If you’re going to lend a hand or ask for a helping hand while you’re afloat and you’re beyond an arm’s reach, you’ll need a length of line to connect across the water. Whether or not you’re able to quickly pull some unfortunate out of the drink or have someone keep you from drifting away from a dock depends on how well you’ve prepared the line for throwing.
For my 36′ monkey’s-fist heaving line I’ve been using a simple coil, twisting the line with each loop to get it to lie flat against the other loops. This works consistently and doesn’t tangle when thrown. The U.S. Coast Guard uses the same method, but neatly making the coil takes a bit of time and attention to ensure that the loops are even and not twisted. I was once handed a hastily coiled line to throw from the boat I was aboard to a dock during a boat festival with dozens of nautically knowledgeable people watching and no time to recoil it. I knew what was going to happen: it would land in a bird’s-nest clump halfway to the target.
There are two other ways to coil a throwing line quickly and effectively: the butterfly coil and the figure-eight coil, which is known in whitewater-river circles as the TRU coil (for Thompson Rivers University). Both alternate the loops of the coil, so no twisting of the line is required to relax them.
The butterfly coil is like the standard coil in that loops are laid in one hand, but instead of making them all in the same direction across the palm of that hand, they’re made on either side of the palm.
Photographs by the author
Hold the end of the line in your left hand, palm up, with the end extending to the left. Hold the line in the right hand, palm down, at a bit more than a shoulder width.
For the standard coil, you would bring the right hand over the left and lay the line across the palm from left to right. For the butterfly coil, the hands come together to form a bight. The left hand turns palm inward to take hold of the line that extends from the right hand.
The left hand holds the bight, which is on the pinkie finger side.
The hands separate to gather a length of line for another bight. The left hand holds while the right hand slides along the line.
As the hands come together to form the bight, the left hand turns palm up.
The right hand lays the line across the fingers of the left hand, forming the bight on the left hand’s index-finger side.
The hands part again and the process repeats.
The figure-eight coil is a modification of the landlubber’s way of wrapping line in loops along the forearm and around the left thumb and elbow, a method sure to create a tangle.
For the figure-eight coil, hold the line in the left hand, palm inward and the end of the line extending on the index-finger side. With the right hand, bring the line down and across the forearm.
Loop the line under the elbow and bring it up and across the forearm.
With the right hand, pull the line across the left palm from index finger to pinkie.
Bring the line down and across the forearm.
With the second turn under the elbow the process repeats.
With practice, both methods can be done very quickly. With the butterfly method, it doesn’t matter how long or even the coils are; with the figure-eight method, the loops are sized automatically.
These coils are ideal for making repeated throws of a rescue throw bag if you miss the first time. You retrieve the line as you make either coil and when the bag is back with the coil you’re ready to throw them together.
The figure-eight coil finished for storage may look like a common coil.
The butterfly coil may have uneven loops when coiled for storage.
Both the butterfly and the figure-eight coils can be secured for stowing by leaving a yard or so of line at the end of the coils and using it to make a few frapping turns around the coil below the left hand, adding turns upward. With a few feet of line left, pull a bight though the top arch of the coils as you remove your left hand. Then bring the tail end over the top of the coil, tuck it through the bight, and pull it tight.
Christopher Cunningham is the editor of Small Boats.
You can share your tips and tricks of the trade with other Small Boats readers by sending us an email.
When I stepped aboard a friend’s little motor cruiser, the first bit of kit I noticed was a rescue throw bag hanging at the ready from the wheelhouse overhead. It got me thinking about the usefulness of a dedicated rescue line and the fact that I didn’t have one. I’d assumed that with all the lines I have on board, including my heaving line with a monkey’s fist, whichever one I could lay my hands on could be used as a throw rope in an emergency. But what I might have handy might not float or be coiled in a manner that I could deploy quickly and throw accurately.
Christopher Cunningham
The floating line contained in the bag has a 47′ reach. The bag, with the line packed into it, weighs less than 14 oz.
So, I recently bought a Scotty Rescue Throw Bag to fill the gap in my safety gear. Its bright orange bag is 8″ long, 4 1⁄2″ in diameter, and it has a disc of 3⁄4″-thick closed-cell foam for flotation on the inside and a band of retroreflective material on the outside for enhanced visibility in the beam of a flashlight. The top of the bag is made of mesh, making the bag self-draining. A cord and spring-toggle tighten the opening around the loop at the end of the line stuffed in the bag so there’s no rummaging around to find the loop to hold onto when throwing the bag. The line is a 50′ length of 9⁄32″ floating polypropylene kernmantle rope. Each end of it has a bight tied with a figure-eight knot. (The knots take up a bit of the line, so its working length is 47′.) The rope is “flaked” into the bag so it will pay out without getting hung up. The bag and line weigh just under 14 oz.
To throw the bag, you open its mouth, hang onto the loop with your non-throwing hand, and pull out about 10’ of line. Next, grab the bag with your other hand and throw it underhand, overhand, or sidearm—whichever you prefer. I practice mostly underhand and some overhand. The aim is to get the bag to land beyond the rescuee with the line draped over them. The 47′ length of the line is more than enough. My best throws, on land where I could measure them, were at 45′. More often the bag landed at a distance of 35′ to 40′. Throwing with accuracy comes with practice.
Rachel Hynd
An underhand throw begins with holding the tail end of the line with one hand and swinging the bag forward with the other.
Rachel Hynd
If the line has been properly packed, it slips out of the bag without tangles.
Rachel Hynd
A good throw will land the bag at nearly the full extension of the line.
There are different methods for stuffing the line back into the bag, and all involve pushing just a few inches of line in at a time. It may seem messy, but it ensures the line will feed out without getting hung up when the bag is thrown. You can hold the bag open with pinkies and ring fingers on both hands and feed the line in, pinching it between thumb and index finger, alternating hands as you push line in. I prefer holding the bag with the ring and pinkie fingers of my right hand and guiding the line with a bit of friction with a stationary right thumb and index finger. The thumb and forefinger of the left hand pull the line in a few inches with each pull. Having the line draped over your shoulder makes either method easier.
Rachel Hynd
The line has to be put back into the bag by pushing it in a few inches at a time. Hold the bag open with the ring and pinkie fingers and push in the line, pinched between the thumb and index finger, first one hand…
Rachel Hynd
…then the other.
Restuffing the bag takes a few minutes and isn’t necessary or practical if you miss connecting with the rescue on the first throw. The coiling methods in this issue’s Technique article are much quicker and ensure the rope doesn’t get tangled when the coil is thrown along with the empty rescue bag.
Because I do a lot of boating alone, much of the safety gear I carry on board was acquired with keeping myself safe in mind. The Scotty Rescue Throw Bag will make me better equipped to help others.
Christopher Cunningham is the editor of Small Boats.
The 793 Rescue Throw Bag is made by Scotty and available from many outdoor and boating retailers and online vendors. The price is around $27.
Is there a product that might be useful for boatbuilding, cruising, or shore-side camping that you’d like us to review? Please email your suggestions.
It’s been a humid, foggy summer in Maine, one of those summers where you don’t leave the shore without a compass. You need one in fog or if you are doing any open-water rowing. It might be something as simple as a hiking compass tucked into a PFD pocket—a compass that you won’t use to navigate precisely but one that will get you home when the world closes down to 100 yards visibility.
Photographs by the author
The easy-to-read card is printed backward so that a rower, facing aft, can immediately see the heading—no math, no straining to see the far side of the card. The note on the card, “Dial Reads 180° Out,“ alerts users to it’s unusual orientation.
If you want something better, there are lots of compasses available. Some are removable, some want a fixed mount, but almost all of them assume that you are facing forward. If you’re rowing, that poses a problem. To see it as you row, the compass has to be between you and the stern. If you use a regular compass, set or mounted so its lubber line is parallel to the boat’s centerline, you’ll need some math. Adding or subtracting 180 from the number you see on the compass card is easier if you add 200 and subtract 20 if your course is less than 200, or subtract 200 and add 20 for courses 200 and greater.
In the days of flat-card box compasses, you could read your course directly from the card, just by reading the edge that was closest to you, whether you were facing forward or aft. Small ones were sold as dory compasses, part of the standard outfit for fishing on the Grand Banks. You can find them in antique stores, and there are replicas available.
A thwart aft of the rower is the ideal location for the reverse-reading compass. It is mounted on a block that is bungeed to the seat so that it can be removed at will without leaving behind exposed screws on the thwart. Note the bezel has been rotated to 212° to provide a desired heading. The rower holds the course by keeping the compass card at the same reading behind the lubber line. Ritchie calls this feature the CourseMinder.
The Ritchie company, which has been manufacturing compasses of outstanding quality since 1850, makes its reverse-reading Rowing Compass, a modern spherical compass designed for the rower. The card is printed backward so that the lubber line, on the bow-facing side of the compass, indicates the course that you are rowing. Clearly printed on the top of the card is “DIAL READS 180° OUT.” With white marks printed on the black card, it is highly visible, with numbers every 30 degrees and easily legible vertical marks every 10 degrees and, in between them, dots marking the 5-degree increments. The compass is 4 1⁄4″ in diameter and has a 2 3⁄4″ card. Outside of the dome is a movable bezel, Ritchie’s “CourseMinder,” with big numbers mirroring the compass markings. You use it by turning the bezel to set your course under the lubber line, then just steer the boat to match the compass card with the CourseMinder. I find the compass easily readable from 3′ or so away; the ideal distance is a mount below your knees, at your feet, or on a thwart aft of your rowing thwart.
The compass is designed to be removable. Its base has two small keyhole openings and a glued-on layer of foam. The non-magnetic screws to fit the keyholes need to be installed on a line parallel to the boat’s centerline. When you install the compass over the screws it locks with its lubber line in the proper orientation. If you have a place on your boat to mount the compass where you can leave it installed, the screws that hold it won’t be a problem. If, however, you mount the compass on a thwart or floorboards, the protruding screws will catch on you when the compass is removed. I suggest mounting the compass on a block of wood and working out a way to bungee the block to a thwart or add a spline on the bottom to slip into a gap between floorboards.
Bob Lombardo
There is not always a suitable place to mount the compass—a thwart or floorboard, for example—and even if there is a suitable location, leaving the two mounting screws uncovered when the compass is removed would be a hazard. Here, the compass has been mounted on a triangular block that sets flush to a foot brace. The CourseMinder bezel has not been set for a particular heading. Here, set at 0°, it would be used for rowing north.
If you have neither floorboards nor thwart aft, some creativity will be needed. My friend Bob Lombardo solved the problem in his Gloucester Gull by making a footboard mount using a triangular block as a base to which a wooden compass baseboard is bungeed.
With handheld GPS units common, why a compass? Reliability and legibility. Batteries run out of power at inopportune moments, and I’ve had devices fail from moisture getting into “waterproof” battery compartments. A GPS on a fixed mount can’t be moved to read a small screen in direct sunlight, and a handheld GPS tends to wander about the boat. Compasses, on the other hand, have centuries of unfailing performance behind them and can be read at a glance.
Ben Fuller, curator emeritus of the Penobscot Marine Museum in Searsport, Maine, and former curator of Mystic Seaport and Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum, has been messing about in small boats for a very long time. He is owned by a dozen or more boats ranging from an International Canoe to a faering.
Working as the editor of Small Boats for the past nine years has given me the opportunity to meet, correspond with, and work with a lot of remarkable people from all over the world. Jim Schroer, who first emailed me on March 29 of last year, was one of them. In the subject line he had written the following: “Hi Christopher, launched in Feb. after 6 months work, still not done. I’m a reader and this is reader built. Is there a way to get the info to you without all the composing and typing? thanks, Jim.”
While those few words didn’t say much about him, the photographs that appeared copied in the body of his email suggested Jim was a kindred spirit. The johnboat he had built for river cruising echoed many of the ideas I’d had for HESPERIA, the little camp cruiser I’d built with all the comforts and conveniences I’d dreamed of while on my earlier cruises.
In our subsequent emails and phone calls, I learned that Jim and I had even more in common. We both had done long cruises in small boats, though he had done many more and continued even after getting married and having twin daughters. Our fathers were teachers and we both had attended the schools where they taught. We both had flown hang gliders, though he had become an accomplished and licensed flier and I could only claim to have gotten airborne, briefly, with bamboo, plastic sheet, rope, and duct tape. As an aircraft pilot, Jim had aspired to own a Stearman biplane, the trainer my mother had flown while with the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) in World War II.
After our calls, I was always eager to share what we’d talked about with Rachel, and Jim evidently did the same with his wife, Sher. In an email he sent on April 10 of 2022, he wrote: “My wife explained it this way after hearing about all your adventures and boat building ‘I guess you’ve found your brother by another mother.’” I was honored to be regarded so by someone whose accomplishments far outshone my own.
Jim had offered the photos of his latest boat for a possible Reader Built Boat article, but as I was reviewing the many photos he’d sent of his boats and travels and transcribing the recordings I’d made of our phone calls it became clear that there was so much to his story that our narrative feature was the better place for it. I told Jim I would be pleased to write it, but months went by without leaving me time to work on the article.
We kept in touch by email and my last message to him, dated October 25, 2022, ended with, “Is all well with you?” I never heard back from him. Sher emailed me a few months later: “This is Sher, Jim’s wife. I am writing to convey the sad news that Jim passed away. I would like to thank you for all that you have done. It meant so much to Jim to have his life’s work recognized.” She added that she and her daughter “were facing the task of finding homes for the many beautiful things that he had made (the most recent boat, canoes, kayaks and many paddles).” For the things that they wanted to sell, I suggested a few places, including our Small Boats Classifieds, where they could post ads. I had been intrigued by one of the paddles Jim had made that appeared in one of his photos. Sher was happy to let me buy it and had it safely boxed and mailed to me.
Jim passed away on December 27, 2022, at the age of 79. In March of 2023, I turned 70, entering a decade on that perilously steepening slope that lies “over the hill,” where time passes more swiftly and opportunities can easily slip away. Jim and I never met face to face, and I don’t have any pictures of the two of us together but I now have a paddle that he made. While it will do nicely to keep him and our nascent friendship close at hand, it will also remind me to be more mindful about how and where I spend my time because people can slip away too.
Jim’s paddle is extraordinarily light: just 9.2 ounces. The four spruce canoe paddles I’ve made had always seemed light to me but they weigh an average of 21.6 ounces. The lightest of them is 3″ shorter than Jim’s and comes in at 18.9 ounces—more than twice the weight. On a windy day, I’d be wise to either tie or weigh down his paddle to keep it from taking flight.
The blade is flat and just 7⁄32″ thick. If I had made the paddle, I would have made a parallel-sided slot in the shaft to fit the blade and tapered the outside surface before gluing the shaft and blade together. By studying the shaft-stave glue lines I could tell that Jim cut a slot that began with a 7⁄32″ width at the throat and widened to the tip. When the shaft was glued to the blade, the two sides of the shaft were bent to meet the blade. Jim’s method was harder to execute but preserved the parallel-sided exterior faces of the staves, an aesthetic choice that few would notice. The blade’s black coating concealed whatever it is made of. An edge guard of white paracord is seated in a groove routed in the blade’s perimeter and saturated in epoxy.
The shaft is made up of eight coopered western-red-cedar staves and, judging by the sound it makes when tapped, it’s hollow. It has a diameter of 1 1⁄64″ and measurements taken with a digital caliper vary only occasionally by 1⁄128″. Some of the glue lines are nearly invisible and lost among the wood’s grain. The handle is made of two pieces of darker western red cedar and tapered to a wedge that is let into the shaft. I don’t know how Jim got the interior faces of the notch in the shaft straight and flat to fit the handle. Making a simple scarf joint is difficult enough; making two that face each other and intersect is a much greater challenge.
I remember using a carbon-fiber paddle for the first time and being impressed with how light it was, but Jim’s was a step beyond that. It had such an airy touch in my hands that as I switched sides, I found myself watching the blade to see where it was as it crossed over the canoe. The paddle has just a bit of flex, much less than I would have expected given its slender dimensions and light weight, and yet I could take strong strokes with it and not feel any give in the shaft. Using Jim’s paddle has been a remarkable experience.
Joe Lanni’s boatbuilding journey began in 2020 when he built 3’S A CROWD, a sectional rowing and sailing skiff designed by Ken Simpson. Two years later, in search of something “more boatlike…a composition of curves flowing into one another,” he built David Beede’s Wackless Lassie, based on Fritz Funk’s Wacky Lassie. Still a boat of relatively simple construction—hard chine, flat bottom, sheet-plywood sides and bottom—the Wackless Lassie had enough curve and subtle sheer to satisfy Joe’s aesthetic leanings. But even as he christened it PARTY OF ONE, Joe was already musing about his next boat: “probably something larger and with, perhaps, even more curves.”
In 2023, Joe did, indeed, launch his third boat, a Puddle Duck Racer. “The complete opposite of a boat with nice lines and curves,” admits Joe. “It is quite literally a box.”
Joe Lanni
Joe made the parts for the hull inside over the winter then brought them out into the spring light for assembly. The side panel clearly shows the boat’s profile. The curve of the bottom is required for racing Puddle Duck Racers.
But Joe describes himself as the perpetual novice and, despite his appreciation for more complex hull designs, and his proud admission that his skills are “much improved,” he didn’t feel he was quite ready to “build a more complicated type of sailboat.”
There were no boats in Joe’s early life, nor even any woodworking experience. He watched his father work on carpentry projects in the house but never got to help. But he has always loved boats and has always been good with his hands—today he is a middle-school art teacher. He is also, by his own admission, addicted to small wooden boats. “I can’t stop looking at SmallBoats and WoodenBoat. I dream of all the boats I would like to make and use. If I had better woodworking skills, my addiction would be much easier to take.”
Joe Lanni
The boat comes together. The bow and stern are similar in profile although there is a little more height in the bow, seen here to the left. Toward the stern, Joe added some 1 x 2″ pine to strengthen the sheer and provide a modicum of comfort when sitting on the windward rail.
The Puddle Duck Racer was the brainchild of David “Shorty” Routh, who devised the class in 2003 so that amateur boatbuilders could get out on the water, easily and cheaply. Shorty enjoyed building boats, messing about in boats, and racing boats. But when he realized there was no club that catered to and encouraged all three, he established his own and created the 8′-LOA Puddle Duck Racer as the club boat.
There were simple rules: all Puddle Duck Racers must have the same shape for the hull’s flat parallel sides; all must be at least 48″ wide across the bottom; all must have enough emergency flotation to be self-rescuing. Today’s class rules are even simpler: the bottom 10″ of every boat must be identical. But, says Shorty, “it’s not about the limitations of the rules, it’s about the creativity of everything else.”
Joe Lanni
Once the boat was fully framed up, Joe turned it upside down and attached the bottom panel—a single sheet of 3⁄8″ plywood. The two vertical struts on the starboard side are for the leeboard.
Joe came across the Puddle Duck Racers during his many wanderings down the rabbit holes of the internet. “They kept popping up,” he says. “I kept reading how surprised people were by how well the boat actually sails, despite being so easy to build.”
At the time, Joe had an old Styrofoam Snark sailboat that had become waterlogged and very heavy. When he saw an image of a Puddle Duck Racer rigged with the instantly recognizable lateen sail of a Snark, he saw his way forward: he could save the usable parts of his old Snark to outfit a new Puddle Duck. He was also drawn to the affordability: “The plans were free; the materials were cheap. I could use my Snark sail and modify the daggerboard—it would be perfect.”
Joe Lanni
Joe used a Snark ‘s daggerboard for the rudder’s blade and a Sunfish’s daggerboard for the leeboard for his PDR. The latter was too short so Joe extended it with a piece of pine sandwiched between two pieces of overlapping plywood.
One aspect that attracted Joe to the Puddle Duck Racer was the “encouragement of creativity. The bottom 10″ have to follow the plan, but above that anything goes, and people have introduced a variety of rigs and styles.” The most obvious element of variation is in the flotation. “Shorty Routh considered safety and encouraged the building of airboxes. Some builders have made them lengthwise on either side, others, like me, have placed them in the ends, where they take up less of the cockpit area.” As it says on the Puddle Duck Racer website, with the end airboxes there is “a lot of interior room for passengers, drink cooler, and your dog.” Also, by placing the buoyancy tanks in the ends the skipper is encouraged to sit farther forward, which in turn balances the boat, and the forward tank keeps the boat a little dryer when sailing into a chop. For Joe, there was no doubt, end airboxes were the way to go. He downloaded the plans and building instructions for Jim Michalak’s Catbox design.
Over the winter of 2022–23, Joe built the boat’s parts in his basement. “I used three sheets of exterior-grade plywood, 1⁄4″ for everything except the bottom, which is 3⁄8″.” He started by sketching all the parts full-size on paper. “I taped the paper sheets together and then transferred the drawing to the plywood sheets.” For the framing he used 1 × 2″ pine and, to strengthen the bottom, he would add longitudinal pieces of 1 × 6″ pine. By spring everything was ready for assembly and Joe moved the project outside.
Joe Lanni
Ready to go: LUCKY DUCK sits on her home-made launching trolly. In the stern, Joe used small bicycle wheels, while beneath the bow are smaller dolly wheels, which Joe says are not large enough and will be replaced.
“Always looking for ways to keep the costs down—I have a patient wife who allows me the time to build but did not want me to spend a lot—I decided against using epoxy and fiberglass,” he says. “Instead, I used the same method I used on my two earlier boats: stainless-steel screws, Titebond III waterproof glue, and FibaTape, a self-adhesive fiberglass-mesh tape used by dry wallers.” Titebond is typically used for non-structural joints but, Joe says, when combined with the tape, it “forms a rock-hard seal on the outside edges, which has held up well on my other builds.”
Joe painted the sides of the boat with latex house paint and finished the interior and bottom with exterior porch floor paint. “I didn’t ’glass the bottom,” he says, “because I wanted to keep the expense down until I was sure I liked the boat. Of course, now I wish I had.”
Joe Lanni
The old Snark daggerboard was repurposed as LUCKY DUCK’s rudder blade. Joe made a pine frame resembling rudder cheeks, to which he attached the tiller, and which holds the lifting blade in position, down or up, by a single bungee in tension.
With construction complete, Joe turned his attention to the rig. The sail and spars came from the Snark, but he decided to use the Snark’s daggerboard as his new rudderblade. He fitted it in a pine-framed slot and made the tiller from a single piece of knot-free pine, “stained to look like a more expensive piece of hardwood.” The leeboard was fashioned from a daggerboard reclaimed from an old Sunfish. “It wasn’t long enough so I extended it with a piece of 3⁄4″ pine sandwiched between two pieces of plywood that overlapped the bright-finished board.” He attached some leftover 1×2s to either side of the sheer for strength, to provide some protection for the sides of the boat, and to make a more comfortable perch for the skipper should they wish to sit up to windward. Finally, he made a transom-mounted bracket for a Minn Kota electric trolling motor, and a launching trolley fashioned out of 2×4s and reclaimed bicycle and dolly wheels.
Ruthann Lanni
The Snark lateen rig fits LUCKY DUCK well, with its boom set high to make changing sides easier when coming about. Kept in place by their oarlocks, the oars are out of the way while sailing yet instantly ready when needed.
LUCKY DUCK was launched and christened in May 2023, and Joe sailed her all summer long. “My hull is #1108. It says a lot that more than a thousand of these little boats have been built. I read somewhere that there’s no good reason a boat that looks like this should sail as well as it does, and I have to agree, it does sail really well, and it feels super big for such a small boat. I can take my 13-year-old daughter and 11-year-old son for rides, one at a time; it’s pretty comfortable. And it’s standing up well: I’ve dragged it, banged it, bunked it, left it in the rain, and it’s going strong.”
Ruthann Lanni
The stern flotation compartment doubles as a seat for the skipper although when performance demands it, Joe moves forward to sit in the cockpit.
For this year, it seems, Joe’s small-boat addiction has been fed. But there will come a time, he knows, when the rabbit holes will get the better of him, and he’ll be pulled into a new boatbuilding project. Maybe next time, he’ll trust his abilities and go for that “different type of sailboat…a larger one, with more curves.”
Jenny Bennett is managing editor of Small Boats.
Do you have a boat with an interesting story? Please email us. We’d like to hear about it and share it with other Small Boats readers.
We sail across some invisible divide, into a dreamscape in dream time. Time slows.
Away out there, the ocean’s floor creeps. Relentlessly shoves at the granite continent. Inconceivable force hefts coastal ranges to buckled heights. The foreshore fractures and crazes and mazes.
And the sea sweeps in, and with it, fog.
What lives here the years round has winter scribed on its very bones. Stunted trees lean into winds long blown yet soon enough come storms again. We are mere transients. Brief sojourners in summer’s easy embrace. We move among survivors of winter’s mauling wind and wave—and are humbled.
For all this surge and surf, these waters teem with life a’roar and a’roil, adapting to each moment.
We drift and row and sail among wonders, wondering. Our senses flung wide. Our selves hushed. Our hearts and breaths slow to the tempo of this place.
My first sailboat was a Summer Breeze, an 11′ 8″ flatiron skiff designed by David Beede, and winner of the 2001 Duckworks design contest. For decades I was content to paddle canoes, then, one blustery day on Ross Lake, my wife and I were hammering the water like we were killing snakes while trying to round a point when it popped into my head that it would be really nice to have a boat that could harness the wind instead of fighting it. About that time, I found Gavin Atkin’s book Ultrasimple Boatbuilding and it convinced me to build my own boat, one that could comfortably sail two people for short camping trips. The book includes only one tiny photo of the Summer Breeze but somehow it was enough to capture my imagination.
Then I found David Beede’s website and was impressed by his description of the boat: “Summer Breeze was designed to be the most boat from the least materials. It is a robust all-purpose skiff targeted primarily at pleasurable rowing and sailing in protected waters, but also suitable for a small motor. It’s light enough to car top, narrow enough for most truck beds, and yet has capacity for two adults and a child. When fully loaded (up to 500 lbs) with two adults and gear her transom and stem barely touch the water.”
That sounded ideal. I decided to trust David and, heck, the plans were free. Back in 2017 I spent $235 on three sheets of exterior grade 1⁄4″ plywood, some good 2×4s, and some brass screws. For the adhesive, the instructions recommended PL Premium construction adhesive, epoxy, and Titebond II, which is what I chose to use.
Bob Van Putten
Blocks of 2″ rigid-foam insulation, wrapped in offcuts from the sail tarp and lashed firmly in place with paracord beneath the inwale should provide good flotation in the event of a capsize or swamping. It has the added benefit of providing a comfortable surface on which to lean when sailing.
The free building instructions on David’s website may seem a little disorganized at first—because they are duplicated in two places—but they include a lot of useful information based on several builds. There are also printable drawings for the plywood layout, center frame, transom, and sail.
The sides of the boat are lofted to measured drawings showing their positions on sheets of plywood. Butt blocks, screwed and glued, join the two pieces that make up each side. The plans don’t call for it but I later ’glassed the outside of the butt joints with polyester resin and 2″ fiberglass tape.
The single frame has plywood gussets at the chine corners. The drawings indicate a cross spall, but the frame didn’t seem to need one—bending the sides in around the frame didn’t impose too much force and didn’t distort it.
The shaping of the hull begins with bending pre-shaped sides around a center frame and connecting them to the beveled stem and transom. External chine logs are attached with glue and bronze ring-shank nails, then planed flat. The two pieces for the bottom, cut slightly oversize, are dry fitted then joined with a butt block near the bow. The full panel for the bottom is then glued and nailed in place before being trimmed flush with the chine logs. It’s about as simple as a boat can be.
Bob Van Putten
Bob originally built frames for two removable thwarts but ultimately decided the seats introduced too much clutter and replaced both with a single moveable box. The sail’s halyard and snotter are made fast to simple belaying pins in the mast thwart.
David didn’t include a seat in his prototype: “I like that space open for sailing,” he wrote. “With no centerboard trunk, the whole boat becomes a cockpit with much sprawling space. I prefer to sit on a moveable seat when I row, usually a stack of cushions.” He did include a drawing for short risers attached to the center frame and a pair of 1×2 supports set forward of the frame and parallel to it. A thwart would be cut to fit on the risers. I originally made two removable rowing thwarts using similar side frames and risers. One thwart sits amidships for solo use and the other can be set forward for when there is a passenger in the stern and you need to trim the boat. I made the thwarts from heavy 1′ × 8′ rough-cut boards but I eventually tired of the weight and clutter in the boat. I replaced them with a portable storage box/rowing seat, as per David’s suggestion and it suits the purpose nicely.
I made the rudder and its pivoting blade rudder to David’s specifications, but I used a pair of old door hinges for gudgeons, knocked out the original hinge pins, and connected them with one long 3⁄16″ rod. The plans call for seatbelt webbing as the rudder “hardware,” between the rudder stock and a tapered wooden wedge that slips between a pair of mating wedges on the transom.
The instructions suggest running the mainsheet “through a hole in the tiller that has been routed into a kind of smooth fairlead.” The sheet is clamped by light downward pressure of the tiller against the rudderhead. It works surprisingly well and allows for one-handed sailing. I added a bungee cord stretched across the stern which catches a cleat on the tiller to hold it and the sheet in place, at least in light winds, allowing a solo sailor to let go of the helm long enough to unwrap lunch.
Heidi Kay Van Putten
With no centerboard to occupy space in the cockpit, there is plenty of room to stretch out. Directional stability is provided by the single leeboard. The sail is sewn from tarpaulins, reinforced at the corners and along all four edges.
The Summer Breeze has a standing lug with a sprit boom spreading a sail of 63 sq ft. My mast, yard, and boom were made from cedar saplings. For the mast, the instructions call for a 10′ 2×4 tapered along the upper 7′. It is stepped with the wider face athwartship. David cautions, “If you end up in conditions you think are going to break your 2×4, get out your oars and get home!” David also documents making a mast of two pieces cut from a 2×6 on a taper, glued together, eight-sided, and rounded. David used bamboo for the yard and sprit boom and suggested 10′ closet rod or 2×2 as alternatives.
A link on the Summer Breeze webpage provides instructions for making a lugsail from poly tarp. I’d found a big tarp, laid it out on my rather uneven lawn and, using wooden battens, cut it out as best I could to the dimensions David provides. It was hemmed and reinforced with double-sided fiberglass carpet tape. Amazingly, this sail was very effective and surprisingly close-winded. But, by the end of the second outing it was little more than a rag. The tarp material was wearing out, the carpet tape no longer holding. I bought a new tarp and made another sail to the same pattern, carefully sewing it together with many reinforcements. Sadly, it never worked as well as the original—the leech fluttered and the sail was never very close-winded. I used it for several years and it held up perfectly, but I eventually tired of its lackluster performance and carefully sewed a third sail, still to the same pattern. This one works better. It seems that making a truly good sail is something of an art.
I took a hint from one of Dynamite Payson’s books and sealed the plywood with Bondo polyester resin thinned with acetone. This sank right into the plywood and seems to have prevented it from checking. I found free paint at a local recycling center.
It took me about two months to complete my Summer Breeze, much of the time being spent waiting for the glue and paint to dry. The boat weighs more than it should, a hair over 100 lbs. I knew nothing of boatbuilding so many of the components are oversized and I used heavy larch for much of it. Call it “workboat specs.”
The day I cartopped the boat to a local lake for its maiden voyage was the first time in my life I’d rowed a boat, and it took a little getting used to. I soon discovered that it rows surprisingly well when light and have rowed it more than 10 miles a day many times. I’ve become fond of rowing: it’s good exercise and I can row faster than I can solo paddle a canoe and keep at it longer.
Heidi Kay Van Putten
When rowing, the rig and rudder can be carried in the boat and do not impede the stroke. With the leeboard left down, the boat tracks well. Raised or lowered it does not obstruct the sweep of the oars.
On that first outing, the breeze picked up, and I decided to raise the sail. The halyard passes through a hole at the top of the mast and is made fast to a pin on the mast partner. The downhaul is looped around the mast under the partner, fed through the loop of the bowline and pulled tight; it is finished off with a quick-release knot. The snotter is pulled tight to tension the boom and is also made fast to a pin on the mast partner. We were soon sailing faster than I could row. Before long the breeze intensified, and the Summer Breeze was really zooming along. The boat is quite stable and unlikely to go over if kept out of the whitecaps. I think I was hitting 6 knots that day, quite a clip for such a short boat. Since that exciting first day, I’ve seldom been able to match that speed, but David reports hitting a measured 7.5 knots “quite a few times.”
The Summer Breeze has a single leeboard on the starboard side, which is used on both tacks. Mine was inspired by the designs of Jim Michalak and is a little more sophisticated than the one shown on David’s website. It pivots on a bolt through the hull and an extension of the board forms a handle for raising and lowering it. A lanyard, which passes through the leeboard and is retained by a stopper knot, can be cleated off to hold the board up or down. In practice, friction and gravity hold the board well.
The boat tacks just fine. I have no trouble switching sides in the cockpit, but sailing the boat would probably be a bit easier for a smaller, more agile sailor.
David notes “being all wood, this skiff won’t sink, however it won’t float high enough when swamped to make self-rescue very feasible,” and he provides general instructions for installing blocks of construction foam as flotation. I fitted blocks of 2″ rigid foam insulation along the interior of the boat under the inwale, wrapped the blocks in leftover tarp material and lashed them firmly in place using paracord and small eye screws. This should be enough flotation to make bailing after a capsize relatively easy. While I haven’t yet tested it, it’s a nice surface to lean back against when sailing.
My wife and I took the boat on a three-day island-hopping trip on Priest Lake, Idaho. Our food pack was stashed under the tiller, our tent and a dry bag with clothes and bedding went in front of the mast, leaving the whole center of the boat open for lounging. The trip was a great success, but other boaters couldn’t understand how we fit in something so small. At the end of the first day, we encountered winds so strong along the east coast of Kalispell Island that we could only just manage to work the boat to windward. It felt like a solid 25 mph, gusting higher. Without all the ballast on board I would have had to drop the sail and row, or more likely beach the boat and walk it along shore. I’ve since added a row of reef points to reduce the sail to about 45 sq ft.
In 2019 I took the boat on the first Salish 100, a 100-mile cruise running nearly the full length of Washington’s Puget Sound. I ’glassed the whole bottom (which fixed a leak that had developed) and made a rowing seat/stowage box to replace the removable thwarts. I left the seat risers in to lash things to. The only shorter boats in the race were two Mirror dinghies, but my boat was the cheapest, for what that’s worth.
Aleta Mueller
With the sail pulling and the tiller secured just windward of amidships, the rower is helped on his way. The thwart has been replaced by a moveable box that doubles as a watertight storage compartment.
There was some fine sailing, a long exhausting day of rowing, and a day when I set out reefed and opted for a tow when it began blowing over 20 knots. In rough water the boat rolled rail to rail several times but did not take on any water except for spray. It was a challenging week, but the Summer Breeze got me safely over the finish line.
I’ve had many more adventures, especially on Lake Roosevelt, a reservoir in Eastern Washington, where I often go for day sails and occasional overnight trips. I dream of taking the boat from the Canadian border down the Columbia River and Lake Roosevelt to the Grand Coulee Dam some summer.
I have since built bigger, more sophisticated boats but LA MADALENA, my simple little Summer Breeze, is always the first out of storage and the last to be put away for the winter.
Bob Van Putten and his wife live off-grid deep in the mountains of Washington State in a straw-bale cottage they constructed for themselves more than 20 years ago. He is a self-employed systems integration technician specializing in smaller municipal water and wastewater systems.
When my wife and I decided to start cruising together, we acquired a 19′ Phil Bolger–designed Chebacco gaff cat-yawl and quickly realized that we’d need to find a dinghy as well. Although it will float in a foot of water, the Chebacco’s weight and bulk make shore landing more challenging than we are used to in either our Oughtred Arctic Tern or Adirondack guideboat, both of which can be easily beached. Moreover, we cruise the tidal waters of Oregon and Washington, where the possibility of being stuck aground in an outgoing tide makes it prudent to anchor out and row ashore.
The first season we towed a plastic sit-on-top kayak. It was easy to transport and light enough to carry solo, but it was a wet ride, had no cargo capacity, and was challenging to climb aboard from the Chebacco.
The following winter, I researched other lightweight options, including an inflatable packraft, as well as some plywood boats like the Nutshell Pram. I eliminated the packraft because it seemed it would sit low in the water and be another wet ride. While the Nutshell is a proven design, at 90 lbs it would be too heavy to lift and carry by myself.
Upon further research, I discovered the 6′ 8″ by 3′ 8″ Portage Pram, available as a kit with CNC-cut plywood parts and having a finished weight of 35 lbs. I borrowed a completed pram that a friend had built, and after a few minutes at the oars I realized that its combination of light weight and good handling would be perfect for our needs.
Photos by or courtesy of the author
The design of the Portage Pram has been updated to include a foam gunwale sandwiched between two pieces of plywood. Bulkheads under the seats fore and aft create sealed flotation compartments, which can also be used for dry stowage if access hatches are added.
The Portage Pram was originally designed for solid-wood construction in the 1970s by Bill Peterson at Murray G. Peterson Associates. Duckworks Boatbuilders Supply prototyped an ultralight plywood version in 2017 and soon after began selling kits. (Recently, Duckworks started offering a sailing version of the kit.)
The rowing-only kit I ordered arrived in a flat-packed crate approximately 7′ × 2′ × 3″. All pieces were precut and required only minor sanding. A 190-page digital manual, illustrated with color photographs and drawings, guides builders through the steps of construction. The manual was helpful, although it was last updated in 2021 and did not represent all aspects of the latest updates to the design (and could be edited for brevity). As an example, the manual showed a previous version of the gunwales, which were composed of 6mm plywood inwales and outwales supplemented amidships by shorter inwale doublers, each made of two layers of 6mm plywood laminated inside the inwale. The kit was delivered with an updated gunwale construction: closed-cell foam pieces to be encapsulated in plywood strips and fiberglass to create a curved bow-to-stern box beam.
Even when a few pounds over the design weight of 35 lbs, carrying the Portage Pram to and from the water is an easy task for one person.
The pram is initially assembled with zip ties, using the stitch-and-glue method. Its benches have precisely cut tabs that connect to slots in the hull. The chines are filleted with thickened epoxy. The gunwales, lower chines, and entire bottom of the pram are covered with fiberglass for strength. Building the pram is straightforward and involves basic woodworking tasks, such as trimming plywood, drilling holes, applying epoxy, and sanding. This makes it an easy project for first-time builders. I spent about 60 hours on the construction, with some extra time figuring out how to assemble the foam-cored gunwales.
The completed pram has a comfortable 11″ × 32″ aft bench. A 40″-long T-shaped forward bench, along with two sets of oarlocks, allows a rower to shift as needed to balance a second person or heavy load in the boat. The 8″-high benches sit atop sealed compartments, each providing about 1.5 cubic feet of flotation or dry storage if ports are added for access. No floorboards or foot braces are specified in the plans. The recommended oarlocks are tubular plastic sleeves installed vertically through the gunwales.
My boat weighs 43 lbs, including a stainless-steel pad-eye for towing, two nylon cleats, two pairs of bronze oarlocks, and two watertight plastic inspection ports. Even as a middle-aged man, I find the pram easy to load onto my car’s roof rack or roll up a beach on a fender. Carrying the boat solo from car to shore is easy.
Trim is all-important in the Portage Pram. With a single rower onboard the twin skegs are not fully submerged, but despite this the boat still holds its course well. With a passenger seated in the stern, the skegs provide excellent directional stability.
Getting in and out of the pram from a dock or a boat is like climbing aboard a large canoe. The pram can slide horizontally if I don’t place my weight in its center but overall is fairly stable. Due to its flat bottom, it rolls very little, especially when we climb aboard or adjust our weight while seated. When using the pram solo on flat water, I find it stable enough to stand up in. It can comfortably hold two adults, a full 3-gallon gas can, and a bag of groceries.
Although no oar length is specified in the plans, I used the Shaw and Tenney oar-length formula and made 6′ 6″ straight-blade cedar oars, which are effective and stow flat on the seats while towing. The two rowing stations function well as designed, and the boat balances nicely, with one or two aboard. At 6′ 1″, I am unable to fully stretch out my long legs when I’m rowing at the center station with my feet braced against the aft bulkhead. When I’m rowing at the forward position, I just rest my feet on the lower strakes. Although I prefer foot braces in a rowing boat, I do not miss them in the pram because their absence keeps the boat light, and I only use the pram to travel short distances. The boat rows comfortably at around 2 knots; at faster speeds the oars and bow splash, getting me, and the inside of the pram, wet. There is a sculling notch in the transom; it works, but with a 6′ 6″ oar, I find it challenging to use while maintaining good trim by squatting near the aft thwart.
The forward seat allows the rower to shift his weight into the bow and thus trim the boat to comfortably carry a passenger. Unusually, for a boat of this size, the pram has two rowing positions, allowing for correct weight distribution.
The pram tracks well with one person aboard, and even better with two. While rowing solo, the rocker allows it to turn quickly and playfully, but it never turns without my choosing to. With a second person aboard, the two skegs on the aft end are better engaged with the water and keep the boat going straight, even in a strong crosswind. The pram tracks and rows comfortably in winds up to about 10 knots; however, splash and spray come on board more often when there is any kind of chop or wake. Surprisingly, while towing it through 2′ to 3′ chop or in crosswinds, the interior can remain almost entirely dry.
When under tow behind the author’s 19′ Chebacco, the Portage Pram tracks well, following politely whether going straight or turning. Even with a bit of chop or swell, the pram stays dry and upright.
The pram is impressively well mannered when towed by our Chebacco under sail or motor. It follows our track whether going straight or turning, and whether the water is choppy or smooth. Even when faced with multiple large wakes from passing trawlers, the pram rises without tipping or taking on water, then resumes following behind. It never surges forward during rough conditions, threatening to hit our sailboat.
For such a small and light boat, the Portage Pram carries a substantial load and has the stability of a larger craft. Aside from the occasional challenge of keeping it from hitting our sailboat while boarding and deboarding the pram’s easy manners make going ashore elegant and fun.
Bruce Bateau, a regular contributor to Small Boats, sails and rows traditional boats with a modern twist in Portland, Oregon. His stories and adventures can be found at his website, Terrapin Tales.
If you were to draw all of Jim Schroer’s travels on an atlas of the world, it would look as if an untended toddler had scribbled all over it with great scrawls across two oceans and a tangle of squiggles all over the eastern half of the U.S. But the intricate lines are the tracings of a waterman’s life, shaped by water winding across a continent and wind wandering over oceans.
Jim had never intended to share his stories beyond his family and friends. The notion of publishing anything soured after his first ocean crossing: “After my girlfriend and I sailed a 19 1⁄2′ boat to Hawaii, she talked to a person who was writing an article while I was out trying to earn some money so we could fly back to the mainland. It must’ve been a year later when we were cruising in the Florida Keys and crossed paths with somebody who had read the article. He showed us the magazine it was in and asked, ‘Is this you?’ We said it was. The title of the article was ‘From Yachts to Buckets They Come to Hawaii.’ Of course, the bucket was our boat, which I did not appreciate much. So, I figured people who write articles are more concerned with themselves than the people they’re writing about. And I don’t think that about you, and it’s because I’m comfortable with what you do that I’m doing this. This is very different for me because I’ve never gone for recognition or fame or whatever you might call it. But I’ve been reading your articles and what you’ve done and that convinced me that I could do this.”
Jim passed away suddenly and unexpectedly in December of 2022. His wife Sher and his daughter Zoey were eager to have me publish his story in Small Boats and provided invaluable assistance with finishing this project. In 2022, I recorded two long phone conversations I had with Jim. The last call ended with him laughing and saying, “Okay, this might be the longest I’ve ever been on the phone.” Below, in his words, is what he had to say.
Travels and Boats
Photographs courtesy of the Schroer family
Jim (right) had two friends, Cal Hand and Bill Hinkley, see him off as he launched his Grumman canoe to paddle the Mississippi River from its headwaters to the Gulf. Cal and Bill were musicians and future members of the band, The Sorry Muthas, and went on to perform on A Prairie Home Companion.
Jim encountered muddy shores on the Mississippi River.
The first thing was the Mississippi River in 1968 and that was about three months in a 17′ Grumman from Itasca to New Orleans. I did Itasca to Minnesota alone and then I picked up a girlfriend and did the rest of it with her.
Jim: “My girlfriend, my cat, and I crossed the Pacific from California to Hawaii in this 19 1⁄2′ sloop.”
After the Mississippi, my girlfriend, cat, and I hitchhiked back to St. Louis to get my truck. We then went west to California and bought a little blue-hulled 19 1⁄2′ sloop. Apparently, the owners thought they had broken something underneath. When we hauled it out, the plywood form that they had poured the cement keel into was torn off, half torn off, and sticking out. I guess they thought it was the keel itself. We got the boat cheap and just ripped the plywood off. We used a bunch of instant concrete and smoothed it up.
We didn’t know anything, but I read everything in the San Diego library about singlehanded sailing. I then had a lot of theoretical knowledge but no experience. We sailed the sloop to Hawaii. I had rerigged it with two jennies to run downwind, a tradewinds thing, but they overpowered the little boat, so we only used one. That was better than the mainsail, which made it difficult to steer—it wanted to round up when we didn’t want to round up. Our slow trip to Hawaii took 39 days. In Hawaii we sold the boat. That was in 1969.
Jim: “I lived aboard this 1959 cutter, TRESARUS, for 13 years, had it for 15 years, most of the time without a motor. I sold the motor to keep sailing. I sailed around the islands in the Atlantic and back to the Caribbean and up and down the coast a couple of times. It’s a William Atkin fore-and-aft cutter, very English. Strip-planked and quite a nice boat, it was 15 years of my life.”
After that, the big one was to the Atlantic islands in 1975 in the TRESARUS, a 28′ 8″ Atkin cutter. I left Cape May, New Jersey, and sailed to the Azores, Madeira, Cape Verde. That was with a girlfriend, a different one, but they were close friends. [Laughs] When one departed, the other one moved right in. I sailed alone after Cape Verde and had the fastest passage over to Barbados. That was just under 15 days. That was not fun, but I always said if I had the chance to do something fast in the boat, I would just grit my teeth and do it just so I could brag about it. It was horrendous. It was noisy plowing through the water all the time, bashing around, and having a hard time staying in the bunk. There were times the boat slowed down to 4 knots and I’d put up the topsail and get it back up to 5 1⁄2. I had back-to-back 265-mile days in that little cutter. Normal sailing would be 100 miles per 24 hours. From Barbados, I went up the island chain to the U.S. Virgins and then I sailed to Panama to go through the canal, but I didn’t get to, so I sailed up to Newport. That was in ’75. I don’t recall how long that took.
Robin, Zoey, and Sher paused at the Penobscot Bay launch site just before embarking on a four-month cruise.
My wife Sher, daughters Robin and Zoey, and I did a long canoe trip ’79. That was what I call the Maine Triangle. It’s probably the trip I’m most proud of. That was with a boat we called TSHANNA, which is an Indian name for The Silent One. It was a wooden and canvas 20 footer and it was quiet. We had rebuilt that. We re-canvassed it and patched up all the broken frames. It was a $30 canoe when we bought it—well, my wife, Sher, and the girlfriend bought it—for my birthday and we took it to Florida. We were then living on that cutter. We did that in a little park next to the marina. We re-canvassed it, and got it ready and then we hauled it all the way up Maine. My wife and I and two daughters—I don’t really remember if the cats went or not—went up the Penobscot, and up the West Branch and up the North Branch until we ran out of water. It was a beautiful month, and it didn’t rain on us hardly at all, so we didn’t have any water when we got to the North Branch. So we backed down and went over, what’s that called, the Mud Pond Carry. And then we got into the Allagash, and went down the Allagash to the St. John, and down the St. John to the coast and down the coast to Penobscot Bay and up to where we started the trip and left our vehicle. That was about two-and-a-half, almost three months. Great trip, a great trip. The girls don’t want anything to do with boating anymore. I lost my crew after that trip.
Jim, with daughters Robin and Zoey, about to embark on a cruise to the Florida Keys on TEATIME TURTLE, the lapstrake canoe he built.
Did I tell you about the problems in the Florida Keys, getting raided because we were camping hidden in the woods? Well, let me see, that was TEATIME TURTLE, the 22′ lapstrake. It was 1981 and we got a delivery car to drive to Miami, Florida, and we put this great big canoe on top of it, which you’re not supposed to do on a delivery car. This was with the two girls, twin daughters Zoey and Robin, who were 9 at the time. We never got to pick the car and just got what they had available, but I couldn’t complain about the Mercedes. It was very nice. I dropped the canoe and the family on the beach in Miami and delivered the car and got back somehow. Off we went in the canoe. There were lots of little islands, so we didn’t have to go very far to make our first camp. I remember the island was full of flip-flops. We had a contest to see who could get a pair of flip-flops that fit. That was great fun. We paddled along the Florida Keys and got down to Marathon. There we went into the harbor, way up into the top of it, found some woods, and hauled out. We put up a tent and made a barricade to hide the canoe and covered it with a tarp. We were there for days while I went to work at a marina. It was almost Christmas. We didn’t have any money, so I had to make some. I varnished a boat and did this and that. One day I came back and Sher was real upset because the police had shown up and told her it was illegal to camp there. They took her and the girls down to the station, hassled them, and then told them that if we continued camping, they would confiscate the girls. While they said they would take the girls away, they couldn’t actually do much to us because we were from out of town and not Florida residents. They couldn’t get us for the girls not being in school.
TEATIME TURTLE formed part of the roof over the derelict motorboat that was home to the family.
Sher didn’t want to continue after that. We paddled out and stopped to talk to a guy on a boat. He had two more boats in the harbor, and he let us spend the night on one of them. But then his wife didn’t like the idea of him letting weirdos stay on the boat, so we went over to where the fishing fleet was. They were cleaning out the area with a bulldozer making a pile of junk, a great big hill of junk. On top of it was this old plywood motorboat, an open boat, and kind of big but with a hole in it. I found a guy with a pickup truck and told him I’d give him a couple of six packs if he would pull the boat down and to the water. He did, happily, and I patched the hole and we put it into a little creek area of the harbor. We moved aboard it, and the police never bothered us again. We put the canoe on top and then the tarp over it and we had it enclosed that way. We spent the rest of the winter in that junk boat meeting all sorts of interesting people including Cubans who were arriving about that time. They loved the girls and would bring them food. They thought we were destitute, I guess, but we weren’t really.
The back of the Oldsmobile was riddled with rust but stayed in one piece on the road.
I bought an Oldsmobile from a fisherman and I guess he used to throw fish in the trunk because it was really rusted out. To get it ready to haul us back to Rhode Island I took it to a mechanic and said, “I’d like it looked at to see if it would get us back to Rhode Island. Could you put it on the lift?” He took a quick look under it and said, “No, we can’t lift it because it’ll probably break in half.” We decided to forgo that and drove it to Rhode Island anyway. It was a great comfortable car, but I couldn’t get out of the driver’s door because it was smashed. I had to get out the passenger door, but otherwise it did really well. It was just difficult to pay tolls.
Robin and Zoey were older when the family cruised northern Florida.
Our north Florida trip was in ’87 with TEATIME TURTLE, the varnished 22′ lapstrake canoe. I had a boat shop in St. Petersburg, Bayside Boatworks, for a couple of years. The Atkin cutter was in a little bitty harbor behind the Salvador Dalí Museum and the shop was about a block away from the water, so we could go down to look at the boat. We were living in a school bus at the time.
While in St. Pete, Jim opened a business doing boat repair.
Anyway, that canoe trip was up the St. Marys River, down the Suwanee, and then along the Gulf coast, up the Withlacoochee, down the Hillsborough, and into Tampa.
At Rattlesnake Key in Tampa Bay, Jim came across a rattlesnake while he was walking on the island where the family had camped. He cut off a branch with a fork in it, took photos, gave a dissection lesson to Zoey and Robin (who’s peering in from the left), and served it for dinner. Zoey recalls, “It tasted like chicken.”
The friends who took us to the St. Marys lived in Tampa, so we called them up and went back home with them to where the truck was. You know, I haven’t found any sort of notes or log on that trip so I really don’t know how long that was. It was a winter trip and cold a couple of times because we had frost on the canoe. It looked like snow.
While Jim stepped ashore, Sher and the four conscripted feline sailors—Looper, Friends, Rebar and Beanie—remained on board the 20′ Old Town canoe.
And then, let’s see, the nine-month canoe trip in Maine was in ’95–’96. It was an open-ended trip without a destination. The girls were much older so Sher and I went without them but with our four cats. We were going to paddle forever—that’s what we had in mind. We started at Popham Beach, just below Bath, and went up the Kennebec River and all the way up the Androscoggin to Errol, New Hampshire. There we portaged by vehicle—that’s where you go talk somebody into taking you over in a pickup truck or stick your thumb out—over to the Connecticut River. It’s not very far actually, just one highway, and that was to Colebrook. Then we paddled down the Connecticut River, through Massachusetts and Connecticut all the way down to the coast. A great trip. A great river.
There we got picked up by friends from Rhode Island and taken back home so Sher could visit with our daughters. It was September and I knew that we were going to get caught by weather, so I bought a junker and we loaded up and, instead of taking the canoe west to the Genesee River, which dumps into Lake Ontario, we drove to Pennsylvania and started on the upper Allegheny River.
And, of course, the police caught us there. Well, I wanted to sell the car and the guy I tried to sell it to called the police and said, “This guy is trying to sell me a stolen car.” They didn’t catch us driving but as we were unloading the canoe from the roof racks and getting ready to go down the river. Somehow, they just decided to forget it. Maybe because we weren’t driving. Anyway, they did all the stuff they had to and left. I gave the car to somebody.
Sher and I paddled down the Allegheny to the Ohio River then up the Kanawha. At the New River, Sher’s sister from Boone, North Carolina, came up with a little Coleman canoe, and Sher went to North Carolina with her in the big canoe. I went up to the New River, which was a fantastic, very interesting trip. When I got into North Carolina it was freezing. My tennis shoes would be frozen outside the tent every morning.
Once I got to North Carolina, I thought that’s good enough. Sher and her sister picked me up and we did Thanksgiving in Boone. We bought a motor for the canoe because I thought we could still maybe beat winter if we had a motor. That was stupid, because we didn’t beat it, and Sher’s sister and husband gave us a portage over the height of land over to the French Broad River. We descended the Tennessee River, and then the Tombigbee River down to the Gulf coast. We did a little along the coast, but I knew that if we went too far we’d wind up back at Cedar Key where we had already been on our North Florida trip. It was too early to head back north and I couldn’t think of anything else so we kind of gave up. A friend flew down, rented a truck to carry the canoe, pick us up, and take us to Saint Pete. We stayed there a while. But anyway, that was that trip, a big one.
Sher and Jim toured the country in a motor coach with a van and canoe in tow.
We bought a van that my brother had for sale cheap, mainly because it needed a lot of work. I fixed it up and we made a bed in it. We traveled in it for a year and then found a nice motorcoach in Florida. We traveled in it and towed the van with the canoe on top of it. That was from ’96 to ’99 and we went paddling here and there.
While Jim was working at the camp, he took many week-long solo canoe trips.
In 2000, I got this job as caretaker here at a camp in Rhode Island. Or I should say my wife got me this job. It really wasn’t my idea. So, after 2000 it has just been trips of a week to 10 days on New England rivers doing all of the river except for the whitewater parts at the beginnings. A couple of rivers I split in half and did three days for part of it and three days the rest of it, like the Kennebec. I did the Machias River, the Grand Lake Stream, the Delaware River, and the Saint John River, which is up along Canada. The Saint John was interesting because without a passport I couldn’t camp or even land on Canada’s side. It was the first river that had only one bank that I could get out on.
These trips were all in solo canoes. One was a 14′ Bell Wildfire made of ABS. Then I got a lighter one, which was a Mohawk Solo 13. The Solo 13 is 1′ shorter and not as pretty but it’s lighter and I’m getting older, so that is good. Then I got a a 12′ Kevlar ADK and went for three or four years doing different things in the Adirondacks, mostly for a week at a time.
Jim: “I have a shuttle car that I do all my solo trips with. I have a Honda van, an old one, an Odyssey, and I tow a ’91 Corolla with a canoe on top. And then I can drop it off and go up to the headwaters and paddle down to the Corolla. I’ve taken the rear seat out of the Corolla so I can sleep in it and then drive back up to the headwaters and pick up the Odyssey, then tow the Corolla back home. I’ve done that for ages, the past 20 years, and it’s worked out very well.”
In 2020 I drove to the Susquehanna River. It starts in New York and continues all the way down to the Chesapeake. That’s a big river so I did just the part in New York. That was the first year of the pandemic, so nobody was on the banks and nobody was on the river. The highway runs along the river almost the whole way so I hid water bottles on my way to the put-in so I wouldn’t have to go to people’s houses to ask for water. That worked out really well. A good trip.
There was another nice solo in 2014 that took 10 or 11 days from north to south in Rhode Island. I started up near the northern border and worked my way down the river to the bay. I got out of the bay at Fall River and paddled several rivers and came out at Westerly. I crossed over to Connecticut and took out.
I guess that’s about it. It has been pretty constant.
Jim: “My brother asked me: ‘Do you want a schooner,’ and I said, ‘Are you kidding me?’ This is after I had sold the others, my last sailboat. He was working in a boatyard and he knew this boat, DISTANT STAR, had sunk at the dock and the owner was not being responsible. The boatyard wanted it out, so he said to me I’d better come look at it. And I got it for under $2,000. I really really didn’t want the schooner; I was really done with sailboats. I sort of refurbished it. All I did was make it look pretty to resell it.”
There are a few things other than boating. There was flying. I always have my eyes up in the sky when I hear something. I love the biplanes and always wanted to buy a Stearman biplane. I remember when they were about $5,000 and I just didn’t have quite that much. Then I sold the DISTANT STAR, the big schooner, and I said, “Gee $25,000! I can get a Stearman now.” I looked it up and they were $60,000 at that time. So, okay, I’d forget that dream. I did hot air ballooning and got my certification for that and for gas balloons because it was early on and they weren’t too organized and they just put them both together. If you could answer the questions about the dangers of gas, you got the certificate for gas (even though I couldn’t afford to fill a balloon up with it). In the ’90s my wife and daughters bought me hang-gliding lessons, so I did hang gliding for about three years. I got up to Hang 4, which is an advanced rating. With it I could technically fly off any mountain. That was really cool. I loved it.
The other fun thing was motorcycling. I’ve had five motorcycles. The biggest fun trip was with my daughter Zoey, from Saint Pete up the Smokies all the way to Rhode Island. I was really surprised that she agreed to go. And I once did 1,000 miles in 24 hours just for the heck of it.
What in my background led me to do all this? I would say one thing. It was the fact that my dad was a schoolteacher and a principal and I went to his junior high school. He retired a year early and talked about what he and my mom could do, but then he died that year, the year he retired. So that probably influenced me. I know that in college—I went to Southeast Missouri State in Cape Girardeau, Missouri—the Mississippi River ran nearby and I would go down to it quite often. It gave me what I needed for the four years that I was in school. Instead of looking forward to what the school could give me, I think I looked forward to what the rivers could give me.
JAYCEE BODIE, Jim’s last boat
Jim: “That’s the first time I got to see what my so-called plan would look like in real life. Uncle John’s classic Louisiana Johnboat happened to be a boat that I like the looks of. I decided I wanted more flat bottom and less curve so I moved my center form toward the bow a little bit and drew that curve from the sideview full size. That’s what I went with. I’m pretty happy with it.”
Jim: “I turned the hull over right in the garage, alone. I tend to collect whatever anybody doesn’t want and when I needed a come-along I was able to find four of them. With them I was able to lift the boat. I lowered one side of the boat and rested it on dollies and then cranked the other side up with the come-alongs until it was vertical. I got it all the way over and set it at working height, right-side up.”
Jim: “That’s the mobile-home trailer. Of course, I had to buy that winch gizmo, the whole thing. That’s my garage in the background. When entering or leaving the garage shop, I would acknowledge the boat’s presence or compliment its progress. Since there were six canoes hanging from the rafters, I addressed it specifically as Boaty, pronounced Bodie because that was easier, I guess. On my design doodles it was ‘Johnboat Camper.’ JC Bodie looked too obvious, so it became JAYCEE BODIE.”
Jim: “That’s the port side, my bunk. Back when I quit teaching…I taught for two years after college in St. Louis County…I built a camper out of a panel truck. Well actually, my brother and a friend and I bought a St. Louis County water truck and filled it full of camping gear and went out to Wyoming and backpacked different places in the mountains and stuck our heads into Utah and kept going around Wyoming then I bought the truck from them. It was 8′ long and as wide as this boat. That’s where the design came from except the camper didn’t have a bunk and I slept on the floor. The johnboat’s head, stowed in a compartment under the mattress along with toilet paper and a bag of sawdust, is just a bucket with a plastic bag.”
Jim: “The galley is on the starboard side. I had a rolling stool in the truck so I have one in the johnboat.”
Jim: “I bought this stove just for this boat. I still have the ’60s model double-burner propane stove that was in my truck, the camper. It’s heavy; it’s got cast iron. The galley has room for a double stove, but I didn’t want the big tank, so I use this little stove with the 1-lb propane tanks and they’re underneath the cabinet. I’ve never used the teeny fuel canisters that look like a paint spray can. I can refill these one-pounders, so that’s what I’m doing. On the starboard transom knee I have a hole where I stick a flag or set my fire pan. That’s probably the nicest feature. It gets the most uses anyway.”
Jim: “The fire pan on the starboard quarter is a film case for old-time 35-mm movie film. My daughter was into photography and teaches photography in college. They were throwing a bunch away and of course I don’t let anything get thrown away. She said ‘just be careful with the film because it’s very flammable.’ I said, ‘Well, maybe I’ll take it on my camping trip!’ But anyway, the cans had been bouncing around and I had thought of using something bigger, but I’ve always had very small campfires. Generally, what I do at night is watch the fire until it gets late.”
Jim: “The blue thing is my battery. I have a battery for recharging things like the phone. I have a rechargeable that’s the anchor light but I don’t have running lights yet—but I’m working toward that. In the black bag is my anchor line. I wanted it kept neat. I’ve had enough anchoring with my sailboats. I prefer not to anchor. It brings up all the mud. But I figured I could anchor off the stern as I go toward the beach, hit the beach, and just throw the anchor off the stern and then do whatever I have to do. The tape on the oars is trying to keep the copper from scratching up the paint. I’ve got some makeshift things scattered around. The white things next to the black bag are kneepads. I kneel in my canoes when I paddle and I use kneepads like the white ones here. I stumbled once and landed with my knee on a root and now it’s difficult to kneel. I’ve been using the kneepads on the boat as well whenever I kneel. I have several pair of them because I’m trying to protect my knee and I want to keep paddling. What am I? 78, going on 79 this month. We’ll see.”
Jim: “Because I’ve had big boats and little boats I have some boat parts around and that’s where that great big bronze cleat comes from. I put it there because it’s been sitting around the garage for a long time. I know it’s overkill, but it was free and sitting around, wanting to be used. As well as my oar locks, I had two sets of these, too, so I had to use those. The oars I bought for a boat in the backyard, a Rangeley Lake boat from Maine. They’re a little short for the johnboat but they’re the longest I had. I’m using them until I can find something else. I wouldn’t use spoon blades on this boat.”
Jim: “This is a pond near the Pawcatuck River. I’m anchored with my pole here, practicing what I hope to do when I’m on some kind of voyage. It will be real handy where I expect to be, hope to be, or might not ever be. ”
Jim: “That’s just one of the ponds in Rhode Island. The Wee Lassie canoe here is the fourth that I built. The first one I built was a canvas skin on open wood framing. I had bought some good cedar, boat cedar, to build a lapstrake one but after I built the skin one, I just went paddling and didn’t look back. I’m more of a paddler than a builder…in my mind, anyway.”
Jim: “I built the boarding ladder strictly because I thought I would have difficulty getting into the canoe from the boat, but I couldn’t use it. First of all, the second step is under water and I have had enough of wet feet. If want to go paddling from my johnboat, I don’t want wet feet. Standing on the top step was no good because that made me really unbalanced. That was no better than laying on the deck, so I did not use it. I didn’t even take it the next time I went out. If you’re the kind of person who likes to swim, the ladder would be fine but I’m an on-the-water not an in-the-water kind of guy.”
The johnboat is not really for here in Rhode Island. It’s for the big rivers of the Midwest. We’ll see what happens. I don’t think we can get out of here unless things change. But you never know. It doesn’t matter. I’ve enjoyed building it and it has been great fun. I did add some more things. I put the shelves beside the bunk so there’s a place to put a few things: clothes, a wallet, whatever. I’ve enclosed the space behind the cabinets and those spaces will be hidden and look like just a panel to hide the hull. I’ve got them attached by magnets, so I can squirrel something in there like money or papers or whatever. Whatever I want to hide, I’ve got a hiding place.
I built the boat for finishing the Ohio River and then seeing the tributaries and the interesting areas along the Ohio, and maybe the Tennessee River. And there’s the Cumberland. The Tennessee goes way on up to Knoxville. That would be a nice place to spend the winter. But we’ll see.
Christopher Cunningham is the editor of Small Boats.
If you have an interesting story to tell about your adventures with a small boat, please email us a brief outline and a few photos.
Few things will ruin a small-boat trip faster than trailer drama, and no component of a trailer is as likely to fail as its electrical lighting system. Conventional trailer lights have it hard: they are often cheaply made and poorly wired; they are subject to the indignity of regular dunking; and they rely on the metal of the trailer and its oft-corroded bolts for their ground connection. By building an LED light bar you can ensure that the lights are properly wired, reliably grounded, and never dunked. Because of their position high up at the extreme rear end of your trailed load they are also much more visible to other drivers.
Photographs by the author
Assembly parts for a custom light bar: an LED trailer light kit, a wooden bar, a length of brass rod, a four-wire cable, some heat-shrink butt connectors, and various fastenings; the only things missing are the split sleeving and wire ties with which to attach the cables to the bar.
To build your LED light bar you’ll need the following items (the links are to products that I used, but there are many equivalents available elsewhere).
A four-wire cable as long as the combined length and beam of your boat plus 6′. A 30′ cable was about right for my 18′ pram. I recommend a jacketed four-wire cable with a flat connector. I do not recommend the flat four-wire trailer wiring kits commonly found at auto parts stores. Their white ground wires are usually cut short on the assumption that you’ll use the trailer itself as the ground; the four wires are not protected by any kind of jacket; and the individual wires themselves are often thin and unreliable.
A Y-adapter is required to supply power to the light bar as wells the trailer’s existing lights.
A bar about as long as the width of your trailer. I used an old wooden hockey stick that I pulled from the trash. It’s a hardwood laminate roughly 3⁄4″ × 1 3⁄16″. Aluminum C-channel from the hardware store also works well.
A 5′ length of slit corrugated sleeving (also known as wire loom), about 1⁄2″ inside diameter (not pictured above).
Rudder fittings or some other way to attach the completed bar to your boat’s transom for trailering. I used a length of 5⁄16″ brass rod because it fit nicely through my 3⁄8″ transom-mounted rudder gudgeons.
Zip ties
Start by cutting the bar to length—about equal to the width of the transom—and mark the location of your upper gudgeons, usually the center. If the transom is angled, drill at the same angle for the rod that will go through the gudgeons. This will keep the lights parallel to the road. Install the rod through this angled hole and secure it with epoxy and/or peen the top of it.
The bar is countersunk to recess the light fixtures’ mounting hardware. If the bolts protrude, they should be cut flush with the back of the bar. Here the hacksaw blade has been mounted on the frame at a 45-degree angle, facilitating the flush cut.
Drill for the light kit’s mounting bolts and test-fit the lights. The fixture with the white license-plate lamp goes on the left with the light pointing down. Bolts that protrude past the back end of the light bar should be cut flush with a hacksaw and filed smooth.
A central hole is drilled through the bar. By drilling at the same angle as the slope of the transom, the retaining rod will fit smoothly through the gudgeons and the bar will sit snugly against the boat.
Check the fit of the bar on your boat and determine how you’ll keep the bar locked in place. The same retaining clip that locks my boat’s rudder down when on the water keeps this light bar in place when we’re on the road. A tie around the bar and the gudgeon could serve the same purpose. Now is also a good time to determine how you will secure the cable to the light bar. I drilled two holes, just large enough for the cable, through the bar from top to bottom, about 1 1⁄2″ apart. The cable will make a U-turn through these two holes. With assembly and hardware complete, remove the light fixtures, then prime and paint.
Pull enough cable through the two holes in the bar to reach both lights—first one, then back across the bar to the other. Where the cable makes the U turn, a zip tie around the bar and the bottom of the U will lock it in place. Carefully strip away a few inches of the jacket where it emerges from the bar until you can see the individual wires inside. Go slowly so you don’t damage the insulation on the wires. Then gently pull the cut-off end of the jacket from the protruding wires.
A heat-shrink butt connector is slid over two of the three wires that have had 3⁄8″ of their insulation carefully stripped away; the copper wires are spliced together before being covered by the butt connector.
If you bought the recommended four-wire cable, the connections are straightforward: everything of like color should be spliced together. Bring each wire from the cable to its matching wire on the LED lights. Cut the wires so the leads from the light fixture overlap the cable wires by about 3″ to leave some slack in the system and room for a possible rewiring in the event of a bad connection.
When heat is applied—from a heat gun or a flame—the butt connector shrinks around the wires. A ring of low-temperature solder melts and wicks into the copper strands, assuring good electrical transmission, and a white heat-activated adhesive within the connector melts and bonds to the wires’ insulation, making the connection both strong and waterproof.
Notice that the white wire and the red wire must be brought to both lights. I first cut the red and white wire at the length needed to connect them to the nearest light. When I connected each to its partner on the near light, I included the off-cut wire of the same color. I then carried the other end of the off-cut wire to the far light.
Your LED light kit probably came with some wire nuts or solderless splice wire connectors to make up these cables. Do your future self a favor and throw them away. Electrical connections are likely the weak link of this system; make them as reliable as possible with heat-shrink butt connectors that include low-temperature-solder. Here’s how to make the only-slightly-more-complicated three-way connection needed for the white and red wires. Start by slipping one end of the 18–22-gauge solder-loaded heat-shrink butt connectors over two of the 18-gauge wires, then strip 3⁄8″ of insulation off both wires. Holding those wires parallel, push their copper conductors into the third stripped wire. Ensure the copper strands interweave, then slide the connector back over the joint. Apply heat to the connector with a heat gun or torch. When the heat-shrink contracts around the wire, a heat-activated adhesive will make a strong bond and seal out water. Continue heating until you see the doughnut of solder melt and wick into the copper wire. The resulting connection will be secure and weather resistant.
The cables, kept tidy and protected from the elements by a length of slit sleeving, are cable-tied to the light bar. The bar itself is held in position on the boat’s transom by a rod slid down through the two gudgeons. On a boat that has no gudgeons the light bar can be tied to existing attachment points.
When all six connections are completed, plug your light bar into a vehicle and check the running lights, brake lights, and turn signals. Then, protect the wiring with the corrugated sleeving. Tuck all the wires into the sleeve and secure the sleeve to your bar with zip ties and electrical tape.
The rudder retaining clip holds the light board down and prevents it from popping out of the gudgeons. The sculling notch is a convenient channel for the light cable as it is led from the light bar to the vehicle outlet. The trailer’s original lights remain operational; it’s especially important that its left taillight illuminate the license plate as required.
Your light bar is complete and is ready to be connected the the Y-adapter that will power it and the trailer lights. It should provide years of trouble-free service and an additional measure of safety for your boat while in transit on the roads.
James Kealey lives and teaches in Richmond, California. When he’s not chasing his two young sons, he can usually be found banging away on some project in his garage workshop or sail-camping on a mountain lake.
You can share your tips and tricks of the trade with other Small Boats readers by sending us an email.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s I taught small-boat seamanship classes under sail at WoodenBoat School in Brooklin, Maine. For the most part, we sailed within a sheltered cove with an occasional voyage around some not-too-distant islands. At no point were we out of sight of land or, indeed, more than a few hundred yards from shore. Our boats were Herreshoff and Haven 12-1/2s, each equipped with sails, paddle, chart, anchor, and compass.
I had come to Maine from southwest England, an area known for its rain and wind. Those of us who sailed small open boats there were well practiced in reefing, but we rarely had to navigate by chart and compass. I don’t remember ever carrying a compass except for the few times we were sailing offshore or at night. We did, of course, have the occasional foggy day, but it was always well forecast and when it came, it hung around, socked in for the day. We simply stayed home. Maine, I quickly realized, was different. Here, on a bright summer day, a fog bank could roll in and overtake me with alarming speed. Within minutes I could go from full visibility to a few feet. Even more confusing, I could be sitting in full fog yet still see blue sky above. I understood why all the school’s sailboats had compasses.
Photographs by the author
Mounted on the aft end of a centerboard case the compass is conveniently placed for use as a steering compass and easily to hand if needed to take a bearing. The underside of the bowl has a flat area that allows the compass to lie flush with the surface beneath it.
While most of the boats had small bulkhead-mounted steering compasses, one or two had handheld compasses that had to be retrieved from a locker and so were seldom used. One boat had a compass that hung in a simple bracket mounted on the forward bulkhead and could be removed to be used as a handheld bearing compass.
I came to love that compass and determined to buy one for myself. I researched the product number and details only to discover that it was no longer on the market. Through the ensuing 20 years I have, from time to time, half-heartedly looked online for my compass.
Last month I found it. It was not the same brand, but in all other respects it appeared to be identical. I ordered one immediately.
The central strip in the bracket has a slight flex. When the compass is slid into the sleeve two tabs on the bracket snap into grooves in the compass handle and hold it securely, but not so tight that the compass cannot be pulled out of the bracket one-handed and with just a slight tug.
The Silva 70UN measures 7″ from the top of the bowl to the bottom of the handle, and the outside case around the bowl has a 3 1⁄2″ diameter. It is waterproof and floats semi-submerged horizontally. It comes with a bracket and four brass mounting screws. (Additional brackets are available if there’s a need for more than one fixed location.) The compass can be mounted at any angle, even upside down, and read from the side or the top. As a steering compass, it must be mounted parallel to the plane of the boat’s centerline, either horizontally on a flat surface such as a thwart or centerboard case, or suspended from a cabin-top, or vertically on any bulkhead or other fixed upright.
Once the bracket is fitted, the handle of the compass is slid into it and held stable, prevented from jumping out by a subtle plastic snap within the face of the bracket that aligns with shallow 3⁄8″-long grooves in the compass handle. If the bracket is mounted so the compass can be seen from the helm, head-on with the curved front and back lubber lines overlapped, it can be used as a steering compass and, thanks to the large digits, is easy to read.
The compass is fully waterproof and floats. The case of the illuminated 70UNE is white, which might be easier to see if it’s dropped overboard.
For taking sights, the compass is quickly detached from the bracket. It can be lifted out with just a little force; only one hand is needed. The ergonomic shape and plastic’s matte finish make it comfortable in the hand. There are two scales: a main steering scale on the horizontal face of the compass card and a direct reading scale on the vertical edge. Both are marked in five-degree increments, with each 30-degree angle numbered: 0°, 30°, 60°, etc.
The manufacturer’s description says that the bowl is made from clear scratch-resistant acrylic and that the “combination of a sapphire jewel bearing, and a hardened steel pivot minimizes friction, which in turn gives rapid and accurate movements.” The damping-fluid-immersed card does not spin. When the compass is mounted, the card will still function with the boat heeled up to 30 degrees. Beyond that, it sticks.
Thanks to its ergonomic design and matte-plastic finish, the Silva 70UN is well balanced and comfortable in the hand making it easy to hold steady when taking bearings.
In the week following delivery of the compass, I used it in various boats, both under sail and power. Weighing just 9 oz, it can be held steady with straight or slightly bent arm and reading the bearings is easy and swift, even in choppy water. Depending on where it is mounted, either scale is used for steering. I read the vertical scale most of the time, but my crew enjoyed being able to lean over from any position in the cockpit to line up the lubber lines and easily read the horizontal face. The compass is also available in a battery-powered illuminated (red light) version, the Silva 70UNE.
Jenny Bennett is managing editor of Small Boats.
The Silva 70UN is available from various online outlets priced from around $110, the Silva 70UNE is priced from around $120; I found my 70UN on Amazon for $107.99, and additional brackets at tridentuk.com priced $13.43 plus shipping.
Is there a product that might be useful for boatbuilding, cruising, or shore-side camping that you’d like us to review? Please email your suggestions.
When I’m out sailing on the wide, cold waters of Puget Sound, I carry a lot of safety gear, but I’m more casual in my approach to kayaking for exercise on a slow-moving, shallow slough. A few weeks ago, I saw a couple of deadheads lurking just below the surface, and while I now steer clear of where they’re located, they got me thinking about the consequences of hitting something else hard enough to crack my kayak’s delicate mahogany hull. If the kayak took on water, it would be easy to get ashore and my safety would never be compromised, but getting back to the launch ramp overland wouldn’t be easy. I’d have a miles-long walk with a tote bag full of gear slung over one shoulder and my kayak over the other. I would spare myself a lot of misery if I could simply patch the hull and paddle back to the ramp.
Jennifer, my dental hygienist, in a one-sided conversation while a suction tube, a mirror, and an ultrasonic scaler were keeping me mum, mentioned that she carries Flex Tape aboard her sea kayak. It looked promising on the web, so I bought a roll. The label said it was for “boats and yachts, canoes and kayaks” and could be applied “wet or dry…even underwater, conforms to any shape or object,” and could seal “virtually everything.” I was, however, unpleasantly surprised the first time I tried to apply a piece of it to my kayak, which I had hosed down for the test. The tape stuck in some places but not in others and didn’t flex enough to stick to sharp inside corners. I did a bit more research and found a reference guide for Flex Tape on the manufacturer’s website. It stated that the tape is “not compatible with most paints”; to that, I’d add varnish. And then, hidden inside the roll of the tape, there was a warning I found nowhere else in the manufacturer’s literature: “Tape is not intended to remove cleanly. May damage surface during attempt to remove.” That was it for me and Flex Tape. I may give the rest of the roll to Jennifer because the tape will work on her plastic kayak.
Photographs by the author
While the packaging for Flex Tape makes wide-ranging claims about its abilities and applications, especially for marine uses, it didn’t take long to find out what it wasn’t able to do.
Decades ago, I’d heard that British kayakers were using Denso’s Densyl Tape for emergency leak repairs. It was manufactured in the U.K., primarily for industrial use to protect pipes from corrosion, and at that time wasn’t available in the U.S. The tape is now manufactured in Texas and available for DIY use in a 2″ × 33′ roll. Densyl Tape, according to the manufacturer, is “a cold-applied corrosion prevention and sealing tape based on a synthetic fabric, impregnated and coated with a neutral petrolatum compound.” The olive-drab petrolatum is only slightly sticky to the touch and has a texture somewhere between modeling clay and lip balm.
While Flex Tape’s rubberized backing is flexible, it does not do well with sharp inside corners or compound curves. This test patch adhered to the hull and skeg, but couldn’t adapt to the shape and seal the area.
The full roll is about 5″ in diameter and much more than I’d need to carry for any outing so a few precut lengths would do. For testing, I cut 6″ pieces with scissors and, following the lead of U.K. Denso-advocates like sea-kayak instructor (and Denso-kit supplier) Howard Jeffs, I backed them with aluminum foil. The foil can stay with the tape when it is applied to a leak, preventing fingers from getting sticky with petrolatum. I put waxed paper on the other side and trimmed it and the foil around the tape with a margin of about ¼″. The prepared pieces take up very little space and would be easy to add to the minimal amount of gear I take for a two-hour paddle.
When the Flex Tape’s adhesive is able to bond to a surface, it has a tenacious grip and may need pliers to be removed.
I wasn’t going to punch any holes in my kayak for the tests—it has already suffered enough after taking flight from the roof rack. Seeing how well it stuck to the hull was the important thing. After hosing down the hull, I applied one patch with the foil backing and one without it, both on the gentle curves amidships. Pressing the patch from the middle outward pushed trapped water out from under the tape. On the patch without the foil, I could see how smearing the petrolatum also forced a few beads of water through the tape but then consolidated the tape’s coating and the fabric to form a more impermeable barrier. Smeared petrolatum also created a fillet outside the fabric that seemed like it would facilitate the flow of water over the patch and prevent it from peeling. I applied a third piece of Denso, without foil, to the forward end of the skeg and it quickly conformed to the complex contour without creases or gaps.
Denso’s Densyl Tape comes in a large, sticky roll. Developed as a means of preventing corrosion on metal pipes, it has been adopted by kayakers as an effective emergency patch.
With the patches in place, I paddled on a local lake for an hour, which is as long as it would take me to get back to the ramp on the slough in a worst-case scenario. All three patches stayed put and only the forward corners of the foil were dog-eared by the flow of water.
A strip of Densyl Tape can be applied right off the roll. Note how the tape’s coating feathers the edges. Gloves can keep hands clean but aren’t required.
One of the concerns I had about Densyl was for whatever residue it might leave behind after a patch is peeled off. If it were difficult to remove and perhaps contaminated the damaged area with petrolatum, it could make permanent repairs difficult. I needn’t have worried. What little goop was left behind was quickly removed with a paper towel and firm pressure. I finished up with soap and water just to make sure no oily film was left behind. The Densyl Tape I removed was as good as new and could be used again.
Strips of Densyl Tape can be sandwiched between aluminum foil and waxed paper to make ready-to-use patches. The foil backing can be left in place while the patch is pressed to the hull. It eliminates contact with the petrolatum and adds an extra measure of waterproofing to the patch.
Having the tape on the outside of the hull takes advantage of water pressure to stay in place. To see how it resisted water pressure working against the tape, I used a 4″ ABS drainpipe to hold a column of water and, for a leak, cut a 3″ kerf with a bandsaw.
Densyl Tape is exceptionally flexible and was easily applied to the complex shape at the forward end of the skeg.
Denso, without foil and applied over the kerf while water was flowing out of it, initially adhered to the pipe and stopped the leak. With 16″ of water in the pipe, the tape developed blisters that crept to the edge and then allowed water to flow. With 12″ of water, the Denso held its own against the pressure and didn’t form any blisters. None of my boats have hulls that draw even 12″, so a patch made on the inside could keep water leaking through a narrow crack. I would keep an eye on the patch and back it up to better secure it.
The three test patches on my kayak survived in very good shape after close to 5 miles, even with a few encounters with weeds like the one left draped over the stern.
The residue that Densyl tape leaves behind is easy to wipe off with a paper towel and firm pressure. The used tape can be re-covered with foil and waxed paper and reused.
Denso’s Densyl Tape is wonderful stuff: simple, effective, and well worth adding to any small-boat repair kit, and there’s enough on a roll to share it with boating friends.
Christopher Cunningham is the editor of Small Boats.
John Greiner celebrated his 85th birthday in February 2022 and, six months later, sailed his newly launched 24′ boat into a slip at the North Cape Yacht Club in La Salle, Michigan. The boat’s arrival was the culmination of 23 months of work, and the realization of John’s lifelong dream to build a small cruiser.
When he was five years old, John was introduced to sailing by his father. “It was World War II,” John says, “and little boys didn’t get to do anything because of gas rationing and lights out at 8 p.m. to save energy. My dad was line foreman at Ohio’s Toledo Edison and was kept out of the war to repair wires…they were afraid of saboteurs taking down the electrical lines or bombing our factories. He’d come home from work on a Saturday afternoon and say, ‘George wants us to go sailing.’ So off we’d go to Toledo Yacht Club and join George King on OLD SAM, his 22′ by 8′ centerboard K-class catboat. They’d let me take the tiller. I had nothing to compare it with, but I fell in love with sailing.”
In 1951, when he was 14, John bought his first boat, a 12′ Nipper. Designed by Ray Green, the Nipper was a marconi-rigged catboat first built in 1938. There was an active Nipper fleet at the Toledo Yacht Club and John began racing with about 20 other boats. Within a year he was winning. It was the start of a long racing career on Lake Erie.
Photographs by Randy Mascharka
Before building his dream boat, John created a half model by gluing together some pieces of wood and then shaving the hull to the shape he wanted—high-sided, plumb transom, slightly raked stem. Initially he considered a centerboard but ultimately went with a fixed keel so that he could maximize the cabin space.
Three years after buying his Nipper, 17-year-old John tried his hand at building a boat. “I was working at a boatshop where we worked on molded-plywood outboard boats,” he says. “I built a Rhodes Bantam in the shop. I loved it and thought I’d make a career building wooden boats, but five months after graduating from high school in 1955, the boatshop owner said, ‘all my dealers are buying those damn fiberglass boats.’ Just the year before, he had told me that fiberglass construction was a fad, and I shouldn’t worry about it. But people still had wooden boats, so I started doing repair work. And I built four more Rhodes Bantams.”
When he wasn’t working, John was on the water sailing and racing. It was while he was racing Thistles that he tried his hand at sailmaking, a move that would change the direction of his career. “I made myself a sail and then friends started asking for sails for their boats. I set myself up as Greiner Sailmakers and made sails for 52 years before I turned the business over to my grandson, Brian, in 2019.”
John had built small boats before and even cold-molded a 30 footer with a friend, but MY WAY was the biggest he had built solo and his first lapstrake hull. The project was too large for John‘s garage so he built a temporary extension off the back, but space was still tight.
While boatbuilding may not have been the focus of his career, John continued to build boats for himself and the family. With the exception of a half-ton cold-molded 30′ sailboat, which he built with his friend, Jim Davis, his builds were all small: Penguins, Optimists, kayaks, and iceboats. “I was always too busy and didn’t have the spare time to build a bigger boat,” explains John. When COVID struck everything changed.
In early 2020, Brian was running the sailmaking business, but John was still working as an advisor and going into the office and sail loft on a regular basis. As the threat of COVID grew, however, the family became increasingly nervous. It was John’s daughter, Jill, who spoke up: “Dad, get out of here, you shouldn’t be here with all these young people partying and what-not. They don’t need you here anymore.” It was, says John, a pretty harsh message, but then the light came on: “At the age of 83,” he says, “I was finally free, with time to follow my dreams, time to build my own little cruising boat.”
Courtesy of John Greiner
MY WAY emerges from the garage. The move was complicated and required removing the door frame leading into the garage to accommodate the boat’s beam, and then removing the top frame from the front door and jacking it up to take out the span’s sag. There was just enough space for the boat to slide out beneath.
At the time, John was still sailing his Santana 35, RED CLOUD, in which he had won 150 first-place flags since the beginning of the 2000s, but she was 41 years old and had been raced hard for most of that time. And, John was forced to admit, she was just too big for him these days. He turned his thoughts to the next chapter. He would design and build a new boat in which he and his wife, Judy, could enjoy cruising for the next five years, until he was 90 or more.
Lake Erie, where they would be sailing, is known for its occasional serious and sudden storms. John decided that 24′ would be as small as he should go. It would have accommodations for four so they could take friends along on cruises. It needed to have full headroom, which would not be easy on a 24-footer, and John knew that a taller cabin would give the boat a “high look,” but comfort and safety were all-important.
Never one to do things without thought and planning, John developed the design by building a half model. Using a 1:12 scale—“It made the math easy!”—he glued some wood together and got out his block plane. He shaved until he had a hull with flat topsides, a fairly plumb bow, and a vertical transom. Lake Erie is relatively shallow and John considered fitting a centerboard, but didn’t want to compromise the interior space. Instead, he designed the boat to take a fixed keel.
John sits in the cockpit of MY WAY—where a racing background meets a cruising future. The tiller extension is a reflection of John’s many years racing small boats and allows him to sit forward of the outboard and mainsheet. The placement of the outboard within the cockpit is a nod to John’s age and an acceptance that he no longer wants to be leaning out over the transom to start the motor.
John’s garage wasn’t large enough for building the boat, so he built a 26′ × 16′ workshop off the back of it, and by October 2020 he was ready to start the boat. He took the lines off his model and scaled them up to construct 10 frames. He was, he says, torn between cold-molding and lapstrake but in the end went for lapstrake because he didn’t want his boat to “look like every other fiberglass boat.” To educate himself in lapstrake techniques he read the Clinker Plywood Boatbuilding Manual by Iain Oughtred, Practical Yacht Joinery by Fred P. Bingham, and The Gougeon Brothers on Boat Construction.
John created the molds, built the strongback, hung the molds and laminated stem, laminated the keelson, hung the transom, and bent on the 1 1⁄2″ × 2″ sheer battens. He spent a week fairing the molds. “Because I was only working off my model and not from plans drawn by a professional naval architect,” says John, “getting things fair took longer than I’d anticipated.” He cut the planks. “Each plank is 9” wide and I could get six pieces out of one sheet of 1⁄2″ marine-grade plywood. I scarfed these together. I got all the planking—13 strakes—out of 14 sheets of plywood. When the hull was fully planked, I epoxy-coated it and then we had a turning-over party. Forty friends came over and the youngest 20 of them picked it up and flipped it over. It took two minutes!”
Randy Mascharka
Down below there are accommodations for four and full standing headroom. Thanks to the many large portlights there is plenty of natural light, and with both a built-in sink and porta-potti, longer cruises on the Great Lakes will be comfortable.
With the hull right-side up, John worked on fitting out the interior and completing the structural framework. He ’glassed-in bulkheads of ½″ marine plywood and floors of 2″ Indonesian pine and built accommodations for a porta-potti, a sink and an icebox, a double berth in the forepeak and twin saloon berths. He made a well for the outboard motor because, “When I’m 90,” he says, “I won’t have to lean over the stern, I can stay in the cockpit and deal with the motor from there.” The cockpit was framed out, the sole installed, and the side benches—hinged to access spacious lockers beneath—were fitted. The deck, two layers of 1⁄4″ plywood laid over laminated 2″ × 2″ beams, was followed by the mahogany cabin sides and cockpit coaming.
When the build was complete and there was still all the finish work to be done, John’s friend, Ben Riley, showed up to lend a hand. “We sanded everything down with 220-grit sandpaper and then coated the deck, cockpit, and cabin with three coats of epoxy before applying three coats of varnish.” John had planned to paint the hull blue but decided, instead, to leave it bright so the grain of the wood could be seen.
Randy Mascharka
The two saloon berths are a good width and, thanks to cut-outs beneath the cockpit, long enough for most adults. The lower shelf fiddles are angled to provide a comfortable back rest.
Then, says John, “the fun started. We had to get the boat out of the shed, through the garage, and into the street. We had a lot of help. The boat was in a cradle and my son-in-law, Gary Goldberg, engineered two 16′-long 2 × 6s, which he slid under the cradle. We rolled the whole contraption—cradle and all—on 1″ pipes. The boat’s beam is 8′ plus the rubrails, which we had left off at this point. The back door into the garage is 8′ wide, so I had to remove the door frame and we wheeled it through into the garage…it just touched!”
With the boat still in the garage, John fitted the rubrails and then, once more, they were on the move. This time there was ample clearance of the boat’s beam, but height was a concern. “We had removed the upper frame of the door but, even so, it was too tight a fit and she got held up on the frame of the cabin hatch. We couldn’t remove that so, instead, we stood a 4 × 4 on end on a bottle jack and raised the door opening just enough to take the sag out of it and—BINGO—we rolled out into the street. Now all we had to do was install the keel and launch.”
Randy Mascharka
MY WAY’s sail plan with fully-battened mainsail and large overlapping genoa is more evidence of John’s racing influences. Despite being only 24′ long, there is more than enough room for four adults on board.
While that might sound straightforward, John and his friends were faced with more challenges. John had received a $5,000 estimate to have the keel pre-fabricated. It was too expensive. But his friend Mike Fahle found an old J24 for sale for $1,000. The J24, John says, was in poor condition, but the keel could be reused on his new boat. It took the friends seven hours and 25 Sawzall blades to remove the keel. John’s boat was lifted in slings on a hoist at Jockett’s Marina on the Ottawa River in Toledo and the keel was maneuvered into position on a forklift truck. The keelbolts lined up perfectly and the whole assembly was bolted and epoxied into place.
More parts were salvaged from the J24: the boom, the bow and stern pulpits, the stanchions, the rudder gudgeons, and a few other pieces. The mast was repurposed from a C&C 24 and a friend donated a set of winches. John made new sails and his daughter, Jill, and Gary helped with the rigging.
Randy Mascharka
The pulpits and stanchions were salvaged from a J24 that was to be demolished; they fit MY WAY perfectly. The uncluttered cabintop provides comfortable seating on a fair day.
The boat was launched from the marina into the Ottawa River and with John, Judy and friend Jerry German aboard, sailed from the river to the North Cape Yacht Club in La Salle, Michigan. They christened the boat MY WAY, and took the family out sailing. “We found her to be very well-mannered,” says John, “I could steer her with two fingers on the tiller. We sailed at 6 knots in medium winds, and she pointed well. I’m very pleased with her performance.”
John and Judy are looking forward to several years of happy cruising around Lake Erie. He may no longer be racing, but he is still out on the water, sailing, enjoying the wind and the weather, and, as John says, “still doing it MY WAY.”
Jenny Bennett is managing editor of Small Boats.
Do you have a boat with an interesting story? Please email us. We’d like to hear about it and share it with other Small Boats readers
I’ll put a case to you, as lawyer Jaggers did hypothetically to young Pip in Great Expectations. Put the case that a boat should be designed, and that this boat should be handy under oars. Put the case that this boat should also sail well, and further that it should accommodate a small outboard motor off the transom, should some unknown person desire to do so. Put the case, as well, that this boat must be detachable into two halves that may “nest” one inside the other so as to be hauled aboard and lashed down in the smallest possible space on the crowded deck of a long-distance cruiser, and therefore must be very light yet equally very strong. Put the case that this boat must also be attractive, and put that last case to yourself very carefully. These expectations are great, indeed.
Compromising to resolve such thorny conflicts is the intellectual challenge that Russell Brown, a designer and boatbuilder of Port Townsend, Washington, took on in working up a nesting dinghy that has one further twist: he wanted his company, PT Watercraft, to be able to market the boat as a kit that could be built by amateurs.
The result is impressive. Brown has been working a long time in lightweight boat construction, with an eye toward engineered solutions tending toward minimalism. Using thin plywood and powerful epoxy to best advantage, he strives for construction that is light in weight yet very strong, as many others have in using these techniques. He also spent a good part of his youth cruising the world’s oceans, first with his parents and later on his own, so he has direct practical experience of what works and what does not.
Tom Jackson
By extensive ocean cruising, Russell Brown came to know what he valued in a nesting dinghy, and his PT 11, which weighs just 85 lbs, balances conflicting purposes of sailing, rowing, light weight, and compact stowage while still remaining a handsome boat.
For light weight, Brown chose 6mm okoume plywood for the topsides and the bottom panel. Almost every part of the boat is made of plywood, sheathed in fiberglass cloth set in epoxy. Though 11′ long when joined, the hull weighs only 85 lbs. With its low weight, this boat’s halves can be manhandled ridiculously easily by two people, and probably very easily by a fit person working alone. To keep the dinghy to a minimum size for hauling aboard, Brown chose to make the hull flat-bottomed, with but slight rocker and a skeg of minimal depth. Plus, he made the boat’s profile very flat at the sheerline, that critically important curve formed by the top edge of the uppermost plank. Giving a boat a flat sheerline risks ungainly appearance, but to Brown it was imperative to do so to allow the boat to stay compact when nested on board: the bundle is only 5′ 10″ long and 1′ 8″ high at one end and 1′ 5″ high at the other, and more sheer would have made for a taller nested stack. Brown anticipates that most cruising sailors will lash down the boat under the swinging mainsail boom, so height is critical.
Brown developed custom stainless-steel hardware to join the two halves together, and the system seems to work well in the water or on land. In this type of boat, the hull is usually constructed in full, then two bulkheads are installed at or near amidships, and then the builder—no doubt after taking a deep breath—cuts his hull in half, a process fully described in the kit’s extensive instructions.
Tom Jackson
The 11’ hull divides to form a bundle only 5’10” long, 4′ 2″ wide, and a maximum of 1′ 8″ high, and the flat bottom makes nesting them easy.
The forward of the two sections is completely decked over at thwart height, which provides necessary hull stiffness and also sees to it that any water coming aboard is directed to the after section for easy bailing. At the top of the sheerstrakes, plywood pieces scarfed together and set perpendicular to the sheer planks make L-shaped gunwales that stiffen the topsides, deflect spray, and provide a flat surface to receive a glued-on continuous, low-profile rubber fender that actually accentuates the boat’s appearance. Brown kept his ’midships bulkheads low, so that the foredeck extends aft of the joined bulkheads when the hulls are assembled. This provides a comfortable rowing position, with no need for a thwart.
The joining hardware, meanwhile, consists of four knobs that screw through bushings in the after bulkhead and into threaded receivers in the forward one, with O-rings making the fittings waterproof. The sequence for attaching the hulls together is well thought out. The forward hull has two custom carbon-fiber brackets mounted on the deck and tight against the bulkhead sides. These brackets extend aft just far enough to have the after bulkhead slip behind them, which is easily managed. They hold the hulls together and in the right alignment while tightening first the lower knobs and then the upper ones. The hull halves join together surprisingly tightly, and in rowing and sailing (admittedly in light conditions) I never saw any water come through.
Tom Jackson
The two hull halves assemble easily while afloat.
Technology and innovations seem to have come together to make nesting dinghies more viable than ever. Lightweight plywood-epoxy construction makes a stiff hull, which is especially important when introducing the added complexity of cutting it in half. The challenge of lightweight structural design is what got Brown thinking about nesting dinghies in the first place. “A dinghy is really a tool, it’s not a pleasure boat. If you’re talking about a dinghy being a tender for a cruising boat, it has to be light, it has to be really tough, it has to be abrasion resistant, and it has to perform all the other functions it has to perform.
“The intent was to make a dinghy for serious cruisers,” Brown said. “I have a nesting dinghy that I built in ’85 that I took on most of the cruising I’ve ever done. It didn’t have the kind of sophisticated attachment hardware that this one does, but it’s what really got me into the whole idea of nesting dinghies. And cruising really led me to see the interest and need for a serious nesting dinghy. There’s more nesting dinghies out there than you can shake a stick at, but none of them that were ever really highly developed, as far as easy assembly in the water, light weight, complete kit package, good sailing characteristics, and really good rowng characteristics.”
Tom Jackson
Two carbon-fiber brackets (visible at the edge of the foredeck near the bulkheads) hold the hulls in alignment while knobs are tightened to hold them firmly together.
Brown started with pleasurable rowing in mind. He noticed other cruisers needlessly struggling with dinghies mainly because they were miserable to row, while his was comparatively easy. “That’s what I ended up doing with my nesting dinghy. I loved it. Other people had these god-awful inflatables, they were hoisting these 18-hp engines on and off, and going for gas all the time. It was my experience that got me going in this direction. This boat’s not a sprinter of a rowboat, but it really has very good cruising speed capabilities.” Brown earlier considered all-carbon-fiber construction for even lighter weight, but actually building a prototype gave him experience that came to the rescue: “I actually didn’t like it because it’s too loud. I don’t like rowing it, I don’t like using it. If you dropped the bow painter snaphook into the boat, the whole anchorage woke up.”
Tom Jackson
Coming onto a beach, the boat’s flat bottom, which is well sheathed in fiberglass cloth set in epoxy to resist abrasion, allows her to stand upright, and the long foredeck makes it easy to step ashore.
During my row, I found that the new boat, largely because of its light weight, feels a bit squirrelly at first, but in short order it’s very simple to find her sweet spot. The boat tracks well enough. The combination of light weight and slight rocker, or longitudinal curvature, to her flat-athwartships bottom, meanwhile, make her extremely maneuverable. She’ll turn with just a flick of the oar. That’s an excellent characteristic in a crowded harbor, where responsive turning and quick stops are often necessary. However, in my judgment she would be plenty able for gunkholing expeditions and amply commodious for ferrying supplies from shore. “We’ve rowed the boat with four 200-lb guys, and it still goes right along,” Brown said. I found her quite a pleasure to row; I could see Canada over my shoulder, and Brown coaxed me back to shore only with some difficulty.
Nosing into shore, the flat bottom proved its worth once more. The boat comes easily to the beach, and it stands upright prettily. The foredeck makes it exceptionally easy to step forward and out of the boat, dry-footed.
The sailing rig is deliberately simple, a modified windsurfer rig with the sail’s sleeve slipping over a two-part carbon-fiber mast, which needs no standing rigging. The mast itself fits easily into a tube mounted between the foredeck and the bottom. The entire rig weighs but a few pounds. Brown, who has long experience in developing foil sections in plywood, has also designed a daggerboard and a kick-up rudder, both of which would be very familiar to any dinghy racer. The designer likes to sit right on the boat’s bottom while sailing; in light air, I found kneeling amidships to work all right for me. It was a light-air day during our rendezvous, so I can’t say much about the boat’s sailing characteristics, though I found her quick for what little breeze we had. Heeling to the few puffs that materialized, she held out the promise of surprisingly good performance. Later, when Brown found a bit more breeze during his time at the helm, I observed that she accelerated quickly and tacked easily. Like any lightweight dinghy, she is very responsive to crew weight, yet she feels stable. An old dinghy racer would be at home here and would not be displeased by her sailing qualities.
Tom Jackson
The dinghy attains good speed quickly, tracks reasonably well, and rows very comfortably. Unlike many dinghies, she’ll make rowing ashore from an anchorage a pleasure.
As I sailed, in my imagination, I thought of anchoring down in some pretty harbor somewhere and spending the few minutes necessary to get the boat launched, rigged, and ready to sail into the golden light of evening. I put the case, further, that doing so would allow anyone so fortunate to enjoy such a harbor in a boat that is fine-looking beyond all expectations.
Russell Brown
To keep the PT 11’s nested dimensions to a minimum, Brown made the boat flat-bottomed with only slight rocker and also quite flat-sheered. Nevertheless, the boat is handsome and sails smartly with her modified windsurfer rig. The boat is available in kit form only, and the designer has developed an extensive instruction manual for builders.
The PT 11 nesting dinghy is available as a kit from PT Watercraft.
We won’t see the wilderness wedding we set out for that never materialized. We won’t see Dave forget the durn camera at home and row back a mile for it. We won’t see the whale that almost T-boned us. Those are tales for another time.
We will see our first big wind. Our first narrows to negotiate. A spooky and exhausting coastal passage with no safe anchorage in the exposed surf, breakers, rocks, and foul bottom. And our first glimpse of the outer coast.
Through all our years of venturing, we’ve been sailing “inside” waters—sounds that are occasionally open to the Pacific. Things can and do get rough at times, and there’s plenty of opportunity for trouble. But there’s always a fallbacks to more sheltered waters.
We are sailing a new vessel, untried in every direction. This stretch stretches us!
In this installment, we are getting ready to cruise, intending to row and sail around Chichagof Island, a distance of about 450 nautical miles—if we were to limit ourselves to the straight and narrow. But first we recap a change of venue, from the Southern Admiralty Wilderness site where we built MUSTELID to our home port of Tenakee Springs, Alaska, our jump off point for the voyage.
This trip will touch on each of the ABC’s: Admiralty, Baranof, and Chichagof Islands, which are the 7th, 10th, and 5th largest in the U.S., respectively. All are known for their abundance of brown bear (aka grizzlies), and our Chichagof has the highest known density of them on earth; there are 1,600, outnumbering the roughly 1,350 humans huddled in four communities.
Our trip will take us via “Outer Chich,” a raw and remote maze of rock and islands off the open Gulf of Alaska. We’ve dreamed of this place!
Here’s a look at our living arrangements when we’re aboard for extended periods. The cabin accommodations include heating, sleeping, food preparation, lounging, work, and play—and for foraging for the food, fuel, and materials that extend our provisions.
One thing that turned out hard to show, even in video, is the amazing feel of a cabin of this sort. Picture sitting at ease on a cushioned sheet of plywood. Add backrests below, and full-length windows on either side. Roof it over with pleasant clearance, and even more along the hatched-over, midship gangway. You are warm. You are dry. A meal’s savory fragrance suffuses the cabin. Cue your favorite music. Look about at the lovely vista opening around you from kayaker vantage.
Wait. Aren’t we supposed to be roughing it?
This Part wraps up our focus on the boat. Next we go venturing!
MUSTELID’s rig and rigging are original. They should work, but might not work.
Southeast Alaska is criss-crossed by long runs of water between shorelines of varying height. Winds tend to blow mostly up or down them. Mostly.
Our intent is to sail from a beam reach to a run, and row the rest. Any slight windward ability in this rig is for the sometimes miles-long transits from one side to another. Any small lift can save miles of rowing, with wind on the nose. But, should things get contrary, we can always hunker down until conditions favor us.
For remote cruising, we built the rig of found materials–conifer saplings. The six identical sails are interchangeable and redundant. We led our lines aft then forward again to the cockpit. The masts should come down and stow easily and out of the way for rowing.
Sometimes it’s hard to know if we’re inventing or re-inventing the wheel. Or, before we try what we’ve built, whether we’re even holding a wheel in our hands.
In this episode we take a tour of MUSTELID’s outfit. Much of this has never been tried, to our knowledge. Some has, at least in principle, but we’ve “dumbed it down.” Some is tried-and-true but not in our context or in conjunction with other items. But it must work, or be culled. There’s no space for laggards!
We’re aiming for a handful of qualities in construction, stowage, and use:
Simplicity: It must be clever, but not too clever.
Flexibility: The more roles it can fill, the merrier.
Modularity: Interchangeable, reconfigurable, and redundant.
Synergy: Parts that work together.
And the further challenge of sea-trials lie yet ahead.
Phil Bolger once commented that he had abandoned a design due to the sheer number of untried features it involved. We’re not that wise.
When I read this issue’s story about Reid Schwartz, I knew how he could have fallen into the thrall of birchbark canoes. It happened to me in the early 1990s when I was a speaker at a sea-kayak symposium on the northwest coast of Lake Superior in Grand Marais, Minnesota. One of the other presenters was a birchbark canoe builder. I don’t now recall his name, but my research suggests that it was quite likely the late Walter Caribou, an Ojibwe who had lived in Grand Portage, just up the lake from Grand Marais. He invited attendees to visit his shop and there I was quickly fascinated by the process of building a strikingly beautiful vessel from sheets of birchbark and other materials harvested from the surrounding forests. Walter explained how the bark can be harvested from a standing tree without fatally girdling it and how roots are gathered, scraped clean, and split in two for lashings.
The large basket is in the style of a wild-rice winnowing basket; the smaller one was made to a pattern given to me by an Ojibwe bark-canoe maker. For the sheath, I just folded a piece of bark around the knife, cut away the excess, and laced it with split root.
But the canoe in the shop was overwhelmingly complex and I found myself drawn instead to his birchbark baskets. Many had been decorated by scraping away the bark’s dark inner layer, and some of the small ones were made from a single piece of bark scarcely larger than a sheet of paper.
While the scarcity of suitable birch trees inspired Reid to build a traditional canoe without bark, I was inspired to make things with whatever small pieces of bark could be found. With a Chippewa basket pattern from Walter and some scraps of bark and a few roots, I made my first basket before the symposium ended.
Root lashings are integral to making things with birchbark. When I made tools for working bark, I wrapped them with split roots and coated them with melted pitch. The bone knife is for cutting bark, the antler wedge for peeling it, and the bone awl for piercing holes for lashings.
A few years later, while I was teaching a workshop in Greenland kayak construction at WoodenBoat School, I took a break to explore the surrounding woods and, in my wanderings, found a clearing where a house was going to be built. Some birch trees on the land had been taken down and bucked into 4′ lengths. I made lengthwise cuts on one piece. I didn’t know what time of year the trees had been felled, but the bark peeled off easily and cleanly and was still very flexible. I dug up a few chopstick-thick roots in the area. In the soft duff it was easy to push my fingers through to the underlying soil to find roots almost everywhere.
For the past 20 years, I’ve been using the birchbark sheath I made for one of my most-used carving knives.
When I had some free time back at the school, I scraped the bark off the roots and split them in half, working the thickest end. An inch-deep cut with a knife was enough to get the split started and then it just had to be steered down the middle. If the split began to stray, bending the thicker side more brought it back in line. I cut a piece of bark and wrapped it around the knife I was using during the workshop, trimmed the bark to make a sheath, and laced it with the split root. Some 20 years later I’m still using that sheath.
In the Pacific Northwest, Western red cedar is plentiful and it is not uncommon to find downed trees for harvesting bark.
Canoe-bark birch trees grow in the Pacific Northwest but their natural range ends about 25 miles north of my home in Seattle. Western red cedar, on the other hand, is everywhere. In Hilary Stewart’s book, Cedar, I read about the many ways in which First Nations people who have lived on this land for thousands of years used cedar bark. While it wasn’t used to make canoes here—the trunks of large cedar trees provided the wood for carving them—the inner layer of bark was used to make, among other things, baskets, rope, clothing, blankets, and hats. I’d known how the bark was used for some time, but I had never gathered any to see what I could do with it.
When I make a cedar-bark basket in the field, I work with bark that hasn’t had a chance to dry, so it shrinks after I’ve made the basket and the weave isn’t as tight as it should be.
One spring day, on a path through the foothills of the Cascade Range, I found some recently wind-downed cedars still green with their flat, scale-like needles. It was the time of year when the sap would have been running before the trees fell, and after I made cuts through the bark it peeled off easily. As I ran my fingers between the bark and the slick sapwood it felt as if cold creek water had just been poured through the widening space. The soft bubble-gum pink inner bark of the cedar, the cambium, has to be separated from the craggy umber outer bark before being cut into strips for weaving. I made a few small baskets with 1⁄2″-wide strips and a larger basket with thicker 1 1⁄2″ strips.
Twisting three strands of cedar bark together makes surprisingly strong and flexible cordage.
Later, on a car-camping weekend when my kids were six and nine years old, a downed cedar supplied bark that I used just as it came off the tree with the inner and outer bark still together. With a long rectangle divided roughly into thirds, I folded the ends up, cambium to the outside, and pleated and gathered the ends. That curved the center into a small semicircular trough. With the ends of a twig handle lashed with strips of cambium to each upturned end, the bark was quickly turned into a blackberry-picking basket for the kids. The same form had been used by Nootka mariners as canoe bailers.
In all the years I’ve been building boats, I’ve developed a fondness for a few types of wood, cedars mostly, for their color and warmth, the fragrance they bring to the shop, and for the many things they can do and become. For much of that time, the wood came from lumberyards and beach driftwood, stripped bare, but when I began harvesting birch and cedar bark from windfalls, I found a closer connection with the trees and a better appreciation of the reverence native people had for them. Walter said that before bark is taken from a tree, it is given thanks. I suspect that the gratitude runs deep and is not just for the bark but also for air to breathe and life itself.
After years spent exploring Baja California’s Bahía Magdalena in MADRINA, my 19′ 6″ Iain Oughtred Sooty Tern—an ideal boat for the job—I was beginning to feel my advancing age. It wasn’t only the sore muscles and creaking joints as I settled onto the floorboards, squeezed in next to the centerboard trunk for another long night of intermittent sleep; nor the dampness inside my cockpit tent, nor another meal cooked on a stove set on those same floorboards between my upraised knees. No, the larger question that returned whenever I thought about replacing MADRINA with something a wee bit more comfortable, and thus more substantial, was simply: If I’m ever going to tackle a bigger boat project, hadn’t I better begin now rather than later?
From the moment I opened my copy of Plans & Dreams Vol. 1, Paul Gartside’s first collection of plans and invaluable essays originally published in Water Craft magazine, I was taken by the 19′ 9 3⁄4″ centerboard lugger, his Design #166. I was particularly drawn to the simple standing lug, a rig with which I was already familiar, and imagined the design approaching that sweet spot between size, seaworthiness, and ease of handling. Also, having already built Gartside’s Design #130, a 12′ dinghy, I remembered the wealth of detail included in his plans, the breadth of classic, old-school building techniques they revealed, and that Gartside himself had been always quick to respond to questions.
Scott Sadil
Out of the water the sweet lines of Gartside’s design are clearly visible: the fine entry and aft skeg enhance performance both under sail and when rowed; the gently curved sheerline complements the sloping cabintop. For trailering, the boom crutch—used to support the main boom when at anchor—is moved aft to stand in the mizzen maststep to support the head of the mast.
Still, for months I hemmed and hawed. No question, Design #166 was a lot of boat: decks, cabin, exterior ballast, a tricky forward maststep, an impressive freestanding mainmast. Did I really want to commit to the time and expense of a job this size? Eventually, I realized there was only one answer: If not now, when?
Although the plans for #166 show two construction choices—strip-planked and ’glass, or glued-clinker plywood—Gartside states, in his essay that accompanies the plans, that his own first choice for the hull would be “cold molding: a triple-skin layup of two diagonal and one fore and aft to finish about 12mm thick would be perfect and require little in the way of framing.” I was sold. I contacted Gartside and he drew up another page of construction details for cold-molding, bringing my set of plans to eight pages in all: lines plan, table of offsets, construction details, stem and maststep details, layout, sail plan, and the original setup detail for strip-plank or glued-plywood construction. There were no patterns. Throughout his writing Gartside advocates strongly for lofting: “Avoid the temptation,” he argues, “to shortcut the process.”
I did my lofting on plywood sheets spread out across my living-room floor, built my molds, and ordered up a load of western red cedar “shingle stock”—wide, uneven material (minimum thickness 4mm)—that I ran through a thickness planer to 4mm and then ripped into 4″-wide planking stock—narrow enough to fit the shape of the hull but not so narrow that I ended up with an unmanageable number of pieces. Gartside leaves the plank width to the builder’s discretion. The plans detail eight molds, and 13 battens measuring 3⁄4″ × 1 1⁄4″.
I applied the two opposing diagonal layers of planks and the final fore-and-aft layer and, after fairing the hull one last time, I sheathed it with a layer of 6-oz fiberglass saturated with epoxy. I used a two-part epoxy paint for the hull—further protection for the cedar hull. When a group of friends helped me to lift the hull from the molds, carry it outside and turn it over, I was surprised by its light weight even though the #166 hull is 1′ 7 3⁄4″ longer and 2′ 1 3⁄4″ wider than the Sooty Tern. Then, I was struck by the boat’s dimensions: mid-flip, when standing on its side, the hull stood far taller than my helpers—I was dealing with a boat of much greater size.
Kim Boehler
The pivoting rudder blade doesn’t rely on weight to submerge it from its retracted position it. Its haul-up and haul-down lines are secured by a jam cleat on the tiller. The motor mount, mizzen mast, and boomkin are all offset so a standard tiller can occupy the centerline.
The lugger was also more complex. Among other testing elements in the build, it has a keel with 305 lbs of recessed external lead ballast—a great comfort when the 191-sq-ft mainsail fills with wind, but a construction challenge to be approached with care and consideration. The forward mast tube is also challenging. It is an aluminum sleeve that houses the maststep and runs from the deck, down through the forward flotation chamber, and drains downward through the keel itself. Its construction and installation involve some low-tolerance engineering that demands competency with this sort of metalwork. The plan details are explicit: the tube is fashioned in three parts that must be welded together and the heel plug, also clearly shown, is best machined out of high-density plastic.
The final challenges were in finding all of the hardware for the finished boat. I wanted to stick with silicon-bronze fittings as an appropriate match for a boat with such handsome, traditional lines, but could find nothing suitable at any chandlery. In the end I went with bronze fittings cast at Port Townsend Foundry, Tufnol blocks, and three-strand lines.
The free-standing mast is 22′ long and a full 4 1⁄4″ in diameter at deck level. I built it out of a single piece of Douglas fir, 10″ x 2 1⁄3″ × 26′, ripped down the center, ends swapped, the two halves hollowed out—as per the plans—starting 1,200mm up from the bottom and ending 600mm from the top. I kept the wall thickness to no less than the specified 25% of the outside diameter and epoxied the two halves together to complete the blank.
From start to finish, building TAMALITA took just under three years. Of course, the challenges would fade quickly from memory if I ended up with a boat that lived up to my expectations.
My goal was to replicate the shoal-water attributes of my Sooty Tern: easy singlehandling, good speed under sail, maneuverability under oars. I also hoped to enjoy the added comfort of a small cuddy as well as the security of side decks, coaming, and external ballast when I ventured out onto California’s open Pacific Coast.
The cockpit is expansive. In the text that accompanies the plans, Gartside calls his lugger “a daysailer first and foremost.” Indeed, for an outing with friends it would be ideal—you could distribute six adults along the two side benches. The cuddy is small but still usable: large enough for a single wide berth, lots of floor space, a tiny galley, and what Gartside refers to as “the illusion of privacy for the head.”
This shallow-draft, flat-floored boat will also please sailors who have trailered any boat near this size in the past. It’s easy to launch and retrieve at any typical launch ramp. It’s also light for a boat of its length. My trailer is a standard model although the axle position was adjusted to suit a sailboat rather than a sportfisherman with a heavy motor hanging from the stern.
Kathleen Wilder
For its size the lugger has a generous sail area. Most of the power comes from the 191 sq ft balance lug mainsail but the off-center leg o’ mutton mizzen sail can provide a bit of a boost and be tuned to achieve a neutral helm.
Setting up before launching offers some challenges. Anticipating what it takes to step the free-standing mast, Gartside added a second step 15″ aft of the main step. “The mizzen,” he writes, “is dropped in here first and used as a crane to lift the mainmast.” It takes some time to tweak and adjust the rigging, and the first time you raise the mainmast overhead, expect to feel your heart flutter. As a newcomer to the boat, I got some extra practice stepping and unstepping the mainmast while working through the mainsail rigging. Four lines lead back to the cockpit—throat halyard, peak halyard, parrel line for snugging the yard to the mast, and topping lift—the easy-to-handle setup is perfect for the singlehander once everything is sorted and in place. Once the lines are all rigged, they can be left in place. After gaining experience, I can step the masts, hang the rudder, go through my checklists, fuss with this and that, launch, and be sailing easily within an hour.
For a relative novice like myself, the boat is a delight to sail. With the substantial ballast built into the keel, its shapely hull carries the big mainsail well. The off-center mizzen will also make a lot of sailors happy, as it allows for the swing of a conventional tiller rather than the push-pull steerage seen on many small boats with two-masted rigs. I have sailed luggers most of my brief sailing career and find that Gartside’s points at least as high as I’m used to. Its peak halyard helps to keep the mainsail from twisting. The boat comes about easily, and if you do need a little extra turning momentum in light air, you can snug the mizzen in tight and hold the boom for a moment to backwind the mainsail. Adjusting the mizzen also takes care of any weather helm.
With the side decks and cockpit coaming, even in a stiff blow if the hull does dip a rail, the water stays out of the cockpit. Given a tough chance, however, there are three large watertight flotation compartments, one forward, and one on either side beneath the side decks aft of the cabin bulkhead. According to Gartside, the lugger will float upright if swamped.
Kim Boehler
The author prefers to row standing up and facing forward—a position that offers excellent visibility ahead. Although the mainmast was not stepped in this picture, even when it is in place, the boom and yard can be raised above the rower’s head with the topping lift.
The boat moves smartly under 9′ oars, which are the longest that can be stored on deck. I row from a standing position in the cockpit so wouldn’t want to have to fight much of a wind, but if there’s a breeze, I could sail instead of row.
Finally, although I was initially reluctant to have a small outboard dangling from the transom, Gartside had included the arrangement in his plans, and I went with it. The first time I found myself in Baja’s Magdalena Bay in the face of a stiff wind and a foul tide, I felt lucky to have followed the designer’s lead. Aside from that episode, I’ve never felt the need to use my 5-hp Mercury propane motor for more than a few minutes at a time.
Scott Sadil
For singlehanded cruising the lugger has much to offer: its flat ’midships sections allow it to sit upright when beached; the small cabin proves comfortable shelter for overnights; and the uncluttered spacious cockpit with angled coamings is a relaxing place in which to sail or just sit and enjoy the view.
With the retractable rudder blade, the lugger can be beached and will sit level and upright on a flat bottom. I prefer not to beach if there is any surf and on extended voyages I tow an inflatable stand-up paddleboard, which I use as a tender.
Headroom is limited, and at anchor I spend much of my domestic time seated atop the cabinet between the galley and the centerboard trunk, my head poking through the companionway. With the hatch closed, however, and vented washboards in place, the cabin is dry, quiet, and cozy. A small fan forward adds to the luxury as I stretch out on the spacious berth.
Paul Gartside’s Design #166 has many of the attributes and even comforts not often associated with small boats. He calls it a small boat and “a very simple boat.” Both descriptions have much to do with point of view. Gartside is surely a master of boat design and building. For mere commonfolk like myself, his Design #166 is neither small nor simple; rather, it is a big boat for big adventure, and an elegant piece of his legacy.
Scott Sadil decided he needed to learn how to sail while he was building his first boat, TÍA, a Chesapeake Light Craft Northeaster Dory, a dozen years ago. He is currently the angling editor at Gray’s Sporting Journal and the author of six books, both fiction and nonfiction, that weave essays and stories into the sport of fly-fishing.
Centerboard Lugger Design #166 Particulars
[table]
LOD/19′ 10″
LWL/18′ 11″
Beam/7′ 6″
Draft/1′–4′
Displacement/1,405 lbs
Ballast/304 lbs
Sail area/214 sq ft
Mizzen/23 sq ft
Main/191 sq ft
[/table]
Plans for Paul Gartside’s Design #166 are available from gartsideboats.com, $360. Study plans are also available: $20 for electronic delivery, $40 for printed.
Is there a boat you’d like to know more about? Have you built one that you think other Small Boats readers would enjoy? Please email us!
For more than a half-century I have explored many of the Minnesota waterways from a canoe and although I have enjoyed much of that time fishing from it, the idea of trolling or casting for hours on end is not, to my bewilderment, met with as much enthusiasm by my wife and two kids. Our 17′ canoe is more boat than I needed for what has become an individual activity, and I wanted something much more portable and nimble—a solo canoe. Purchasing a new canoe was never going to be an option due to limited resources, and reasonably priced used solo canoes don’t become available often. So, I decided I’d attempt to build one as a winter project.
My criteria for choosing a design revolved around the following: stable enough for trolling or casting, ease of transport on and off my car roof rack, light enough to portage, uncomplicated construction for a first-time boatbuilder, and affordability.
Mike Hoyt
With the two end pieces joined together, the canoe takes shape as the sides are curled up. The seams that will become the chines end short of the stems and are reinforced with small plywood patches, epoxied in place, to ease the transition there from angled chine to curved bow.
I found many resources on the web for one-sheet, lapstrake, and tortured-plywood designs. After finding and browsing Michael Maddox’s site, I settled on his Hiwassee Wanderer design because I felt like it fit well with my key criteria. As Michael wrote, the “canoe is designed to combine classic aesthetics with simplicity of construction. It features a traditional recurved bow and is well within the abilities of a first-time amateur builder.”
I purchased the plan set online and promptly received PDF files for the two sheets of 1:5-scale measured drawings, one with the patterns for the five plywood hull components and the other detailing the single frame and its gussets, the breasthooks, thwarts, and seat supports. The 12 pages of instructions included informative drawings and color photographs detailing every step in the construction process. Michael’s clearly written instructions walked me through each step of construction in a sequence that was easy to follow. The construction doesn’t require any special tools—most people probably own (or are able to borrow) the necessary tools and equipment for the project.
Mike Hoyt
Stitch-and-glue construction often uses wire to close the seams, but zip ties make it easier to align the joined plywood edges.
The hull of the Hiwassee Wanderer requires three sheets of marine-grade 1⁄4″ plywood—fir, judging by the looks of the plywood in the photographs—but I opted to use 4mm okoume instead. I built the rest of the components from scrap materials I had on hand or wood purchased from a big-box lumberyard. When I had all my tools and materials gathered, I was ready to begin the build. I consider myself a competent woodworker but would never claim to be a master carpenter. I was familiar and comfortable with the tools required for this project and found it easy to construct the canoe without assistance.
The plans provide thorough instructions for drawing the hull shapes on the plywood. After the two end pieces are cut out they are butted together and the “floor block” is epoxied in place over the joint.
Peter H. Thompson, www.phtpht.com
The outwales and the inwales (which are installed here in sections between thwarts and frames) were not indicated in the plans but reinforce the sheer and make the canoe easier to grip from anywhere along its length.
Shaping the hull with the stitch-and-glue process was new to me, and as I slowly ratchet-strapped the flat assembled panels I was surprised at how they curled up to take the shape of the canoe. As the seams between the bottom and sides closed, they formed the hard chines amidships and forced curves into the ends. Working slowly while tightening the zip ties that close the seams helps ensure even alignment of the joined edges. Using zip ties was easy and much more efficient than twisting copper wire. A friend who had built her first dinghy told me that using copper wire to stitch the seams together was the hardest part of the process.
Two slightly curved rectangular plywood panels measuring 63 1⁄2″ × 11″ fill the gaps on the sides of the hull. They’re zip-tied to the bottom panel at the chine and butt-blocked on their ends.
Peter H. Thompson, www.phtpht.com
With the author aboard, the Wanderer sits lightly on the water and its wide bottom provides good stability.
After the hull had taken shape and all the zip ties were in place I tacked the seams with epoxy thickened with fumed silica. It took some trial and error to get the ratio to achieve the right viscosity, and my skills improved as the project progressed. After the epoxy had cured, I cut and removed the zip ties, applied fillets of thickened epoxy to the chines inside the hull, and filled the gaps outside. Finally, after sanding them smooth, I applied fiberglass tape to the chines, inside and out.
The instructions suggest “the builder may choose to fiberglass the entire hull and/or encapsulate it in 2 or 3 coats of marine epoxy for increased water resistance and added durability.” I sheathed the exterior with fiberglass and epoxy. I installed the breasthooks, thwarts, frame, and the wood-slat seat (woven webbing is an option) as directed by the instructions but held off on installing the keel to see how the canoe would handle without it.
Peter H. Thompson, www.phtpht.com
The raised seat makes for a comfortable paddling position and facilitates getting in and out of the canoe.
I finished the canoe in roughly 100 hours over three weeks and I think most builders, even novices, should be able to take on this project without too much difficulty. If you want to varnish the plywood, slow down, as all the imperfections caused by hastily done work will show. You can prolong the enjoyment of the process by reducing the urge to cut corners.
Mike Hoyt
The Wanderer can be easily lifted on and off roof racks. The Kevlar skid plates applied to the ends are not in the plans but offer strength and protection.
I took the canoe out on a local lake for my first test paddle. It was very easy to transport on my car’s roof rack and was light enough to portage, without a yoke, from the parking lot to shore without difficulty. The conditions were mild to moderate winds. Once afloat for the first time, I was impressed with the initial stability, an important characteristic in a solo canoe that I’d use for fishing. With no keel the canoe did not track as well as the tandem canoes with which I was familiar, but I attributed some of this to the canoe’s shorter length and ample rocker.
Peter H. Thompson, www.phtpht.com
The light weight of the Wanderer makes it an easy carry. Here its partial-length keel is visible.
After about five days on the water and a few email exchanges with Michael about how the canoe was performing, I decided to add the keel. It was, after all, part of his original design and I figured it would help. After installing the keel, I took the canoe on a multi-day fishing trip on a small trout lake in northern Minnesota. For most of the time the conditions were mild, and I explored a body of water new to me at a casual pace. I was out of cellular service and there hadn’t been any bad weather forecast for the area, so I was caught off guard when a storm moved in. As the sky darkened and the winds picked up, I did my best to get off the water, but did not make it before being challenged by horizontal gusts of hail and whitecaps. It was not an ideal position to be in, but it did give me some assurance that the canoe had good stability. I got safely back to shore.
The addition of the keel did improve tracking, but not dramatically given the short waterline. I found that using a slightly longer paddle made my J-stroke more effective for course corrections by giving me more reach over the wide beam. I paddled for a day with a double-bladed kayak paddle, and it was easier to maintain a straight course with that than it was with the canoe paddle. Although I found the kayak paddle too cumbersome for use while fishing and trolling, if fishing is not a priority, I recommend using one with the Wanderer. The canoe maneuvers easily and can be rotated in place and repositioned quickly. When trolling I found it helpful to set the canoe across the wind so that its ample freeboard caught the gusts for a slow sideways drift.
Michael Maddox
As designed, the sheer is unreinforced by inwales or outwales, keeping weight to a minimum.
The raised seat was among the reasons I chose the Wanderer. At my age, I don’t want to sit or kneel on the bottom of a canoe. The seat height is quite comfortable and affords a good upright paddling position, even after five hours on the water, and it helps with entry and exit at the shore. There is plenty of leg room and enough space between the seat and the forward thwart for my fishing gear.
DeAnna Oliver Maddox
With designer Michael Maddox aboard, the Wanderer sits right on its lines with the stems touching the water.
After logging 30 to 40 hours in the Hiwassee Wanderer, I could happily confirm that it met all my initial criteria. It is extremely stable for solo fishing and provides ample room for gear. Compared to a tandem canoe it is much easier to throw onto the roof of my car for transport, which means I will get on the water more frequently and for more hours at a time. And it is certainly a more cost-effective option than purchasing a new or used solo canoe. Perhaps even more important, building it was a very enjoyable project.
Mike Hoyt is a Kanaka Maoli currently living on Dakota homeland, Bde Ota Othunwe, Mni Sota Makoce, Minneapolis, Minnesota. He is an independent professional artist and the Creative Community Director at the Pillsbury House Theatre.
The path to a first boatbuilding adventure is not always straight, nor even obvious. For some, boats have been a lifelong passion, stemming from childhood when school notes were embellished with doodled sailboats, or scrap-wood vessels were towed on the end of a string across driveways and puddles. For others, like Reid Schwartz, the journey was more oblique.
Reid Schwartz grew up in the Lake Sunapee region of New Hampshire, and while his family didn’t have boats of their own, he often went paddling with neighborhood friends whose family owned two canoes. But Reid was drawn more to arts and crafts than boats, and after high school he went to the Massachusetts College of Art to study sculpture and printmaking. It was there that he discovered a love of tools. “While trying to learn blacksmithing,” he recalls, “I made blades and hatchets…my professors were not amused.”
Reid Schwartz
In the course of researching indigenous crafts and canoes, Reid learned that when suitable birch for canoe building was hard to find, Native Americans improvised, initially trading for bark from other regions, or, by the late 1800s, for manmade materials such as canvas. By the late 20th century, the preferred fabric in parts of Canada was waterproofed tarpaulin. When Reid built his own canoe in this more recent tradition, he used a PVC-coated truck tarp for the skin.
After graduating in 2006, Reid took an apprenticeship with a cabinetmaker and learned skills that would allow him to make a modest income by taking odd jobs. He moved to New York City to work in commercial illustrating, but it was in making things in his spare time that he found his true calling; after the crash of 2008 he rented a studio in which to start “making for work. I built furniture, cabinets, outfitted galleries with displays, took repair jobs on old windows, and dabbled in restoration carpentry.” He also carried on with his blacksmithing and taught himself how to make woodcarving knives.
In 2016, he took a very part-time gig in a boatyard in Westport, Massachusetts, restoring the interior of a fiberglass sailboat built in the 1970s. And, around the same time, he brought into his own shop a late-1800s Rushton wood-and-canvas canoe for restoration. During the weekdays he was tearing the sailboat back to rough, splintered fiberglass, and in the evenings and weekends he was falling in love with the canoe. “Something about the mass and complexity of the sailboat left me craving boats I could actually pick up and carry. But it was also the lines of the canoe. It was very much an interpretation of Abenaki birchbark canoes, which were still being traditionally made in the late 1800s and were considered some of the most desirable canoes of their day.”
The canoe restoration led Reid to look into the history and origins of the Abenaki type. As he delved ever deeper into native canoe-building he came across César’s Bark Canoe, an hour-long documentary by Bernard Gosselin that follows César Newashish, a 67-year-old Atikamekw of the Manawan Reserve north of Montréal, as he builds a birchbark canoe, from felling the tree in the forest to paddling the finished boat on the reserve’s lake. Watching the “sublimely skilled and deft-handed craftsman build his boat with the materials at hand in the boreal forest, was absolutely jaw-dropping,” Reid says. “Virtually all the timber he worked was split, hewn, and shaved to outrageously fine proportions using the most wondrous indigenous tool—the crooked knife.”
For Reid, seeing “such critical and intuitive understanding of material” had the effect of “grabbing a thick bundle of loose strings in my head—toolmaking, woodworking, art, history, my love of nature and interest in trees and their growth, the desire to work from the log and to choose my own tree—and tying them together in my mind.”
Cody Nowell
Created in the Cree tradition, Reid’s crooked knives have yellow-birch handles carved by axe and knife, finished with tung oil, and hand-forged steel blades. Unlike the scooping cut of a spoon knife, the crooked knife carves out a gentle hollowing cut.
But Reid was still far from building a bark canoe. He set out to make a crooked knife and learn how to use it. “It is a notoriously difficult tool to use when you first pick it up,” he says. There is no standard one-size-fits-all crooked knife. This Native American multipurpose tool is designed to be used, most often, gripped palm up and drawn toward the user to shave and carve wood. It is particularly adapted to carving long, flat objects like the frames and ribs of a birchbark canoe. The shape of the crooked knife varies from tribe to tribe and from craftsman to craftsman. There are, says Reid, not many native-made crooked knives around, and those that do exist “represent the quirks of the maker. The tool is very particular—different users and cultural groups prefer different functional details. They are tools that can be broadly similar but individually distinctive.”
Over time, Reid studied and tried many knives until he found some shapes that worked for him. Eventually he started making knives for himself and then making them to sell.
His knives don’t suit everyone, he says, nor do they suit every task, and “you only really know if a knife is right for you if you’re using it on the right material—wood split from a round.” This led Reid to another step on his path to boatbuilding: green woodworking. “I had to learn how to use wood that’s fresh cut. It was exciting but challenging. I started to see firsthand how variable wood growth is and that if I wanted to have a decent time splitting, hewing, and shaving, I had to be more careful about my choices in the field.” Reid began to see not only the tree but also how the ecology and landscape affects the tree and its wood. As he explored his family’s property looking for suitable woods on which to practice the carving skills for building a traditional canoe, he started thinking about bark.
Reid Schwartz
When harvesting summer bark, a vertical cut is made according to the length of bark required. Because the cut is made vertically very few of the capillaries working sap and nutrients up and down the trunk are disturbed, and since the bark fibers run in circumference it will tear off cleanly at the top and bottom of the harvest site, with no horizontal cuts needed. If harvested in the late spring, when new bark is being first formed, the bark almost pops off the tree and is at its most smooth. A healthy tree will survive losing as much as 20′ of bark if harvested correctly.
“Suitable canoe bark,” Reid says, “is very hard to find; it’s not as simple as finding a birch tree with white bark. A usable canoe birch tree, Betula papyrifera, needs a lot of girth without flare—it needs to hold its girth all the way up, staying nice and straight. It can’t have bumps or scars, and, even then, the bark has to be the right thickness and when you bend it through 90° in either direction, the layers must stay firm, without delaminating or splitting. It’s a really tall order. You have to cover a lot of ground and look at a lot of trees.” Reid became a forager, hunting through the woods near his home for the right canoe birch tree.
He snapped up every book on bark canoes that he could find. He discovered the writings and drawings of Edwin Tappan Adney, who is famed for his documentation of the history and different styles of indigenous bark canoes. Reid read and learned; he practiced splitting and shaving with his crooked knife, but still he wasn’t ready to build his own bark canoe.
In 2015, Reid went to the Peabody Essex Museum in Massachusetts to hear Passamaquoddy birchbark artist David Moses Bridges talk about canoe building. “He was very gracious about my overbrimming interest,” says Reid. “And we got talking about tools and bark and digging roots. He encouraged me to get my hands on the materials, and the very next day I peeled some bark to make my first model.”
Two years later, Reid and his wife moved back to New Hampshire, to settle near his parents on a piece of family-owned land. There, he met Bill Gould, an Abenaki basket maker, snowshoe maker, sawyer, and member of the Nulhegan Band of the Coosuk Abenaki Nation. Bill invited Reid to help him build two bark canoes—a 10-footer and a 12-footer—with materials they harvested. “Before we knew it, we had a 10′ canoe, a 12′ canoe, and a 14′ canoe in the works. From one to the next, our technique improved, and we learned a tremendous amount. Perhaps the greatest learning curve came when we were working with roots to make gunwale lashings. Roots have a few challenges. You have to be choosy about where you dig. The trees have to be spread out enough that their roots aren’t just tangled together in massive mats—plus if the ground’s too rocky the roots grow kinky. Then, once you’ve found them, peeling the roots is tricky. At first, we tried whittling the bark off, but it took hours and hours, and you need 600′ or more for a canoe. But, after a while, we learned that if you boil the roots, the bark and pitch just slide off, and once the root is soft, splitting it down the center is very easy.”
Reid Schwartz
The gunwales, pre-soaked for a week, are shaped at temporary cross spalls at the thwart stations. Sheer is introduced by weighting the gunwale and raising the ends up onto blocks. The gunwales are left to take shape for a week.
Building a birchbark canoe starts with the skin of the boat. The bark is laid out, with its exterior facing upward so that the smooth inner layer of the bark becomes the outside of the canoe, and a temporary bottom frame is set on top of it, weighted down with rocks. The sides are folded up into a flat-bottomed, vertical-sided trough in the rough shape of a canoe. The gunwales—typically northern white cedar, but spruce and pine are also used—are fitted along the top of the bark, inside and out, and pegged through before being lashed around and through with split and shaved spruce roots woven tightly to bind the gunwales and form the sheer. The temporary frame is removed, and the final curved shape of the canoe is then created with the placement of tight-fitting pre-bent ribs, which are tapped under the gunwales bringing the bark into tension. As the ribs are set in place, planking, fashioned from finely shaved staves, is fed between them and the bark skin to produce a strong, watertight hull. The ribs force the hull into the desired shape, whether flare-sided, high or low tumblehome, narrow and round-bottomed, wide and flat-bottomed; it can also have as much rocker as the builder desires, from flat to heavily raised. The only restriction on shape is the bark itself. “The challenge,” says Reid, “is to tailor the shape in the very first step, when the bark is laid out.”
That summer, Reid and Bill built several canoes with varying success. “It took me several full-sized boats to figure out what was going on,” Reid says. “My first had way too much rocker; it was like a banana. It was solid and watertight but hard to paddle because it was so tender. The next was flat-bottomed, but the ribs were not tight enough and needed shimming, and once I’d done that, there were a lot of leaks.”
Reid Schwartz
The tarp (as it would be with a birchbark skin) is laid out on the ground, and the temporary frame, weighted down with rocks, is laid out on top of it. The gunwales, with thwarts in place, are supported by struts anchored to the temporary frame.
By fall, Reid was more experienced but broke. He went back to making tools for sale and thinking about his next steps. In the course of their harvesting, Reid and Bill had realized that there were very few suitable birch trees for canoe building. If Reid built another canoe, finding bark to harvest was clearly going to be an issue. He began researching indigenous canoes built in regions where birchbark is scarce.
He learned that the Cree, one of the largest tribes in Canada, from the late 1800s had adapted their canoes to be built with canvas skins. “Indigenous builders,” says Reid, “are, without fail, ingenious and practical, combining their labor with an intimate understanding of natural materials. The Cree of the Ungava peninsula in Québec, used many of the same techniques as the Abenaki, but the native birches in their area are so small that to build a canoe you have to sew a quilt of small squares. So, they began trading for larger sheets of bark from other regions or even other materials. By 1908, canvas had become the dominant material and produced a canoe that was considered superior for its smoothness and light weight, but was less durable than the birchbark canoes.” In more recent times, “probably in the second half of the 20th century,” says Reid, “the Innu, in the eastern portion of the Québec-Labrador Peninsula, took this one step further and used a pre-coated tarpaulin, the kind used to cover goods on trucks. The great advantage of the tarpaulin over canvas,” he says, “is that it’s already waterproof.”
Reid Schwartz
The tarp is pulled up around the temporary bottom frame weighted down with rocks. The temporary thwarts have introduced flare to the canoe’s sides, and the gunwales further define the sheer.
Reid ordered some 18-oz PVC-coated truck tarps to have on hand for a canoe skin when he turned up the wood he’d need for the project.
Shortly after the tarps arrived, in April 2022, some large white pines on the family property were felled and sawn by a portable bandsaw mill to make boards for a barn his parents were building. “I crawled over the slash and pulled out the waste created by squaring off the round logs. I set about splitting some, and the wood was of much better quality than I’d expected. If it weren’t for the pitch all over my hands and clothes, it would be rather pleasurable to work pine this way.”
As with a native canoe, every part of Reid’s boat is based on measurements of the body: “from fingertip to fingertip on outstretched arms, single arm length, handspan, all the way down to finger widths—it’s very handy, especially when working with rough balks of wood that aren’t easy to measure with a tape.”
Each piece for the rib blanks and the gunwale was hewn out by axe to close proportion and then shaved by crooked knife. He shaped all the pieces and left them to soak in the old industrial-site millpond across the street from his house. Over the course of the summer, he would grab a handful of blanks each weekend, split them as close as possible to the finished dimension, and then fine-tune the edges and faces with a crooked knife. After the ribs soaked for a week, he bent them into their final shape, and set them to dry. “I bent them by eye,” says Reid, “in bundles of eight to ten ribs. The bundle is lashed tight in the center and then the rope is tied around the ends to draw the whole into a U, which is checked for shape against the gunwales. By nesting the ribs in bundles, you get graduation in the bends, which you need to form the shape of the canoe. Of the 50 ribs I made, I used about 40 in the finished boat.”
For gunwales, Reid used more of the pine again roughed-out with an axe and trimmed with a crooked knife. After the pieces soaked for a week, the gunwales were set up around temporary cross spalls at the thwart locations. The ends were held together with notched sticks. “Once the gunwales’ form is set up end-to-end,” Reid explains, “it gets bent into its sheer profile. It’s laid out on the ground with heavy rocks on boards pressing the middle down, while the ends are lifted up and held on blocks. After a week, the temporary spreaders can all be removed, mortises are cut in, and the thwarts are fit in their places. The temporary building frame on the bottom is made the same way, except that it has transverse crosspieces screwed along the lengths of its ‘chines’ to carry the rocks that weigh the frame down.”
Reid Schwartz
Creating the stems was probably the hardest part of the construction. The tight bend at the top is created by cutting two V-shaped grooves into the inside face of the board and then bending the board across them under tension. If the grooves are too deep, the board will snap; too shallow and the extreme bend will be unattainable.
The trickiest part of the build was producing the stems. It took Reid five attempts to get them to bend to shape without breaking. “To produce symmetrical ends,” he explains, “both stems are bent as a single wide board. The board is bent to the arc of the stem profile” which is carved in the ends of the planking and then split into two matching pieces. Each of those is then split down the middle to sandwich the edges of the fabric at each end of the canoe. The upper end of the stem must be hard bent to about 90 degrees to lie parallel with the gunwale and form the peak at the bow. To achieve this bend, two V-shaped grooves are cut across the inside face, leaving a few growth rings intact to form the outside of the bend. Finding good grain and figuring out the right depth for the grooves was the key to getting a bend instead of a break.”
By late fall, Reid had all the parts shaped and ready. For his building bed, he used a flat patch of the lawn outside his house and laid out his tarp. Using tarp for his canoe’s skin also introduced new challenges, he says. “Instead of folding it or cutting gores to take up the extra skin as it comes to the gunwales, I subtly puckered it between temporary staples. Until I added the planking between the skin and the ribs it looked very ripply, but once the planking was in place, even though some puckering remains along the gunwales, overall, it’s very smooth. For the permanent attachment to the gunwales and stems, I used clench nails.”
Throughout the process—splitting and hewing a log to a rough balk, and then carefully shaving it to an even board—Reid used hand tools. “It goes from coarse to fine,” he says. “I start with a wedge or froe, then an axe, and finally, to the crooked knife,” the tool that started the whole adventure.
Reid Schwartz
Framing out the canoe. The pre-formed ribs are set in place, tapped up under the gunwales. As the builder works from stem to stem, finely-shaved staves are slid in between the ribs and the skin to create a strong, watertight boat.
Reid ribbed out the canoe on his 39th birthday at the end of October. Working alone, he would complete the entire build two weeks later. On November 5, 2022, he launched his tarp-skinned canoe. It is 15′ 6″ long, has a beam of 37 1⁄4″ and a depth amidships of 14 1⁄4″; it weighs just 48 lbs. Built of white pine, red spruce, balsam fir, and PVC tarpaulin, it was the culmination of an eight-year-long odyssey.
As canoes go, Reid’s is relatively narrow. “We are more accustomed to wide-bottomed canoes today, with nearly upright or tumblehomed sides and a very broad bottom that nearly matches the beam. But in native canoe building there are both wide- and narrow-bottomed canoes. Narrow canoes have more flare to the sides with the broadest part of the bottom being only two-thirds or less of the beam. They can have a hard or soft chine with a round, flat, or even shallow-V bottom. Mine is narrow with a soft chine and round bottom, which should be the most tender combination. But as I’ve used the canoe, I’ve discovered that it feels at its least stable when it’s upright, and as it leans to either side the stability quickly firms up against the flared sides.”
Cody Nowell
Normally, when paddling alone, Reid shifts his weight forward to just aft of the center thwart. That prevents the bow from lifting out of the water (as seen here) which reduces the waterline length and impacts the directional stability of the canoe.
It was not until spring, some months after the build, that Reid was able to use the canoe on a regular basis, but then he went out on the millpond nearly every day. With only his own weight in the canoe, he says, “I paddle from a kneeling position to keep gravity low and settle my weight off center to the port side just aft of the center thwart. That keeps the waterline as long as possible and gets me close to the gunwale for comfortable paddling. As the canoe tips it becomes more stable, feeling firmer as the gunwales lean harder toward the water. When I’m seated low and well aft, even the initial tenderness is pretty mellow, but shifting back to lean against the second thwart sacrifices some speed—with so much rocker, it’s easy to have the bow pop up out of the water and thereby lose some waterline length and speed. It’s still responsive to a J stroke, but it does have a slight propensity to oversteer when the bow is out of the water. That issue disappears completely with more weight aboard.”
Reid Schwartz
Despite being narrow, Reid’s canoe is flat-bottomed enough that it will sit upright when beached, making it easy to load. The backrest is simply lashed to the center thwart so that it is easily removed and adjusted.
Before embarking on longer outings, Reid tested the canoe under load. “I added sandbags to the bow and forward middle sections, 25 lbs at a time. Any weight added to the bow greatly increased stability. With all my sandbags loaded plus the folding cart that I had used to bring them to the canoe, I had about 120 lbs on board with me. It brought the canoe to its waterline and made it feel extremely stable. Now I could move back to the most comfortable paddling position all the way aft, perched on the stern thwart. Sitting there is as comfortable as sitting in a chair, and the canoe is very narrow at that point, so I’m paddling as close to my body as possible with the paddle strokes working not far from the centerline. Tracking was very good. I was simply at ease and hugely impressed by the canoe’s stability.” It was, says Reid, a day of confidence boosting, and demonstrated that the canoe performed best when loaded. “It made perfect sense for a working boat,” he says. “Canoes were built to be picked up and carried, but they also needed to be load carriers. It was exciting to prove that in practice.”
As spring turned to summer, the rains came to New England and as the millpond dam burst twice within a month, Reid scaled back his boating, but he’d had enough time on the water to test the durability of the canoe’s tarp skin. “By June there were lots of scrapes and several gouges in it, but it seems they’re only superficial. The coating scuffs back to the woven-fiber core, but that stays intact. The millpond has quite a few sharp granite boulders lurking just beneath the surface. I’ve hung up, scraped, and crashed hard onto them. The flexibility of the tensioned ribs and floating planks seems to be very robust, and the canoe stayed as dry as can be.”
Cody Nowell
After rough-shaping the paddle with an axe, Reid fine-tunes with a crooked knife, holding the tool palm up and drawing it towards his body.
In the course of all his trials, Reid decided the thing he was not completely happy with, was the paddle. He had carved it to use on his 12′ birchbark canoe, which has less freeboard, and it was too short for the new boat. He decided to make a new one. Working in white pine, he hewed it to the outline and established the tapers and volumes with an axe before carving it to the finished dimensions with his crooked knife. He prefers a long, narrow paddle blade and says that he finds it appealing that “indigenous paddle design is rooted in the same anthropometric measurements as the canoe—everything is made to one’s own personal scale. The paddle’s blade width is limited to the span that can be comfortably gripped between the curled tips of the thumb and middle finger. This keeps the paddle from being so broad that the user pushes too much water and tires quickly. The long, narrow blade sacrifices power, but is conducive to the J stroke and the box stroke. The trade-off is worth it. I’ve even used it for sculling when I’ve needed to be completely silent on the water.”
Reid Schwartz
While the canoe is relatively narrow, at 15′6″ long there is ample room for two passengers (plus toddler) and all their gear. By stowing the cargo in the bow, the weight is well distributed and the canoe is at its most stable.
With the paddle finished and the summer bark-harvesting season upon him, Reid set off through his family property in search of bark with which to make birchbark canisters that he plans to sell at a local craft event in the fall. With his tarp-skinned canoe he had a stable mode of transport with excellent load-carrying capability.
Reid Schwartz
For a young family living in an area with many easily accessed freshwater lakes, the canoe is proving to be the ideal boat: light enough to get up onto the car roof rack without too much effort, stable enough to protect the passengers, and large enough to carry all the gear for a long day’s outing. The tarp skin has withstood bumping over rocks in the shallows and even coming in hard and getting stuck fast on a sharp-angled rock. The outer layer scuffs, but the weaving beneath remains intact.
He continued to use the boat almost every day, weather permitting, and in mid-July, finally took the family—himself, wife Cody, and toddler son—for a picnic outing. “We car-topped to a favorite lake,” Reid says, “packed a lunch, swimming gear, and all the baby stuff. We traversed the lake and cruised the shady side of a few coves before settling on a protruding rock for lunch. The canoe turns out to be the perfect family boat—it was a relaxed, happy day…the first of many.”
Jenny Bennett is managing editor of Small Boats. When he’s not out on the water with his family, Reid Schwartz continues to make knives by hand and eye. He sells them via his website.
If you have an interesting story to tell about your adventures with a small boat, please email us a brief outline and a few photos.
The perfect oarlock socket exists, and you can make it in a modestly equipped home workshop. These sockets are very strong, precisely machined, and will never corrode or need lubrication. I got this design from avid rower Rick Thompson. Installed in 2010, his original pair are still going strong and they have never squeaked!
The secret ingredient is a $6 Oilite bushing. Oilite is sintered oil-impregnated bronze: powdered metal coalesced into a porous solid, permanently holding lubricant in its interstices. In use, oil travels through the pores of the material to lubricate the bearing surface. Commonly used in motors and machines, Oilite bushings are available in a huge range of sizes including the 1⁄2″ and 5⁄8″ inside diameters that perfectly match commercially available oarlocks.
To make these sockets, you will need:
Oilite sleeve bearings about 2″ long with an inside diameter equal to the diameter of your oarlock shafts. I made the sockets in these photos to fit Sawyer Super Strong oarlocks with a 5⁄8″ shaft. It is wise to purchase your oarlocks first to confirm that the shafts have been precisely turned; the sockets and oarlocks form a system and will work best if they match closely.
Plain bronze sleeve bearings. You will press the Oilite bearings into these to create a larger non-porous outer layer. This will stop the oil from leaching out of the bearing into the gunwales. Choose a size with an inside diameter equal to the outside diameter of your Oilite bearings and with a length 1⁄2″ less than the bearings. Brass bar stock 1⁄8″ thick and about 1 1⁄2″ wide; 3″ of length per oarlock socket is about right. Links to the pieces I purchased are listed below.
Photographs by the author
Within the plain bronze bearing there is an Oilite sleeve bearing. It is this extra element that makes the socket a superior product and cuts down on the squeaking so often heard when oarlocks rub within their sockets.
To assemble your sockets, first push each Oilite bearing into a bronze sleeve bearing until it bottoms out. While an arbor press would probably be ideal for this, I had no trouble using a low-quality 5″ bench vise.
Now, make mounting plates from the brass bar. First, make a jig. Route a 1⁄8″ recess the width of the bar and 3″ long into a scrap board. Bore three holes to clear the bits you will later use to drill the brass: a central hole larger than the outside diameter of your plain bronze bearing, and two peripheral holes larger than the holes you will drill for mounting screws. (When you lay out for these holes, extend the layout lines beyond the routed recess to the surrounding surface. You’ll later use these lines to transfer the location of the holes on your brass bar).
Before cutting the brass plate to size, it is covered in masking tape—to avoid scratching the surface—and held between two pieces of wood within the vice to further protect it and provide a guiding edge for the saw.
Before working the brass bar, protect it with a layer of masking tape. Insert the brass bar into the jig. Cover it with a scrap piece of wood, clamp the resulting sandwich in the vise, and cut along the edge of the jig with a hacksaw. Use a file to clean this cut down to the surface of the jig.
When drilling the holes into the jig it is important to make them just slightly oversized—the central hole is sized just larger than the outside diameter of the bronze bearing, the two side holes just larger than the screw holes in the socket plate.
Keep the bar in the jig for drilling. (The increased holding power provided by the jig makes drilling much safer, particularly as brass stock tends to catch on conventional drill bits and the brass can then spin.) Carry your layout lines onto the bar, then drill and countersink for the fastenings. Standard woodworking countersink bits should work well. Drill the smaller holes for the fastenings after the countersinks. Use a step drill to make a hole the size of your Oilite bushing’s outside diameter. As with the plain bronze sleeve bearing, the precision and standard sizing of these parts will allow for a tight press fit.
Take the sockets and plate to the vise and press the Oilite bushing into the large hole in the center of the plate; a hardwood block with a clearance hole drilled in will allow the bushing to extend past the top of the plate. When the plain bronze sleeve presses against the brass plate, your sockets are complete.
The finished sockets ready to be mounted on the boat. They make look identical, but the alignment of the screwholes is just slightly different on each. The author labeled the undersides so that if he ever needs to remove them he will be able to see easily which goes where.
I installed my 1″ outside diameter oarlock sockets into 1″ holes in the gunwale. Here’s how: first, drill a hole through the gunwale (or oarlock pad and gunwale) for the bearing. After pressing the socket assembly into place and carefully aligning it with the gunwale, temporarily install fastenings (I recommend brass bolts and nuts) then mark along the outside of the plate with a sharp knife. Remove the socket assembly, mortise inside your line to the depth of the plate, and complete the installation by bedding the hardware in compound, paint, or old varnish.
The four sockets I made all appear identical when installed on the boat. However, if you tried to swap them, you’d find that the location of the holes for the fastenings is not perfectly aligned. I was sure to scratch a label on the underside of each socket’s plate so that I can match them with the appropriate mortise on the gunwale in their proper orientation should they ever be removed for varnishing.
The perfect socket, made to measure for both oarlock and boat.
I have been exceedingly pleased with the quality of these home-brewed sockets and would put them up against anything on the market for quality. Try a set for yourself!
James Kealey lives and teaches in Richmond, California. When he’s not chasing his two young sons, he can usually be found banging away on some project in his garage workshop. In high school, he rowed in racing shells. He still gets away most summers for sail-camping trips on mountain lakes.
The materials James used were sourced from McMaster-Carr.
Audrey, aka Skipper, and I built ST. JACQUES, our little Penobscot 14, to row out on a nice day and ride back with the wind and tide to our launch spot. While I row, Skipper takes the helm and steers. She occasionally nods off, and we may veer off course. We recently added a nice piece of gear, the WaveFront TillerClutch, which can keep us on track while Skipper snoozes. And when I take ST. JACQUES out for a singlehanded row and sail, I can now have the TillerClutch mind the tiller while I attend to the many other nautical bits that often keep me pretty busy.
The TillerClutch works by locking on a control line that is run under the tiller and anchored port and starboard. When the device is activated by flipping the control lever down, it holds the tiller in the set position. Squeezing the lever partially upward momentarily releases the hold on the control line for quick adjustments. For an unrestricted tiller, the control lever is set in the full up position to allow the tiller to swing freely. In this position, there is enough clearance between the lever and the tiller to prevent finger pinching.
The body and handle are machined from marine-grade aluminum alloy, and the clutch spring and rivets are made from Type 316 marine-grade stainless steel, which has been passivated (treated with acid to create a protective oxide coating). The internal lever bushing is made from a self-lubricating synthetic material that requires no maintenance beyond a periodic freshwater rinse. The bushing also acts as an insulator to prevent dissimilar-metal galvanic corrosion. The body measures 3 1⁄8″ × 1″ × 1 1⁄8″, and the control lever toggle is 2 1⁄4″ long. The finish is superb, and the rounded edges of the control box feel smooth and safe to the touch. The clutch body can be mounted to tiller surfaces that are flat, rounded, or circular, with the recommended mounting location being on the underside of the tiller.
Photographs by the author
The TillerClutch offers three positions: fully engaged the clutch holds the tiller in a set position; partially engaged allows the helmsperson to move the tiller for course adjustments; fully released disenages the clutch so that the tiller can be used without restriction. The clutch is operated with a gentle squeeze of the hand.
The TillerClutch kit comes with an owner’s guide, detailed installation instructions, 12′ of 3⁄16″ braided control line, and two 1 3⁄4″ stainless-steel screws. WaveFront also sells additional hardware to facilitate installation, including V-cleats, cam cleats, pad-eyes, and even tillers. While the instructions call for installing the clutch 6″ to 7″ from the forward end of tiller, we installed it within Skipper’s easy reach from her accustomed perch well aft in the port quarter. She can still lean back against the transom, rest her arm on the tiller, and click the clutch on and off with the flick of a finger. This sternward clutch position lessens the mechanical advantage the clutch has to resist slipping, but our helm is very well balanced. Boats that have a heavier helm may need to have the clutch farther forward on the tiller.
The manufacturer recommends mounting the tiller 6″ or 7″ from the forward end of the tiller to keep it close to hand and also to maximize the mechanical advantage. They also recommend temporarily strapping the clutch to the tiller in order to find the optimum position before final fitting. The authors decided to mount their clutch farther aft so that it is within easy reach when leaning back on the transom.
We took the option provided in the instructions for small boats and attached the control line to pad-eyes fastened to the transom. With the lines back to the transom and close to the tiller’s rudderhead pivot point, we are still able to raise our tiller to its maximum limit. For larger boats, the control line is led through fairleads on the transom, then forward to jam cleats so the line can be released for unimpeded access to the stern or raising the tiller. For our boat, we only need to be able to remove the rudder for trailering, so one end of the line is secured with a bowline and on the other end we use several half hitches, so that we can slip the control line out of the clutch body.
The control lever is easy to operate and has a positive feel when shifted between the locked and unlocked positions. Under normal sailing and rowing conditions, the TillerClutch handles the rudder loads without slipping, and the tiller can also be repositioned in an emergency by pushing or pulling the tiller with more than 15 lbs of force to override the friction created by the clutch when it is engaged. When Skipper steers and I row, she usually unlocks the TillerClutch, but she has the option of locking it when she’s fixing to doze off. When I’m singlehanding the boat, I am very happy with the assistance provided by the clutch. It keeps the tiller straight while I’m rowing and when I’m sailing and need to move forward to tend the sail or centerboard. The TillerClutch is also very handy when transitioning between rowing and sailing.
The TillerClutch is working great and is allowing us more freedom on ST. JACQUES. It’s like having someone else aboard to mind the tiller. Made in the USA, it comes with a lifetime warranty, and the company has been very responsive to emails.
Audrey (Skipper) and Kent sail and row around the Tidewater region of Virginia when not restoring boats. They blog their mess-about adventures at Small Boat Restoration.
Photographs by the author
