Wood boat designs seen at 16th Annual Pirates Cove Wood Boat Festival

Here is a link to a video slide show I posted on YouTube of wood boat designs I saw at this year's Pirates Cove Wood Boat Festival.

 

Great stuff; I thoroughly enjoyed it. And I'm green with envy. Here in the desert along this stretch of the Colorado River, we don't get boat shows at all - much less shows with lots of wooden boats.

Years ago, I was doing pick-up work on some tract houses in the middle of California's delta country. So I built a quick-and-dirty ancestor of my Blue Rose flat bottom canoe, using scrap wood from the construction dumpsters.

1x2 furring strips for chine logs and gunwales; 3/8" shear paneling for the sides and bottom; I nailed the 1x2's to the sides before I bent them into shape. 2x6 Douglas fir scraps ship-lapped for the transom; a stem cut from a 4x4; a chunk of 3/4" ACX for the center mold. After the sides and bottom were on, I cut the center mold at 3 1/2" with a Skilsaw. to leave a frame (of course, I rounded the top corners). I laid the trapezoidal scrap piece down with one edge on the frame and the other on a 2x4 block, to give myself a seat. It took me three or four evenings to build the thing, because I only had an hour or two between the end of work and sunset....

As I was finishing it up, a young framer stopped and watched me for a while. Then he said, "yo're buildin' a boat outa wood?!? How'ya gonna keep the warter out?!?" I've always wondered what he thought boats were built out of throughout history, during the thousands of years before they invented fiberglass. But the answer to that is probably simple: he just never thought.

 

Full video version of Pirates Cove Wood Boat Festival

I have finally completed and uploaded the full video version of my good times at this year's Pirates Cove Wood Boat Festival.



My 17 foot Selway-Fisher Mandarin Thames Rowing Skiff got 2nd place in class (14 foot and over paddle or oars). I got beat by an Adirondack Guide Boat.

I'm going to post another thread about wood rowboat design, performance, analysis and testing. I like the testing part the best since that means lots of rowing!