RudderPosts

GINGER: A 50' Fast Daysailer

In WoodenBoat magazine No. 201, we published an article on the 50' fast daysailer GINGER. The boat, designed by Robert W. Stephens, while evocative of the Sonderboats of the turn of last century, is a thoroughly modern concept--above the water and below. In the magazine, we weren't able to show her underwater profile. Designer Stephens sent over a color rendering after publication, and offered it for the letters section of WB 202. Space constraints prevented its inclusion there at a reasonable size, but we promised you could find it here. Enjoy!

Small Boats

Watch your local Newsstand in early December. WoodenBoat is publishing a new annual edition called Small Boats. It profiles, in words and photographs, twenty small boats. What's a small boat, you might ask (as lots of people have)? The answer is published in the new magazine, but here's the essence of it: It's a boat you can haul home yourself, and store in the garage or driveway. The publication is packed with all types of craft: powerboats, sailboats, rowboats, paddle boats. There are boats for camp cruising and exercise and daysailing and going fast (and going slow).

First week in December. Newsstand near you. Let us know what you think.

Looking for Information on SEMINOLE

Elizabeth Meyer is seeking information on Seminole, a Lawley yawl she's just had restored to pristine condition. Here's a note from her. If you have any details, leave a comment, or send me an e-mail.
            --MPM

Seminole is a 1916 George Lawley gaff yawl. Thanks to the temptation dangled before me by Anne and Jay Greer of the Wooden boat Foundation, I bought Seminole in 1996, sight unseen, for one dollar at an auction in Oceanside. Now I want more information on her history.

Particulars
LOA: 60’
LOD: 46’4”
LWL.:33’-0”
Beam: 13’-0”
Draft: 4’ 10” board up.

She is a gaff yawl with bowsprit and boomkin and has no topmasts.

Her ownership history: 

1916 – 1920        Julian H. Harris          Detroit, MI
1921- 1923          Elisha H. Cooper       Essex, CT
1924 – 1927             “              “           Lyme, CT
1928 – 1934        T. Dwight Partridge    Los Angeles, CA
1935-1942          Arthur Westmark        Los Angeles, CA
     From 1942 to 1982, the ownership record is unclear
1983(?) – 1996      Timothy Rhodes         Oceanside, CA
1986 -                 Elizabeth E. Meyer    Newport, RI

Seminole will be re-launched on May 28, 2005, after a two-year refit at Steve White’s Brooklin Boat Yard in Brooklin Maine. I would greatly appreciate any and all information about her history, owners, registration and exploits. 
All the Best,

Elizabeth Meyer

Sloop Envy

This is Siren. She's a New York 32, a class designed by Sparkman & Stephens and launched by Nevins in 1935. (The 32s replaced the aging Herreshoff-designed, gaff rigged, New York 30s, which are profiled in the current issue of WoodenBoat.)
   Peter Cassidy owns Siren, and has for the past several years. She was a yawl when he purchased her but, in a fit of sloop envy, he spent the past winter building a new mast for the boat. This is a recent photo, received this morning by e-mail, showing the newly stepped spar—which, according to the grapevine, is 1/4" taller than those of Peter's competiitors. Why? So Peter can look across the water at those other boats and mutter, "What a nice little mast.”
    Each summer, for a week or so, I sail on one of Siren's competitors, a NY 32 called FALCON and owned by Bob Scott of Castine, Maine. There's another 32 in Castine, GENTIAN, recently relaunched by the Rogers family there (with lots of help from Paul Rollins, who rebuilt the hull). It's an unfolding story, this New 32 thing. There's a fellow in Holland building a new one--from the bones of an old one--and there have been murmers of other potential new constructions and acquisitions. Stay tuned. And while you're staying tuned, you can learn more here at the site maintained by sloop-man Cassidy.

A Placemat Moment

I just had a placemat moment. You know those perfect images of perfect boats--the ones that adorn the paper placemats of touristy seafood restaurants and hang on the walls of the Route 95 rest area in southern Maine?  Those pictures sometimes seem too perfect—the soft light a little too doctored, the scene a little too staged, the boat itself too right.
    It's a drizzly day here on Eggemoggin Reach. I just looked out my window over to Babson Island. The green grass of the back field is glowing in fog-filtered light, buds on apple trees are beginning to steal the thunder of the spruces, and the water beyond is a steely gray melting into a same-colored sky. Into this scene motors a perfect white lobsterboat with a red steadying sail. It spins a few circles in the cove and then motors off, bone in teeth, to the west. Kinda perfect. Is somebody setting me up here?

Cool Boat: A 15' Crowninshield Knockabout

Remember Chip Flanagan's Dark Harbor 15 featured in WB No. 183? Chip, a Portland, Maine, boatbuilder, designed and built the boat for a man in Seattle who'd fallen hard for the B.B. Crowninshield-designed Dark Harbor 12 1/2--a boat that Chip deemed inappropriate for Puget Sound. Its big sister, the Dark Harbor 17, was more boat than the client wanted. Fifteen feet (on the waterline) was about the perfect size for him, but there was no Crowninshield design in this range. Or was there?

Over the past year, I've made an informal study of knockabout sloops. "Knockabout" is a sometimes vexing term that applies to a loose family of boats. It came about in turn-of-last-century Marblehead, where (and when) two wholesome sloops were conceived to replace the jib-on-bowsprit boats of the day. A few years later, a family of knockabout fishing schooners evolved in nearby Gloucester. They were called knockabouts because they had no bowsprits. The term also applied to later one-designs--like the Dark Harbor 12 1/2 and 17—even though some knockabout sloops carried a short bowsprit. But I'm getting off the point. The point is that, in my informal research into knockabout sloops, I stumbled onto a Rudder magazine design review of a B.B. Crowninshield 15' knockabout.

Crowninshield designed the boat for Vincent Astor, who used it as a sailing tender to his steam yacht, NOMA. The little sloop was not called a Dark Harbor, but it gives us some insight into what Crowninshield might have come up with had he pursued a fifteen footer in that family of one-designs. It seems Chip Flanagan got it right.

Mr. Astor's boat had built-in hoisting bolts so it could be hauled by its mothership. It may not show in this view, but the gooseneck track is extra long, so the furled sail could be slid down to deck level to clear the davits. Hodgdon Bros in East Boothbay, Maine, built the boat. I don't know when. The Rudder magazine article says "last summer," but my photocopy of the article is not dated. I'll find the date, and edit this post accordingly. But right now, I have other things to tend to. For now, here's the sail plan, and the dimensions (the lines drawings in the photocopy are light; if they're okay in the magazine, I'll post those when I find them.) Click on the thumbnail to enlarge it. But you knew that, right?

LOA                    23'6"
LWL                    15'0"
Draft                    4'0"
Sail Area             265 sq ft
Displacement        2,400 lb