10'0" Yankee Girl

by John C. Harris "I consider the boat and Gerry Spiess, her designer-builder-skipper, to be paragons of the type..."

I was going to save Yankee Girl for the last of my series about tiny ocean-crossers, as I consider the boat and Gerry Spiess, her designer-builder-skipper, to be paragons of the type. I received a copy of Alone Against the Atlantic for Christmas when I was in 4th grade. Within a few days I’d read the book four times cover-to-cover. Spiess, an unassuming math professor from White Bear, Minnesota, designed and built the 10-foot Yankee Girl in his garage. I had read Chichester and Slocum by then, but as a landlocked kid sailing on TVA lakes, Spiess and Yankee Girl were relatable. I was transfixed by the concept of small, inexpensive plywood boats built in garages as a portal to grand adventure. That vision has served me well at Chesapeake Light Craft.

For Small Craft Advisor’s finale in print, I like the symmetry of writing about the boat that ignited my lifelong passion.

I’ve learned one thing in decades of collecting books about big voyages in tiny boats: the design and execution of the boat itself isn’t predictive of success. There have been microcruisers fancier than Yankee Girl that were lost at sea, or that required costly rescues. Gerry Spiess approached his voyages in Yankee Girl with conservative assumptions, meticulous planning, and some smart innovations.

As far as naval architecture goes, you need a sense of humor (or of the absurd) to take the design brief seriously. To cross the North Atlantic, you need more than a thousand pounds of water, food, and gear. You don’t need to be Olin Stephens to appreciate that a fat little 10-foot hull will be the result. With a single chine, deep V bottom, and dragging a tall transom, Yankee Girl’s lines are…coarse. Think of a tiny displacement powerboat hull.

Speaking of power, Spiess differs from nearly every offshore microcruiser of record in shipping an outboard engine, and not hesitating to use it to speed his progress. Spiess’s friend and writing partner Marlin Bree notes that at fast idle, his 4hp Evinrude would give him 2.2 knots in a calm. That may sound slow, but Yankee Girl’s consistent speed while on passage raises eyebrows. In 1979, Yankee Girl averaged 60 miles per day on the 54-day passage across the Atlantic. That’s flying for a boat that displaced 2,200lbs on a 9'9" waterline. In 1981, Spiess doubled down, sailing from Long Beach, California to Sydney, Australia by way of Hawaii. According to Bree, on that remarkable voyage he often averaged 74 miles per day, with a best day’s run of 138 miles under poled-out twin jibs.

In the days before noise-cancelling Apple AirPods, the puttering of the eggbeater was aggravating, Spiess reported. And as he had no choice but to carry gasoline in plastic containers in the bilges—54 gallons for the Pacific crossing—the fumes were nauseating and potentially explosive.

I get the impression that everything below got wet soon after the start of both voyages. Real misery, there, but in my experience the same thing happens offshore in any boat smaller than about 35 feet, no matter how well you cork the bottle.

Being wet and cramped, for months on end, combined with the violent motion of such boats, brings me to a crucial observation about ambitious voyages in tiny vessels: It’s not the boat. No amount of clever design will keep the small boat voyager comfortable and dry. The variable is the skipper. Such a crossing requires physical stamina, but more than anything, a mental toughness that I’m pretty sure I don’t possess. Gerry Spiess, and not many others, had what it takes. •SCA•