Category: Small boats

A skin on frame Imp

The admirable Trevor Akin (in the skin on frame canoe in the YouTube) has built a rather beautiful and clearly successful skin on frame canoe using the lines I drew up for the Imp canoe design some years ago.

I wasn’t happy with the Imp – its strakes would never lie smoothly, and I judged it a failure even though it performed well enough as an open canoe. I don’t even know where I’d find the drawings now, but Trevor has a copy of them from somewhere and done something wonderful with them.  He deserves a firm manly handshake, and certainly gets my admiration. And thanks for letting me know about the project Trevor!

He’s written about the project extensively on his weblog Eh Whatever. Here he is close to finishing the boat, and here he is again at a messabout (for Brits, I should explain this is a kind of camping party with boats).

I love this shot:

Pomme de Terre Lake - Oct. 2016;

Making a boat from a single length of 2x4in

My heavens! And – a great bonus – there’s no need to warn anyone to turn the sound down!

And there’s this. Well, maybe it’s not terribly successful, but it’s definitely fun…

12ft Bevins Skiffs in a 60-mile sponsored sail

bevins-skiffs

My American buddy Shawn Payment has been been working with the Lowcountry Maritime Society, local organisation that uses boat-building as a means of teach grade-school students maths and technology through hands-on learning. The projects have included coaching a group of 6th-8th graders at Simmons-Pinckney Middle School through building four 12ft Bevin’s Skiffs.

Right this minute, half a dozen of the adults involved in the programme are sailing those little 12ft boats about 60 miles from Charleston to Georgetown South Carolina, just in time for the Georgetown Wooden Boat Festival (warning – turn your speakers down a bit or you could be in for an surprise).

Why? To bring attention to the programme and perhaps raise a few dollars to keep the boatbuilding programme going in the future.

Shawn’s carrying a SPOT satellite tracker, so if you would like to follow his progress up the coast, click here.

Each skipper is trying to raise as much as possible, including Shawn. He asks that you go to PayPal and send a donation to spayment800@gmail.com. All proceeds will be forwarded to the Lowcountry Maritime Society.