Sarum Boats: April 2021

4/14/21

April 14th

A lot accomplished in a couple weeks: The boat furthest along has both thwarts in and is ready for rub-rail fabrication. Most front thwarts have some sort of custom engraving, and will be installed soon.

There are some small details: floorboards, and seats to deal with, but the frames are nearly ready for varnishing.

And in the back room:

The stitch-and-glue dinghy is coming along.

The seams are being filled and shaped, and then the fibreglass will cover the bottom 'plannk'.

4/1/21

Design Development-how I spent my Spring Break

This one has stems with more curve, and a beefed-up gunwale. The front thwart is more basic, being just a straight bar. I also tweaked the width of the boat at the thwarts so that the bow is a bit narrower than the stern, to see what effect that will have on tracking.

Boat Building at Salisbury School

This is a record of boat building at Salisbury School, a boys' prep school in northwest Connecticut. In 2002, Eliot Hovey finished his Annapolis Wherry, from a Chesapeake Light Craft, stitch-and-glue kit. He rowed it to a very respectable fourth-place finish in the Blackburn Challenge.

Since then, students /faculty have built sea kayaks; lake kayaks; a couple of prams; Oxford rowing shells; one canoe; a Chester Yawl, a skiff and two surfboards from kits.

Along the way, I learned how to build low-seat, skin-on-frame, solo canoes, which have become our most popular project. After a few of those, I built a ‘recovery’ kayak and a plywood coracle. As of summer of ’14 we were up to seventy-five boats (I’m not counting the surfboards as boats). My lifetime total is well over a hundred boats.

I've also built three West-Greenland style kayaks and four coracles; for the blog of the latter, go to Steel Coracle.