Launchings

Northern White Cedar strip canoe with black walnut and cherry detail. Cedar tree cut down and strips milled by builder. No nail/staples construction method utilized.

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.

John Brooks and Ruth Hill and their four children at Brooks Boats Designs designed and built a new plywood kit boat last summer. The DragonFlyer design is meant to be a trainer for beginning sailors and then grow with their skills, offering lively sailing as their own skills are developed.

The Swan is a CLC Light Craft “Wood Duckling 8” built over a two week period by 9 year-old McKenzie Kaufman and her grandfather Charles McParland of Tega Cay, SC. She was launched on August 6th on Lake Wylie in South Carolina.

I completed building this Northeaster Dory from a Chesapeake Light Craft kit in June after 8 months of weekends working.

Students Sheldon Patterson, Ross Melhorn, and Andrew Dingledine built this Jon boat at Edgewood High School in Trenton, Ohio, under the instruction of Mark Schallip. They found plans for the 12′ x 4′ hull online and then modified those plans to create this design.

Kjell Klinkenberg of Oslo, Norway, finished two boats in the summer of 2004: a 18' x 25" Cape Charles kayak (CLC designs) and a 16' x 4'5" Shearwater (Joel White). The boys in the pictures are his son Oyvind on the right, and his friend, Inge Svale. Kjell is at the helm.

Handwork.

After a couple of years owning and extensively sailing our 12′ Westphal catboat on Biscayne Bay, we decided we needed a larger day sailor. Unfortunately, the classic day sailor market is pretty limited in South Florida and as we couldn’t find anything we liked, the answer obvious: build one.

Sulkava is a two person sliding seat row boat that readily converts to a single. It is designed by Ruud Van Veelen a Dutchman living in Finland. I chose this design as I was after something that was fast and elegant but suitable for two novice rowers.