wonacott canoes

[wonacott canoes]

I purchased a Wonacott canoe (cedar strip)and need information on the history of this canoe,my last name happens to be Wonacott so my interest is peaked.Purchased in 2002,only information I have received is coast guard listing company WCL REGraham corporation,Wonacott canoes inc.Out of Business 5/28/86.In business 3/17/75.Based in Orange,California.Any help out there? :confused:

[Fitz]

Go here and ask?
The WCHA:

http://forums.wcha.org/index.php?s=1a14443ab7a0ed43feda6d793386b92e

[Todd Bradshaw]

If I remember correctly, the builder's name was Bob Wonacott. At the time he started building canoes for commercial sale there weren't many recreational strippers on the market. Hazen (and later, Foster and Forrester) produced a line called "Wilderness Boats" primarily building Hazen's Micmac models and a few Pro 327 marathon boats, a few builders like Jensen were marketing marathon boats to racers and Wonacott was building very pretty touring canoes. They were cedar - generally very carefully selected rosy colored strips and they were book-matched on either side of the centerline. Workmanship and trim was generally first rate.

I never got to paddle one, so I can't say much about the performance and don't know where the original designs came from. They were fairly traditional shapes, typical of most recreational canoes, rather than the plumb-stem, racing-inspired touring boats from the Sawyer/We-No-Nah/Jensen types. I suspect that Wonacott found stripper canoe building a tough way to make a living, as have many others since.

Last thing I heard was a rumor that he had switched to building drift boats because there was more money in it (canoeists tend to be pretty frugal, compared to fly fishermen) and that had to be around 1978 or '79. I always liked drift boats and remember thinking "Well, if Wonacott can build a strip drifter, so can I" - so I did and I have pictures of it behind my 1978 Chrysler Cordoba (which I only kept until 1980). I don't remember ever seeing ads for his canoes after that. If you could find an old copy of "Canoe Magazine" or better yet, "Wilderness Camping" from the late 1970's you would likely find a small ad in it for Wonacott Canoes.

I don't remember him ever advertising in WoodenBoat, but could be wrong. For many of the early years, we strip canoe builders were kind of the illegitimate step children of the wooden boat community. Everybody knew we were there, but nobody wanted to admit it or have much to do with us. Photos or articles in WB of, or about, strip canoes sometimes spawned outrage from the readership and plenty of letters to the editor, since these boats weren't "real" wooden boats and were held together by that evil fiberglass stuff.