Small Boats Annual 2016

Boat Profile

SCAMP

A little camp cruiser for big dreams

It's an odd duck, both in appearance and in its strange synthesis of big and small, but it’s plenty of boat no matter where your interests lie, whether it’s puttering around a lake in a breeze or taking on the challenges of the Inside Passage to Alaska.

Boat Profile

The Caracal

Born by a beautiful bay

The customer's request was for a boat suitable for a crowd of kids, a cockpit with seating for eight, a cuddy with space for a portable toilet and room to take a nap, and inboard electric auxiliary power; a boat well suited to day-sailing, racing, and making the crossing to Martha’s Vineyard.

Boat Profile

Clam Skiff

A Bolger-designed workboat

The 18’ flat-bottom clam skiff Phil Bolger designed for Harold “Dynamite” Payson had to be “a solid skiff that could stand generous power, carry a big load, and have flat footing right out to the side. Nothing about it should be hard to explain.

Boat Profile

The Sand Bar by Tidal Roots

A Maine-built cedar SUP board

Kyle Schaefer and Kent Scovill are avid fly fishermen and four years ago, when a friend left a stand-up paddleboard with Kyle, they immediately used the board to give them a better way to find fish. A light went on: What if they designed a board for stability rather than speed, one that was built in Maine out of local materials, and built it of wood? They now make stand-up-paddle boards in a weathered, three-bedroom house in Eliot, Maine.

Technique

The Taming of the Sheet

Sawing plywood made easy

Not many home shops have the space or the machinery to facilitate cutting sheets of plywood down to size. A sturdy sheet of insulating foam is an inexpensive and versatile solution to the problem.

Boat Profile

Saajuu 470

A craft for many purposes

In a country riddled with thousands of interconnected lakes, it’s no surprise that rowing would be a time-honored tradition. The glued-lapstrake Saajuu 470 is a modern take on workboats once rowed by Finland’s farmers, fishermen, and loggers.

Boat Profile

The E.M. White Guide Canoe

A classic design from the 19th century

Sharon and Paul LaBrie celebrated their first wedding anniversary with a canoe trip on Maine’s Narraguagus River. For years they paddled an aluminum canoe but in the 40th year of their marriage they worked with canoe guru Jerry Stelmok to build the canoe they had always wanted, an E. M. White Guide.

Adventures

Made in Vermont

The journey of a dory from logging to launching

Charles Johnson’s adventure begins with harvesting trees that have grown in the woodlands in his home state of Vermont, and in the years that follow, he gathers both wood and wisdom from friends who help him on his way to launching NONA BELLE.

Boat Profile

The Mallard

A voyage from fantasy to reality

Inspired by SWALLOW, a boat that first gained fame in children’s fiction in the 1930s, Andrew Wolstenholme’s Mallard measures up to adventures in the real world. A “boat-shaped boat which will genuinely sail” it has “considerable visual appeal to inspire the builder in the first place and along the way.”

Boat Profile

The SailZO

A new kit boat from Bristol, Rhode Island

The sailZO is a 15′8″ double-chined skiff with a beam of 4′5″, designed to perform well under both oar and sail, carry three adults, and afford a couple or a small family the opportunity to explore coastlines and lakes, whether for an afternoon, or an overnight camp-cruise.

Boat Profile

The Somes Sound 12½

An amateur-friendly update of a Herreshoff classic

A century ago Nathanael Herreshoff designed a 16′ keelboat known widely as the H 12½ after her 12′6″ waterline length. She was intended to handle the steep chop and strong winds of the Eastern Seaboard, and to serve as a sailing trainer. John Brooks, after many requests from his students at WoodenBoat School, drew up plans for a glued-lapstrake version, and in 2002 launched the first Somes Sound 12½.

Boat Profile

The Marsh Cat

Everything from gunkholing to open-water sailing

Simplicity is certainly one of the Marsh Cat's most appealing traits. The single sheet and sail make solo sailing a breeze. There is no interior furniture to get in the way: The sole is the seat and the coaming is the backrest. The Cat can handle heavy loads and stay out when the rest of the fleet is heading for shelter. Its spacious accommodations are a delight when camp-cruising; the rig's reasonable setup time at the ramp isn’t an impediment to frequent use or going sailing on a whim.

Boat Profile

ROSINA MAY

A Thames River Skiff

Within the pages of Eric McKee’s book on British working boats there are drawings of a 24’ Thames skiff attributed to W.A.B. Hobbs at Henley-on-Thames in the very early part of the 20th century. Thames skiffs were an evolution of the wherries used to transport cargoes and passengers up, down and across the Thames for many years before bridges and other forms of transport put them out of business. Although the vast majority of skiffs have been used for leisure purposes many of them have earned a living by being hired out.

Boat Profile

A Lapstrake Livery Boat

A Whitehall for quick construction

What was left of the boat rotting in the brambles on the north shore of Clear Lake in Western Washington was once a very fast under oars. Back in the 1930’s John Thomas “could row it across the lake, fill up two gallon jugs with spring water and row halfway back on one cigarette.” When John Sack, Thomas’ nephew, took over the lakeside family cabin in the 1960s the boat had been sitting at the base of the largest pine tree on the property, unused for a decade.

Technique

Making a Wood and Leather Scoop Bailer

What a cut-up bleach bottle wishes it were

A few bits of scrap wood, a piece of leather, and a handful of copper tacks will bring elegance back to bailing.

Boat Profile

The Escargot canal cruiser

As a wooden boat, the Escargot is an unlikely charmer. It has a hull like a shoebox, only one curve to speak of, and is entirely bereft of brightwork and brass. Nonetheless, it has an ineluctable appeal inside and out. The cabin with its arched roof and stovepipe has the look of a gypsy wagon and the lure of running away from it all, in comfort. My father said of it: “The moment I step aboard, I’ve arrived.”

Boat Profile

The Candlefish 13

Three Men in a Boat (to say Nothing of the Moose)

Sam Devlin drew up plans to a customer’s specs and in the process imagined how he might adapt the design the boat for his own use: “a couple of weeks of moose hunting on a far northern lake with my friends Sven and Ollie.” To that end, the Candlefish 13 he’d build for himself would be able to carry three successful hunters and a half ton of moose meat, and still have about a foot of freeboard.

Boat Profile

The International 12-Foot Dinghy

100 Years as a Class

In 1913 England’s Boat Racing Association, a small club of sailing enthusiasts, called for a design to comply with the following requirements: length 12’, beam 4’8”, and a single 100-sq-ft sail with no battens; she should be a capable rowing boat as well as a good sailing craft, suitable as a tender for larger yachts. The winning design was submitted by an amateur designer named George Cockshott.

Boat Profile

The Færder Snekke

A racing workboat from Norway

“I first encountered a lone Færder snekke at a maritime festival in Oslo. She was small and open, but did not fit in with the similarly scaled, rough, and hardy oiled workboat from the north. On the other hand, the boat had shadows of an appealing older working aesthetic that didn’t fit in with the larger, yachty Meter boats or varnished cruisers, either.”

Boat Profile

The MerryMac

A Cat-Rigged Sharpie

The MerryMac catboat tends to make the blood hum with a sense of adventure and challenge. Its owners claim that it has always been so since the first of about 200 MerryMacs sprouted wings on the banks of New Hampshire’s Great Bay back in the early 1950s. And MerryMac lovers will tell you that the sense of adventure and challenge root in both the boat itself and her designer/builder Ned “Mac” McIntosh.

Boat Profile

The Mower Dory

Sailing again after a century in hiding

One day in the early 1990s, a local contractor visited my boatbuilding shop in Marblehead, Massachusetts, telling me he’d been hired to convert an old boatshop into a playhouse. “The museums and antique dealers have been through it,” he said, “Take anything you want or it’s going to the dump.” The building was mostly empty but in the long back room there was a planking bench with odd parts scattered around. Above the bench, tucked under the eave, the blackened end of a tight roll of paper caught my eye. I took the roll down, dusted it off, and put it in the truck. That evening, I unrolled my find.

Boat Profile

The Willis Boats of Maine’s Dark Harbor

The enduring legacy of Willis Rossiter

The legacy of the Rossiter Skiff outshines that of even its most popular fiberglass counterparts. The family of skiffs that evolved on the mid-coast island of Islesboro, Maine, has been around for decades, and summer residents and local fishermen alike continue to use these boats more than a half-century after the design’s debut. Some of the boats have become family heirlooms.

Technique

Comfortable Seating for Sailing a Small Rowing-and-Sailing Skiff

The trim of a small boat dictates where you need to put your weight; adding width and wings to the center thwart will give you a place to sit when you’re where you belong.