Crabbing skiff Cinnamon Girl
Speaking of Chappelle as I was yesterday, I was very interested to see a post at Duckworksmagazine about a crabbing skiff described in his little book Crabbing Skiffs, and built from his drawings.
The book Crabbing Skiffs can still be obtained from the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum, and anyone interested in these elegant but simple boats might also like to read Reuel Parker’s The Sharpie Book, which is now pretty well established as the standard introductory work on the topic of American sharpie-style boats, and includes enough information to build a range of boats ranging from small river boats to pocket cruisers based on traditional types.
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From the Department of Shameless Self Promotion, if you are interested in this kind of boat, you should check out my series on building one at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum:
http://www.chineblog.com/archives/155-Making-sawd…
Of course I'm interested – I've been fascinated by the sharpie and skiff forms for years, and there's a hazy but interesting link with sailing dinghy design over here. For a while at least our small sailing dinghy designers regarded their small vee-bottom sailing dinghy type as a descendent of the true sharpie, and even called them sharpies. The 12m Sharpie is a case in point.
The boats themselves were not unlike some of the boats Ted Geary designed; useful sailers, but nowadays they'd be regarded as rather utilitarian and too expensive for all the expensive materials involved.
Ply versions might work, of course, but that would require the designs to be re-worked.