Month: November 2008

The boatbuilding bug bites another victim

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Ed’s 10ft Maine Skiff, built from plans and instructions
supplied by Duck Trap Woodworking

Ed Engarto in New York State is one of the many people who build a boat, only to discover that it can be a life-changing experience.

This seems to happen a lot. I know there’s a lot of satisfaction to be gained from building even the smallest boat and then using your creation on the water, but I think there’s more to this phenomenon: perhaps it’s the fact of slowly over time creating a tangible object, the quality of which the maker can judge and come to terms with as they proceed, perhaps it’s the discovery that, after all, one can learn new skills and complete a new category of projects, or maybe it’s the result of all those quiet hours the boatbuilder spends working alone in quiet contemplation.

Ed seems to me to be a typical convert to amatuer boatbuilding. I hope he enjoys his second project as much as he did his first.

He writes:

‘I built this little ten foot, lapstrake row boat over a period of three plus years, ending in July of 2008. The design comes from Duck Trap Woodworking and is known to those fine folks as their Maine Skiff. I started out journaling every working session and before the molds were even finished, the entries began to touch on life experiences, the trials of a large project, the virtue of commitment, and some thoughts about events that took place during the skiff’s construction. It actually became a mechanism through which I shared the most influential events in my life and therefore is much more than a sequence of construction steps explained. I learned so many boatbuilding skills and enjoyed the project so much, that I have become a lover of wood and water and am already looking towards my next boat.’

See the Duck Trap Woodworking website.

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The proper proportion of salt in his veins that a British boy ought to have

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The sort of dinghy we’re told a boy should have. Now
that part seems fair enough!

Have you got the proper proportion of salt in your veins?

These days they say too much salt in your veins causes osmotic pressure leading to raised blood pressure, which leads ultimately to end-organ damage. But it wasn’t always like this, and certainly not when they were busy bringing up the breed that led men into the dreadful battles of World War 1.

I’ve been reading The Complete Yachtsman by B Heckstall-Smith and E Du Boulay, first published in 1912. Much of what it has to say is sensible and reasonable. For example, there’s a great section on the draftsmanship involved in yacht designing. All in all, I’m pleased I invested in a copy.

Nevertheless, there are some bits that bear all the hallmarks of 1912. Take this priceless paragraph on teaching a boy to row, for example:

‘If a boy is of the right sort, with the proper proportion of salt in his veins that a British boy ought to have, he will soon get to love his little craft and a steady development in his character and improvement in his health will be visible to all who know and watch him; for there is no sport in the world that brings out all that is best in a man like that of learning to use the sea for his playground; judgement, courage, and especially self-reliance, are learned there as they can be nowhere else. In all other branches of sport, when a lad or a man feels he has had enough of it he can generally retire. Not so at sea; if he should be caught out in a squall he must fight his way back himself, using his brain to set one force of nature against another to his advantage, and not until the fight is over, and the boat is safe in some shelteredwater, can he rest or retire. This is why the sea so often makes men of boys, and heroes of men.’

Can’t you just smell the tanned leather, liniment and pipe-smoke in that voice? Pass the port Heckstall-Smith, and damn and blast the foreigners.

Copies of The Complete Yachtsman may be obtainable via ABE Books – I’ve been told there are lots around in second-hand bookshops, but the one I have is the first I can recall having seen.

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John Welsford’s Pilgrim – by the man himself

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John Welsford’s Pilgrim takes shape on the drawing board

Inspired by my post yesterday, John Welsford has kindly written a short essay about his Pilgrim project, and about his long-standing admiration for the fishing boats of the English South Coast. It seems my remark about convergent evolution was quite wide of the mark, for John knew what direction he was travelling all along!

Pilgrim, a history and what I am aiming at

For many years I have had a real interest in the small fishing craft of the English South Coast. This area is one where high inshore winds, fast currents and rough seas have bred a type of small craft of exceptional seaworthiness, very smooth motion and surprising speed under sail.

The Falmouth quay punt is one at the larger end of the scale, and smaller boats were beach launched or sailed from the many tiny fishing ports between Falmouth and the Solent. Many of the distinctive types are closely related in hull shape, and I so envied their ability that I took a set of lines from a Falmouth quay punt, drew them up at ¼ scale and set out to reduce the shape to a set of numbers.

On completing that analysis it was evident that the boat fitted right in the middle of all the desirable statistics for comfortable and able cruising yachts plus some interesting characteristics that are not so common in todays production boats. With the design of small serious blue water cruisers in mind I set out to design a boat that would have those characteristics, but which would be easier for an unskilled backyard boatbuilder to produce than the original shape would be.

I drew up a design called Houdini, half the length of what I had in mind, but wider due to the scale effect that reduces stability as a boat gets smaller. This is a plywood boat, quite easy to build, a centreboarder rather than a deep keel boat, and both comfortable and roomy for her size but still right on the “numbers” so a valid vehicle for testing the theory.

I sailed Houdini for three summers, went out in conditions ranging from flat calm to seriously bad and she was wonderful! Just what I’d hoped for, and a real reward for all the figure work and the tow test models that had lead to the design.

Since then I have drawn Swaggie, junk-rigged and just over 18ft long, intended for offshore work and just big enough for a couple to cruise long distances in; Sundowner, which at 21ft 4in on deck is about the size of the smaller Falmouth quay punts; and now Pilgrim, which is for my own use.

Swaggie and Sundowner are interesting boats, much more roomy than you’d expect, better sailers than their considerable beam and weight would suggest, and they both have very comfortable motion in a seaway. More confirmation that the theory is in the right direction.

With that experience in mind, and the prospect of a bigger build ahead of me that will take five years or more to complete, I decided to build myself a cruising open boat so that I’d have a sanity machine to get away in when the combination of a fulltime day job (which I need to pay for the big boat),a design business, and the pressure of building a 12 ton cruiser gets a bit much.


I first set a target of March 2010 for a trip in the new boat. That’s our late summer, and generally a time of settled weather and mild temperatures.

The trip is a bit over 200 miles along a coast where at that time of year there can be strong onshore winds, and where there are long stretches with no harbours, which set the criteria, stable, very able, strong to windward in open sea conditions, and all of the other desireable things for a boat intended for a week on board in near blue water conditions.

Pilgrim is the result, descended from the small fishing boats of the English South Coast, set up for comfortable sleeping on board, with bouyancy enough to enable self-rescuing in the event of a swamping, with about 300 kg of ballast to hold her up in a blow. Some of that weight is lead bolted to the boats keel, some is in the steel centerboard and some is internal water ballast to get the boat back to a weight that I can tow with my 2-litre car.

The structure is as simple as I can make it so that I have a chance of building it in the timeframe allowed. In materials it required about what I had already in my workshop, so she has a rig that was drawn up from spars that I already have, and will use fittings that I’ve collected over the years and have kept for just this sort of project. This is a shoestring, no frills building project!

I have begun a diary on her design build so that people can follow the process of a designer thinking aloud on paper, then drawing the plans, and then the boat growing as she is put together, and at the end I’ll be writing of the adventures we have on the way up the coast.

There are three diary notes there now, and you can read them here: http://www.jwboatdesigns.co.nz.

I’ll be keeping your editor up to date as well, so, watch this space too.

John Welsford. designer

See John’s website or contact him at jwboatdesigns@xtra.co.nz.

(Top) A gaff sloop-rigged Houdini, the first of this style of boat. Even though she’s a sheet plywood amateur built 14 footer she still evokes a sense of her parentage. This one is of builder Herco and friends sailing Kurkprop (think of the sound the cork makes when you open a bottle of champagne) in the South African sun; (Second row, left) Swaggie, sailing near her builder Luis‘ home port in Uruguay, bigger, a lot heavier and rigged very differently. But still the same numbers, and proportions (Second row, right, and bottom) Resolution, built to the Sundowner design, showing her underwater lines, and sitting at her berth waiting to be rigged. Designed to cope with Cape Horn, the first of the Sundowner boats to be launched she sails and handles like a much much bigger boat. She’s based on the same line of thinking, with similar numbers and ratios, and again produced the same result. Pilgrim should be more of the same, says John