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December 1, 2000 Issue
December 15, 2000 Issue
December 1, 2000
Pepin Vintage & Wooden Boat Show
By James Broten"If I haul my boat down to your show," I asked organizer Don Claxton, "what'll I do with it while I'm there; leave it on the trailer, or launch it to prove that it floats, or push off and sail it around now and then?" "Or all of the above!" Don replied.
And so it was that I found myself towing my recently rebuilt Rhodes Bantam (new wood hull and old rig), accompanied by my old friend Phil (we met at the University of Minnesota in 1945), on the way to the First Annual Pepin Vintage and Wooden Boat Show on August 26. Pepin is a small "touristy" town on the Wisconsin side of Lake Pepin. The I ake is a widening of the Mississippi River which forms a lake averaging two miles wide and twenty-odd miles long.
The show area was on the lake shore between the public boat ramp and the marina. There were thirty-three boats entered and displayed at the show, including canoes, kayaks, a hydroplane, a sloop-rigged red-sailed sharpie, a lapstrake tender and small lapstrake sailboat, a wooden workboat, several iceboats, and two 27' yawl boats built by classes at Urban Boatbuilders, Inc. One was rigged for sailing. UBI is a non-profit group targeting young people in the Twin Cities.
Vintage boats included a 1932 cedar strip boat equipped with an antique Johnson Sea Horse Motor, also a restored inboard runabout. Mississippi Bob Brown had at least two boats, one the "Recycled Chris Craft" seen in the October 1, issue, and one the kayak he described in the April 15 issue.
Jerry Sicard set up a demonstration of stitch and tape construction, using a kit for a small pram dinghy he brought back from the big WoodenBoat Show. If Jerry hadn't taken off for a sail mid-afternoon, he might have fin-ished it.
There were an estimated two hundred spectator-visitors at the show; one couple flew in from Bethel, Minnesota in their Cessna seaplane. Proceeds from the show will be used to help establish a community boat-building and boating program in Pepin.
For information on the 2001 Show, contact Don Claxton, (651) 282-7229, Email: claxtond@wwdb.org.
December 15, 2000
A Few Small Boat Opinions
Advice For Amateur Boat Builders
By Robb WhiteI have an ad in two boat magazines where I say that I am a small boat builder. Because of those ads, I get a lot of mail from people who want to build a small boat or a bunch of small boats. Since I have been struggling in this business for nearly forty years, they think I know what's up and they have a few ques-tions. Because I believe that the beautiful work of capable amateurs is the best thing to keep the old craft going, I do the best I can to help out. Here is what I tell them:
First, there ain't no money in it. The nearest thing I can think of like building small boats for a living is writing poetry for a living. I tell them they need a mentor. My wife fills that role for me. She is a school teacher and is very generous with her money. She knows how to live poor too.
Second, anybody who thinks that any person can build a boat as cheap as people in a factory can is a fool, Even if you use sheath-ing grade plywood on stud grade "Paul Bunyan" fastened with drywall screws and "liquid nails" and then paint it with latex house paint, unless your time is worthless the boat is still going to cost you more than a cheap aluminum butthead (appropriately called a "Honkey Drownder" around here). So you say... "I don't like aluminum boats".
Well, I don't like temporary boats made out of trash. I wouldn't participate in any "Quick and Dirty" Contest even if first prize was a whole case of polyurethane crack filling dook even though I would be a shoo-in since I once (when I was 30 years old) completely planked an 18'round-sided, lapstrake dory skiff in one day. Of course, I had pulled and plarled the lumber the day before. What I am getting at is that a boat that you build yourself is going to become very dear to you no matter what kind of a piece of junk it is and when it self-destructs, it will break your heart. Since you can't build a boat as cheap as a bunch of desperados with chopper guns sucking the juice from a pallet load of fifty five gallon drums, you might as well do what no factory can... build a boat that is far better than any manufactured boat ever was.
Any capable amateur can do that. It is even possible that you might able to starve along until you can attract the few widely scattered people in the world who will pay what it costs to have the best small boat ever made. Strip-planked wood boats, properly glued and sheathed inside and out with epoxy and fiberglass are the strongest and longest lasting small boats ever within the reach of an amateur builder. Though building a boat like that is not easy and takes so many hours that few professionals find it profitable, it is possible to build a truly wonderful boat with little previous experience.
Here is what I would do if I were starting out right now. I would build one of those little strip planked Wee Lassies from a kit. You can worry about your dignity so much that you never do anything in your spare time but wash the car, cut the grass and participate in political discussions. Until you have wedged your ass tight into something like a Wee Lassie and paddled off up a little creek somewhere, you ain't really got the goody out of life. You can drag one of those little things through the bushes with a string and put it into a piece of water that has never floated a boat before. A I the wonderful things you can do with such boat is beyond the scope of this advice but your great grandchildren will jump for joy when they find that tiny wonder... still as good as the day you made it.
After you get that done and learn all about little pieces of wood and epoxy and fiberglass, then you can hunt around for the plans for a little more boat. I'll tell you something for a fact though. The joy of boats is inversely proportional to their size. The dwindling starts when you get to where you can't carry it in one hand and the fishing pole in the other and keeps on getting worse from there until you get to the bottom-job and joker-valve stage.
There ain't no joy left when they get big enough to grow oysters on the bottom and have a plumbed in toilet and deck leaks and electrolysis and lightning struck electrical system and rusted out exhaust elbow and fuel in the bilge and osmosis blisters all over the bottom and mold on the mattress and mushrooms on the stem and leaks in the deck and frazzles in the running rigging and cracks in the swage and leaks in the deck and galled shaft in the stuffing box and penetration in the core and deterioration of the hoses and cormorant doo-doo on the teak and leaks in the deck and stoppages in the fuel system and worry in the the thru-the-hulls and leaks in the deck.
You know, having a big boat is kind of like what happened to... well.... it is a little attractive at first thought I guess, and there is probably a little thrill to it while it is still in the oval office stage, but you know what is going to happen... serious trouble. Best thing to do when you get thinking about something that will get you in a bad fix is to buy one of those big shiny magazines andjust look at the pictures. You can build any kind of boat by the strip-plank method. It is not all that hard to carve a model and take the lines off, loft them up and build to your own notion. Or you can adapt the plans for any round bilged boat to work with strips. I'll give you a hint for the second boat after you have built the tiny ca-noe. Weston Fanner published the plans for a sport boat type skiff called "Dolly Varden" in the old Science & Mechanics Magazine. It was designed to be strip planked. One nifty trick with that boat was that the garboard strakes were shaped so that once you got them done, even though all the other strips were parallel sided, they did not have to take the cheap-shot of running out on the sheer. A skiff like that, epoxified inside and out with fiberglass sheath-ing, will stay with you and be such a joy that it will become a treasured heirloom.
I checked with young Wes Farmer (damn near as old as me) and he does not have the plans for "Dolly Vardell" but I bet a little relentless pursuit would scratch up Boat Builder's Handbook put out by Science and Mechanics Magazine, 505 Park Ave., Department 2196, New York 22, NY (for what that's worth since that address was way before they invented zip codes). "Dolly Varden, Craft Print Project 179" is on page 103. The plans were $1.00, post paid in 1960 but if you can find that book you don't need them because my old hero, Weston Farmer, gives you all the plans you need and tells exactly how to build that wonderful boat in his clean concise style right there in the article. Of course, epoxy has changed all that and you can leave out the frames and all now.
My last opinion is to ignore all the opinions of others including mine. If you want to build a boat, build it just to suit you and I give you joy of the relentless pursuit.
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