May / June 2019

It’s a balmy summer’s evening when I visit yacht designer Ed Burnett’s parents, Adrie and Jeremy, at their former captain’s house overlooking Falmouth Harbour, Cornwall, in southwestern England. I’ve barely sat down when Jeremy asks if I want to see his son’s first-ever design. “It’s hanging in the hall,” he says with evident pride. It is a 54' gaff-rigged ketch with a plumb stem and what looks like a lute stern, which is typical of some English traditional craft. The boat is meticulously drawn, with reefpoints on the main and mizzen sails, ratlines on the shrouds, a large bowsprit net, and anchors forward and aft.

Ever since Lin and Larry Pardey sailed around the world in their 24' Lyle Hess–designed cutter SERAFFYN, 24-footers have come to be seen by many as the perfect size for pocket cruisers. They are economical to maintain, yet big enough to feel like “real” boats. The 24' PANACEA is no exception, though her design brief was very different from SERAFFYN’s.

The sport of recreational rowing is growing, and boat designers and builders are responding by offering a variety of light, high-performance craft that match the needs of both novices and experts. While these boats are all so-called “sculls”, they are from a diverse family of designs—examples of which are presented on the following pages.

As we headed out to the starting line in her Hai-boat, KAUNE, Anita Saksi reminded me about the jaska (boom vang). Our three-person crew consisted of Anita as skipper, Heidi Nieminen handling the foredeck, and me between them in the “pit” position. I was in Naantali, Finland, for the 2018 National Championship (SM 2018) of the Hai class.

Once you have owned a wooden boat, or built one, or simply become a pathetic lovesick dock hound, you may find yourself walking through a forest, seeing boats in the trees: a fine stem in the crook of that gnarled live oak, a grove of masts in the prospective yield of this old-growth Sitka spruce. I have learned to not give voice to these visions when hiking with friends, who invariably find them self-indulgent or even sacrilegious. I wonder myself,  sometimes: how does one justify creative works that also require destruction?

The Celtic coracles of the British Isles are round or oblong-shaped skin-covered boats. In their simplest form, they are propelled with a paddle and meant for light inshore work. The Irish called all of their skinboats currachs; coracles were called river currachs, and they evolved into the oar-propelled currach by increasing their length, adding tholepins for oars, and finishing the sterns with transoms.

Willow is easy to find, sustainable, and usually inexpensive or free. It is flexible when green, stiffens without becoming brittle when dry, and can be returned to flexibility by soaking in water. It has been used in currach and coracle construction for thousands of years. 

In fall 2017, ZISKA sat neglected for the second time in her long life, now 114 years, and she was 5,000 miles away from where she was built in northern England. ZISKA is officially a Morecambe Bay prawner, a type colloquially known as a Lancashire nobby, but she was built in 1903 as a yacht and racing boat by the Crossfield Brothers at their yard in Arnside, Cumbria.

On the morning of February 8 this year, the 60-ton Danish fishing ketch YUKON eased alongside a floating dock in the town of Kettering, in the Australian island state of Tasmania, to collect a load of passengers en route to the Australian Wooden Boat Festival in the nearby city of Hobart.

In 2018, the 40' LADY FREE became the first Norwegian vessel to successfully complete a circumnavigation of the North and South American continents. The 32,000-nautical-mile odyssey, which took two-and-a-half years, is all the more remarkable for having been accomplished, for the most part, shorthanded in a 20-ton, double-ended wooden boat whose lines and traditional gaff topsail rig have remained essentially unchanged since they were conceived more than a century ago by Colin Archer, the great Norwegian designer of Scottish descent.