grip if you have to shift your weight forward.
With Clint and his kids aboard, there’s still room and enough freeboard for one more. You can see here that the tilt of the outboard contributed to making the bow riding high during the sea trials.
When Clint’s two kids got in the boat, they sat forward and he returned to the stern seat and removed the improvised tiller extension. Now, with weight balanced nicely, the boat skittered effortlessly across the chop. They did lap after lap around a broad basin in the Saco River, then Clint gave each of the kids a turn at the helm and the boat appeared to handle nicely in young hands, even on a blustery day.
Clint brought the kids back to the dock, and I got aboard. With Clint in the stern and me in the bow the payload was at least 375 lbs. I was anticipating getting hit with a bit of spray, but even as he gunned the outboard we stayed dry. The high bow and ample freeboard were doing their job. Clint navigated through the wind chop and then, in an added test of seakeeping ability, did tight circles and crossed through our own wake as well. The little skiff performed admirably, and no one got wet.
At the end of the day, after pulling the boat back aboard the trailer, I was pleased by how easy it was to manage the skiff. When the boat got cock-eyed on the trailer, we just lifted it up and centered it.
For someone who is crunched for storage space in the garage or needs a nimble tender, the Compass Skiff could be a good solution. And, as Clint proved with the Compass Project and his own children, it could also be a good boatbuilding project to do with kids and an ideal vessel to get them off to a good start learning how to handle a small powerboat.
Peter Van Allen is a fanatic for small craft that keep him close to the water, whether it’s a surf ski, a sea kayak, a paddleboard, or a single-fin surfboard. He is based in Yarmouth, Maine.
Compass Skiff Particulars
[table]
Length/9′6″
Beam/4′1″
Draft/3″
Depth amidships/17.6″
Recommended power/3.5- to 6-hp outboard
[/table]
Clint Chase does business as Chase Small Craft. The Compass Skiff is available as plans and plywood ($1,117.50), and a complete kit ($1,725.77).
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Iain Oughtred’s Guillemot is a multipurpose boat intended for rowing and for sailing with either a gunter or lug rig. He designed the boat 25 years ago and based it on the lines of a 19th-century ship’s boat or large yacht’s tender. It is intended to accommodate three adults comfortably, but could take as many as five over short distances in benign conditions.
Oughtred is best known for applying contemporary glued-lap plywood construction to traditional hull forms, and the Guillemot was primarily intended for that method. Glued-lap plywood has several advantages: it is easier to source the materials, easier to build, and results in a lighter boat. The Guillemot can also be cold-molded, strip-planked, or built in traditional lapstrake.
Regina Frei, a student at England’s Lyme Regis Boatbuilding Academy, opted for traditional lapstrake construction. Of the 319 sets of plans for the Guillemot sold to date, Oughtred believes that about 10 percent of the boats built have been traditional lapstrake, but suspects that percentage has increased in recent years. A glued-lap plywood hull is normally around 125 lbs; a traditional lapstrake one would be about 25–40 lbs heavier.
The plans include full-sized patterns for the stem, transom, floors, and temporary molds, and no lofting is required, but the Academy requires that students begin their projects with lofting, so Regina drew the lines from the offsets included with the plans, faired them, and created her own patterns. Oughtred’s drawings provide guidance for traditional construction, including scantlings for planking and steam-bent frames, frame spacing, and a recommendation for nine or ten strakes instead of the eight on the glued-plywood boats.
photographs by the author
Building the Guillemot in a traditional manner provides lots of interesting and appealing details that are often absent in the glued-lap ply construction commonly used for Oughtred designed boats.
Aside from the applewood from her Swiss homeland that Regina used for the transom, she purchased sustainable materials and locally sourced timber as much as possible. The Douglas-fir for the spars came from the Stourhead estate less than 50 miles away from Lyme Regis, and the larch planking stock came from Scotland. (British boatbuilders generally agree that the farther north larch is grown, the better it is.) The ribs, thwarts, and stem were made of English chestnut, and the rest of the centerline structure, along with the inwales, outwales, and sheerstrake rubbing strips, were of Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certified oak. When an adhesive was required, she used a bio-based epoxy.
Oughtred’s plans for glued-ply construction specify that the hull should be built upside down, but he agrees with Regina’s decision to build her boat right-side up to allow easier access inside the hull for clenching nails or, as Regina chose to do, peening rivets. The assembled centerline was set up on a base structure, and seven temporary molds were then fitted on the keel hog and braced with supports going up to the workshop ceiling. Regina initially lined the hull for eight strakes, but this convinced her that she would be wise to follow Oughtred’s advice and fit a ninth strake. She then re-spiled accordingly, to more easily get the planks to follow the shape of the boat.
The Guillemot has two rowing stations, spaced about 3′ apart—close, but not impossible quarters, for rowing in tandem. Two stations come in handy for a single rower managing wind and passengers.
Regina had to steam the forward ends of the bottom three strakes and the aft ends of the top three so the 5/16″ larch planking could take the twist required by the shape in those areas. With planking complete, she removed the molds, fitted the centerboard case, and then steamed in the 1/2″ x 5/8″ English chestnut ribs and riveted them in place. The two thwarts followed, and instead of using the sawn knees indicated in the plans, she fitted a single steamed chestnut knee at each thwart end. Oughtred felt that single steam-bent knee might not be strong enough: “I would suggest that two each side should be adequate. Very neat, in fact; a lot more comfortable if sitting on the thwart, leaning against the gunwale, which you can’t really do, with the usual single knee.” Installing the seats in the bow and stern came next, followed by the oak outwales, inwales, and rubbing strips.
The whole boat was coated, inside and out, with a “boat soup” of tung oil, linseed oil, turpentine, and Stockholm tar, the last coat of which also had some Japan drier in it.
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.
Regina opted for the gunter rig with 72 sq ft of sail (the lug rig has 62 sq ft), “because it looks nicer and it will be more interesting to sail with a jib as well as a mainsail.” The mast is stepped on the keel hog immediately forward of the forward rowing thwart with no deck-level support. It has two shrouds anchored at the gunwale and a forestay connected to a bronze stemhead fitting that also takes the jib tack. The lug rig has an unstayed mast with partners spanning the gunwales at sheer height. Oughtred is considering adding something similar, perhaps at thwart height, to the plans for the gunter rig to allow easier stepping for the singlehander, although shrouds would still be required to brace the mast and provide support for the jib.
As soon as Regina’s Guillemot, christened LEAF, was launched, she rowed her out of the Lyme Regis harbor while her crew—Dan Adam-Azikri—prepared the rig. She rowed from the forward of the two rowing thwarts, and this would have been perfectly satisfactory but for the fact that the yard, boom, and sail were on the centerline ready to be hoisted, requiring Regina to row from an offset position. The centerboard and rudder blade were lowered, the sails that Regina made during a weeklong sailmaking course at the Academy were hoisted, and LEAF was underway. There was quite a chop in Lyme Bay for such a small boat, and only one other boat dared venture out of the harbor to sail. LEAF appeared to handle the conditions nicely, and I soon got the chance to see this up close after Regina and Dan rowed back into the harbor to fetch me.
The generous freeboard and firm bilges give the keep the Guillemot dry and steady in gusting winds.
Although there was some initial concern that the boat might be a little crowded with three of us aboard, the larger crew did give us an advantage in rowing and hoisting sails: Regina and Dan took an oar each in the aft rowing position and kept us head-to-wind while I sat comfortably in the bow seat and hoisted the sails from forward side of the mast. Dan and I then sat on the sternsheets benches either side of the tiller and took turns steering while Regina sat on the forward thwart and moved from side to side as we tacked to keep the boat level. We quickly got used to this arrangement agreed that it didn’t feel at all crowded. Had it been windier, we would have needed to get more of our weight to windward, but there would have been adequate space for us to do so.
The Guillemot’s performance was impressive. The gunter rig was easily managed, and we never seemed in danger of getting caught in irons when tacking. It was surprisingly easy to steer through the waves both upwind and downwind. The freeboard was just enough to give us a reasonably dry ride. While the wind was fairly constant, in the gusts that we did have, we didn’t have to react quickly to spill the wind from the mainsail or move our weight to the weather rail to keep the boat under us. It was clear that Oughtred had put an emphasis on safe, steady sailing so “you don’t have to hang out to keep her upright.” Still, the Guillemot was enjoyably lively. Oughtred later told me that he himself had been quite surprised at how lively the Guillemot was when he first sailed one.
The mast for the gunter sloop rig is supported by shrouds and a forestay, not a mast partner.
Regina–an experienced rower–later had a chance to row LEAF properly without having the mainsail and its spars in the way. She was by herself in the boat rowing from the forward thwart and was really pleased with the performance. Oughtred later told me that although that is the favorable position for a singlehander as the boat is currently configured, it would be better still to have single ’midships thwart aft of the opening in the top of the centerboard case where the rower’s weight would put the Guillemot in better fore-and-aft trim. He is thinking of adding this to the plans as an alternative to the two thwarts that LEAF has.
The Guillemot is a really nice and functional all-round sailing and rowing boat and it will take a small outboard, too. The boat is eminently suitable for two or three adults, or perhaps better still, a family of four with young children. It is especially pretty when built in the traditional manner.
Nigel Sharp is a lifelong sailor and a freelance marine writer and photographer. He spent 35 years in managerial roles in the boat building and repair industry and has logged thousands of miles in boats big and small, from dinghies to schooners.
Guillemot Particulars
Length: 11′ 5″
Beam: 4′ 5″
Weight: 143 lbs
Sail area:
–lug: 62 sq ft
–gunter sloop: 72 sq ft
Gill Moon
Marc Davies
Marc Davies
Marc Davies
Gill Moon
