Playing With Boats

At the end of the last post I was driving north with what remained of US 78, a Lou Whitman Manana II International 10 square metre canoe, strapped to the roof of my truck. I probably left a little trail of bits of veneer all along the Thruway, because, to tell the truth, there wasn’t much left. A hot-moulded frameless hull is great until it isn’t. With little or no internal framing, they don’t age gracefully and are hard to repair. 

I brought the boat into my friend’s shop in Toronto and had a look in the cold light of day and what I saw wasn’t encouraging. Overall, the boat was old and weathered, but almost everything would have been salvageable. Almost everything, that is, but the bottom. For about the middle one-third of the boat, from turn of the bilge to the keel, the veneers had opened up, and so there wasn’t much left. With nothing to lose, I embarked on a rescue attempt, but in the end I admitted that US 78 was history, salvaged the gear and began looking for another boat.

Back on rec.boats, I heard word of a 1980s Steve Clark King Ferry Canoe Company IC in Utica, NY that was looking for a new owner. One really long one-day road trip later, I was back in Toronto with a new boat–that’s her above, still with the NY state plate on the trailer, temporarily wearing the old main from the perished Manana.

I can honestly say that I thought I knew how to sail, and then I tried a canoe. Boy oh boy, that was different. In a sailing canoe, you’re the ballast. The position of your rear end is critical to the success of the whole enterprise, and subject to more or less constant revision. To tack a sliding seat canoe, there’s a few things that have to happen in more or less the same order, more or less every time. Because the boat is long and relatively light, you also have to sail through the tack with a fair bit of way on or else you’ll end up in irons. As a novice canoe sailor, the only thing more alarming than trying to make the boat go forward with some degree of control was trying to back it out of irons.

Let’s say you’re on port tack, perched out on the seat, admiring your daggerboard slicing through the water. As you begin to head up, you also slide in on the seat as the pressure on the main eases until you have your feet on the gunwale. As you turn into the wind, you let the jib sheet fly, and then you get up and kneel behind the sliding seat. Knee pads help. Grabbing either one of the holes in the seat top or the hiking strap, you throw the seat across to the new windward side as soon as the bow crosses the wind. Once the seat is thrown, you stand up, turn and sit down on the new windward side. Trim and cleat the jib, find the mainsheet, find the 6′ long hiking stick and take the mainsheet with you as you head out on the seat and you’re off. Takes much longer to write about than to actually do. Some of my new rec.boat friends had outlined the procedure for me, but out on the water there’s really no time to read the cheat sheet.

After the first trip, I was sweating, banged up and realizing that I had a heck of a lot to learn about dinghy sailing. I was also hooked. My wife, who observed some of these early outings from shore, asked whether “IC” stood for “inverted canoe,” and suggested that I paint my sail number on the bottom of the hull, since that was what was most often visible. The first time I got the boat dialed in and planed to windward on the end of the seat, however, pacing an International 14 and a Contender, I was completely hooked, and thought that this canoe sailing business was a pretty cool part of the sailing world. 

I sailed US 151, which became CAN 33, until we left Toronto for Rhode Island in 1998, whereupon I sold her to a fellow canoe sailor. I had no boat, but it didn’t mean I stopped thinking about the strenuous but intoxicating experience of sailing a canoe. This photo isn’t me, not by a long shot, but it captures the essence of what sliding seat sailing is about: