The Beachcomber-Alpha Dory

Small-boat designer and builder Daniel Noyes launched his Beachcomber-Alpha dory—with some alterations—in 2008 as a kind of tribute to maritime historian John Gardner. Living as he does in Newbury, Massachusetts, he was well aware of the type, which originated in the late 1800s in nearby Marblehead. These towns are near Gloucester, north of Boston, where dories thrived in the schooner fisheries and were soon enough adapted as racing sailboats when the sport took hold in the late 1800s.

In the 1970s, Gardner documented the Beachcomber-Alpha dories not once but twice, first in his Building Classic Small Craft (International Marine, Camden Maine, 1977) and again in The Dory Book (International Marine, 1978). Gardner was a vocal advocate of traditional designs for small craft and also of traditional and practical construction. Dan’s dory touched water for the first time at WoodenBoat’s waterfront in Brooklin, Maine, hours before the Small Reach Regatta (SRR) in 2008. He brought it back again in 2009.

Lauren Noyes

Originally intended for spirited racing, the Beachcomber-Alpha dory can be an exciting handful to manage. With three crew, one handles the jibsheet, another the mainsheet, and the third steers by means of a continuous loop of line made off to a yoke over the rudderhead.

For boats like these dories, what has changed since Gardner’s day? Construction, primarily. Like many boatbuilders these days seeking materials that are readily available and also light in weight for their lapstrake hulls, Dan used marine plywood—1⁄4″ on the sides and 3⁄8″ on the bottom. But Dan elected to clench-nail the laps in the traditional way in addition to gluing them. A traditional builder who had worked at the Pert Lowell Company earlier, he was setting out on his first glued-lapstrake project, so “it felt a little bit safer with clench nails as well.” He sealed the inside with epoxy and paint and sheathed the outside in 6-oz fiberglass cloth set in epoxy.

Dan followed Gardner’s hull shape and construction plan closely but not exactly. After looking at one of the original boats in the Marblehead Historical Society collections, he decided to flatten the sheer by reducing its height by 1⁄2″ at each end and adding about 3⁄4″ amidships. Gardner himself wrote that he had actually added spring to the sheer in his rendition—and many might like it better that way, or at least to not stray from the plans—but Dan preferred to pay a little homage to the original boat he had seen. He used four sawn frames as Gardner called for.

“We kept the bottom rocker, although the bottom was flat in the original boat,” Dan said. “I really love the shape of the stern there—the ‘mackerel tail.’” In the old “cod’s head and mackerel tail” way of shaping a hull, the widest part of the boat is a little forward of amidships, with a long taper aft to the transom. “The widest point is up by the centerboard case, almost,” Dan says. “It’s definitely an old way of thinking about how to get a boat to go fast. I have a feeling it shapes the boat aft, reducing the suction around the transom area.”

Dan took considerable liberties with the sail plan, adding 3′ to the sail’s luff and 3′ to the foot to substantially increase the area. He wanted the boat to move well in the comparatively light airs of his home waters around Newbury. Some of his decisions would have probably tickled John Gardner, not to mention the old Marbleheaders. For his clench nails, for example, he used commonly available aluminum siding nails instead of harder-to-find and more expensive copper ones. His mainsail is cut from a cast-off old jib—a touch I have to believe that Gardner would have thought well of, and one that fits right in with the go-to-it tradition of the dory racers.

The Beachcomber-Alpha dories were always meant for racing, so it should come as no surprise that they are fast, by any measure. The name of the design itself comes from the two rival sail racing clubs, Beachcomber in Marblehead and Alpha in nearby Salem, that once used them for spirited competition. Like other dories of the era (among them the similar Swampscott, Nahant, and Chamberlain gunning dories), Beachcomber- Alphas were adapted and tweaked by experienced sailors who were always looking for ways to take the dory to new heights. Competition was their driving force, and sometimes they stretched the definition of what a dory is.

Lauren Noyes

These dories make excellent daysailers that not only can be launched from a trailer, but with the rudder stowed inside, can be beached and easily refloated.

With my own boat to manage and a lot of obligations at the SRR, I could join Dan and Joel Peck, his friend, co-builder, and co-sailor, only briefly in light air one midday. My first impression was that at 21′ LOA and 5′ beam, this is a big dory, and I found her to be quite stable. But in the bit of a zephyr we found that day, the boat still moved with remarkable ease. And, in watching her sail during the SRR weekend as we experienced breezes touching 20 knots, she seemed very stable in the blow, as well, with skipper and crew providing intelligent ballast on the weather rail. Dan and Joel sailed her off the beach after lunch one gusty day, and she shot out of there at a truly amazing pace. The sail doesn’t have reefpoints, relying instead on the change in sail shape when easing the mainsheet to reduce power. “It’s a bit overcanvased,” Dan admits, but he sails most often on Plum Island Sound in winds of “maybe 8 to 10 knots, where it would be 15 to 20 plus in Marblehead,” where the earlier racers used a smaller sail. If he were to build a boat for a client, he’d use something more like the original. “In the Gardner plans, the sail has a 15′ hoist and a 15′ boom. I used to sail a Sunfish that was 14′ × 14′, so I thought, what, this is a 21′ boat? But I can see where it [the Gardner sail plan] would be perfect in Marblehead. And then, I’ve been sailing dories since my Dad gave me a Chamberlain dory skiff when I was 14, so I have an idea about keeping right-side up.”

Steering a sailing dory—or any fine-ended double-ender—presents some challenges. A tiller for such a boat would be a ridiculously long thing, and it very likely would force one crewman to take his weight to leeward to steer—not a place where you want to have to go when it’s blowing 20 knots. I suppose that a page could be borrowed from racing dinghies by using a tiller with an athwartships extension, which would allow steering while keeping your weight on the weather rail, but even then such a long tiller would sweep a large and sometimes inconvenient arc. One time-honored solution on boats of this form is a push-pull tiller working fore-and-aft through a single-arm yoke fitted to the rudderhead. This can be very effective, though it takes a little getting used to. The longstanding solution in the Beachcomber-Alpha dories, however, has been to use a continuous loop of line made off to both ends of a two-armed steering yoke at the rudderhead. This works even better, because the crew can distribute their weight not only athwartships but also fore and aft and still be in reach of the steering. Unlike the push-pull system, there’s no long tiller to contend with during tacks or to flop overboard when launching or beaching. This loop system has been used in a lot of boats to very good effect—the lately very popular N.G. Herreshoff design Coquina uses the same idea—and it is truly amazing how easy it is to get used to it. Dan runs his steering loop only as far forward as the ’mid-ship thwart, which puts the line within easy reach, just as in Gardner’s drawings.

Even in the original boats, the mast had to be stayed, using one shroud per side and a forestay upon which the jib was hanked, so Dan followed suit for his larger sail area. The mainsheet is set up to distribute the load along the boom, which can therefore be rather light for its length. The rigging is more complicated than the stark simplicity found in many sailing dories, yet it takes only 10 or 15 minutes to get the boat set up and ready to sail after launching.

I didn’t have time to join in for a row, but Dan tells of how easy it is to get the boat moving with her two pairs of 9′ oars and how well she keeps up her pace. In a 5.5- mile rowing race on the Essex River last year, she came in only 20 minutes behind the first-place finisher—but Dan notes that his was the only boat in the class set up for sailing. All the others were designed to win rowing races, and the winner was a high-tech, fabric-covered hull pulled by a couple of athletic types. Not a bad showing for a design over a century old.

Lauren Noyes

Competitive sailing was in the genes from the beginning for the Beachcomber-Alpha dories, but builder Dan Noyes has also found that his boat can hold its own in rowing races against more modern competitors.

At the time that Gardner documented and celebrated dories and other historical small craft for the books he published in the 1970s, no one could have predicted how the small-boat resurgence he so longed for would play out in the coming decades. With mooring and dock space at a premium and seem- ing to cater to exceptionally large boats that are more often the rule than the exception these days, there seems to be a small-is-beautiful counterpoint going on. Comparatively small and light boats that can easily be kept at home and launched from a trailer are finding eager audiences of camp-cruisers, gunkholers, explorers, daysailers—and boatbuilders working predominantly in wood.

None of which is to say that the kinds of traditional boats Gardner held up to the world as worthy of attention and in need of respect have been superseded in any way. Far from it. In fact, what made traditional boats great in the first place still makes them worthy today. Plus, nine times out of ten, boats designed these days with the small-boat sailor in mind derive from one kind or another of traditional craft: Scandinavian faerings and Greenland kayaks above all, but sharpies, dories, Whitehalls, you name it. Time and use seem to prove the merit of adapting these traditional types anew again and again, rather than confining them to the history books.

“Last year,” meaning 2008, “they didn’t run the John Gardner workshop down at Mystic,” Dan said, meaning the John Gardner Small Craft Workshop at Mystic Seaport in Connecticut, a weekend gathering of traditional craft that Gardner, then a Mystic employee, started in the early 1970s. The event was canceled in 2008 but returned in 2009, albeit at a reduced scale. “So I thought it would be cool if I could build a John Gardner—one of his designs. I thought about a Merrimack wherry.” But that was only 12′ long, and he wanted something for camp-cruising. Gardner produced books full of plans showing every detail you needed to build the boats, a tactic he hoped would lead to a liberal proliferation of traditional types. “So I looked at the Beachcomber- Alpha, looked at the budget, and went for it. We had the SRR as a deadline, and banged it out in about a month and a half.” I never met John Gardner, but I can’t imagine a better kind of tribute.

John Gardner drew his lines for the Beachcomber-Alpha dory in the early 1970s. He made the sheer a bit flatter than usual for the type, which was used extensively for racing in Marblehead and Salem, Massachusetts.

John Gardner’s plans for the Beachcomber-Alpha dory suitable for construction, with extensive descriptions and including the table of offsets, are found in Building Classic Small Craft (International Marine, 1977), which is available from The WoodenBoat Store.