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Archive for the ‘Sailing Canoes’ Category

What Boat to Build Next: Part 2

Posted in Boat Building, Boating, Boats, Canoes, Sailing Canoes, Uncategorized, tagged , , , on December 31, 2011| Leave a Comment »

As I mentioned in the last post, I’ve started to explore whether the 1893 sailing canoe design Isalo would be suitable for re-designing for construction in modern materials. One of the first big questions to is how to build the boat.

If I follow through with the idea that this cruising canoe and the 16-30 are “bookends” that between them cover a nice range of sailing canoe history, then it would be best if Isalo was rendered in stitch-and-glue plywood. This has worked well for the 16-30s, proving to be light and durable and reasonably quick to build.

The body plan for the 16-30, showing its single chine hull made up from four separate stitch-and-glue panels.

The original 16-30 was a perfect choice for stitch-and-glue construction, with a single hard chine and a V-shaped bottom. The only difference from the original to the new version was that the plank keel was replaced by a filleted epoxy joint.

An interior shot of the original 16-30, showing the top of the plank keel. The bottom planks converge in a slightly rounded V-joint on the bottom of the hull.

The interior of the plywood 16-30, showing the filleted and taped seam on the interior bottom.

Our original 1893 canoe, however, has an arc bottom, much like a Star-class keelboat.

Body plan for Isalo from the original 1893 drawings.

You could likely make the plywood conform to this shape, but not in stitch and glue. In order to get the compound curve in the bottom panels, you’d have to introduce some interior framework, as on the 15 1/2′ sailing canoe Zephyr, and this would take us away from the idea of making both canoes as similar in construction as possible.

The arc-bottomed sailing canoe Zephyr, published in Yachting in 1925, was designed for traditional batten-seam plank-on-frame construction.

There are (at least) three possible ways to tackle the bottom of the new canoe, starting with the original lines. Here’s a sample section.

The original body plan at midships, with an arc bottom.

Option one is to take all of the arc out of the bottom and connect the chine and keel with a straight line, as on the 16-30:

Bottom section straight from chine to keel, with the dotted line showing the original arc section.

As you can see from the sketch, this takes a fair bit of volume out of the bottom. It might be ok, but I wouldn’t know until I did some hydrostatic calculations. Another option would be to introduce a second chine below the waterline.

The straight section from keel to chine has been broken into two parts by the addition of a second chine, with dotted line showing the original arc section.

This option preserves more of the original volume, but we’re now up to six hull panels, which will be more work to construct. Another way to do this is to give the canoe a narrow flat bottom panel:

Introducing a flat bottom panel equals or exceeds the original volume of the arc-bottom hull.

There are a few reasons why I like this option: it only needs 5 panels; it will make the boat easy to beach; and finally, the flat bottom will give a good solid anchorage for the centreboard trunk and mast steps without the complications of fitting them over a filleted centre seam. I built and sailed a little canoe with a hull like this for several years in the 1990s and it worked quite well. It was designed by John Bull, who used to own Solway Dory in the UK. He’s since retired, but the company continues, though I don’t believe they offer this design any more. The only drawback is that you need to install some floorboards so that you’re not sitting in any water that happens to come aboard!

Next step is to lay in the flat bottom on the original hull, re-draw the lines and do some calculations.

Until then. . .

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What Boat to Build Next?

Posted in Boat Building, Boating, Boating Books, Boats, Canoes, Sailing Canoes, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on December 22, 2011| 4 Comments »

Well, it’s December 22nd, 2011. The Fiddlehead is done, all my hand tools have been sharpened and tuned up again and I have a couple of weeks off work and some precious free time. What better way to end the year and look ahead to 2012 than to think about what boat I should build next?

Three possibilities have been going through my head for a while. Back in the mid 1990s when I worked at the old Marine Museum of Upper Canada with Peter the Boatbuilder (see last post), we taught a workshop course called “Introduction to Lapstrake Boatbuilding.” The boat we used as the example was Pete Culler’s 13′ lapstrake canoe, a design he called Butternut. This is a lovely little boat, weighing about 35 lbs. We liked it because it showed you everything you needed to know about traditional lapstrake boatbuilding in a nice small package that didn’t go through a whole lot of materials, and was also small enough that we could have two of them underway in the shop at the same time. We told the students it was “the original personal watercraft,” a boat you wear more than use. Here’s one of the completed Butternuts:

As usual with these projects, I didn’t end up with one for myself, so maybe now it’s time? Something this light would also fit on top of Wendy’s little Nissan, and be light enough for her to get up and down easily. Butternut is featured on pp. 23-25 of John Burke’s book Pete Culler’s Boats. The original book is out of print but WoodenBoat have reprinted a catalogue of Culler’s designs. A simple lines plan can be ordered from the Ships’ Plans Department at Mystic Seaport.

Another boat I’ve had in my head even longer than Butternut is the late Bob Baker’s lapstrake canoe Piccolo. He designed this for WoodenBoat back in the magazine’s early days, and a comprehensive how-to-build article appeared in issues no. 36 and 37. It’s an exquisite little sailing canoe, a boat of thoroughgoing charm and modest windward ability (but gentlemen don’t cruise to windward anyways, right?). I liked this boat as soon as I saw her and have always wanted one. Plans are available from The WoodenBoat Store. I’ve gotten as far as lofting Piccolo and starting to pile up some cedar to plank her with (sorry for the grainy photo, hard to take a picture of pencil lines on lofting!):

Two little lapstrake canoes, two worthwhile projects, and eventually I’ll probably build one of each. I’m still thinking about the 16-30 sliding seat canoe, though. One of the ideas I’ve been mulling over is turning the 16-30 into a how-to-build book that also includes some of the history of canoe sailing. I’ve made a couple of false starts on this, but they’ve always come up short. I think one of the things holding me back has been the fact that, much as I love the 16-30 and the sliding seat era of canoe sailing, it was a relatively late development, and isn’t really representative of the whole 1870-1900 era when recreational canoeing first flourished.

An idea came to me in the shower a while ago (often happens there, perhaps the water hitting my head shakes loose a thought?): what about developing another historic canoe design for construction in modern materials that could be a companion to the 16-30? The aims of that project (see the 16-30 page on this blog) were to capture the decked sliding seat canoe sailing experience in a boat that could be built by one person with average tools and skills, in a garage, in a winter, using readily-available parts and materials. Could I find an original design for a cruising sailing canoe that could be adapted the same way? If I did that, then the book could feature these boats as “bookends” exemplifying the range of canoe sailing types, with some history sandwiched in between, and complete plans and building instructions for both.

On to the search for a suitable design. One of the things that made the 16-30 work was that the original boat I was inspired by was a hard-chine hull. I don’t mind turning hard-chine cedar on oak into hard-chine stitch and glue plywood, but I’m not as interested in rendering a round-bottomed hull into a multi-chine stitch and glue boat. Then I came across a design while browsing through Forest & Stream, a treasure trove of canoeing, yachting and other 19th century sporting history. Called Isalo (which is a town in Madagascar, not sure of the connection to canoeing), the boat is a hard-chined hull with a removable sliding seat and two sliding gunter rigs: a cruising outfit of 60 + 18 square feet and a racing rig of 100 + 30 square feet.

This design looks as though it has some potential, so the first step is to do a feasibility study by scaling the design up, re-drawing the lines, generating offsets and thinking about how she might be built. I’ll let you know how it goes.

In the mean time, here’s an interesting development for those interested in the history of small craft. Isalo‘s lines were originally published in The Model Yachtsman and Canoeist, a British magazine which appeared from 1884-1894. It wasn’t what you’d call a mass-circulation piece, so original copies are very hard to find. The Albert Strange Association has just announced that the whole run of 2000 pages has been digitized and made available on two CDs in a searchable pdf format for the very reasonable price of 15 pounds sterling. You can order your copy from the Association’s web site. Perfect Christmas gift for the boating historian on your list.

Best wishes of the season to you all.

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Back in Action (It’s Been a While. . .)

Posted in Boating, Boating Books, Sailing Canoes on August 6, 2011| Leave a Comment »

My last post was April 18th, 2011. There’s been a lot of water go under the bridge since then, including a couple of deaths in the family and a major car accident that kept me out of the workshop and away from the computer, but I’m pleased to report that I’m back in action.

Received a nice compliment on the blog from Rod Levene of the Historic Canoe and Kayak Association in the UK, and I’ll return the favour by suggesting that a visit to their website at http://www.hcka.org.uk/site/index.html is well worth your time. They have a wide interest in a very eclectric group of small boats. They’re also involved with the Open Canoe Sailing Group, another worthwhile organization. The OCSG is supported by Solway Dory, whose tagline is “The Home of Canoe Sailing.” Solway Dory was started by John Bull in the early 1980s, and here’s another connection.

A number of years ago, I picked up a copy of John Bull’s book Sail Your Canoe: How to Add Sails to Your Canoe (now out of print, I think, but Solway Dory may know more). On the strength of that, I ordered a set of plans for his “Little Pete” design, a double-chined stitch and glue boat with a lateen rig and a single daggerboard. I had a number of years of good sailing and paddling with this little boat:

I’ve just started another building project which I’ll tell you about in the next post.

Until then. . .

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A Brief History of the Sailing Canoe: Part 2

Posted in Boating, Sailing Canoes, Uncategorized, tagged , , on April 18, 2011| 2 Comments »

We were talking in the last post about canoe clubs. Here are some more of the members of the Toronto Canoe Club out on a cruise in the late 1880s. Canoeing offered sportsmen a whole separate world of rituals, activities and annual meets and cruises. Of course, one had to be properly equipped and attired for such activities. It wasn’t long before specialized canoeing gear began to be offered for sale:

One of the centres of sailing canoe activity was in the 1000 Islands region of the St. Lawrence River. This beautiful area, with Ontario on the north bank of the river and New York state on the south, was home to a thriving recreational economy. Frequent trains brought vacationers north to any number of palatial hotels on the mainland and some of the islands. Fishing guides waited to take city “sports” out in the region’s eponymous St. Lawrence skiff and cook them a shore dinner afterwards. Most summers, members of the American Canoe Association gathered at Sugar Island, on the Canadian side of the river, for two weeks of racing, cruising, sailing, paddling and fellowship.

That’s a St. Lawrence Skiff in the right foreground, lurking as a light-air canoe race drifts by in the twilight. What were canoeists sailing at these meets? The first generation of boats were multi-purpose cruising canoes, able to be paddled (generally with a double paddle) or sailed. Derived from MacGregor’s original Rob Roy, they were generally round-bilged and often lapstrake planked. If smooth skinned, their hulls were generally of batten-seam carvel construction. Mostly decked over, they had cockpits and deck hatches to allow access to storage compartments.

The rig was usually divided into two sails, a main and a “jigger” or “dandy” at the stern, to keep the centre of effort low and allow for trimming and balance. The masts were usually unstayed, and seldom sported jibs. As above, the sail plan was usually either a lateen or some variant of the lug. Sometimes the plans were mixed, and one boat would carry both a lug main and a lateen mizzen. Lugs, either standing (as above) or balanced, offered a powerful, low aspect ratio sail that didn’t require a long mast and was divided into easily-reefable sections with full-length battens. This latter was important as canoe sailors couldn’t exactly get up out of the cockpit and walk forward to take in a reef.

Canoeists debated endlessly about the merits of particular hulls and rigs. Significant early canoes lent their names to design types, and the sporting press of the day was filled with disquisitions about the relative merits of the Shadow, the Pearl, the Nautilus and the Ringleader. North American canoeists discussed types within their own clubs and within their own national organizations but also with British enthusiasts across the Atlantic. Out of these discussions arose an international sporting rivalry that is still contested to this day for a trophy first awarded in the 19th century: The International Challenge Cup.

At the centre of this international rivalry was a famous canoeist and his even better-known canoe: Warington Baden Powell and his Nautilus.

To be continued. . .

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A Brief History of the Sailing Canoe: Part 1

Posted in Sailing Canoes, Uncategorized, tagged , on February 27, 2011| 1 Comment »

What my IC experience led to, other than a realization that I’d finally found a boat that you could learn something from everytime you took it out, was an interest in the whole topic of canoe sailing. Watching over my interest, I think, has been Leo Friede, as close to a patron saint as the sailing canoe has, at least from its early days. That’s Leo above, aboard one of his Mermaid 16-30 canoes, doing what he did best. Most of his competitors only saw the stern of his canoe.

So off we go on a capsule history of the sailing canoe, focusing mostly on sliding seat boats.

It’s all John MacGregor’s fault, really. He was a hinge, a pivot point around which the history of recreational boating turned. His late 1850s travels in North America, during which he ventured far enough north to see skin boats being propelled with double paddles, stayed with him when he returned to Europe. He commissioned a lapstrake oak version of the native craft he had seen. A hybrid of skin boat and lapstrake construction, the first of many Rob Roys was not a kayak, for she was not intended to be rolled, but was, rather, a new form: the double-paddle canoe.

MacGregor was an ardent canoeist who travelled far and wide in his Rob Roy canoes at a time when the notion of travelling for pleasure in small boats was, to say the least, not widely shared. This in and of itself makes him a pioneer, but what was of greater significance for recreational canoeing was that he was also a tireless self-promoter and astute publicist. He wrote a series of immensely-popular books about his travels, and lectured widely throughout Europe about his picaresque adventures.

In 1866 he founded the Royal Canoe Club, and his travelling and writing were the inspiration for literally hundreds of other canoe clubs in North America and Europe. The Rob Roy became an icon, and the Rob Roy type one of the dominant strains in recreational canoeing well into the 1890s. Canoeing took hold among sportsmen on both sides of the Atlantic and became the first of the great recreational crazes, leading to the founding of the American Canoe Association in 1880.

From the earliest days of recreational canoeing, canoeists congregated in clubs. It has often been observed, somewhat misleadingly, that these late 19th century sailing canoes were “the poor man’s yacht.” They weren’t, really, for in relative terms they were expensive small boats, and the leading canoeists of the day tended to be well-established professional men and their wives. What they were really was “the poor [yachts]man’s yacht.” Canoe clubs had all the trappings of yacht clubs, from the elegant waterfront clubhouses which hosted dinners and dances, to the dues and social obligations attendant on belonging, to officers such as Commodore and Vice-Commodore, to a racing schedule organized by classes with handicaps.

Here’s the Gananoque Canoe Club’s headquarters on the Canadian side of the St. Lawrence River in the 1000 Islands. The building still stands today, though it’s now a theatre.

Here are some members of the Toronto Canoe Club in the mid-1880s (the club is still in existance, now called the Toronto Sailing and Canoe Club) on a cruise to Etobicoke Creek west of Toronto. They’ve pulled their cruising canoes up on shore and rigged the tents for sleeping aboard at night. If you’re down in the Adirondacks, the Adirondack Museum, in Blue Mountain Lake, NY, has a wonderful exhibit called “Boats and Boating in the Adirondacks” which features a J.H. Rushton “Princess”-model decked sailing canoe set up with one of these tents.

Until next time. . .

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Me and My IC’s

Posted in Canoes, Sailing Canoes, tagged , on February 6, 2011| 1 Comment »

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:

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The Photo That Changed My Life, or, Where the Whole Sailing Canoe Thing Started

Posted in Boating, Canoe Restoration, Canoes, Sailing Canoes, Uncategorized, tagged , , on January 29, 2011| Leave a Comment »

 

By the mid 1980s, I has been sailing  for a while, beginning with Flying Juniors and Lasers in Vancouver, and extending eventually to anything I could cadge a ride on, including a Chinese junk and a Bristol Channel Pilot Cutter. I was browsing in a bookstore, looking for something boat-related to spend that week’s grocery money on, when I picked up the April 1985 issue of The Yacht. I think it’s folded now, but at the time it was a glossy, swanky publication with wonderful photography. Paging through it, I came across page 94, which carried an article by Steve Clark entitled “The International Canoe: Mercurial Fantasy.” I can’t honestly recall if I’d ever really thought too much about sailing canoes before that moment, but reading Steve’s article fixed that pretty quickly. The image above smacked me between the eyes just like the handle of the rake that you left lying in the back yard, and I haven’t been the same since.

I mean, how could you look at that old-school Swedish IC photo and not want to go do that right away. Planing to windward, the skipper is perched at the end of his sliding seat, perfectly balanced (for the moment) between his rig (a foil in the air) and his centerboard (a foil in the water) with only a little hull between the two. All of a sudden, I needed to know more about canoe sailing, and about International Canoes in particular.

I posted a message to rec.boats [remember Usenet?] asking for anyone who could provide some information about these wonderful boats, and maybe help me find one of my own. Replies came back from a couple of stalwarts of the Chesapeake Bay IC community [one of whom, sailmaker and Moth afficionado Rod Mincher, runs a great sailing blog of his own]. Some chatting back and forth did nothing to diminish my enthusiasm. The grapevine told me that there was a boat located just outside NY City that might be available. Its owner had recently passed away, and his widow was cleaning out the garage. It was IC US 78, a Lou Whitman Manana II design. Here’s Lou aboard one of his boats off City Island in the 1960s.

So, off I went down to New York City to have a look (just a look, mind you, I wasn’t going to buy it. . .) at this canoe. As I drove south, I was thinking of what Steve Clark had said at the end of his article.

Canoes combine power with lack of drag. Their speed potential is outstanding, but what probably makes the Canoe most attractive is the nature of that potential, for it is not realized without consummate technique and finesse. For this reason, the Canoe lives on a frontier of the imagination that historically few have ventured to cross, and from which even fewer have chosen to return.

What I saw when I arrived at the house in the shadow of the George Washington Bridge was a very tired boat that had been outdoors a little too long. The Manana hulls had been produced by Max Andersson in Sweden, who was normally a builder of racing canoes and kayaks. In the technology of the 1950s, they were hot-moulded, laid up from layers of veneer adhered with resorcinol glue which had to be cured by heat and pressure in an autoclave. This produced a light, strong frameless hull with one great disadvantage: it didn’t age well. By the time I saw US 78, she had been sitting out in the back yard for too long, and water had gotten into the veneer seams on the bottom. The result looked like an old head of Savoy cabbage, with the veneers sprung up in all directions.

Nevertheless, I loaded her on top of the truck, along with all the gear and a nice piece of stained oak which the sailor’s widow thought was part of the boat but which was really the center leaf from an old dining room table, and headed back north. What I didn’t take, and I regret it to this day, was the William English paddling canoe that was hanging overhead in the garage, and was in much better shape. I only had room for one boat on the truck, though, and I had IC on the brain. Now I had one in my hands, too.

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Boating Books: The Works of W.P. Stephens

Posted in Boat Building, Boating Books, Boats, Canoes, Sailing Canoes, tagged , , on January 1, 2011| 1 Comment »

 

I’m going to take a break from writing about the restoration of the Old Town sailing canoe to talk about some boating books. Reading books about boats and boating (and buying books about boats and boating!!) is something I enjoy almost as much as boats themselves. Turning away from my desk to look over my bookshelves, I’ve made a quick selection of some volumes I think are worth talking about. At the top of my list are works by William Piccard Stephens.

Better known as W.P., Stephens (1854-1946) is one of the giant figures in late 19th and early to mid 20th century boating. A true polymath, Stephens participated in his chosen sports as a builder, designer, yachtsman, editor and writer. Among his most enduring contributions to yachting and boating are his written works. Over the course of hundreds of thousands of words, he performed an invaluable service by documenting the history of North American yachting and boating, working from both meticulous research and considerable first-hand knowledge and experience.

My favourite book of his, hands down, is Canoe and Boat Building, or, to give its full magnificent 19th century title: Canoe and Boat Building. A Complete Manual for Amateurs. Containing Plain and Comprehensive Directions for the Construction of Canoes, Rowing and Sailing Boats and Hunting Craft. . .With Numerous Illustrations and Fifty Plates of Working Drawings. The copy I have to hand as I write this is the 5th of many editions, published in 1891. One can find copies on the second-hand market, but they are usually shorn of their plates. These 50 large-format drawings were sold in a separate folder, printed on very thin, almost tissue-paper-like stock, and most have not survived. Mystic Seaport Museum performed a great public service in 1987 when they compiled and published a complete set of plates, at the original size, from two original editions of the book. Canoe and Boat Building has been reprinted in paperback by Dover, that indefatigable reviver of out-of-print materials. You can also read a scanned copy of the 9th edition, along with the original plates, at the website of Dragonfly Canoes.

This book could be a litmus test for whether you are the least bit interested in small boats and boatbuilding. If you think you are, I defy you to read through even the first chapter and not want to head straight for the workshop, and/or the lumberyard, to start a project right away. Canoe and Boat Building is an almost inexhaustible well to which I return regularly for advice, inspiration or simply daydreaming. An added bonus for me is that the greater part of the book is given over to the building of decked sailing canoes, of which Stephens was one of the chief American exponents. Though there are some classic examples of sneakboxes, canoe yawls, sailing skiffs and a handsome little Delaware River Tuckup, it’s pretty much all sailing canoes, all the time.

The writing is characteristic of Stephens and his late Victorian age. It is sensible, practical, energetic and straightforward, and assumes that you want to roll up your sleeves and get on with it. In 18 chapters, an appendix and descriptions of the plates, Stephens gives you all that you need to know about building a sailing canoe, from making a model through lofting, building methods, rigging, rudders and centerboards and finally canoe-cruising accessories such as tents, stoves and camp beds. While the gear you take with you (and what you pay for it!) has changed, much of Stephens’ basic advice about laying down, building and rigging is as fresh and useful as the day it was written.

Stephens was involved in recreational canoe sailing and travelling from its earliest days, and in addition to its other virtues, Canoe and Boat Building is a history of the sport written by someone who was not only there but in it up to his ears. The decked sailing canoes illustrated in the plates, from Stephens’ own Shadow-model canoe Dot through the British Invasion Nautilus and Pearl boats of Warington Baden Powell and E.B. Tredwen to Robert Gibson’s game-changing Vesper and later developments such as Pecowsic, are a hall of fame of the most significant sailing canoe designs of the late 19th century.

Canoe and Boat Building is a book well worth owning and reading repeatedly for anyone interested the history of recreational small craft in North America and also, of course, the wonderful sport of canoe sailing. In the next post I’ll talk about Stephens’ other monumental work: Traditions and Memories of American Yachting. Until then. . .

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An Old Canoe Comes Back to Life: Part 4.

Posted in Canoe Restoration, Canoes, Sailing Canoes, tagged , on December 5, 2010| 1 Comment »

So I was now the proud owner of a 1937 Old Town HW. After I moved the boat into my shop, the first step was to sit down and have a good think about how I was going to do this project. This was going to be a practical boat, a “user boat,” as the Antique and Classic Boat Society folks would call it, and if it ever went to a boat show, it would only be an observer, not a participant for judging. I wanted it to float, and to be useful, so there were clearly some things I had to address, but how far should I go?

For a number of years now I’ve found “restoration” to be a really problematic word. It can mean: 1) a boat that’s only 2% original structure, but still presented as a restored old boat; 2) a boat that is far shinier or better-appointed than it was when left the builder; or 3) a project involving meticulous research, scrupulous attention to detail and a great concern for accuracy of materials, fit and finish. I knew that the project I envisioned for the Old Town wasn’t going to involve massive repairs, so 1) wasn’t an issue. I wanted a workmanlike finish, not 10 hand-rubbed coats, so 2) wasn’t going to be a problem. But I bumped my head on 3), because I wasn’t going to spend an inordinate amount of time on this, either. I wasn’t going to do anything really perverted, like re-covering the hull with naugahyde, but at the same time, I wasn’t going to sweat it if I couldn’t match the original fasteners exactly, or if I changed a detail, like adding sheet copper around the mast where it was severely worn from chafing in the mast ring on the seat, or if I gave the boat a new synthetic sail.

In the end, I settled for describing the end result of the project as a “return to usefulness.” To me, this means more than a repair, but less than a full-blown, super-accurate restoration. It’s a phrase that describes most of the boats I’ve worked on over the years, I think, and I’ll probably use it more. With the philosophical part out of the way, the first practical question was canvas. The canoe was still wearing its original 1937 canvas. On top of the original filler and orange enamel were a couple of coats each of bright blue and then greenish blue. All of the paint was cracked and peeling, and there were “dry lakebed” cracks in the underlying filler, too.

Aside from the aforementioned two small tears in way of the keel, however, the canvas was sound. A careful look along the underside of the outwales revealed none of the usual problem, which is water pooling in that area during prolonged inverted storage outdoors and rotting the canvas so that it separates right below the outwale. Nor were there any problems at the ends. The oak keel was gone at one end, and a little punky in two or three other places, but it was nothing that couldn’t be addressed by scarphing on maybe 2′ at one end and graving in a couple of little filler pieces. All this led me to consider trying to refinish the canvas rather than replacing it.

Re-canvasing would mean removing the stembands,  keel and outwales, and given the state of the oak keel and the boat’s spruce outwales, I didn’t think either of them would survive being taken off and put back on. So, the plusses to recanvasing were that I would have an exterior skin that would be good for a nother 40 or 50 years. That minuses were a longer and more expensive project, and probably some new wood. In the end, I decided to try refinishing the exterior first, and if that didn’t work, or if I really damaged the canvas in the process, I would re-do it entirely.

So, out came the stripper, and I took a small square patch right down to the filler as a test. With some care, good sharp scrapers with rounded corners and 3 applications of stripper, it went ok, and I embarked on stripping the whole hull. This was just as exciting as paint stripping usually is, so I amused myself while I was doing it by playing loud music and thinking about sailing next summer.

 (to be continued. . .)

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An Old Canoe Comes Back to Life: Part 3.

Posted in Canoe Restoration, Canoes, Sailing Canoes, tagged , on November 19, 2010| Leave a Comment »

I have long had a hankering for boats that are slightly out of the ordinary, and that’s one of the things that has led me to sailing canoes. The more obscure the better, really.  Over the years, it has been from time to time observed by friends and family that most of these “slightly out of the ordinary” boats that I like to play with are either uncomfortable, hazardous, awkward and/or wet to use, and therefore fine for me but not really suitable for a relaxing afternoon outing.

A decked sailing canoe, the perfect example of a boat I really like that is "uncomfortable, hazardous, awkward and/or wet to use." Not relaxing at all, but a great deal of fun.

The Old Town was perfect for us, then. It was, with all the extras removed, just a nice, older, wood-canvas canoe in which one could take either a long trip or a relaxing afternoon paddle. However, it also had a complete sailing rig, and in just a few minutes I could change over from paddling to sailing. “Sail when you can, paddle when you must,” the old guys used to say, and I’ve always agreed with them. So what was in box when I unwrapped my new-to-me Old Town?

The as-yet-unamed canoe was a 1937 17′ HW model canoe, produced in what the company called its “CS” grade, which the catalogue described this way:

This grade provides a hardwood and spruce trimmed canoe of thorough construction, good finish, and with the omission of no detail essential to strength, serviceableness and long wear. No shaky or unsound lumber is used, but the wood parts are subject to slight discolourations, small knots etc. Planking and ribs are of cedar; gunwales of spruce, decks, thwarts and seat frames of oak, birch or ash. . .bang plates of brass, and fastenings throughout of brass, copper and galvanized iron. . .For general use where a superior finish is not desired C.S. Grade provides a common-sense canoe of guaranteed dependability.

The canoe was still wearing its original canvas, which was intact except for a couple of small tears under the keel. The varnish finish was in bad shape, and peeling, cracking or just plain gone. The caning in the seats was shot and would have to be replaced. Overall, the canoe was tired, but structurally sound and eminently fixable.

Because the Old Town company records are largely intact, I was able to find out that the canoe had originally been ordered by a Mr. O.A. McPeek of Netcong, NJ. The hull was completed by January 19th, 1937 and canvassed and filled on January 20th. A second coat of filler was applied on March 30th, and on April 10th it was “railed,” or given inwales and outwales. Painted on April 16th, it had received two coats of varnish by April 19th, and Mr. McPeek presumably picked up his new canoe not long afterwards. The build record indicates the color as “orange,” which was likely the “Princeton Orange” shown in the middle of the catalogue color chart.

The canoe also had a complete factory sailing rig, including mast, yard, boom, rudder, leeboards and leeboard thwart, mast step and the special bow seat which incorporated the mast thwart.

I am indebted for the images from the original Old Town catalogue, as is everyone with an interest in old canoes, to Dan Miller and Benson Gray, who scanned and reproduced a great many old canoe and boat company catalogues. You can buy these fascinating documents from the web site of the Wooden Canoe Heritage Association.

(to be continued. . .)

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