Rowing Boat - Custom Boat

Lake George Paddle-Wheeler

The original of this interesting little hand-cranked paddle-wheel boat was built by a Lake George grandfather for his grandkids. After half a century of use, the boat was stolen. The family brought me some old photos and the paddle-wheels, and I fashioned this somewhat more shipshape new plywood boat roughly to the measurements of the old.

Ken Swan's Rowboat

I built this flat-bottomed rowboat, slightly modified from plans from the west-coast designer Ken Swan, to replace a beloved old boat for a summer place in the Poconos. In okoume plywood with cedar seats and mahogany trim it cost about $5000. There are lots of plans for very likable plywood boats like this, with and without sail rigs. Everybody in a family would be able to use such a boat, spring, summer, and fall, and it would last for many decades.

Birdwatcher You can read all about this great shallow-water trailer-sailer in the July/August 2004 issue of WoodenBoat. She's a light flat-bottomed sharpie with lexan cabin-sides almost full length and open standing room down the middle. Sleeps 4, can take a beam-ends knockdown and right herself, comfortable, fast, safe, easy to sail, and wholly unusual. Phil Bolger's favorite and most innovative design. I'll build these boats to order. Prices look like $12,200 without sails for Birdwatcher I and $17,000 without sails for BW II. Sails around $1500 and $1700 from Douglas Fowler. I sold this one and immediately bought another, with a Solent-sloop rig; something new to learn. They're so good.

Lily

This is an electric boat that uses a standard electric motor but a very much better-than-usual bank of batteries, controls, and dockside charging system, and has better-than-usual range, seaworthiness and comfort, at a much better-than-usual price. (The designer, Phil Bolger, assures me that the materials can be had for as little as $2500, complete). I like the look of it, too.

Rushton Rowboat

This is a boat we have in the family, a Rushton Florida model pleasure rowboat, and I think it's more beautiful and I know it's more practical, among old-style double-enders, than the Adirondack guideboat, more practical for most users, and the sweetest, easiest boat to row. It's also no more than 2/3 as expensive as a guideboat to build. Dan Sutherland builds a similar reproduction of the so-called Rushton 109. But I prefer this later evolution of the model, from the 1890s. Rushton left a set of journals labeled "Knowledge" that some of us call the Books of Knowledge, which contain accurate definitions of the shapes of all the planks in this boat, among others, and I want to try the experiment of building one straight from these "spilings," as he called them. This is the boat that with its great appeal drew me and my brother Everett into the boat business: we started making Rushton reproductions in 1973. Too early. We knew we were starting the Wooden Boat Revival but we did not know about the Inertia of History.

Here are a few of designs I particularly like and want to build:

I am eager to help you select, from the thousands of great small boat designs available, the boat for you. (I'd also gladly consult on the purchase of other builders' boats whatever the material, new or used.)