A great deal has changed in the world of plywood since those masters of the medium made the recommendations quoted above. The prospective plywood boatbuilder of 2017 wades into a thicket of unenforced standards, uneven quality, and outright flim-flammery. Lots of great choices remain, but you can’t simply judge marine plywood by its stamp.
Some years ago, I watched a traditional Norwegian faering take shape in an adjacent classroom. Driven half-mad by the beauty of those singular lines, I thought, “Aha! Next year’s stitch-and-glue class!”
Synchronicity,” muses 70-year-old Jonathan “Johnny” Waters, sharing coffee from a thermos with his 34-year-old daughter, Emilie Waters Harris. It is late summer 2022, and we’re sitting in weathered wooden lawn chairs on the wharf at Bradley & Waters Marine Railway. It has been the Waters’s wharf since 1985, and their railway. It’s the last bit of working waterfront in the village of Stony Creek, nestled in Connecticut’s Thimble Islands.
It started on an October evening in 1936, with a drink in hand, as so many of the best challenges often do. After a sumptuous dinner at the Gibson Island Clubhouse near Annapolis, Maryland, on a broad veranda overlooking Chesapeake Bay, J. Linton Rigg declared, “I’ve got the fastest bugeye on the bay.” The newest owner of the bugeye BROWN SMITH JONES had a point: she had been feared by nearly every oyster poacher on the bay 40 years earlier, when the Oyster Police used her to enforce catch limits.
Sakonnet One Designs are stiff, beamy, and comfortable, with high freeboard and a coaming to help keep sailors dry. They have solid spruce masts and deep, cast-iron keels. They carry a large mainsail; a small jib; and a symmetrical spinnaker.
A good fun boat,” very popular with younger sailors, the Starling Burgess-designed, Abeking & Rasmussen-built Atlantic Class received an added boost when parachute spinnakers were introduced in the mid-1930s.