Maintain the designer's intent, even if using modern materials
John Summers, Contributing Editor, Peterborough, Ontario, Canada
When I was a kid growing up in Vancouver, British Columbia, one of my favorite haunts on the weekend when I wasn’t sailing or walking the waterfront, looking at boats, was the big downtown branch of the Vancouver Public Library. Vancouver being a seaport town, the library had a wonderful selection of books about boating and seafaring. It also had nearly every volume in MotorBoating magazine’s Ideal Series of plan books, which collected designs first published in the pages of that remarkable magazine in its heyday. As well as the MotorBoating volumes, the library had extensive back files of Yachting, MotorBoating, The Rudder, Pacific Motorboat and other boating magazines from the early to mid 20th century. To this day, I know of no better way to waste an afternoon that to pull up a pile of those magazines and browse. Canoe sailing being but one branch of the great sport of yachting, you will find the occasional sailing canoe sprinkled in amongst the meter boats, cruising yawls, grand motor yachts and racing speedboats. 
In March of 1923, Yachting published photos, lines and offsets for the 16’ decked sailing canoe Breeze, designed by Dwight S. Simpson of Boston. (Contributing Editor Dan Miller wrote about Breeze in the August, 2008 issue of CSM. Ed) As the article accompanying the design points out, she might be called a “canoe yawl,” and one could discuss that definition and indeed the definitions of “canoe” or “sailing canoe” for some time, as a recent extended thread in the Yahoo Sailing Canoes group made abundantly clear. Whatever the designation, this is an attractive and capable little boat that would lend itself to being built today in updated materials. The low-aspect ratio rig, with its sliding gunter main and gently bent yard, could be made from short spars that would stow easily when the boat was not in use, and requires only a forestay, for which the main halyard could also serve double duty. A buoyant hull with a plumb stem and somewhat slack bilges would convey the live-ballast, canoe-sailing experience, but reef points and the ability to douse the mizzen entirely would also make for a flexible cruising rig. The original boat sailed with two 25 lb. bags of buckshot beneath the floorboards and a steel plate centerboard. Though this is not the modern practice, there’s something to be said for a boat that is in its basic form exciting to sail, with a big-ish rig, and can gradually be made more mannerly with ballast and reefing. You might also amuse yourself with a clamp-on sliding seat to go across the cockpit coamings for breezier days, or for when you leave the ballast at home. I said earlier that this is a design worth building in modern materials. Let me take my hobby horse out of the barn for a few moments and expand on that remark. In so saying, I’m not for a minute advocating changing the original design. It’s a natural human urge, and one worth resisting in the case of boat designs, to fiddle: “If only she was a couple of feet longer, or a little wider, or I changed the daggerboard for a centerboard....” I’ve read yacht designers complaining about clients who were perennially writing in to request changes, for free of course. I used to think that some of this might just be curmudgeonly grousing, but then I was amazed when I first published the plans for the 16-30 to receive inquiries from those who wanted to take what was clearly a round-the-buoys racing boat and use it for camping, and in one case add oarlocks(!). If you like to fiddle with boat designs, the time might be much better spent creating your own new boat from scratch and leaving well enough alone. 
If you did decide on a potentially lighter construction technique, such as cold-moulding, you would want to keep careful track of the weights as you went so as not to make the boat overly light and change the handling characteristics. Strip plank would also work well, though there must be few if any less interesting ways to build a boat. The hull could also be constructed in batten-seam carvel or lined off and planked lapstrake, though these methods wouldn’t suit trailer-sailing as well as others. They would, however, produce a boat whose construction techniques would perfectly complement her design. In any case, this boat is certainly on my list of designs worth building, and as soon as I get my shop set up again (I’m in the midst of moving at the moment, and away from my tools), I’m probably going to make a half model so that I can admire the hull up on the wall. In addition to being a Canoe Sailing Magazine Contributing Editor, John is the General Manager of The Canadian Canoe Museum in Peterborough, Ontario, Canada |
