The Perfect Boat (For This Time And Place)
I’ve been lurking here for a while, soaking up the collective knowledge, and getting a sense of what’s involved when it comes to acquiring The Perfect Boat.
A little (admittedly self-indulgent) history, for context.
I had as much to do with boats as most 70’s kids in New England. Homemade rafts. Canoes. Ridiculously heavy and unmaintained fiberglass v-hull rowboats dragged to the lake. Some indifferent sailing (as crew) in college.
But I’ve always wanted to learn to sail, and so with iron-willed drive and discipline, I put off learning for more summers than I can count. In my defense, things like work, family, and deployments got in the way at times.
For the year or so, I’ve been living in New Jersey, about a half-mile from Raritan Bay, and the aforementioned obstacles are no longer relevant. Last summer I looked out on the virtually empty bay and decided to learn to sail.
I went out and picked up an 11’ Minifish with a homemade dolly, which allowed me to walk the boat down to the shore and take it out for the day. And I had a *lot* of fun, learning to recover from several dozen knockdowns, and getting down the basics. Yes, it was more like swimming with short bouts of sailing mixed in, and yes, it was pretty dumb to take it out in near-gale conditions, and yes, my girlfriend is beginning to suspect that these sailing urges are just another way for me to indulge my inner adrenaline junkie without being shot at, but I *did* learn a lot.
All the same, I eventually decided I’d like to spend a *little* more time in the boat, which would also allow me to extend my ‘sailing season’ a bit.
And yes, I understand that a somewhat waterlogged Minifish may not be the *best* choice for an open-water boat. I don’t mind a bit of a workout with my sailing, but I’m in (ahem) in my fifties and crouching in the tiny footwell of the Minifish while ducking the boom was getting a little old. So I looked around to see what everyone else was doing.
And I found I was pretty much alone.
This area has a long and rich boating history, but at present, at least to the semi-casual observer, local boating culture has, for the most part, settled on fiberglass powered v-hulls, the bigger the better, launched from a ramp from a trailer.
It’s understandable. It’s a vicious circle. The waters here can go from placid to choppy (and worse) fairly quickly, so an enormous deep-draft powerboat is, for most people, a basic safety consideration. After all, if you’ve gotten the time off from work for a day or two on the water, and it ends up being rainy or gusty, you’ll need all that seaworthiness to stay out anyways, plus a cabin to keep things dry, etc., etc. And since launching a good-sized boat from a trailer at a busy ramp is such a pain in the @$$ to begin with, who’s going to kibosh the weekend just because of the weather?
So people work like maniacs to afford the boat that will allow them to get out onto the water and get the most out of the time they have to spare, given how hard they have to work to afford that boat. Thoreau would be doing barrel-rolls.
But I’ve read up on the local history, and I know that a hundred years ago, this almost empty bay was the home of almost *a thousand* small wooden working sharpies, whose crews fished and worked the oyster banks for a living. Those boats were designed to be built cheap, yet fast enough to get to shore if things got dicey. Almost exactly the reverse of what’s become the norm today.
My circumstances lend themselves to this older way of getting on the water. I don’t have a lot of ’disposable’ income, but I have free time. So I can walk a light boat down to the water and launch from the beach, and if it gets rough, I can head to shore and call it a day.
What I have in mind at this point is a small row-and-sail open boat. Something I can launch from my rocky and rotten-piling forested beach, row out in whatever direction I want, catch whatever wind I find, and drop the sheet, strike, and row in if it gets to be too much.
I’ve considered the historical local designs, following Chapelle’s reasoning that boats like the Sharpie, the Garvey and the famous Sneakbox evolved in these local conditions, and worked well. (David Clark of ‘Estuary’ fame disabused me a little of that notion, informing me in his deadpan straightforward manner that I’d probably get killed trying to sail a sneakbox out on Raritan Bay.)
I like the faering-derived boats like the Skerry and the various Oughtred designs. I’ve even considered Clint Chase’s Drake 17: the ability to sail a bit without a centerboard appeals to me.
So there’s where I am. I’m currently doing a bit of house renovation, but I get to the end of the day thinking I’m a day closer to putting a boat together and heading out to the water.
I’ve done some homework, but I know I have a lot to learn, and that nothing beats experience, and there’s a lot of it in these forums. Any thoughts? Are my instincts realistic? I’d especially love to hear from anyone with experience with these waters, since it seems like most people I meet think the answer to rough water is more boat.
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