Turn-of-the-Century Gilbert Boat Company design updated for S&G construction

John Summers, Contributing Editor, Peterborough, Ontario, Canada

Would you like to build and sail a unique small boat that will draw admiring glances wherever you take it, let you learn new skills in the workshop and on the water and make you a better sailor? If so, you may be a candidate for the 16-30 decked sailing canoe.

Not long after recreational canoeists started to paddle their craft in the 1870s, some added sails as well. At first, these were an addition to the paddle to be used when the wind was right on long cruises—“sail when you can, paddle when you must,” they said. Human nature being what it is, however, the canoeists also began racing each other under sail, and this led to rapid development in hulls, rigs and hardware. The first sailing canoes were cruising boats with sails added, where the sailor sat down in the cockpit. Getting the skipper’s weight up on deck allowed more sail to be carried. An expert but small-of-stature sailor named Paul Butler created a sliding seat mounted above the deck which allowed him to get his weight even farther out to windward. Along with these changes, cockpits became smaller and side decks wider. Canvas liners were added to make cockpits waterproof in the event of a capsize, and eventually the cockpits were completely enclosed and made self-bailing.

By the late 1890s, canoe design had diverged into three main types: decked-over canoes for racing under sail, all-round cruising canoes for sail or paddle and racing paddling canoes, each optimized for its particular use. The canvas spread by sailing canoes grew ever-larger, to more than 120 square feet on some 16 foot hulls, and capsizes became a constant feature of competition. By the early 20th century, the American Canoe Association had formulated a set of rules that governed the dimensions of all classes of racing canoes, both paddling and sailing. Decked sailing canoes like this one were most often known as “16-30’s.” Those dimensions (16’ length x 30” beam with 90 square feet of sail) were typical for boats built under Rule IV, “Sailing Canoes,” of the classification system of the American Canoe Association.

A number of these canoes survive in museum collections and private hands, and some have been restored and are regularly sailed. Some new 16-30s have been built in recent years too. One such example, a copy of Ralph Britton’s Gilbert-built Tomahawk, was built at the Antique Boat Museum in Clayton, New York, nearly a decade ago. Beautiful to look at, she features the same batten-seam carvel planking, hollow spruce spars and wide mahogany decks of the original. Like the original, she also leaks, an almost inevitable consequence of a long, lightly-built hull subject to strong wracking forces from hard sailing with a big rig and a sliding seat. With a heavy, round-bottomed hull only 30” wide, the boat is challenging to sail at first, but almost everyone who tried it wanted to get one of their own after their first taste of the 16-30 experience. Since most of the original hulls were round-bottomed, a faithful reproduction is a reasonably complicated proposition, requiring either a fair degree of boat building skill or some good check-writing ability to pay a builder, and so many who wanted to get involved were frustrated. This led directly to the new 16-30 class.