Gunkholing?

[Lone Star]

I was checking out the Duck Flat Wooden Boat website in order to do a little research on Iain Oughtred's Grey Seal. One of the design features was that the Grey Seal was suitable for gunkholing. Gunkholing!? What is the origin of this word and if one was to gunkhole... what would one be doing?

W.L.

[Ian McColgin]

Haven't I waxed lyrical about this before - the origon of gunk hole is plainly tickles and salt marshes there you have nome nice gooey gunky mud at low tide. You gain the shelter of the marsh and even as the wind howls you sit quietly.

Perhaps an osprey's evening hunt will amuse you.

Perhaps you forgot what stage of the tide you were at when dropping the hook and you wake up at ohdarkthirty at a considerable heel.

"All free of life's false ambitions
I laugh at the world and its shams
And think on my happy condition
Surrounded by acres of clams . . ."

Check Stilgoe's book "Alongshore."

G'luck

[Bruce Hooke]

Ian has offered up as good a derivation of the origin of the term as anything I can come up with. All I will add is that to me gunkholing means poking into small coves and inlets where the bigger boats can't go and the people in a hurry never bother to go. For, example one of my favorite anchorages on the Maine coast can only be entered at low tide in rowboat, but at high tide a boat with 4' draft can make it in (if you've been there first at low tide to check out where the rocks are), and once inside you are in a perfectly protected cove miles from anything other than salt water, spruce trees and granite, and with enough water under you to anchor for the night quite comfortably. That, to me is gunkholing.

As to what makes a boat good for gunkholing, I would list the following characteristics:

- Shoal draft and/or a centerboard.
- Sturdy enough to take running aground occasionally in calm waters (sooner or later you will hit something if you like poking into small coves and such).
- Small and light enough to make getting away from a grounding a minor delay rather than a major crisis.

- Bruce

[Dave Hadfield]

It (the shallow draft) also allows you to pull into a crowded anchorage at 7:00 pm and
still find a place to stay. The difference between 3ft draft and 5 ft draft is the difference between staying and leaving. And 2 ft is much better.

Dave

[Todd Schliemann]

When the day is done, the sun is setting, you head off in youth with your pram. You poke into everywhere and map the shore with your shallow bottom and your imagination. You find each rock, each soft seaweed bed, each mud or sand bed that lines the shore, feeling it with the bottom of your boat. Until you fall asleep in that pram and the tall grass, until the sun lifts you to do it again.

It's an endless facination known to all that gunkhole.

[Mike Field]

I'll add my bit by saying that while everything above is absolutely true, Willy, no-one has yet mentioned bilge-keels. But they are really the gunkholers best friend.

My three-tonner's permanent berth is in a gunkhole. See

http://albums.photopoint.com/j/AlbumIndex?u=1231924&a=9316678

for photos of Sanderling, bilge keels, mud, and all.

[Alan D. Hyde]

Mike-------

A pretty boat, and a practical gunkholer.

Who designed her?

There's much to be said for bilge keels.

Alan

[Dave Hadfield]

Mike,

Indeed, very nice. I like the interior with the flush deck. Simple, practical and attractive.

Dave

[BrianCunningham]

Likewise Mike, nice boat.

[Ian McColgin]

I like twins and that's an especially nice version. Some are pretty bathtubby!

My fears may have been misplaced but I ran one aground on the inside of Clatsop Spit - mouth of the Columbia - and the ebbing tide was so vigorous that we ended up with the bilge keels buried. We were afraid that she might not bob loose, so we dug the sand out a bit at low tide and kept moving sand through as much of the flood as we could stand the cold cold water. Then we moved on to prayer. Prior to flotation, there was a bury to the keels and we could feel the boat think about it and then bob free.

Just a thought if you're hitting gumbo mud in still water or sand in a good current.

But then, half the fun of gunkholing is seeing if, as you step off the boat, the muck overtops your boots.

Slurrp

[Mike Field]

Thanks for your complimentary comments, gentlemen. Sanderling is indeed a comfortable little gunkholer. She was designed by Alan Buchanan back in 1948 -- one of his very early designs, that won the Yachting Monthly design competition for that year -- hence now known as the YM 3-Tonner. The original design was for centreboard, and either Bermuda or gaff rig, but the bilge-keels, I think, were suggested (by Maurice Griffiths who was YM's Editor at the time.

Buchanan and Griffiths co-produced another design, Swin, a little later, quite similar but a bit bigger.

Sanderling's only 20' on deck, and you can see how roomy the built-up topsides make her (although they should really have a bit more tumblehome than they've got.) She really does indeed suit me very well.

[This message has been edited by Mike Field (edited 01-24-2001).]

[BrianCunningham]

Multihulls make great gunkholers, don't have the wieght of ballast, and they sit on even keels