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Part 1: Design Considerations
Our part of Maine is blessed with a chain of large and beautiful lakes that make it, in the words of a billboard we pass regularly on trips to town, a “sportsman’s paradise.” And our house is situated just about in the middle of the chain, which means that if we--my wife Theo and I--leave our dock and turn right, it’s a little less than a ten-mile trip to Canada; if we turn left, there’s another ten or so miles worth of boatable water, and that’s just if we go in a straight line. Following the shoreline, much of it now under conservation easements, gives us what feels like an almost unlimited amount of territory to explore. You can get a sense of what it looks like in this photo, which also includes a good shot of the back of Theo’s head:
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Following the shoreline, much of it now under conservation easements, gives us what feels like an almost unlimited amount of territory to explore. |
Up until recently we’ve done all our exploring in kayaks, either in singles (Theo in the CLC Chesapeake 16 I built for her and I in my Feathercraft Kahuna) or in our pride and joy: a` George Dyson double baidarka, bought as a derelict and rebuilt with the kind and patient advice of the designer. That’s the baidarka in the first photo; the shot below shows the whole boat about to float away from the dock. because I forgot to tie it.
| Our pride and joy: a` George Dyson double baidarka, bought as a derelict and rebuilt with the kind and patient advice of the designer. |
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But kayaks, when all is said and done, are for paddling. They’re not the best platforms for fishing or photography, and even the baidarka, which is pretty doggone fast for a kayak, suffers inevitably from the limited range of people-powered boats, especially when the people in question are avid but aging. Either the muscles or the bladders give out too damned soon.
Confining ourselves to day trips that push but don’t pop the stamina envelope, we’ve been able to investigate only a small portion of our local waters. We decided we needed a powerboat (or two, as it turns out) to expand our horizons.
First we bought an Old Town Osprey canoe and outfitted it with an electric trolling motor. The big box you can see in the middle is where the battery lives, surrounded by floatation foam. Notice also that I remembered to tie this one to the dock. It’s a nice little boat, better than a kayak for fishing and photography, but it still doesn’t give us the range we’re looking for or room for a porta-potty.
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We bought an Old Town Osprey canoe and outfitted it with an electric trolling motor. |
So I decided it was time to finally do something about the boat that’s been percolating away in my head for years, approaching and then receding from the front burner depending on the state of my time commitments and finances. The parameters I started with were these:
1. The boat had to be big enough to offer a stable platform for fishing, photography, and swimming. There had to be a cabin of sufficient dimensions to provide minimal shelter and space for a porta-potty. Overnight cruising ability would be a plus, but not necessary. We once had a 12-foot former daysailer that we used for recreational crabbing. That size would be too small. We also had a 24-foot cabin cruiser that we used primarily for running aground in the lower Chesapeake Bay. That size would be too big. I settled on 18 feet as a sort of arbitrary middle ground.
2. The boat had to be capable of handling the occasional rough water outing. We are really quite diligent about checking the sky and the weather radio, but storms can come up fast in our neck of the woods, as evidenced by the picture below, taken at the nearby camp we rented the year before we bought our house. Not ten minutes before the photo was taken, the water was dead calm, the sky just beginning to cloud up. Depending on wind direction, the fetch over these big lakes can produce waves a lot rougher than the ones shown. This requirement suggests a bit of deadrise in the hull, but I was determined to avoid the sledgehammer approach of a monster engine driving a deep-vee planing hull over the waves. Even the otherwise reasonable aluminum fishing boats common to our lakes use this approach. But we don’t need to go fast through the rough water, we just need to get home. At the beginning stages of the design process, I was thinking in terms of a displacement hull, mainly because of requirement #3.
| We are really quite diligent about checking the sky and the weather radio, but storms can come up fast in our neck of the woods, as evidenced by the picture below, taken at the nearby camp we rented the year before we bought our house. |
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3. The boat could not be a resource hog. The design goal here was to find the combination of hull and propulsion that would get the job done with minimal impact on the environment and on our budget. Since it’s almost certainly illegal to build a teeny-tiny submarine and use it to blow them out of the water, we can’t do much about floating codpiece substitutes going way too fast and making way too much noise, but we surely don’t have to add to the mayhem. I did a lot of research on electric power for this boat as well as the canoe--I really, really wanted to go electric because the silent, clean power is so appealing--but came to the conclusion that with current battery technology, a boat of the size we were contemplating could be most practically powered by a smallish 4-cycle gas outboard. 10 or 15 hp would be ideal from an economy standpoint. 20 hp would be OK, and also give us more wiggle room in case of bad weather.
4. There’s this bridge. . . Within sight of our dock is a highway bridge that serves as home for countless pigeons, a diving platform for the local teenage boys, and the Great Preventer of Tall Boats from our half of the lake system trying to get to the other half. At its highest point, there’s only four feet of clearance from the bottom of the bridge to the water. One local resident cut the railings off his pontoon boat to make it through. Others remove their windshields and duck. The alternative, if your boat won’t make it under, is to trailer it three miles from the launching ramp on one side of the bridge to the one on the other side, thus missing the water in front of our house entirely. I’m sure this constriction saves us from even more idiot traffic than we already have, but we need to get under the bridge to take advantage of the increased range our motorized craft will give us. So we’ve got to be less than four feet from the waterline to the highest point.
5. The boat had to be pretty. There’s just no sense that I can see in going to all the trouble to build a boat if you need to hide it under a tarp when you’re done, so as not to offend the neighbors with its ugliness. I confess that I like to look at the baidarka almost as much as I like to paddle it. I was aiming for the same effect here.
6. The boat had to be relatively easy and quick to build. Although I enjoy boatbuilding immensely, I was looking for a useable boat here, not another long-term project that never gets finished. I once built a Chesapeake Bay crabbing skiff the authentic way--all solid timber including the bow staving, herringbone planked bottom, the works--only to lose my building space before I had a chance to put the decks on and finish it up. That boat had to be given away, sadly. This time I own the garage, but I don’t want my kids to have to finish construction.
The most obvious way to avoid the neverending project blues, of course, is to just buy a boat and have done with it. And we considered that option. The quintessential craft of our Maine waters is the Grand Laker canoe--20 feet or so long, square-sterned for outboard power. legendary for its seaworthiness--and there were a few of those for sale. But the good ones were expensive (rightly so considering the workmanship) and the cheap ones would need total rebuilds. I looked at a beautiful Scott freighter canoe--less expensive than a Laker because of its fiberglass construction but equally seaworthy in reputation--and came very close to getting out the checkbook. But in the end, we held out for the cabin and porta-potty requirement and rejected the canoes.
Once I determined that I’d have to build to get what I wanted, to say that I consulted a lot of books and looked at a lot of plans is a horrible understatement. Here’s a shot of one corner of my basement office. You’ll notice a few boat books on the shelves.
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To say that I consulted a lot of books and looked at a lot of plans is a horrible understatement. |
I bought a couple of those “26,000 Boat Designs on a CD” things on eBay, and enjoyed looking at the old Popular Mechanics articles they contained. I got a book of designs from Arch Davis and admired their ingenuity. I went through my Bolger library for about the thousandth time. I got some plans from Clark-Craft and Duckworks. You get the picture: no stone unturned. In the end the design I actually liked the most--it’s almost pretty enough to ignore the flat bottom--was Karl Stambaugh’s Redwing, but an e-mail to Stambaugh confirmed what I thought I’d gathered from the small-scale plans in his book Good Skiffs--Redwing was too tall to fit under our bridge, so I was left with a few “finalists.”
1. Jim Michalak’s Brucesboat. This one was attractive because in conception it’s like a poor man’s Grand Laker. But it had the same disadvantage as the latter boat--really too small for the cabin we wanted even though Mr. Michalak didn’t think a very small cabin would hurt it much.
2. Michalak’s Electron. As I mentioned before, the idea of electric power was tempting, and I liked the way the cabin is integrated into the overall shape of the boat. I can’t even remember why I rejected this one. Probably just dumbness on my part. As with Brucesboat I still have the plans. Maybe someday. . .
3. The Hartley Trailer-Sailers. Displacement hulls and the promise of low power requirements were attractive here, as was the fact that they had actual cabins. The designer even suggested that they’d make good fishing boats for inboard or outboard power. Just get rid of the centerboard and sail rig and off you’d go. I’d had the plans for the 21 and 16-footers for a long time, and bought an additional set for the 14-footer. As designed, these boats are kind of tubby, befitting their reputation as safe family daysailers, and the flattish sheer isn’t the most beautiful out there, but I did some drawings and made some models (see next installment) that suggested that the 14 or 16-footer could be stretched to the desired 18 feet to make fairly pretty (to my eye) boat that would still do what I wanted it to do.
The construction was a little fussy compared to Michalak’s designs, but not impossible. I had some questions about converting them to powerboats though, and e-mailed the current purveyor of Hartley plans, assuming that I’d get the same kind of helpful response I’d gotten from the other designers I’d contacted. Not so. The guy even said he’d be putting me on his spam list if I wrote to him again. Puzzled at this response--I had even offered to buy yet another set of plans in exchange for help--I posted a question on the Duckworks newsgroup and heard back from John Welsford that nobody seemed to know much about the folks who now sell the Hartley plans. Oh, well. They’re still neat designs, though. Another project for someday, maybe.
4. Another Chesapeake Bay crabbing skiff. My most prized boatbuilding volume is a book of plans from the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum called A Heritage in Wood. Full-size plans are available from the museum for most of the boats in the book, and I’d already used one of those plans for the ill-fated project mentioned previously. Why not build another one, a little bigger one this time? I’d worked on one of these boats--called the Lemon because of its decrepit condition--as a crewman, and it had, at least in the hands of my boss and neighbor Captain Tom Holland, been seaworthy in some very rough conditions despite multiple leaks. It had a small cuddy, and even though Tom didn’t have one you could have stuck a porta-potty in there. The Lemon was a big old heavy thing, but a 40-horse Yamaha still pushed it along pretty well. A lighter version, IF I could figure out how to build a lighter version--might work with the smaller engine I had in mind. The Lark design on page 60 looked like a good starting point for such a boat. I thought I had a winner.
On to Part two - Modeling |
