Choosing the boat

Wooden boatbuilding evolved over the centuries mostly through trial and error. Tremendous pressure was put on this industry to deliver inexpensive, seaworthy, fast boats. Two hundred years ago, the fisherman who could sail a half knot faster than the others would be the first to the best spots, and the first to escape the coming storm.

Two notable basic designs began to take shape in the 18th and 19th centuries. The first was the dory. Dories are flat-bottomed boats made of planks that require little or no steaming of the wood. As a result they are very strong, because the wood follows its natural curve instead of being "tortured" into place. They are also easy to build, because they require fewer boards and less precision woodworking. Finally, dories were extremely seaworthy. They were used as lifeboats, whaling dinghies, and fishing boats in the most severe sea conditions.

The second basic design is the sharpie. Sharpies are also flat-bottomed boats, but they typically have wider bottoms than dories, and are built with lighter materials. As a result they are fast sailboats and rowboats and draw very little water. Sharpies were popular fishing and oystering boats in Ohio, Connecticut, and North Carolina because of their speed and shallow draft.

One legacy of dories and sharpies is that they make great first boats for novice boat builders. They can be built with modern materials such as marine plywood and epoxy, which are easy to work with and very forgiving of mistakes.

I am building a 14-foot sharpie sailboat. The design is taken from Reuel B. Parker's outstanding The Sharpie Book. My boat is a scaled-down version of the larger Cape Cod oystering sharpies used in the later 19th century.