In the early 1980s, I bought Phil Bolger’s plans for the 15′ 6″ LOA Gloucester Light Dory. I was living in an apartment at the time, and I was intending this boat to be my first built to an “official” design. I had built furniture in my living room, and in those single-man days my dining room table was a large Black & Decker Workmate with a cover thrown over it when domesticity required, which wasn’t very often. Of the triumvirate of components for boat construction, though—place, time, money—one always came up short.While I bought tools and plans, sailboat racing and kayaking satisfied my waterlust. Eventually, projects other than the dory came along, most recently my own 18' Interminable Project Boat. It’s senseless to live anyplace without a boat, and Maine is like other places, only more so. I could wait no longer. I went back to my plans bank to find something simple, something I could use while the other boat awaited my attention. A Swampscott dory was a contender, but that sail would add cost and time. The dog ate the Kingston Lobsterboat plans, sparing me those lovely time-consuming curves. There were others, too, but in the Gloucester Light Dory I found what I was looking for. The boat has no rig, no outboard, no systems, no complexity. It’s a pure rowing machine. Besides, I already had the plans, so I was ahead $25. Phil Bolger’s Gloucester Light Dory design is at its very best for solo rowing, although it will also carry a surprising quantity of gear.
Photo by Benjamin Mendlowitz
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Thanks, Tom. Any recommendation as to oar length?
Brad,
Payson’s book, How to build the Gloucester Light Dory, recommends 7′ oars.
I use 8’ spoon blades and I love them. I row several days per week year round and compete in several races a year. Also, I’m 6’1”. So for someone smaller, maybe the 7’ will work. Also, when I get tired, I simply row with overlapped hands, thus reducing length by 6”. Good luck, great boat.
Very sensible boat. Knowing you are always interested in finding ways to improve, a suggestion: add flip-out oarlocks to increase the spread, and row with a pair of oars a foot or more longer. My guess is that rowing performance will be greatly improved, and rower’s hands will be at the right height, with no changes in hull shape or size. As seen in the picture here, the blades are burying deep and the rower is forced to work much harder than necessary. Of course, when stowing longer oars is a problem, you could always switch back to shorter blades. A low-cost experiment worth trying?
A touch of the Kinney Dory here!
To my taste, I would have preferred a version with an optional sail rig.
Nice looking boat though.
Bolger himself would have discouraged this notion, on the grounds that a boat with such a narrow bottom would have almost no sail-carrying ability.
There was a recent article about a couple who tried a small sail rig on the Gloucester during a long rowing expedition, and they agreed with Bolger, who said it was a bad idea. Only directly downwind did they find it safe.
I built one 20+ years ago with the Dynamite Payson book, using 1/4″ plywood throughout.
I took it to the Bowron Lakes circuit in British Columbia, 73 miles of lakes, rivers and land bridges and it performed excellently and was light enough to portage. It was quite a standout among the many canoes and kayaks normally found on the circuit.
Hello John Leyde,
I have two 4×16 sheets of 1/4″ marine plywood. Did you add more strength to your boat with epoxy? Do you know if two sheets is enough to do the whole boat? Bowron Lakes has been on our list for a long time, but we got distracted by the Churchill River system in Northern Saskatchewan.
Doug,
Yes, you can do the whole boat with two sheets of 16′ ply. Both sides can be gotten out of one sheet and the bottom out of the other, which, I think is 12′ long. Harold Payson built his with a chine log. I did a fillet-and-fiberglass-tape joint for the chines and it was plenty strong.
I think I just fiberglassed the bottom panel. Doing the whole boat would add some rigidity and strength.
So fun to read this article! My son and I built Bolger’s dory when he was in middle school. We stopped by Dynamite Payson’s house a number of years before that to buy the plans and had a wonderful chat and visit in his shop, and he sent the plans soon after. Just as in this account, the plans sat on a shelf for years before we actually got around to building the boat.
I would love to say that we used the boat extensively, but that was not the case – time and exposure to the weather took its toll, and the transom rotted, but I brought the boat with me to Maine when we moved here, and finally, this past summer, cut the transom off and fit a new one on. It was meatball surgery and the fix relies on a considerable amount of thickened epoxy to make it work, but, with a new coat of paint, the boat looked pretty good from 25 feet!
The impetus for getting it going this summer was that we put our sailboat on a mooring here in Georgetown after it sat on the hard for 6 years, and we needed a tender to get to it! As Tom points out, the dory makes for a pretty tender tender, but it works. How silly does it look for a 23′ sailboat to be towing a 15′ dinghy behind it, but who cares 🙂 It actually tracks very well and is light, so it did not impair the sailing qualities of the boat and it is one of the best-looking dinghies at the marina 🙂
Thanks for sharing!
Jason Thatcher
I’ve always admired the simple elegance of Bolger’s dory, it is a haiku in wood.
By the way, Tom, you didn’t mention that other important addition, the large log for rolling the boat up the beach.
I swear, Tom, you must be related to Bill Bryson…cousins at least in your joyous play with the language. There’s no boat without a tale to be told and you set the standard for salty narratives. Nice looking boat, too.
30 years or so ago, Tip Johnson of Bellingham, Washington, started a small boat livery near Fairhaven. He had a fleet of these dories, which he may have built himself. As I had helped Tip set up this livery, I sometimes would borrow one of the dories for a row on the bay. One time, when the wind was blowing a good 12 knots or more, I “raced” (informally) a Row Cat, which was a twin-hulled rowing scull, against the wind and considerable chop, for maybe a mile. I was able to stay level with the Row Cat by following Bolger’s advice for such conditions: use a short, quick stroke. I have found the same principle to work in paddling a kayak into a stiff breeze and chop. It seems the quick stroke means you almost always have a blade in the water, thereby keeping steady pressure on the boat.
I know from experience that it is tempting to take big long strokes and apply lots of muscle, but all that does is wear you out. I think the reason may have to do with the fact that both the kayak and the dory are of very light displacement, and can’t develop the inertia to punch through a chop without being stopped or slowed down. By the same token, the scull was also a very light displacement boat, but in typical scull fashion, propelled by big, long strokes with lots of muscle, and would consequently lose way between strokes.
I don’t know how long Tip’s oars were for these boats, but I was convinced they were much too short. I did row one with a another person one time, and we were able to make it go pretty well, but we didn’t go far enough or long enough to come to any conclusions.
I do remember watching Tip working on one of his floating docks while kneeling in the dory’s bilge so that the gunwale was barely out of the water. It appeared to be an amply stable platform heeled over like that. Of course it was a flat calm day.
Eventually the small boat livery became the Bellingham Community Boating Center. I don’t know whether any of the old dories are still around.
I was recently watching video of sculls racing (these were multi-rower boats) or just rehearsing for the Olympics. What was striking was that during the recovery, when everybody scoots aft at once, the sculls almost came to a stop, from the inertia of all that rowers’ mass, before shooting ahead again with the next stroke. Can’t imagine how to overcome that effect, though a heavy enough boat would maintain momentum through the unpowered glide. But of course sculls have to be as light as possible. Maybe that’s how Bolger’s idea of the short, quick stroke works.
I also use such a stroke when paddling my kayak against a head sea and wind. Seems effective in that situation.
My hunch (this is just a thought experiment) is that the oar blade is describing an arc, and that the beginning of the stroke is working against a net gain in propulsion, the principal being the same as sculling over the stern with a single oar in a transom notch. If that doesn’t seem clear, blame my inarticulate gibberish (I am fluent in gibberish).