Launchings

Chesapeake 17 hybrid kit. Stitch & glue hull, cedar strip deck.

The Center for Wooden Boats recently launched the newly restored Blanchard Jr Knockabout (BJK) Pamela in Seattle, WA. This project focused on providing young people the opportunity to learn traditional boatbuilding skills over the span of the last two years.

Peter Yudkoff and his kids, 16 and 11, built their Mill Creek kayak from a Chesapeake Light Craft kit. "This was our first boatbuilding project and it took us about 16 months," writes Peter.

The Lowell Town Class was originally designed in 1932 as a safe children’s training boat. Today they are raced by Town Class Association enthusiasts in MA and RI.The Landing School undertook to build three of these boats in the 2019-2020 school year but only one was completed due to COVID-19.

Classic 17′ Whitehall pulling boat. Her lines are based on boat nearly 150 years old. Glued lapstrake, planking made of Vendia Marine Plank. She has two Alden Drop in Row Wings and three places for those. So she can be rowed as a double or a single.

Ken Foote built TRUANT using Edwin Monk's book How to Build Wooden Boats. TRUANT is a 12'6" catboat with 5'beam. He launched her in September of 2002. He used poplar for the bottom and sides, cypress and cottonwood for the trim.

I found the plans in the back of “The Dory Book”, by John Gardner after looking high and low for a boat I thought I could build. This boat fit the bill. Besides requiring only average skills to build, it is also light, pretty, rowable, seaworthy and cheap to operate.

Hydrofission/5th Axis designs cedar-strip kayaks with extendable pontoons, available in kit form for the homebuilder.

Mark Knee sent in this picture of the boat his father Daniel built. It is a Standard Fly Drift Boat which Daniel and Mark use for fishing trips on the Pere Marquette River and the Big Manistee River, trying their luck at trout, steelhead, and salmon fishing.

The boat kit was received as a large cardboard envelop filled with flat pieces of mostly 3mm Okoume plywood. The stitch and glue process on a 21 foot long boat forced me to be satisfied with slow incremental progress. Fortunately the well illustrated builders manual was excellent.