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John Summers

This 15′ cedar-strip Peterborough Nomad by Woodwind Yachts was built on a mold created from an original Nomad launched by the Peterborough Canoe Company in 1958.

As the market for recreational canoes expanded in the later years of the 19th century, two construction techniques emerged as builders responded to the challenges of manufacturing canoes on an industrial scale. The Old Town (Maine) Canoe Company and the Chestnut Canoe Company of Fredericton, New Brunswick, developed wood-and-canvas construction. In Peterborough, Ontario, and nearby towns, builders such as The Ontario Canoe Company, later to become the Peterborough Canoe Company, pioneered cedar-strip construction. This technique was based on John S. Stephenson’s 1883 patent for “Longitudinal Cedar Strip” construction (hereafter referred to simply as “cedar-strip”), which was awarded Canada Patent No. 32701 and U.S. Patent No. 292183.

Although there were many builders who employed the technique, the Peterborough Canoe Company became the best-known proponent of it, and their cedar-strip boats and canoes were sold around the world. By the mid-1950s their catalog offered cedar-strip hulls in a wide range of sizes and styles from open outboard boats to small cabin cruisers. Stephenson’s patented method, originally conceived for canoe construction, turned out to be a darned good way to build small wooden boats in general, and lots of them, too. No one will ever know exactly how many cedar-strip watercraft the Peterborough-­area companies turned out, but it is certainly in the tens of thousands. The cedar-strip outboard became the archetypal boat of cottage country in central and eastern Canada, and today many are still on the water. They are often well represented in the displays at antique and classic boat shows.

John Summers

The walk-through bridge-deck configuration is convenient for changing places under way.

Over the last 30 years, Ken Lavalette and his crew at Woodwind Yachts in Nestleton, Ontario, have restored more than 50 cedar-strip boats, many of them made by the Peterborough Canoe Company. Well loved and well used, they often come into his shop more than a little worse for wear and leave looking a whole lot better. As he worked on these boats, it occurred to Ken that often the number of hours required to restore them wasn’t far off what it would take to build one from scratch. At 15‘ LOA and 5‘ beam, the Peterborough Nomad runabout was big enough to carry a few people and their gear, but small enough to be easily trailered and stored. Was there a market for a new, traditionally built, cedar-strip runabout?

Lavalette decided to build a boat to test the market, so he measured an original 1957–58 Nomad and built the robust, nearly solid mold required for this method of construction. The Nomad was from the upper end of the Peterborough Canoe Company’s offerings, just below the Niagara model, which was advertised as “The Elite of the Fleet.” Of the Nomad and her shorter sister the Meander, the 1959 catalog said, “Where price is a consideration and an attractive craft, not quite as advanced in styling as our deluxe Sportliners, is desired, we offer our 14‘ Meander and 15‘ Nomad. Both models are proven designs and will give fast, seaworthy service.” Owners could have the boat as an open outboard or add steering, windshield, and deck hardware to turn the Nomad into the double-cockpit runabout described here. The sail-away price in 1959 was $730.

John Summers

With an all-up weight of between 400 and 500 lbs, depending on the motor, the Nomad trailers and launches easily.

Stephenson’s cedar-strip building method differs from contemporary wood-strip epoxy construction. The narrow and relatively thin planks, most often of red cedar, have ship-lapped edges and are fastened to steam-bent ribs. For each design, builders developed several plank shapes that together could be combined to cover the entire hull. This eliminated spiling each plank and meant that stock could be precut in large quantities to expedite construction. The shape of the planks, widest in the middle and tapered toward each end, meant that they could be started parallel to the keel and finish parallel to the gunwale without the need for stealers or the “football” shape commonly seen in wood-strip epoxy construction. It also avoided having the ends sweep upward and run out along the sheerline, as was sometimes done by other builders.

Despite the fact that he’d repaired many cedar-strip hulls, Lavalette had never built one from scratch, so there was some calculating to be done. The real intellectual property in cedar-strip construction lies in the mold itself and the plank patterns, so Lavalette set about lining off his mold to determine the plank shapes required. The prototype boat was built with two distinct plank shapes, but his later hulls have four or five. This more evenly divides the heavily curved area at the turn of the bilge, and avoids a somewhat unsightly downward turn of the hood ends as the planking approaches the bow. It’s the kind of detail only another boatbuilder would notice, but he wants to get it right and admits that he’s relearned on the job some of the tricks that the old factory builders figured out a long time ago.

Though he left the hull shape unchanged from the original, Lavalette slightly increased the scantlings of the stem, keel, ribs, transom, planking, and deck, based on what he had learned from his many restorations of this type. He made the stem from white oak laminated with epoxy, and the keel was solid white oak, notched for the ribs before being fastened to the mold. The half-round ribs were also oak and the transom mahogany. He steamed and bent the ribs into the notches on the keel, tucking their ends into cleats fastened to the mold at the sheerline. Before planking, he thoroughly varnished the back sides of the ribs and the end-grain of the transom.

Lavalette made the decks and planking from red cedar and the cockpit coamings from oak. The dashboard and other cockpit trim was mahogany. Building for longevity, he precoated each piece of wood with three coats of varnish prior to assembly. Later he’d give the whole hull structure another four coats before launching.

John Summers

With a rebuilt 1950s 35-hp Johnson outboard, the originally recommended power, the Nomad promises solid performance, with a top speed in the high 20s.

The Nomad built by Woodwind Yachts is simple and elegant inside, with only the bare minimum of hardware and fittings. The new hull is complemented by refurbished original 1950s running gear. Lavalette prefers to recondition period two-stroke outboards for the boats he sells, and he sticks with the original builder’s recommendation of a 35-hp motor. One customer wanted and received a four-stroke 50-hp unit, but that’s not recommended for everyone.

The boat trailers and launches easily. Underway, it can take a while to get to know the original controls, especially if you’re accustomed to a modern single-lever control and Teleflex steering. Because the Johnson shift unit has separate levers for the throttle and gear shift, and will only shift at very low rpms, you need to plan a little farther ahead when coming in to a dock. The pulley-and-cable steering also takes a bit more time to respond, but you’ll get the hang of it soon enough.

Underway, the boat feels solid and reliable. Though 25 mph is not at all fast by today’s standards, it’s a speed that will get you where you want to go and still let you have a pleasant conversation on the way. It might also save enough on gas, even with an older two-stroke, to let you pay for dinner when you get there. The Nomad turns and banks cleanly without skidding and, once the manual trim on the motor is adjusted, planes out to a nice level ride. With simple lines and an elegant all-bright finish, the boat is a head-turner both on the water and on the road. Because they were so popular, these cedar-strip boats seem to elicit fond recollections from onlookers.

As a modern classic, the Nomad combines the beauty of tradition with the durability and integrity of a brand-new boat. If you’re looking for a beautiful but also eminently practical small runabout, the Peterborough Nomad could be the boat, and Woodwind Yachts would be happy to build one for you. If you would like to do a good deed by finding an original one that is in need of a new home and a little work, that would be a good thing too. Commissioning a new one or refurbishing an old one will make the boating world a better and more attractive place.

New Peterborough Nomads built in the traditional longitudinal cedar-strip technique and equipped with rebuilt 1950s outboards are available from Woodwind Yachts. Used cedar-strip boats in a variety of sizes and configurations can often be found for sale in classified ads and at antique and classic boat shows and auctions.

Particulars:

LOA 15′ 3″
Beam 5′ 3″
Draft 6″
w/outboard 18″
Power 35-hp

ROD MELOTTE PHOTO IMAGERY

The author’s THOMMY, a 1955 Thompson Thomboy, is in original condition, with nothing anachronistic or out of place.

The term “Thompson Boat” conjures a picture of a white-painted lapstrake outboard boat with a stained and varnished mahogany deck and windshield frame. But these “iconic” Thompson watercraft were actually made for about a 15-year period in the company’s 92 years of operation, from the mid-1950s until the company dropped wooden boats from its product line in 1969. For much of the company’s history, cedar-strip hulls were the norm.

The Thomboy, one such boat, was introduced in late 1951 for the 1952 model year by Thompson Bros. Boat Mfg. Co. during the economic boom after the end of World War II. She was designed by Edward Thompson, one of six brothers who owned and operated the boat works. Thompson attended a naval architecture course as a young man and was a gifted designer.

A deluxe model at the time, the Thomboy came standard with the most factory-installed hardware and accessories the company offered. Wrap-around windshield, steering wheel and steering cables, navigation lights, bow and stern lifting rings and chocks were all standard. She was introduced that year as a 14-footer. In ’53, the company added a 16‘ version.

Thompson, with plants at Peshtigo, Wisconsin, and Cortland, New York, was the world’s largest builder of outboard boats. Peter Thompson started in the boatbuilding business in 1889 with Racine Hardware Mfg. Co., maker of Racine boats, and he later worked for Christopher Columbus Smith, founder of Chris-Craft, at Algonac, Michigan, before venturing out on his own with his brother Christ in 1904.

Andreas Jordahl Rhude

Original details, like the intact Thompson logo at the center of the steering wheel, contribute to a vintage boat’s authenticity.

Strip-built hulls and carvel-planked boats were common at Thompson. Small rowboats and outboard motorboats were the focus, but Thompson also claimed in a 1944 promotional flyer that the company was the world’s largest builder of one-design sailboats. They did make sailboats for many classes, including the SeaGull, Lightning, Snipe, Olympic, Cub, Comet, and Red Head. Their claim at being the largest builder of sailboats, however, may have been nothing more than boldness and company puffery.

Thompson had 62 models in its product lineup the year the Thomboy was introduced. Around 5,000 boats were built each year at the Peshtigo boat works and 4,000 more were built in the branch factory at Cortland. At Peshtigo, the output reached the astounding figure of 8,000 boats in the factory’s peak year, or 152 boats every week, 30 boats each workday. The factory was abuzz with saws, planers, and molders, and several hundred workers were busy building fine wooden boats.

Andreas Jordahl Rhude

Like many Thompsons, the Thomboy model was stripplanked over white oak frames, using western red cedar for the bottom and Philippine mahogany for the topsides.

The double-cockpit Thomboy runabout is strip-built with western red cedar below the spray rail and Philippine mahogany above the rail. The bead-and-cove strip planks are 3⁄8“ thick and 11⁄8“ wide. The boats were painted white below the spray rail and varnished above. The spray rail itself was a Thompson invention from the 1920s. The plywood decks and solid covering boards were stained a two-tone scheme, with dark and blond mahogany. This was a common finishing style among powerboat builders in the 1950s.

The 350-lb boat has a centerline length of 13‘2“ and beam of 55“. The structural framing components such as keel, keelson, stringers, and steam-bent frames and stem are all-heartwood white oak. The strip planks are screw-fastened to the frames. Unlike some boatbuilders, Thompson did not nail the adjacent planks to each other through the width. The company was so proud of the Thomboy that she graced the cover of the 1953 brochure. Interestingly, the Thomboy was made at the Peshtigo factory only.

Andreas Jordahl Rhude

A mid-1950s boat begs for an appropriate outboard, in this case a 35-hp Johnson from 1957.

My ’55 Thomboy, called THOMMY, is in original condition, with no changes other than maintenance varnish coats added to the original varnish and paint on the bottom. She has never been restored.

The boat is pushed by a 1957 Johnson 35-hp outboard motor. The motor has a unique after-market tilt-and-lift system called a Lec-O-Lift, a hydraulic device operated by a hand pump on the dashboard. It was made by Cass Machine Screw Company in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

The boat is very fun to drive. She is used sparingly and with great care, but by no means is she a “trailer queen.” She is easy to launch and retrieve single-handed. At 350 lbs, she is amazingly seaworthy for such a Lilliputian boat. When banking tightly on curves, your elbows nearly hit the water!

In 1955, Thompson offered, as an add-on, fiberglass sheathing of the hull bottom from spray rail to spray rail. That option, which added $42 to the price, was included on this boat at the time of manufacture.

ROD MELOTTE PHOTO IMAGERY

The 14’ Thomboy model is very small for a runabout, but its ease of handling makes her a joy to drive, and being close to the water accentuates the sense of speed.

I am the third caretaker of the boat. She was originally ordered as a gift by a mother for her son’s 16th birthday. The boat arrived at Rhinelander, Wisconsin, from the Peshtigo factory, all wrapped up and crated. She was lifted off the delivery rig and transferred to another truck and driven to the Pelican Lake Boat Shop, a dealership at nearby Pelican Lake. There, she was outfitted with a 1956 Evinrude Lark 30-hp outboard motor. She was the queen of the lake for many years. The young owner and his friends used her for pulling water-skiers and cruising. The second owner was a childhood buddy of the original owner. He was there when the boat was delivered by Thompson to Rhinelander in 1955. He obtained her in 1972. The first two owners took great care of the boat. She was wiped clean after each use and any water in the boat was carefully mopped up. Ultimately the motor was replaced with a 35-hp 1957 Johnson.

No one knows exactly how many of the speedy little runabouts were produced between 1952 and 1956, the four years the type was produced. It must have been a low number compared to other models. In 1953, the 14‘ Thomboy was priced at $725 and the 16-footer was $870, with standard accessories, not including the motor or the trailer. It was by far the most expensive model. The 15‘ Ranger canoe, the company’s lowest-priced boat, was only $168. THOMMY was ordered with the optional factory-upholstered seats, which added $125 more to the base price.

Today only 18 Thomboy boats are known to exist. There may be more hidden away, waiting to be discovered. I own two of the 18: THOMMY and another 1955 version that is in dire need of a major restoration. THOMMY the Thomboy is a multiple award-winner at several antique and classic boat shows.

The Thompson Thomboy is a fun, nimble watercraft. Her beautiful, streamlined hull handles rough water like a much bigger boat. This particular boat has brought joy to many people over the past 58 years. Cheers to another six decades of boating and enjoyment!

For information on Thompson runabouts, see www.thompsondockside.com. The author is the president of Thompson Antique & Classic Boat Rally, Inc.

Andreas Jordahl Rhude

Attentive care over the decades has kept THOMMY in pristine condition.

Anthony Shaw

For long-distance rowing trips on Finland’s many lakes, Jouko Koskinen had in mind a lightweight boat that would row very well but could also be fitted with bicycle wheels for portages and equipped for camp-cruising.

In their land of many thousand lakes, Finns and watercraft have developed hand-in-hand since the beginning of modern times. In the heart of the lake district 120 miles northeast of Helsinki is the country’s largest single collection of rock paintings from prehistory, about half of which seem to feature boats. Puuneveniste’s Sinne 610 Expedition is the latest of light multi-chined craft developed for this same rowing heartland, which also witnesses an annual gathering— the 36-mile marathon in the lakes around the town of Sulkava—in which many thousands of rowers compete in wooden boats.

Anthony Shaw

With a fitted tent and even a table in the cockpit, the boat has comforts of home.

Jouko Koskinen has lived most of his working life in Finland’s metropolitan capital, Helsinki, but he has spent time every summer back in his wife’s childhood lakeside haunts just 25 miles away from those rock paintings. Ever since he took a white-water holiday in Lapland in his teens, Koskinen had dreamed of building a craft that could combine overnight camping with his requirements for efficient travel by water under oars. A hectic professional life forced him to postpone his plans until he met an innovative wooden boat builder, Ruud Van Veelen, at the annual Helsinki Boat Show in 2011. The result of their collaboration is a lightweight dory 6 meters long [about 19‘9“] whose dimensions and fittings accommodate a standard three-arch, double-skin, two-person tent (see related article, page 10). The boat is capable of beaching fully laden with all the gear required for a lengthy expedition.

Anthony Shaw

A simple bracket matching the same fitting used for wheels turns the boat into a stable camping platform. A simple bracket matching the same fitting used for wheels turns the boat into a stable camping platform.

Anthony Shaw

Straps on the outside of the hull receive tent poles.

The experience of portaging a local logging dory on that Lapland journey prompted Koskinen to find a solution to the challenge of landing a laden craft and portaging it potentially singlehandedly around any shore with a reasonably gentle slope. The result is a design incorporating two specially sourced 36“ wheels, built onto dry bearing hubs and fitted with spring-release axles that can be attached to either side of the boat while it is still afloat. The first-generation wheels buckled under the heavy load, but he replaced them with wheels that have rims 11⁄4“ wide and support a heavy-duty tire, all procured from Unicycle in the United Kingdom. The portage solution also eliminated the frequent challenge of locating a suitable flat, rock-free surface for pitching a tent on land. The terrain in eastern Finland consists largely of granite bedrock, but with a couple of strategically located supporting blocks under the hull, the Sinne makes a level sleeping platform, and the tent can be secured by passing straps under the hull.

Anthony Shaw

The owner favors camp-cruising, but found that level ground was often hard to find. His solution was blocking, at the ends and supported by side braces, to make the boat a level sleeping platform.

From the beginning, the Sinne 610 was intended to be very different from the dedicated lightweight pulling boats that Van Veelen has been building in Sulkava for the past seven years. This model shuns his usual principles of minimal weight and maximum racing speed for the benefits favorable for a touring craft: ample storage space, flexibility in handling and usage, and adaptability to varied requirements. Van Veelen set out to fulfill the specifications of his particularly demanding customer, who had just these requirements in mind, as well as a scale model in hand. The name of the design reflects its use: the Finnish word “sinne” is difficult to translate to English, but perhaps “thither” is a good approximation.

Anthony Shaw

Designer Ruud Van Veelen, at the forward oars, has specialized in lightweight racing rowboats, but the Sinne 610 client had specific, non-racing objectives in mind. Solo rowing from the after thwart requires weight forward, typically provided by the camping outfit.

Sinne’s construction, however, is based on the same principles as Van Veelen’s other craft, using 6mm, five-ply marine okoume in plywood-epoxy construction, which eliminates any need for longitudinal stringers at the four chines. The finish consists of multiple layers of two-part varnish. The main differences between the expedition boat and the racing boats are the presence of pine framing and the reinforced decking, which the Sinne needs to offer watertight stowage and accommodate copious gear. The modest transom is also reinforced to take a small outboard, while the rest of the craft resembles quite closely above and below the water the single and double skiffs of about the same length that Van Veelen has been building for marathon rowers. (He also builds 40‘, 14-oared wooden “churchboats” along the same principles and for the same course, but that is another story.)

Anthony Shaw

Finnish rowing often has two rowers facing each other, with the forward rower pulling, the after rower
pushing.

Koskinen has used his new boat for the past two summers, traveling from his idyllic lakeside summer base. He has also transported the craft by car, initially on the roof but now on an aluminum trailer. In addition to using sturdier wheel rims, he has introduced some minor adaptations of his own. For a camper generally more accustomed to well-spread urban dining tables than billy-cans on his knees, Koskinen designed an ample dining table for two to fit between the gunwales at the aft end of the cockpit. Positioned inside the tent, the sitting area gives the crew a thoroughly protected place to enjoy the camp cuisine. The dining table stows on the central deck between the thwarts, along with the wheels and any other bulky gear. In addition to watertight compartments amidships and a small one aft, the cockpit has modest side lockers forward and aft.

Anthony Shaw

Despite its shallow draft, the boat has proven reasonably stable.

Rowing Characteristics

With such a lightweight boat, trim is highly subject to the weight distribution of the crew and the equipment. A single rower positioned at the aft thwart requires counterbalancing forward. Still, the boat is responsive and easily maneuverable under oars. Koskinen has made three lengthy journeys under both power and oars. Surprisingly, he advocates the pleasure of rowing by facing forward and pushing on the oars, not only as a variation for posture but also for the unmitigated pleasure of viewing one’s intended course. For a two-person crew, this is also an option for the aft oarsman, who can row facing forward while his counterpart at the forward thwart faces aft and pulls the oars in the usual manner. This resembles the setup used on Finland’s most traditional two-man rowboat, the “shift-rower,” in which the stern oarsman actually uses a long paddle and alternates places with the bow man at the oars at regular intervals. In the more typical, paired setup, the Sinne 610 can easily reach 4 knots [8 km per hour], making a day’s target of 50 to 60 kilometers [about 30 to 40 miles] quite achievable. The 7‘ separation between the two rowers also makes clashing blades unlikely, and two inexperienced rowers can more easily coordinate their efforts, rendering the Sinne a suitable choice for novice rowers as well.

The downside of a lightweight craft is its performance in heavy weather. The Sinne 610 is designed for inland waterways, with an amidships freeboard of only about 35cm [nearly 14“]. There is minimal sheer, making the bow rather exposed, and in the event of shipping water there is no pumping system, so a bailer needs to be part of the gear. That said, the very nature of a lightweight boat is minimal draft. Unladen but for a crew weighing a total of 160 kg [353 lbs], the boat’s draft was less than 3“, and fully laden with an additional 150 kg of gear [330 lbs], it is still well under 4“.

Anthony Shaw

Van Veelen developed unique oarlocks for Finnish racing requirements, which in the tradition of tholepins state that oarlocks must be at the gunwales and the oars cannot be feathered. For the touring boat, these oarlocks permit the rower to let go of an oar without fear of losing it overboard.

An intriguing feature of all of Van Veelen’s boats is the Sarana oarlock, which he developed to improve blade control while still maintaining the non-feathering characteristic typical of all Finnish rowing boats. Traditionally, a short steel tholepin is fixed vertically on top of the gunwale and a nylon hoop attached to the oar simply slips over the pin. Although in Van Veelen’s system the oar blade can’t rest flat on the water, the oarlock has the advantage of locking the oar in place (with a hairpin-style cotter pin), so the rower can never lose an oar overboard. On long-distance trips, the rower can relieve his tired wrists by loosening the grip on the oar on the return stroke. Van Veelen’s adaptation also makes shipping the oars easier, as well as making for a much cleaner gunwale.

Supplied with four lightweight oars, the only additional pieces of equipment required are a couple of paddles for maneuvering in close quarters. With a waterline shape reminiscent of a broad-beamed Viking cargo craft, Sinne proved surprisingly stable with two 6‘ crew standing amidships on her deck. And when they faced each other at the oars in this characteristic Finnish setup, there was no avoiding a pulling contest, which only prompted speculation of which would fail first—the slender gunwale, the folding oarlock pin, some feature of the oar, or the rowers’ backs. So far, this issue is unresolved. The variety of rowing positions (the oars have two nylon sheaths for the pins to suit the differing alternatives for the rowers) and the deft design make this more than just a fun boat to row. In fact, with the bow man rowing aback and the stern man pulling on his oars, Sinne easily achieved 8km/hr [about 5 mph] going astern. Versatility makes her an attractive alternative for a serious adventurer.

Finished boats (but not plans) are available through Ruud Van Veelen, (English version available). An authorized builder of Van Veelen boats in the United States is Walter Baron

Sinne 610 Expedition Particulars:

LOA 6.1 m (20′)
Beam 1.59 m (5′ 2″)
Depth 69 cm (2′ 3″)
Draft (equipped) 139 mm (5″)
Weight (equipped) 90 kg (198 lbs)

Schuyler Horton

The Simmons Sea Skiff was first developed as a beach-launched, oar-powered fishing boat for coastal North Carolina, and it eventually evolved into an outboard-powered range of sizes, from 18’ to 22’. The 18-footer above was built by its owner, for family fishing excursions on and near Narragansett Bay.

The Simmons Sea Skiff is the direct result of a North Carolina commercial fisherman’s need for a seaworthy skiff that would allow him to launch from the beach into the Atlantic surf, row through the waves, and fish with a seine before returning safely through the breakers. That first boat, built in 1946 by Tom Simmons, was a success, and eventually Simmons was asked to build larger, outboard-powered versions. Today, Simmons Sea Skiffs can be built in 18‘, 20‘, and 22‘ versions.

My introduction to the Simmons Sea Skiff was through a friend and neighbor, Schuyler Horton, who is fanatical about fishing. He goes everywhere with a concealed rod and tackle on the chance that a few spare minutes and a body of water come his way. Having fished every possible inch of coastline in Newport, Rhode Island, from shore, he was determined to get out on the water with his two young sons and introduce them to his passion for fishing. Without any prior boatbuilding experience, but armed with books and plans from The WoodenBoat Store, he built a Tom Hill–designed ultralight and then a Marc Pettingill Sweet Dream. Then he and his boys managed to chase down most of the bluefish that ventured into Newport Harbor. But he was still frustrated knowing that all of the fishermen in their Makos and Grady Whites fishing the rocks and reefs off Brenton Point had an advantage just beyond his reach. He needed to get out there. So he decided to build yet another, this time larger, boat.

He happened upon Ellis Rowe at the 2005 Wooden­Boat Show in Newport. Rowe was displaying a new Simmons Sea Skiff 18 he had built, and Schuyler was immediately, well, hooked. The Simmons Sea Skiff is exactly what he wanted—something that can handle the chop off Brenton Point, especially when the sou’wester pipes up in the afternoon, and can be easily trailered. When not in use, it fits in his garage, and, most important, it’s substantial and safe enough to take kids out to the reef.

Tom Simmons’s first boat was inspired in part by a New England dory that had a very high bow. The fisher­man who commissioned her also wanted a high transom to keep waves out as he surfed back onto the beach. The current plans, an excellent set drawn by the late David W. Carnell, a Cape Fear Museum volunteer who measured an original boat, retain those features. They boast jaunty and traditional lines that attract attention and flattering comments. The outboard motor is housed in a well that sits inboard, allowing the transom to remain higher than any comparably sized outboard-powered boat and serving to keep out breaking waves. A cutout in the transom allows the motor to be tilted out of the water, giving very handy access to the propeller in case a line or net becomes fouled. The bottoms all feature a slight, modified V-shape for a smoother ride.

Without an engine, the 18-footer weighs an impressively light 350 lbs. This presents a number of advantages: Fully loaded, with engine, it can be easily trailered behind most small cars; it can be beached and relaunched with confidence; and with a relatively narrow beam of about 5½‘ and draft of mere inches, it can even be rowed into tricky rock-strewn areas in pursuit of elusive fish with the engine up.

Schuyler Horton

Easy trailering and beachability, combined with reasonable seakeeping qualities, are the hallmarks of the 18’ Simmons Sea Skiff. Owners report that the boats become uncomfortable in seas over 2’, while the larger hulls can handle worse conditions.

The construction of the Simmons Sea Skiff is straightforward and manageable for an amateur with some experience. One must keep in mind, however, that a Simmons Sea Skiff is a serious commitment of materials and time; it’s a whole different level of boatbuilding from plywood prams and kayaks. Good guidance is available, though. Before his untimely death a few years ago, Ellis Rowe published a series of articles in WoodenBoat magazine Nos. 186, 187, and 188 on the construction of an 18-footer.

Originally the boats were built of juniper (Atlantic white cedar) on mahogany, but as early as the 1950s Simmons began planking them in plywood. Building them in plywood today requires first erecting a strongback on which the boat will be built, making up a backbone consisting of stem (laminated or sawn), keel, floor timbers, transom, and motor well, as well as installing chines, planking the bottom and topsides, and then fiberglassing the bottom and motorwell. The plank laps are glued together and also fastened with copper rivets. The substantial frames are sawn from solid lumber, making a very robust hull.

As with most wooden boats, the fitout and finish are up to the owner. One thing that’s important to consider before the construction is what type of engine will be used, for its dimensions will determine how big the engine well and transom cutout need to be for the power plant to turn and tilt sufficiently. The number of configurations possible for the deck and interior layout are endless, and include a decked-over bow creating a storage compartment, a casting platform forward, an open boat with thwarts, center console, side console, and tiller steering.

Schuyler Horton

Early Sea Skiffs were built of solid juniper on oak. Gluedlap plywood, as we see here, is also a good option.

Out on the water, the Simmons Sea Skiff does what she was designed to do, proudly charging into the slop upwind, fending it off downwind, delivering her crew to the fish. Because of her size, shape, and lightweight hull, she’s initially tender. Balance is always a consideration. Crew and gear weight must be distributed evenly to keep her level. It’s even possible to steer her left and right by simply moving one’s weight slightly from port to starboard. She has good capacity for gear and, as noted, the owner can decide how to best create custom storage solutions. At moderate speeds, winds, and sea states, she tracks well and handles chop from any direction. The lapstrake construction and considerable flare help to keep the spray down. When docking, launching, or hauling, her proud, high bow and relatively light weight can conspire against you and tend to get blown around—though this is more of a problem in the larger boats.

I didn’t handle Schuyler’s boat in rough conditions, but he tells me that when the seas are more than 3‘, he’s reminded quickly that he’s in a small boat. She gets wet and tossed around a bit. In conditions below that, she’s so well behaved that it’s possible to be deluded into a false sense of security. He doesn’t head outside of Narragansett Bay if it’s expected to blow more than 20—which is fine for him because there are plenty of places to fish within the bay.

Schuyler’s observations were reinforced by another friend, Mike Lavecchia, who also has an 18-footer out of York, Maine. He uses her mostly for exploring with friends and just getting out on the water, for which she’s perfect. He has taken her offshore down to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and back, and when he’s been caught out in winds over 25 knots, or seas in the 2‘–3‘ range, he too gets uncomfortable. He also reported, to little surprise, that when she’s loaded with five or six adults she struggles to plane. With 25 hp, the 18 will do about 20 knots with two people aboard. As for fuel consumption, both Schuyler and Mike described it to me in months, each saying they fill up their 3-gallon tanks once or twice a month during the boating season.

The 20- and 22-footers have better seakeeping abilities than the 18s. The labor to build the larger boats hardly differs from the smaller ones, but there is a cost difference in materials. Laying aside that cost, the trade-off comes down to this: Are you willing to sacrifice garage storage, and towing with the Subaru wagon, to be able to venture out in 4‘–6‘ seas?

The Simmons Sea Skiff is popular now, and although it is unknown how many have been built, Tom Simmons turned out an estimated 1,000 or more between 1946 and 1972. And the Cape Fear Museum reports having sold over 2,000 plans. It is safe to say there are plenty out there, and it seems an excellent choice for the home builder—for many reasons, including all of the support available from fellow builders. A few minutes on the Internet will also reveal numerous threads on the WoodenBoat Forum, as well as a website about the boats, an owners’ club, and countless photos.

When Schuyler Horton wanted to get out to the prime fishing grounds and didn’t have $40,000 to $50,000 to buy a new Grady White or Mako, he found a very economical alternative. He spent $11,000, and working mostly weekends, got out on the water 18 months later with his boys on a brand-new boat. At the time, the boys were six and nine years old. Today, they’re 12 and 15, and have been growing up learning about fishing and boat construction on a fine, sea­worthy, home-built small boat.

For information and to order plans, contact Cape Fear Museum.

Cape Fear Museum

T.N. Simmons took much inspiration from the hulk of an old beach-launched dory when he developed the lines of his eponymous Sea Skiff. The 18-footer, whose lines are shown here, measures 11″ less than its nominal length. It has an optimal horsepower range of 25–40.
The flaring sides give it a high load-carrying capacity, while the scantlings yield a relatively
lightweight hull.

Cape Fear Museum

Particulars:
LOA 17’1″
Beam 5’7″
Draft (motor up) 5″
Weight (empty) 300 lbs
Power 25-30 hp

Nick Owens

The diminutive pram, less than 9’ long, has remarkable carrying capacity. A centerline seat allows the person rowing to choose from two stations, depending on the boat’s fore-and-aft trim.

A thing is right,” Aldo Leopold writes in A Sand County Almanac, “when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” On my bookshelf, Leopold shares space with worn volumes of those other writers more familiar to the boating community, among them L. Francis Herreshoff, Pete Culler, and John Gardner. Small boats do, in fact, represent a “biotic community” of sorts, and Sam Devlin’s Lit’l Petrel design is, to use Leopold’s evaluation, “right.”

Three years ago, my son acquired a magnificent 1959 William Tripp 32‘ sloop, FREYA. Mahogany-planked over oak frames, she has beautiful lines and vast amounts of professionally maintained varnish. Promising him an appropriate tender as a “boat-warming” present, I began my search for a dinghy worthy of such a companion.

I had specific characteristics in mind: The boat had to have the capacity to carry three passengers safely through the choppy seas of the home mooring field, it had to have good manners while being towed, it had to be easy to enter and exit both on shore and alongside FREYA, it had to have a clean and easy-to-maintain interior, and it must have good performance under oars.

Tom Jackson

Vintage Wilcox-Crittenden oarlocks retract with a minimum of fumbling, keeping the horns from damaging the topsides as the dinghy comes alongside and holding the oarlock in easy reach when needed.

Because its transom bow offers the best carrying capacity for its length, a pram is a logical choice for a tender and has the further benefit of permitting “dry feet” exits over the bow. Additionally, a novel fore-and-aft rower’s seat allows for improved trim with varying loads. Sufficient beam, a deep-V cross-sectional shape, substantial rocker, and a generous skeg provide the good manners needed not only for boarding but also for being towed. The latter characteristic applies only if the pram is appropriately positioned behind the towing craft. These features also assure that a craft will row in a straight line when desired without weathercocking when the breeze is on the beam, but at the same time ample rocker will allow her to turn 360 degrees within her own length. Finally, modern construction methods assure a clean, easily maintained interior.

When I saw Sam Devlin’s Lit’l Petrel among the new designs on the Devlin Designing Boat Builders website, I thought I had found a winner. Devlin’s designs can be instantly downloaded, gratifying the impulse that most of us have to see more right away. After more thorough review, all seemed right, and the decision was final.

Living on the coast of Maine, quality boatbuilding materials are readily obtained. Before long, I had the 6mm okoume plywood scarfed and the frames and planking panels cut. The stitch-and-glue construction method proceeded quickly, and in short order the hull was shaped and the finishwork underway. Knowing the hard life an even well-cared-for dinghy has on our rocky shores and crowded dinghy floats, I added an additional 6-oz layer of fiberglass cloth to the exterior. With the addition of the gunwales, inwales, and knees, the little boat stiffened up nicely.

Tom Jackson

The oarlock sets quickly.

Flotation is provided beneath the stern seat. I installed polyester foam gunwale guards around the entire perimeter to shield her against damage from inevitable contact with docks and other dinghies and also to protect FREYA’s beautiful topsides. I also opted for the traditional towing ring, mounted on the bow transom with a substantial eye strap and supported by a robust bronze backing plate. For her two rowing positions, four old-fashioned and now hard-to-find Wilcox-Crittenden Davis-style bronze oarlocks completed the job.

Discussing a rowing boat without discussing the means of propulsion would be like describing a power­boat without ever mentioning the engine. A proper pair of oars can make all the difference. Off-the-shelf oars tend to be too heavy, poorly balanced, and too stiff, lacking any “life.” Fortunately, light and clear spruce is abundant and inexpensive in Maine. Following plans in Culler’s Boats, Oars, and Rowing, I made a nice pair of well-balanced 71⁄2‘ oars, a pleasurable and easy conclusion to the project. Leathered and well tallowed, they, too, have exceeded expectations, feathering effortlessly and easily propelling CELIA B gracefully about the anchorage, and—I can’t help but also add—in a far greater style than the proliferating inflatable abominations with aluminum oar shafts and plastic blades.

Tom Jackson

A substantial bronze ring very stoutly set low in the bow transom assures that the tender tows well and securely.

CELIA B’s sea trials began immediately after her launching in Casco Bay and a two-day trip to Rockport, Maine. She settled off the stern as we prepared to drop the mooring, and her motion astern was smooth and deliberate, lacking any of the sudden accelerations and direction changes induced by a change in the tension of the painter. Leaving Casco Bay, we encountered the predictably unpredictable seas off the mouth of the ebbing Kennebec River. Confused seas, wind and tide in conflict with one another, fog, rain, and gusts to 25 knots gave the little boat a less-than-gentle introduction to her life’s work. With her tow line lengthened to about 30‘, she rode just behind the second stern wave. There, she was as well-behaved as could be, with no sudden high-speed surfing runs or attempts to sneak her bow under FREYA’s transom.

As we entered New Harbor on the Pemaquid peninsula and picked up an unused lobsterman’s mooring, I pulled her near to bail the rainwater out. At one point I dipped my finger in the bilgewater to taste for any salt suggesting she may have taken seas aboard. Fresh as a bottle of Poland Spring! The lobstermen from whom we sought permission to use the mooring expressed his admiration, adding a final exclamation point to CELIA B’s first day at sea, for whether the compliment is given for a proud boat-handling moment or for the boat herself, when it is delivered by men who earn their livelihood aboard boats, it has a sweeter ring.

Tom Jackson

The author wanted his son’s 32’ yacht to have a complementary tender, something more distinctive than the ubiquitous inflatables. CELIA B serves the role well.

From the tightly packed dinghy docks of Northeast Harbor to the sandy South Beach of Roque Island, CELIA B transported her crew in both style and comfort. Entering a dinghy from the cockpit always presents challenges, as the boat invariably seems to want to depart for shore before the passengers are properly installed, creating much flailing about and occasional amusement for observers. However, CELIA B’s wide, deep-V bilge panels, hard chine, and ample skeg made for a remarkably stable entry, with secure footing and no premature departure. As she came ashore or alongside a dock, the dinghy’s transom bow afforded a close approach, allowing passengers to disembark over the bow with dry feet.

Among all CELIA B’s assets, her most endearing to me was her performance in rowing. I have built numerous performance fixed-seat pulling boats, including Gardner peapods, a Chamberlain gunning dory, and most recently a 17‘ double-ended Herreshoff rowing boat. However, in her own short way, the Lit’l Petrel is a delight to row. She tolerates a wide range of loading and allows the oarsman to adjust with two rowing positions. Her beam gives a tolerance to less-than-perfect positioning side to side, minimizing any list. The deep V and generous skeg allow her to track well and minimize any rounding up into the breeze. She will turn in her own length. Finally, coupled with a proper set of oars she moves along effortlessly at hull speed and far more gracefully than her inflated brethren.

If imitation is indeed the best form of flattery, then let it be known that I’m already planning a Lit’l Petrel to serve as my tender, too.

Lit’l Petrel 9 Dinghy Plans and finished boats are available from Devlin Designing Boat Builders.

Devlin Designing Boat Builders

Sam Devlin designed a simple V-bottomed pram with ample rocker to serve as a pragmatic and sensible yacht tender. The pram bow assures maximum carrying capacity and allows passengers to step ashore with dry feet.
Particulars:
LOA: 8′ 10 1/4″
Beam: 4′ 2 3/8″
Draft(cb up): 5″
Weight: 63 lbs
Load capacity: 340 lbs

Ruth Hill

ZIP is the prototype model of the DragonFlyer 3.2, a design intended as a versatile and dynamic sail trainer. She can be sailed with main alone, main and jib, or main and asymmetrical spinnaker.

Here we have the DragonFlyer 3.2, a brand-new 10′ 8″ sloop meant to offer training for beginners and spirited performance for experienced sailors.

Bystanders have described this particularly striking little boat as nifty, swell, cool, or awesome. The choice of adjective appears to depend upon the observer’s age. DragonFlyer comes from Brooks Boats Designs in Brooklin, Maine. John Brooks and Ruth Hill (husband and wife) run this outfit, which specializes in designing glued plywood-lapstrake boats ranging from dinghies to small cruising sailboats.

Brooks has given DragonFlyer a gunter sloop rig with a fully battened mainsail. At first glance, that main looks as if it might be a “batwing” sail pulled from a late-1800s sailing canoe. However, close inspection reveals the battens to be nearly parallel to the boom rather than splaying out in the old batwing pattern. This configuration will permit slightly better airflow across the sail and allow for simpler furling (after we release the sail from the yard).

Ruth Hill

DragonFlyer is easily transported from car to water with a simple two-wheeled cart.

Full-length battens offer several advantages. They support considerable roach (convex curvature to the leech). This allows more sail area to be carried by a relatively short mast, yard, and boom. The mainsail is compact, but of powerful shape.

If we wish to fuss with the full-length battens, they will give us precise control of the draft or “fullness” in the sail. We can vary the thickness of the battens along their lengths or force them farther into their pockets (to produce more draft), or let them project farther out beyond the leech. In any case, we might make the battens somewhat more flexible (thinner) in their forward portions, where we want maximum draft to the sail, and stiffer as they approach the sail’s leech.

Ruth Hill

The DragonFlyer’s light construction and flat bottom make her easy to launch from a beach. Rigging her sails and getting her into the water take only a few minutes.

Full-length battens can almost eliminate violent slatting as the mainsail luffs. Whether this proves to be an advantage or a potential problem seems to depend upon the situation and the skipper’s level of experience. When a fully battened sail is full and driving, it wants to keep going. As we approach the float, simply letting go the sheet might not slow our boat as quickly as we fervently hope. We should keep this in mind, lest we wind up in the parking lot next to a Buick.

The sail plan shows that we can step Dragon Flyer’s mast farther forward and sail her as a catboat. Brooks believes this will prove popular with novice skippers and smaller children. A noble idea, but as a long-ago little kid myself, I’m inclined to think that many youngsters will want to fly all sail possible all the time. They might well leave the conservative cat rig to their parents.

That cat rig, although simple to sail with “only one string to pull,” might prove more difficult to sail really well. Fully battened sails tend not to telegraph notice of improper trim so quickly as unsupported (slatting) Dacron. With no headsail to direct airflow, we’ll need to pay close attention to the single sail’s sheet. In the beginning at least, let’s tape a forest of telltales to the sail.

At the other end of the scale, we can move the bow-sprit to its full-forward position and fly an asymmetrical (single-luff) spinnaker. For the truly adventurous, Brooks has drawn an enlarged sloop-rig option. He describes the overall rig as “simple, affordable, and fast.” Well, it’s certainly versatile as we can set several different combinations of sail.

DragonFlyer’s glued-lap hull shows a fine and shapely forefoot. For about the forward one-third of the boat, the lower “lap-edge” of the second plank widens to nearly 1″. This plywood-epoxy edge forms a lifting strake. Brooks reports that the device deflects spray as well as providing hydrodynamic lift. The hull flows gracefully aft through an easy midsection to culminate in a long straight run. Given any reasonable breeze, this shape allows the little sloop to jump up and plane away. The wide “flat” to its bottom and relatively firm bilges, result in good initial stability. Despite its small size, this is not a particularly tender boat.

Designed from the beginning as a kit, DragonFlyer goes together quickly and efficiently with little waste of materials. We’ll build the hull over a framework of interlocking plywood bulkheads and stringers, accurately secured by a series of slots and tabs. This structure gives us a sturdy well-aligned form on which to hang the planks, and all of it stays in the boat. No separate building jig remains to be stowed, tossed, or burned in the shop stove.

Ruth Hill

Sealed tanks built under the sole and on either side of the cockpit during construction provide ample positive flotation for this sail trainer.

John and Ruth tell us that we’ll build this hull in standard glued-lapstrake fashion, “with an innovative twist: no laps to bevel.” The kit will arrive at our shop with a constant bevel worked into one edge of each strake. They suggest that we might assemble the frame-work “dry”—that is, without epoxy. This procedure will give us a good practice session free from the deadline pressure of rapidly setting up epoxy.

Then we’ll disassemble the framework. The designers recommend that we proceed slowly and keep careful track of the various pieces: “This is easy to do, so long as you don’t get too far ahead of yourself…especially if several selves are working together.”

When the time arrives for final and permanent assembly, we’ll glue together the frame and apply thickened epoxy to the plank laps. Battens sprung temporarily along the outside of the laps will ease the job and help to ensure that each strake takes a truly fair curve. Those who have built lapstrake hulls in the traditional fashion (cedar planks, bent frames, and no goop) might ask: “How can these strakes mate in a leak-proof manner without nice rolling bevels at the laps?” The answer lies in the strong gap-filling properties of epoxy.

As it turns out, the easy lines of this hull allow the straight-beveled strakes to mate more closely than we might think. John and Ruth originally had planned to plank the prototype’s hull dry and then to inject epoxy into the laps. The surprisingly close fit prevented this. In the end, they proceeded in usual glued-lapstrake fashion: coating the lap joint of each strake before hanging it. This boat’s glued-lap construction consumes relatively little epoxy and requires much less sanding and fairing than the popular stitch-and-glue technique.

Glued-lap hulls have been with us for decades. They are light and strong, and last well. When nicely lined-off, as this hull is, the shadow lines along the laps help define the boat’s sweet shape. But these hulls absolutely demand the use of high-quality plywood and thickened epoxy. If we attempt to build them in this manner with traditional materials, they will split along the laps…perhaps not today, but soon and catastrophically. If we wish to play with solid cedar strakes, we’ll need to re-engineer the structure.

At least for now, DragonFlyer can be had only as a kit or completed boat from Brooks Boats Designs. Building plans might be available in the future. Some of us like to start with a pile of raw lumber, or a stack of virgin plywood, so that we can say, “I built this!” But, if we can get past our builder’s ego, the kit offers advantages. It certainly reduces assembly time, and we know all the pieces will fit properly first time around. Novice builders will find that the kit makes for simpler work and requires fewer tools. Given the kit supplier’s access to materials at lower cost, and the efficiencies of series production for the kit’s components, the monetary savings for building from scratch could prove slight.

There might be yet another advantage to kits. Brooks tells us he has no intention of setting up an organized racing class for DragonFlyer, but he expects that some owners will. If that should happen, having all the boats come from the same source could preclude unpleasantness at hull-measurement time.

John and Ruth and their four children built the first DragonFlyer as a family project. The boat’s distinctive appearance, even from a distance, makes for easy identification. When Ruth sees that bright-red fully battened mainsail far across the busy cove, she knows “those are my kids.” And her kids seem to recognize the bugle call that tells them it’s time to come home.

The DragonFlyer 3.2 has proven fast and exciting under sail. It tacks with certainty and planes readily in any real breeze. The little boat teaches lessons gently yet firmly. Novice sailors soon learn to correct their mistakes, but Brooks and Hill tell us that their children haven’t found this boat to be at all “touchy or scary.” Indeed, kids and agile adults consider the 3.2 to be good fun. Larger skippers might hope that Brooks Boats will offer a DragonFlyer 4.7 (15′ 5″ LOD) somewhere down the road.

Kits for the DragonFlyer, as well as finished boats, are available from Brooks Boats Designs; http://brooksboatsdesigns.com

Brooks Boats

Particulars:
LOD 10’8″
LWL 10’7″
Beam 4’6″
Draft, board up 5″
board down 2’9″
Hull weight 100 lbs
Sail area:
Cat 44 sq ft
Sloop 59 sq ft
Large sloop 68 sq ft
Spinnaker 35 sq ft

Brooks Boats

DragonFlyer was designed from the start as a glued-plywood kit boat. The kit arrives with pre-beveled strakes, so the hull sections can be assembled dry, before applying any epoxy, ensuring a good fit and no misplaced pieces.

Jay Fleming

Low-powered, double-ended launches called snekker are ubiquitous along the coast of Norway, but rather exotic in New Hampshire, where Andrew Wallace’s Traditional Boatworks builds these boats.

The soul of the Viking ship lives on, and on, and on, proof that it’s worth sticking with a winning formula. The graceful indigenous lapstrake craft of Scandinavia have metamorphosed into a variety of shapes and types, but the strong sheer, pointed bow and stern, and lapped planks of the boats that raided and traded throughout Europe persist, a thousand years on.

Boatbuilder Andrew Wallace can claim real Norse genes. His mother was born in Oslo and he spent childhood summers at the family’s place in Grimstad, on Norway’s southeastern Baltic coast. Unsure how to contain the boy’s energy, his mother placed him in the care of an elderly local fisherman. Man and boy headed out into the island-dotted strait called the Skagerrak every morning, no matter what the weather. There’d be a breakfast of sardines and jam on bread, then a day of longline fishing for mackerel or cod. They would land cod as large as the eight-year-old Andrew. As the years passed he was trusted with more and more of the fishing and boat handling.

The boat whose Nordic DNA soaked into the impressionable young Andrew Wallace was called a snekke (SNEK-uh). The word translates more or less as “skiff,” but in Norway it means a boat that looks exactly like the replicas Wallace is now turning out under his shingle, Traditional Boatworks, in Canaan, New Hampshire. These sturdy, burdensome descendants of Viking ships are ubiquitous in Norway.  On one Norwegian brokerage site I found 934 snekkes for sale. Harbors there are crammed with them.

Snekker (to use the Norwegian plural) come in a fairly narrow range of shapes and sizes. Most hover around 24′ long and are either completely open like a motor launch, or have decking forward with artfully proportioned windshields, or an enclosed cuddy cabin. Wallace designed his snekke based on photos and his youthful recollections, synthesizing the best features of the type.  Tim Estabrook of Yarmouth, Maine, did the naval architecture chores, including hydrostatics and Mylar patterns for the frames. The boats are built at Wallace’s shop. He’s built three so far, including one on spec, whose moorings we slipped for a test drive one unseasonably cool Chesapeake afternoon in August.

Jay Fleming

The Snekke’s outboard rudder is a trait inherited from its sailing forebaers.

This is a very unusual powerboat. It’s not just the elegant lines and all-bright finish, though to be sure we looked like a swan amongst pigeons as we threaded out of a marina thick with fashionable plastic motor cruisers. That was my first impression of the snekke: To contemporary tastes it is an unfashionable boat. It is unabashedly wooden, heavy, and slow.

Whereas an all-varnished finish can be flashy and showy, it just looks right on this Nordic workboat. Planking is 7⁄8″ European larch fastened to fence-post-like double-sawn white oak frames, 3″ square and spaced just 21″ apart. The keel is a massive 5″×9″ balk of oak. This is not a boatbuilding project for the amateur crowd—Wallace is classically trained in the art. With a hull that combines hollow garboards, tumblehome amidships, full ends above the waterline, and fine lines below, every single one of the nine planks per side requires steam- bending. The laps are fastened with wood screws and bedded in a modern polyurethane adhesive. (Wallace is ambivalent about the latter, seeing little real improvement over older nostrums like Dolphinite.)

Jay Fleming

Some snekker are dayboats with open-air layouts, while others have modest sleeping accommodations. The wind-shield is a distinctive feature of the type.

This noble heap of timber contributes substantially to the all-up displacement of 5,000 lbs, and this weight is essential to the Snekke’s charm. When you step aboard, the sensation of real substance is immediate. A crowd of people on the rail would heel the boat only a little. The Snekke dispatches a light chop and passing powerboat swill with a quiet “crunch.” This is no half-tide rock, however. The large outboard rudder offers precise control, and I had little trouble imagining myself running an inlet in a gale. As we motored into 15 knots of wind and short chop on the South River, exactly zero spray came over the bow. Experiments in punching the bow into the ugly wake of a big stinkpot were anticlimactic; the boat takes it like a duck.

The literal throbbing heart of the Snekke is a likewise noble lump of a Sabb diesel. Our test article is equipped with a two-cylinder, 22-hp mill built in 1968. Wallace had it restored and sent over from Norway to replace a more conventional 20-hp Westerbeke. The 450-lb Westerbeke, while ample to push the boat, was simply too light and required internal lead ballast to settle the boat on its lines. “Motor weight is essential to the character of the boat,” Wallace says. The old Sabb weighs 800 lbs.

Mounted inside a locust and cambrera box amidships, the engine gives the Snekke its special sauce. It has a lovely musical throb, not at all noisy, even with the box cracked a bit to help the external keel-cooler. “It puts my toddler daughter right to sleep,” says Wallace, who uses the boat for day trips off the coast of New Hampshire with family and friends.

As someone who is mostly allergic to engines on boats, I was enchanted with the Sabb. There is no reduction gear, and indeed no transmission. While there’s an electric start, you can spin the huge flywheel with a Victorian-looking hand crank, ease in the compression, and fire up the beast with maybe a half-dozen turns. Another crank adjusts the pitch of the 18″, two-bladed prop, giving you forward, neutral, and reverse at any engine speed without crunching the transmission. While we were at full throttle, Wallace reversed the pitch on the prop. There was a furious boiling under the stern and the boat came to a stop in a boat length or two, smoothly enough not to spill your coffee.

The gently rumbling Sabb pushes the Snekke to all of 61⁄2 knots. This is a stately and completely unfashionable pace. It is also the Snekke’s best feature. Our progress down the South River that August day felt luxuriously out of step with the big machines that were passing us. They were all hustle and mountains of bustle, acutely unrestful. Enjoying the pace of things aboard the wooden Snekke made me think of the Slow Food movement. The nautical analog—boats like the Snekke that are built by hand and get 25 miles per gallon—has yet to achieve the goateed hipness of Slow Food. Wallace admits that it’s been a challenge to sell the concept of Slow Boating, and that many correspondents have asked about a planing version.

Jay Fleming

The snekke, with its displacement hull, is not a fast boat. It moves easily through the water at a consistent 6 knots, sipping fuel.

As he talked about how speed modifications would spoil the boat’s charms, my mind was wandering to thoughts of long coastal passages in the Snekke. It wasn’t just the seakeeping qualities or the long range under power. It was the layout of the interior, peculiar to the snekke type and mostly unseen in these waters. An automobile collector would call it a “cabrio coach.” There’s a decked area at the front of the cockpit, with two big settees port and starboard that extend up under the foredeck to double as very comfortable berths. Passengers sitting here would be dry in any weather. A quick-folding dodger extends the hard top to increase the covered area of the cockpit. Another bit of canvas closes in the stern to create a fully enclosed cabin, sleeping three adults or more. (See page 20 for more about the Snekke’s canvas treatment.)

The helmsman stands at the tiller on a platform aft of the engine box. The geometry is perfect, allowing a 360-degree view from the helm but genial proximity to the passengers under the hard top. There is no inside helm station. Wallace objects to the complexity this would add to his Thoreauvian powerboat. A hydraulic linkage with its oily fittings would not only literally disconnect the skipper from the feel of the boat; Wallace feels that being out of the weather disconnects the Snekke from its undecked Viking ancestors. “If I’m at the tiller, out in the wind and rain,” he says, “I’m going to be in the very best position to assess the weather and sea conditions and make the best decisions for the boat and the passengers.”

Even as the boat is admired wherever it ties up, Wallace wonders openly about the market for charmingly slow powerboats. I don’t think he should worry. There’s one constituency who will “get it”: all of the sailors who’ve thought about crossing over to internal combustion. A speed of 6 1⁄2 knots, all the time, no matter what the conditions, in fine style and perfect comfort, sounds like a great deal. Sailors understand the appeal of Slow Boating.

As we took up our mooring lines that evening, three small boys, damp and sunburned from a day of tubing behind an anonymous plastic sliver of a powerboat, swarmed the dockside. “Awesome!” “Cool!” was the chorus. “Does it have a propeller?” “Is it all wood?” Wallace invited the groms aboard.

“Would you rather go slow in a beautiful wooden boat, or fast in a plastic boat?” I asked the boys, still in reporter mode. After a pause, the answer came back: “Slow, in a beautiful wooden boat!”

There’s hope yet.

For more information, contact Andrew Wallace, Traditional Boatworks, www.traditionalboatworks.com.

Andrew Wallace/Tim Estabrook

Particulars:
LOA 24′
Beam 8’6″
Power 22-27 hp diesel

Andrew Wallace/Tim Estabrook

The sailing forebears of the snekke are apparent in the lines of Andrew Wallace’s interpretation of the type. Snekker typically measure under 25’ overall, and are relatively firm-bilged and double-ended.

Lawrence W. Cheek

The classic transom-sterned skiff that became known as the Sid Skiff, here with cobuilder Zach Simonson-Bond at the oars, first came to Ray Speck’s attention while he was living on a houseboat in Sausalito, California. The boat is as much as joy to look at as it is to row.

So what modifications do you think might make it point a little higher?” I ask, following an embarrassing moment where I boggle an attempted tack. “Drop the rig and row,” answers Ray Speck, who’s built about 20 of these boats.

A perfectly practical solution, for sure, and one that resonates nicely with the Sid Skiff, a boat that’s as practical and adaptable as it is pretty. Okay, it’s not about to claw upwind like a sloop. But it also doesn’t suffer from a sloop’s rigging complications. As it is, it’ll reach off the wind in a wisp of a breeze, and it glides so deftly and easily under oar power that on any given day’s outing, it would be a crime not to include an exercise leg.

“I built one with a 19′ mast,” Speck recalls, riffing on the Sid Skiff’s versatility. “It had maybe 150 sq ft of sail. The guy who bought it was sailing in Raccoon Strait off Sausalito, and he swore it broke away on a plane. And he weighed 195 lbs. His wife, who weighed about 110, capsized in it.”

Speck, who retired in 2012 from teaching at the Northwest School of Wooden Boatbuilding in Port Hadlock, Washington, has a long and intimate history with this boat—though the crucial first chapter is missing. He first encountered the design in 1969 when he was living on a houseboat in Sausalito, California, and frequently noticed the harbormaster, Sid Foster, rowing around Richardson Bay in a lovely little lapstrake skiff. “We all lusted after that boat,” Speck says. “When Sid died, one of my friends got the boat, and another friend thought he was supposed to have gotten it. A battle ensued. I said, ‘Wait a minute, guys—why don’t I just build you another one?’” Speck took the lines off the disputed bequest and built a slightly larger version, giving new life to a classic design. Speck named it the Sid Skiff in Sid Foster’s honor.

Only trouble is—whose design was it? Speck doesn’t know. He asked around the Bay Area and heard a vague rumor that it had emanated from the Puget Sound area. Much later, after he’d moved to Port Townsend to teach, he happened to peer closely at a 1950s photo of a Prothero Brothers schooner on the wall. Tied up at a Seattle dock next to the schooner was a Sid Skiff —he says it was unmistakable.

Speck thinks the design was originally a production boat; the clues were certain signs of construction expedience. “It was down to the fewest possible number of parts,” he says. “Six planks to a side, with sawn frames. It looked like they were able to crank ’em out pretty fast.”

Lawrence W. Cheek

A boomless sprit rig, which is simple to set, strike, and stow, moves the Sid Skiff well in favorable winds. She won’t point as high on the wind as a marconi racing sloop, but asking her to do so is a pointless exercise when it is so easy to strike the rig and row.

Speck has slightly fancified the construction. There are now eight or nine planks per side, and the detailing is careful and elegant. Still, it isn’t a complicated boat. Speck, now 69, says he used to be able to complete one in about 250 hours. He figures an amateur could build a Sid from his five pages of plans in 500 to 600 hours. And for any builder, the design welcomes variation and adaptation. Speck doesn’t mind a bit. He has built iterations from 12′ to 18′ with one, two, and three rowing stations. The builder simply spaces out the molds to vary the length. The plans specify 3⁄8″ fastened lap planks, preferably cedar or mahogany, but Speck says there’s no reason why glued-lap plywood wouldn’t work. For upwind fanciers like me, sailmaker Sean Rankins, who occupies the sail loft in the school’s main building, has developed a jibheaded sprit rig for a 16′ version.

The 13′ 6″ Sid Skiff I sailed and rowed bears an unusual history. Chris Payton, a 1999 graduate of the Northwest School, began building it after his graduation but completed only the backbone, centerboard trunk, and transom before he died. The pieces made their way to the school, where they resided in the boatshop’s rafters for nearly a decade. At some point in the 2011–12 term, the Traditional Small Craft class was running low on project boats, so they decided to begin the planking. The 2012–13 class then finished out the interior and rigging.

As usual with the school’s project boats, the joinery is solid and tight and the details all look professionally executed. The faculty keeps a close watch on students’ work to ensure quality control. Wait: starboard bow, fifth plank down from the sheer clamp—what’s that? A conspicuously mismatched finger-width patch strip of not-exactly-red western red cedar. Speck thinks the students cracked the plank as they were bending it to the stem, then grabbed a random scrap of cedar to make a graving piece. One class was expecting the boat to be painted, but the succeeding class couldn’t bear to cover up the honeyed glow of red (and yellowish) cedar. So the discordant patch now affirms that the boat was crafted by fallible human hands, like the 18th-century harpsichord builders who always took care to incorporate an intentional mortal mistake so as not to irritate God.

Zach Simonson-Bond, a 26-year-old boatbuilding student from nearby Whidbey Island, worked on the skiff during the school year and now is exuberantly, uncontrollably in love with it. On the day I visited, the school drafted him to accompany me on a foggy morning outing on Port Townsend Bay, and he waited for me to finish interviewing Speck with barely suppressed impatience. Once underway, he explained that he used to crew on the historic Puget Sound schooner ADVENTURESS (see WB No. 232), which deployed another Sid Skiff as a tender.

Lawrence W. Cheek

The boat built at the Northwest School of Wooden Boatbuilding is all about the beauty of wood, with western red cedar planking over oak frames, although glued-lap plywood planking would also work.

“People on ADVENTURESS regarded the skiff with so much affection,” he said. “Kids would have their first rowing experience on her. I honed my own rowing skills on her. She’s really easy to row, pretty maneuverable, really sweet lines. No, she doesn’t point too well.”

I don’t have much rowing skill myself, but after ten minutes with the skiff’s oars I sensed that the boat and I were finding an eerily magical groove, we were making good speed, and it felt wonderful. When we began to get a usable breeze and shifted to sailing mode, I was a little less enchanted. Although Sid made good progress in our stingy breeze, it wasn’t necessarily progress in my preferred directions, and the bay was crowded with moored boats that had to be dodged. It seemed to be making a lot of leeway, and it stubbornly refused to point high. I managed one slow tack, blew another, then figured out that Sid is happier obeying suggestions to jibe. After this the morning’s sail went better.

Lawrence W. Cheek

The Sid Skiff is light enough to nose in to a beach for a shore outing.

The next day, I talked with sailmaker Sean Rankins, who built the sails for several of Speck’s and the school’s Sid Skiffs, and whom I’ve found to be an excellent authority on rigs of all kinds. What, I wondered, would improve the boat’s pointing ability?

“First of all, I might have trimmed the sail a little differently than you did,” Rankins said, with exquisite diplomacy. “It’s also very responsive to crew weight and position, and that could make a difference.”

Lawrence W. Cheek

The mahogany transom, along with the backbone and centerboard trunk, waited a decade before helping a new generation of students appreciate the timeless design.

But more fundamentally, Rankins explained that if a Sid Skiff were to be tuned more toward sailing than rowing, several modifications would in fact be useful. “If I were having one built for my use,” he said, “it would have a higher-peaked main and definitely a boom. That would give better sheeting to weather and would better control the twist in the sail.” When I mentioned that the centerboard in this particular boat was limited to a 45-degree deployment, he added that a deeper-setting centerboard, or a daggerboard with larger area, would also improve the boat’s weatherly behavior and decrease its tendency to carve a lot of leeway.

My takeaway from our talk was not that he was critical of this particular boat, or Speck’s interpretation of the design, but that small boats are wonderfully responsive to personalization. It’s a sparkling argument for building one yourself or commissioning one from a professional shop—or a school. (The Northwest School builds boats on commission and speculation that range from the 7′ 7″ Nutshell Pram to a 62′ Bob Perry racer. This Sid Skiff was priced at $8,750.) Adding a jib or boom to the Sid Skiff’s sprit rig or trying out a balance lug might cost a few hundred bucks as opposed to the fluttering away of thousands involved in rig modifications to a big boat. And the physical forces acting on a small boat are small themselves, so mistakes and miscalculations tend not to escalate into disasters. Unlike most other aspects of our modern lives, errors and trials with a small wooden boat are fun.

Plans and finished boats no onger available from Ray Speck, or through the Northwest School of Wooden Boatbuilding.

Ray Speck

Captivated by the shapely hull he first saw in Sausalito, California, boatbuilder Ray Speck got
to know the boat very well, having taken the lines off the original in the late 1960s. He has built
many of them since. The hull’s shape promises a comparatively easy planking job, with plenty
of opportunity to mind the details of fitting out. Everything about the boat seems well proportioned, the very essence of the word “classic.”

Particulars:
LOA 13’6″
Beam 4’9″
Draft, board up 10″
Weight 175 lbs

Matthew P. Murphy

Canvas sheathing over a wooden framework makes Ned McIntosh’s 9’ dinghy extraordinarily light, at only 35 lbs, yet it remains a versatile tender that is easy and quick to build.

These 9′ ×3′ 3″ symmetrical double-enders have been around for many years. Oddly, they were born in Panama while Ned McIntosh and his wife, Alice, were there in 1942 in their cutter STAR CREST and Ned was working in a local boatshop. Although he first built himself a sharpie, Ned needed a lighter boat to get back and forth from STAR CREST’s mooring. First he tried a folding canvas dinghy, but it didn’t work out. Then came this fixed-frame, canvas-sheathed dinghy, which did work.

After Ned devised a sailing rig with leeboards and a small single sail, the boat became so popular that he and friends built about 20 of them. The group—which eventually formed the Panama Yacht Club—had a great time, racing them backwards as well as forwards. (To sail in reverse, Ned tells me, you have to hold out the boom to catch the wind, then steer backwards.) After returning home to his native New Hampshire, Ned continued to turn out many more of these useful little craft. And after he ceased building them, one or two other local builders began turning them out.

My first exposure to the boats came after sighting STAR CREST steaming into York Harbor early one evening about 50 years ago while Anne, our daughter Kathy, and I were there, living aboard our R-boat PENOBSCOT. We met Ned and Alice after they docked, and among all the neat features they showed us was their little canvas tender nestled nice as you please on this 35′ Atkin cutter’s deck. The dinghy could carry two people, yet one person could lift it out of the water and load it onboard. I never forgot our first viewing and, later on, noticed that other sailing yachts, most of them somehow connected to the McIntoshes, were also using Ned’s canvas boats as tenders. Conversations with their owners brought forth nothing but compliments.

After seeing so many of these cute little boats here and there and hearing only good reports about them—including a story Waldo Howland once told me of Ned building some of them right in the living room for the Howland children—I longed to build one for us. As I understood it, there were no plans for the boat itself, although Ned sent me a drawing for the sailing rig. So it came down to finding a boat that I could measure, and Karl Webster offered his. I jumped at the chance and created a drawing that included a building jig I thought would work.

Matthew P. Murphy

A single centerline seat permits shifts in crew weight. When a passenger is aboard, the oarsman turns around to get his weight toward the end, rowing the double-ender in the opposite direction.

Except for the three frames, the pieces of which can be sawn out from common white pine boards, a set of stringers form the skeleton around which the canvas is draped, glued, and stapled. There are five of these stringers. The one for the keel bends at its ends to form the two stems. In addition, there are two chine stringers and a pair of sheer stringers. All of these longitudinal members have to be stiff enough to remain fair between the supporting framework. Pine is too springy; I used Douglas-fir because I had some on hand. But I think spruce, mahogany, oak, or ash would also work well. There’s considerable curve in these stringers as they spring around the hull, so they need softening by hot water or steam. The stems, which have a sharper curve, are easier to bend if kerfed and glued back together—or they, too, could be steamed.

Over this skeleton of inner stringers goes the canvas. Heavy 10-oz stuff (No. 2 is what Ned calls it) is what you need, and if it comes in the usual 60″ width then a single piece just makes it across the boat at the maximum beam—just as Ned advised me it would. Another of his suggestions was to staple the canvas first along the sheer, only just pulling out the wrinkles. (Don’t pull too tight, or when the canvas shrinks it will distort the stringers.) Then mark along the chine with a pencil and make a cut toward the middle from each end. Then, he says, staple the sides to the chine stringers, trim them, and spread a bead of 3M 5200 and staple on the bottom panels. Trim off the excess. Staples should be an inch or so apart along chine and sheer stringers.

Although perhaps it was a mistake, I felt more comfortable covering the bottom first, then completely cutting away the port and starboard overhangs and using them separately afterwards for the sides. This called for a continuous overlap along the chines, and amidships I found that my overlap was a little scant.

Maynard Bray

A simple building jig accepts the keel, chine, and sheer battens, ready here to be covered with canvas.

In any event, my bottom piece draped nicely over the keel for most of its length but had to be cut along the centerline and overlapped at the stems, over a bead of 3M 5200. Closely spaced Monel staples hold the canvas to the skeleton and the adhesive makes the joints watertight.

After the bottom pieces were fitted, stapled, and glued where necessary, I stapled on the sides, doing the sheer first and then pulling out the wrinkles as I worked along the chines, over a bead of 3M 5200. I drove plenty of staples close together and hammered them flush afterward. You want these areas smooth for later installation of the outer keel, outer chines, and guardrails. A putty knife, pressed down hard and run along the overlap, helps squeeze out excess sealant.

Natural canvas was a pleasure to work with and goes on, if you’re careful, without much wrinkling. Ned tells me that his later boats were covered with a heavy synthetic material called Herculite, which makes for a more rugged hull that better resists puncturing. But it doesn’t have the “give” of canvas, so it doesn’t go on as smoothly.

At this point, after the adhesive has cured, it’s probably a good idea to spread on a coat of paint in order to seal the canvas against moisture. Either oil-based paint or latex will work, and you’ll find that both do a good job of shrinking any errant wrinkles out of the canvas.

Now come the outer stringers, which in order to bend around the hull need to be softened with steam or hot water, or else slit, or kerfed, lengthwise and glued into place in two layers. I chose the latter to prove the method, since I’d already used hot water for the inner stringers.

Also, this method kept the surfaces dry for gluing. To attach these outer stringers, I used thickened epoxy instead of 3M 5200 because it is easier to clean up and cures faster. Drywall screws with fender washers held things together until the epoxy kicked off.
For good looks, it pays to plane some taper near the ends of the chines and guardrails and nose them off a little. I also hollowed out their contact surfaces a little for a tight fit. Sinking screws permanently into their very ends always makes sense—just in case the epoxy lets go someday.

For finish, I ended up using a couple of coats of latex paint inside and out. The cedar plank used as a floor-board and seat (there’s no standing up in this boat) was to be left bare, so it went in after painting, held with oval-head screws so it could be removed for access to the bilge.

Oarlocks and breasthooks finished the boat. Unfortunately, I didn’t keep a log of the hours spent in construction, but I can tell you that the work goes fast. Using this design, not much time passes before you have a usable boat.

Because of its relatively high freeboard and double-ended symmetry, it’s surprisingly seaworthy for its size. Being so very light and with a single person aboard, it rises quickly to the oncoming waves. But, as with almost any 9-footer, a maximum of two people s about the limit for capacity, and you always have to be careful where you place your feet so as not to push against the canvas.

There’s only a single set of oarlocks, and you sit right down on the floorboard to row. To keep the boat trimmed right, you row in one direction if you’re alone, and get on the other side of the oars to row the opposite way if you have a passenger. Without a backrest, rowing is a little uncomfortable, but I suppose this could be and probably has been improved upon in other boats. Improvement, however, comes with more clutter and weight. It’s not an ideal “all-day” boat anyhow, so for short distances I think it’s fine as it is.

I can’t recall ever having rowed one of these boats previously, and I was amazed at how easily she picks up speed from a standstill, how quickly you can turn her, and how effortlessly she moves along. Six-foot oars are about the right length. We towed her behind either a powerboat or a sailboat most of last summer, and she bounced along happily at a variety of speeds. I got overzealous in pulling her alongside once while we still had headway and were leaving a wake, and she flipped upside down. That was quite a surprise, and I should have known better, but recovery was almost as rapid as the capsize. At only 35 lbs, she was easy to raise up by grabbing the rail, and once she shed the water it was easy to set her right-side up again.

New boats take getting used to, and all boats—including those you think you know—are able to teach you a lesson. This little double-ender, I’m sure, has more in store for me.

Plans may be obtained from Maynard Bray, [email protected].

Maynard Bray

By measuring an existing boat, Maynard Bray developed construction plans so he could build one for himself. Because he intended the boat as a tender, he didn’t draw the sailing rig devised by designer–builder Ned McIntosh.
Particulars:
LOA 9′
Beam 3’3″
Draft not much

Matthew P. Murphy

Harry Bryan’s 12’ Thistle is powered by a large rudder shaped like a fish’s tail and driven by foot pedals. With steady pedaling you can keep pace with about any rowboat of the same length.

At the beginning of a family cruise to Tasmania some 25 years ago, our friend and frequent Wooden Boat contributor Harry Bryan became intrigued with pedaling a small boat with one’s feet as an alternative to rowing or paddling, leg strength being greater than that of the arms and hands. While at sea, and after having earlier tried out a little foot-powered paddle-wheel craft and finding it enjoyable but inefficient, he began studying how fish moved through the water with such speed and with seemingly so little effort. He caught and examined a number of fish, bending their tails back and forth so he could better understand how they worked. And, as is often his custom, Harry soon started planning how to build a practical version. Long periods of time while standing watch in the Pacific, it seems, got those creative juices really flowing.

Back home again in his New Brunswick shop after the voyage, the ideas for a fish-tail drive generated during those watches began to come to fruition. After building some full-sized prototypes and trying them out, Harry perfected his so-called fin drive.

In its first iteration, Harry tells me, it worked like a rudder in that its big blade, operated by foot pedals, simply swung back and forth. But as the concept evolved (and became more like a fish’s tail), a second pivot came into being partway back on the “rudder” that provided more articulation and increased the forward drive. This worked much better—well enough, in fact, for Harry to draw up detailed plans for sale. He also designed a boat specifically for the fin drive, the 12′ Thistle.

As you can see from the photos, the blade itself is made of thin Lexan sandwiched between a leading edge of the same (but thicker) material, both chosen for their ability to flex. In use, the fin hangs down about a foot below the surface to get a good bite on the water. But it can swing up if it needs to when striking bottom or to make the unit easier to deal with when removed from the boat. The fin assembly is demountable (a threaded hinge pin hangs it onto the transom bracket, and a couple of snaphooks connect the foot pedal ropes), but in use it extends well beyond the boat’s stern; it has to in order to perform so well. After all, it’s supposed to simulate a fish. It’s this streamlined piece of Lexan, bending as it swings back and forth, that pushes the boat ahead.

Matthew P. Murphy

A spring and pin allow the fin to pivot forcefully through the water.

The mechanism between the fin and the boat that does the articulation rides clear of the water. This apparatus is very critical in that, besides supporting the forward tip of the Lexan fin, it has the pedal-driven yoke mounted at the front, along with the gudgeons and pin that make the connection to the boat’s transom. In between, there’s a second set of rudder-like hangers and a tiller (called a top piece on the drawing) that uses a tensioned coil spring instead of a human hand for its operation. By means of this device, the fin bends back and forth somewhat in concert with the forearm unit. In operation, the fin can really push on the water without stalling out, and shoots the boat ahead with remarkable speed.

It really works well, we’ve found, and leaves your hands free for holding a fishing pole, a camera or binoculars, or simply for waving as in, “Look, Ma, no hands.” You can alter course by pushing harder on one of the pedals than the other. Or you can simply stop pedaling and coast with the fin drive in the hard-over position, wherein the fin acts like a simple rudder. Either way works okay for a gradual turn, but for the tightest possible turning circle (and it’s still a pretty big one compared to most oar or paddle-driven boats), you keep the boat’s waggling “tail” toward one side and use rapid short strokes to kind of push the stern around.

Sculling by moving a boat’s rudder from side to side has always worked, but not efficiently. In a Beetle Cat, for example, this technique will get you home when the wind dies, provided home is not too far away. But with Harry’s fin drive, you can pedal for miles and go much, much faster without wearing yourself out. With steady and energetic pedaling, you can keep pace with about any rowboat of the same length.

The propulsion efficiency comes from the fin’s flexibility; it bends naturally as it swishes back and forth and pushes a lot of water aft, just the way a fish swims. With a combination of pivots, a yoke, and a centering spring, Harry has come as close to simulating a fish’s tail as you’re likely to see. While this device has a number of moving parts and may seem fragile, rest assured that Harry, his family, and others as well have proven it through many hours of use. I remember Harry’s daughter Sadie scooting around Mystic Seaport’s waterfront almost continuously during one of the three-day Wooden Boat Shows there.

The materials are commonplace, although there’s some machining and welding to contend with. There’s the Lexan fin itself (three layers, riveted together), some small pieces of plywood to contain it and make up the fin’s “tiller,” a bit of oak or locust for the yoke and forearm, and a few pieces of stainless steel to make the connections, pivots, and reinforcements. But all this is well detailed on the fin drive drawings.

Maynard Bray

Three sheets of Lexan riveted together give the fin both strength and flexibility. The articulated plywood bracket pivots at the boat’s transom, while the fin pivots independently.

Now for the 12′ × 31″ boat that Harry designed especially for the fin drive and which he calls Thistle. The hull is built dory style with sawn frames, a flat bottom, and lapstrake sides. Like most of his boats, it’s designed for cedar planking, but one could adapt the design to lapstrake plywood construction. It weighs 65 lbs and carries only a single person within the cockpit. The bulkheaded stowage compartments in each end are accessed through deck hatches.

You sit facing forward in a comfortable canvas seat that is reminiscent of an early wood-framed lawn chair. The seatback can be adjusted fore-and-aft to fit various leg lengths and make the pedaling comfortable and effective. The pedals swing on a common rod held by three wooden cleats close to the boat’s bottom, and interact with each other by means of the 5⁄16″ braided ropes that run aft and connect each foot pedal through the yoke and finally to the oak forearm of the fin-drive unit.

To dampen the boat’s sideways wiggle as the fin swishes from side to side, Harry added a couple of permanent external keels to the boat’s bottom, one near the bow and the other aft. While these 6″-deep keels keep the boat from wiggling so that most of the energy you put into pedaling drives the boat forward, they are a bit of an impediment ashore. They’re thin and appear a little fragile, so you have to be careful to not damage them when launching off the shore or beaching.

As mentioned earlier, because of these two keels, maneuvering is trickier than in boats using oars or paddles. The turning circle is rather generous, and backing down isn’t an option. There’s no reverse. Either you coast to a stop, or you grab the single paddle that you hope is at hand, and bring the boat to a halt with it.

That said, the fin drive is a blast to use. The boat really moves fast; aiming it is intuitive; you’re comfortably seated in a canvas chair with your arms resting on the side deck; and you’re set for an all-day experience, if you choose. As Harry says on his website, “Although capable of keeping up with any oar or paddle propelled boat of her length, she is at her best silently swimming close to wildlife or just enjoying the waterborne equivalent of an afternoon walk.”

This same fin drive unit, I suppose, could work on other narrow lightweights as well, provided they have a strong flat vertical transom on which to mount it, and are fitted with keels or have some other means of dampening the side-to-side wiggle. My advice is to stick with the Thistle. It’s easy to build, looks good, and has proven to work. Granted, the fin drive is a bit of a gimmick, but a very enjoyable one that you can build yourself of readily available materials using Harry’s very detailed drawings.

Plans consisting of seven sheets and a 36-page instruction book can be purchased directly from Harry at Bryan Boatbuilding, 329 Mascarene Rd., Letete, NB, E5C 2P6, Canada; www.harrybryan.com.

Harry Bryan

The seven sheets of plans for the Thistle include extensive details on how to construct the fin assembly. Bryan also offers a sail plan—a nice feature for long distance runs.

Harry Bryan

Particulars:
LOA 12′
Beam 2’7″
Weight 65 lbs
Propulsion: pedal-powered fin or sail
Sail area: 22.5 sq ft

Matthew P. Murphy

The Spindrift series of dinghies from B&B Yacht Designs promises a range of capable yacht tenders that offer plenty of sailing excitement. Here we see a 12’ model built by Meredithe Stuart-Smith of Castine, Maine.

Here we have one member of a family of boats—four in all—doing business under the name of Spindrift and designed by Graham Byrnes of Vandemere, North Carolina. The very first Spindrift was a 10-footer, and was meant purely as a tender to a larger yacht. As Byrnes tells the story on his website, “Not long after the first few were built, we were invited to take part in a race for yacht tenders with a maximum length of 10′. There were dinghies of every description: Trinkas, Connies, Dyers all were represented, as well as some less-well-known brands—and a few custom boats.”

Spindrift trounced the fleet—so much so that there was a mass exodus of dinghies from the local yacht club, and a flurry of Spindrift construction. The word spread to other parts of the country, and more models followed. Today, the lengths are 9′, 10′, 11′, and 12′, and you can choose nesting versions for all but the 12-footer. “Nesting” refers to the boat’s ability to be separated into two pieces—a bow and stern section—with the bow portion turned around and nestled into the stern sections. The result is a tidy package that can be carried on the deck of a small yacht. The rig options include a cat for the 9′, 10′, and 11′ models, and sloop or cat for the 11′ and 12′ ones. To date, Byrnes has sold 1,025 sets of plans.

“A Spindrift,” writes Byrnes, “is a very good investment if you have a junior sailor in your family. Unlike many dinghies used as trainers (such as the Optimist), you do not ‘outgrow’ a Spindrift. While the boat is very suitable for children and inexperienced adults, in the hands of a good competitive sailor it offers the challenge of top-end racing.” Byrnes also intended for the boat to carry a small outboard, which he says it does very well.

The forgiving nature of the boat and its top-end potential are what drew Meredithe Stuart-Smith to Spindrift. A resident of Castine, Maine, Stuart-Smith had taken a sailing course at WoodenBoat School several years ago, and now she wanted a boat in which to hone her new sailing skills. What boat, she wondered, would be adequate for the local conditions, and under 12′ so she could store it on land at the local yacht club? She called Graham Byrnes’s shop and spoke with his wife, Carla, who mentioned the Spindrift—which, as it happened, was to be the subject of an upcoming class at WoodenBoat School.

Stuart-Smith was intrigued, but a little concerned about her limited capacity with woodworking tools, and she shared this concern with Carla.

“Honey,” Stuart-Smith recalls Carla responding, “there are women who could not get out of their Maiden form bras who could build one of these.”

“So,” says Stuart-Smith. “I came, I built, and I sailed.”

Matthew P. Murphy

The 12′ Spindrift’s spars and blades all stow tidily in the boat for easy trailering.

The construction is stitch-and-glue—a process that has as much in common with sewing as it does with traditional boatbuilding. In sewing, the curved edges of flat sheets of fabric are stitched together to yield a sometimes-complex three-dimensional shape. In stitch-and-glue boatbuilding, flat sheets of plywood are cut to precisely curving shapes, and the edges of them “sewn” together to yield a hull. The sewing is commonly done with copper wire or cable ties, and the seams are then “taped” together with fiberglass set in epoxy. There are nuances in this gluing-together job, such as the filleting of seams to eliminate hard inside corners and allow the ’glass to properly bridge the joint, but the process is rather simple and the rewards quick. Hulls are often stitched together in a day—though require much more work to make them solid and strong.

Stuart-Smith finished her hull in the WoodenBoat School class. After that, the demands of business and family life took over, and she sent the boat to Salt Pond Rowing, a shop operated by WoodenBoat School shop assistant Joe Thompson, who finished it—complete with a distinctive and flawless gunsmoke-blue paint scheme. “I’m sad I didn’t finish the boat,” says Stuart-Smith. “But I knew I couldn’t get it done.”

Matthew P. Murphy

The 12′ Spindrift’s two-piece, unstayed aluminum mast is quick and easy to step, and the wooden boom attaches at the gooseneck with a simple slip-on fitting. Rigging takes a matter of minutes.

Stuart-Smith named the boat ANGEL, and four years after its launching, I joined her for a couple of sails from the backshore beach in Castine. This gravelly strand faces west into upper Penobscot Bay, and we arrived at high tide one August evening in a fresh westerly.
Setup was easy. The aluminum mast separates into two sections, which stow neatly and entirely in the boat. The top mast section has a wooden plug inserted in its top. These two sections are easily joined together, and the lightweight spar dropped through the partners and into the step. There is no standing rigging.

The rig is a Bermudan cat, and the sail’s luff is sleeved, like a Laser’s. But unlike that ubiquitous Bruce Kirby–designed board boat—at least the ones I knew growing up—this luff sleeve has a zipper running its length, allowing the sail to be hoisted up the stepped mast, rather than threaded onto the mast on the ground, and the whole thing raised together. That made a big difference in ease of rigging in the breeze that was blowing that evening, for raising that sail Iwo Jima style would have required some manhandling. The zippered luff also allows for quick reefing and shaking-out from the helm position—which is not possible with a standard sleeve luff.

The clew is left to fly while the boat is launched and the boom attached to the gooseneck. Then the rudder is secured, the boat is pointed into the wind, and the outhaul made off. The engine, so to speak, is now idling.

I thought that getting off the beach in the onshore breeze would be a bit awkward—a reflection on me, and not the boat. In the past, I have found daggerboards can be ungainly in this situation. When beam-reaching into a beach, it’s good to have a little bit of blade exposed underwater for as long as possible. And I like to have the board propped in the trunk, ready to press into deep water, when departing in an offshore breeze. But in some of the boats of my youth, the height of that loaded board could impede the progress of the boom across the boat’s centerline, creating an interesting situation—one not unlike the time my ’75 Ford Grenada’s accelerator pedal got stuck under the floor mat as I was cruising down the Nahant causeway in Massachusetts in my high-school years…but I digress. My point is that Byrnes’s careful fitting of the board to clear the boom gave me confidence in the setup. This is a carefully engineered rig— mindful of both the beginner and advanced sailor.

Meredithe Stuart-Smith

Spindrift has a rare combination of traits: Exciting sailing, good rowing, and ample volume to serve as a yacht tender. The designer claims that
she handles an outboard motor well, too, though this wasn’t tested for this review.

I got away from the beach, deployed the centerboard, sheeted in, and whoosh: Stuart-Smith had told me that the local kids likened the feeling of her boat to a Laser’s—which I hadn’t sailed for decades. This brought it all back. The boat accelerated quickly, and I settled into the tack and tidied up the mainsheet. Then I tried a few turns. The boat was quick to tack, and sure-footed in jibes.

Stuart-Smith had told me earlier that every one of her sailing outings is like Groundhog Day, referring to the Bill Murray movie in which the protagonist awakes every day to the same circumstances, his life never advancing. She typically sails the boat with a more experienced hand along, and on one solo outing did have the distinct and enlightening pleasure of capsizing. She reports that it was easy to right, and came up only partially filled with water. Much of the interior volume is taken up by the flotation tank seats, so there was minimal bailing. Stuart-Smith has pushed through insecurities about a solo outing, saying that she’s “always doing things that terrify me.” She was bound and determined to take a few passes along the beach that night. And she did. As is often the case in learning, she’d internalized more of the previous year’s lessons than she’d thought. She’d developed instinct. This was proven out in one particular incident when, after the boat was caught in the wind while departing the beach, the sails filled as ANGEL sat still. That’s often the sitting-duck position for a capsize, as all of the sudden wind energy is pressing the boat over, and little or none of it is bleeding off in forward motion. Stuart-Smith leapt to the high side, settled the boat down, and darted off. The rest of the evening was textbook sailing, and putting the boat up took only ten minutes. We lowered the sail, hauled the boat up the beach on its aluminum trailer, popped out the mast, and secured the blades and spars in the bilge. With the hull strapped down, Stuart-Smith and ANGEL headed for the barn.

She told me later that building her own boat was a bit like having a baby. “Afterward, I thought, ‘I’m never doing that again.’” But the confidence she gained from the project soon eclipsed those feelings. “Six months later,” she says, “I was looking at design catalogs. I will definitely build another boat.”

B&B Yacht Designs, 196 Elm St., Vandemere NC; www.bandbyachtdesigns.com.

GRAHAM BYRNES, B&B YACHT DESIGNS

The Spindrift dinghy from B&B Yacht Designs is available in four lengths: 9’, 10’, 11’, and 12’. Here we see the 12-footer, the boat tested for this article, with the optional sloop rig.

GRAHAM BYRNES, B&B YACHT DESIGNS

Particulars:
LOA 12’0″
Beam 4’6″
Sail area (sloop rig) 85 sq ft
(cat rig) 70 sq ft
Weight 95-120 lbs