First Boats

For better or worse, you never forget your first boat. By Marty Loken

Mine was an 8-foot Minimax hydro, nailed together in the 1950s with two sheets of fir plywood, lumber scraps and leftover house paint. At age 11, consumed by a need for speed, I powered the floating shingle with Grandpa’s aging 5-hp Johnson and reached the blazing speed of maybe 15 mph, which felt like 60 to a kid with his first speedboat.

While I would later build and restore dozens of larger and more sensible boats, I’ll never forget the sensation of skimming over the water with the wide-open Johnson buzzing in the background, doing its best to keep the little hydro on a plane. The Minimax was crudely built, totally impractical and something you’d never dare take into rough water, but it launched a lifelong addiction to small boats, so it gets some of the blame along with fond memories and my eternal gratitude.

We asked readers to share thoughts about their First Boats, and the response was varied, enthusiastic and in some cases touching. Here are some of the results:

By Vince Bobrosky: Our first boat was a Chrysler Man-O-War sailboat. We called the boat Borderline 11, which came from the movie Gone Fishin’ with Joe Pesci (Joe) and Danny Glover (Gus). In the movie, Joe and Gus grew up together. They would rate their adventures on a scale of 1-10, and usually had so much fun that they would apply a rating above 10 they called “Borderline 11.” The little Man-O-War was so much fun that she deserved the rating.

My son was eight years old at the time. We would pack a quick sandwich, chips and soda and head to the lake after work, often sailing or paddling up to sunset. During the spring when all the shad minnows would be swarming the surface of the water, the setting orange-red sun would reflect off their silver scales and create fiery sparks of light on the water. We called them fire minnows. My son would sit on the bow with his legs dangling as we sailed along on the falling breeze, chasing fire minnows across the lake. We had many great times on Borderline 11—the memories truly lived up to the name of the boat.

By Dan Phy: My first boat was a Sidney Sabot (leeboard pram) built by Sidney Sabots of Venice, California circa 1957. My best friend from Venice High shared the boat with me. We learned to sail in and around the “Venice Canals,” and later out of Santa Monica Bay into the Pacific.

By about 1960 I had a ’53 Ford woody wagon; we’d head up the Pacific Coast Highway with the Beach Boys singing “Surfing USA” on the radio, with the Sabot and surfboards on top. In those days, Refugio State Beach was a small county park with an excellent point break for surfing. We got the bright idea of surfing the Sabot. (On small-surf days you could sail off the beach outside to the point, then sail into the point break…and surf-sail it about a quarter-mile into the beach.) We’d do it again and again, but occasionally the surf would get big in the afternoon and “close out” in a vicious shore break. We pitchpoled that poor little Sabot in the shore break numerous times, splintering the spars on more than a few occasions. I’ve been sailing ever since. My buddy from high school crossed the Bar last year at age 74…Sail on Carlyle “Biff” Boyd.

By Pat Noonan: As I sit here on what I expect to be my final boat, (Last Call, a Cape Dory 25), I’m remembering my first love affair...a 12-foot open-cockpit, cat-rigged Nassau Dinghy. My first boat had no motor—that came later on the second one, a Com-Pac 16—then there followed a succession of “one-footitus” steps up in boat size until I got smart and went back down to a size I could singlehand again. That little Nassau Dinghy remains a fond memory, and I’ve never gotten over the love of bluff bows, wineglass transoms and cat rigs. I named her Seagull.

By John Carroll, on behalf of Edward Peter Carroll: My father, now 80 with mild Parkinson’s, has cruised thousands of miles in small boats over his lifetime. But a notation on the back of a photograph from 1953 reads, “Summer Fun, my pride and joy.” That was his first boat, a 14-foot Chris-Craft kit boat built by the Peterson Ship Yard. Dad bought it used, and mounted a 15-hp Evinrude. At the age of 16, he and a buddy boat-camped from Minisceongo Yacht Club (just north of New York City on the Hudson) to the Canadian border and back—over a two-week period—in this 14-foot open boat. A 600-mile expedition! They slept in the boat every night under the mooring cover—pulled into the reeds along the shore of the Hudson River; tied to a wall outside a lock on the Champlain Canal; beached in a cove on Lake Champlain. Dad repeated the cruise the following summer. He and his buddy were the “talk of the yacht club” for many years.

In 1981, Dad and I recreated the cruise—this time in a 20-foot open boat. Soon, I will make the cruise with one of my teenage boys in an identical 20-footer.

As an ode to the “small-boat philosophy,” the back of my Dad’s old photo continues to read the following: “Had more fun on this boat than most others, combined!”

By John Trussell: In 1968 I was newly married, had just bought my first house and second car, and I decided I needed a boat. I had messed around with some canoes before college and I had seen a number of kayaks. At the time, I thought that sitting on the bottom of the boat with a double paddle was neater than kneeling with a single paddle. And having most of my disposable income committed to mortgage and car payments, I needed to economize by building the boat myself. At the time (1967) there were not a lot of plans for kayaks, but there was a company called Folbot which advertised heavily in magazines like Popular Mechanics, Popular Science and Mechanix Illustrated. In addition to folding kayaks, Folbot also offered kits for what are now called rigid skin-on-frame kayaks. My letter to Folbot produced a catalog, and a check for around $70-80 delivered a kit for something called a Big Glider.

Equipped with a quarter-inch electric drill, a dull handsaw, a hammer, screwdriver and pocket knife, I started construction. Living in a townhouse, there was no place to build a boat outside, but I figured I could assemble the boat diagonally in an empty bedroom. I then imagined I could maneuver the boat out the door, down the stairs and through the front door.

Eventually, the Folbot was finished…but there was no way it would go down the stairs. The good news was that taking out the bedroom window wasn’t too hard. With the window missing, I was able to lower the Big Glider to the ground with a rope.

The boat was transported on top of the car with a towel for a roof rack, lines to four corners of the bumpers, and another line over the top of the boat and through the two back doors. With the kayak, I was able to poke around Bull Run, a couple of small lakes, and once to Chesapeake Bay…exploring and fishing, but never in rough water. In time, we moved and there wasn’t room to bring the boat, so it was abandoned. I hope someone found it and enjoyed it.

In my old age, I am astonished that I was able to build a usable boat with no experience, minimal tools and an inappropriate place to work. But like the bumblebee who doesn’t know he can’t fly, I was awfully young and thought I could do anything. (As it turned out, I was right. In the next 50 years, I built 14 boats and I learned how much easier it is with a better collection of tools and a covered work area. But experience starts when you begin, and the Big Glider was where I began.)

By Morton Caplan: First job, first love, first boat. The summer of 1957 was a magical time of firsts, and the beginning of my loss of innocence. I had graduated from college in the spring of 1955 with a degree in mechanical engineering and a job with the Westinghouse Electric Company, headquartered in Pittsburgh. By the time winter came I had accepted a permanent assignment with the Commercial Atomic Power Division, starting what I thought would be my lifelong career. By spring—that would be the spring of 1957—I was in love with a beautiful and charming young lady, and had acquired my first new car, a ‘56 Ford Sunliner convertible—to me the most magnificent example of automotive art ever created.

I also became a member of the Sylvan Canoe Club, located on the Allegheny River in Verona, on the outskirts of Pittsburgh. It was an old club, probably founded in the early 1900s. The clubhouse was a large two-story wooden building with a dock, a tennis court and a large porch facing the river. The ground floor was open—a wonderful place for parties and dances. The second story was a dormitory for half a dozen of us, all in our 20s, who lived there that summer.

It was truly a canoe club. There was one powerboat, and no sailboats, but at some point early in the season I bought a sailboat, my first. It was a Moth about 11 feet long and cat rigged—just big enough for one person.

On a Saturday morning in early summer I decided to go sailing. I knew nothing whatever about sailing or sailboats, or boats of any kind, but I had the optimism and invincibility of youth. Some people helped me carry the boat down to the dock and put it in the water. Somebody said “Don’t jibe” and pushed me off. Of course I had no idea what “jibe” meant, and almost immediately jibed and turned the boat over, ending my sailing for the day.

The following week I was reading a magazine, and there was an article about sailing. It said that to change direction while sailing, push the tiller towards the boom. The world was now mine; I was empowered and could sail anywhere. The only thing to remember was to push the tiller towards the boom.

I sailed the boat extensively the rest of that summer. In the fall I got caught in the great westward tilt that caused everything loose to roll out to California.

While the girl, the boat and the car have been lost in the mists of time, there have been others. But something I learned that summer stayed with me all these years. When the weather turns bad, when wrack and ruin threaten, when the peasants are marching on the castle with their torches and pitchforks, push the tiller towards the boom, and you’ll be okay.

By Jamie Schering: My first boating humiliation involved a Glen-L 14-foot sailboat I bought for $400 with trailer and a new set of sails. The boat is long gone now, but I reused the rig on a Pixie 14 catamaran I built several years ago.

My vivid memory of the Glen-L 14 was when we sailed out of Penetanguishene, Ontario. It was a beautiful day, sun shining, wind just right and at our backs, as my wife and one-year-old son joined me in heading north out of South Bay. I was feeling like a real sailor, having a great and easy sail under bucolic conditions. The first shadow on our day was when I landed at the dock and a sudden gust caused me to bash the concrete pier. After picnicking and fishing there, we headed back to the boat ramp, dead against the wind. The breeze had picked up in the afternoon and the bay got choppy, spray over the bow causing my son to cry. I was having a great time but was attempting to point too close to the wind—a bad habit I still carry. At that point, the rudder and tiller parted company and left me without steering, as well as an appreciation for things being bolted together as opposed to just screwed. I grabbed a paddle and was attempting to steer into the wind at the narrow part of the bay, when my wife, suddenly holding the loose forestay turnbuckle, asked “What’s this?” The mast instantly came down, fortunately missing everyone’s head but landing on my wife’s knees. We frantically gathered the sails and I paddled through the chop to shore. We beached in front of a cottage where two older gentlemen (who’d watched the whole debacle) were having a beer. After suggesting I didn’t know what I was doing, they drove me back to the boat ramp to get my car and trailer. But the humiliation continued: I then got stuck in the sand on the old guy’s beach and he had to pull my car out with a come-along tied to a tree. We made it back to our campsite and I spent a long evening staring into the campfire.

By Ed Manzano: I rewarded myself with my first boat after completing grad school. She was a Mark Marine Down East Schooner 26, cuddy cabin model—a Chuck Paine design, 22 feet on deck with a 3-foot draft. I purchased her in 1987 and sailed her on and off until 2011. I would dearly love to know where she is now and how she’s doing, if any readers know.

By Mike Waters, NA: Although on track for a career in classical music, that plan was derailed by two early events in my life. First, I was given a children’s’ book entitled Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome, the adventure story of kids who sailed on a “seemingly” large lake in my native England. Along with thousands of others in England right after the Second World War, that book and its vivid adventures so totally enthralled me that I knew I had to try sailing. So when “uncle” Cyril was seeking help to build a 15-foot lapstrake boat, I quickly volunteered to hold a heavy hammer behind the copper nail heads while he “peened” her up, and had my first sail down the local River Stour at age ten.

After more reading of that magical book series, I figured I knew exactly how to sail and all I needed was a boat! But with parents who never went near the water, I had to research this alone and was soon off to the library—in those days the only source for new information. A paperback inspiringly called Build Yourself a Boat caught my eye and soon, all my pocket money (a shilling a week) went into buying planks to make the bottom. I’d already decided the name—I needed my own Swallow to live my own adventures. Neither glue nor plywood was available right after the war, so having read that “stout boats should be built of oak and elm,” I headed to a lumberyard to see what I could find. They dug up some dusty old planks of 5/8" elm just 10 feet long, but they were not planed and I had no money for that work. So after battening the planks together with oak strips, my father sharpened up a small block plane and I set to work smoothing off the rough, gnarly surface inch-by-inch, working on my knees. It took me over a week and I soon came to appreciate just how tough elm could be (and I don’t remember ever buying the wood since)!

Once the bottom planks were done, I added a stem with a sturdy stem knee and then waited until I could save enough money for some pine to plank the sides. Lucky for me, friends and neighbors were intrigued enough that they would pass and throw in “’alf a crown,” or I might never have gotten the money to finish Swallow. Soon I was off to the wood yard again and back with four lengths of pine to lay around the sides, with the top strake overlapping the first one so that I could practice my own copper rivets and roves just like my uncle. After adding a gunwale rail and some thwarts, we turned her over to follow more instructions on caulking the seams. I still remember the large ball of caulking cotton and, even 70 years later, its unique smell. We didn’t have a proper caulking tool, so I managed with an old cement chisel with the edge filed off.

I remember falling into bed each night totally exhausted but full of dreams of where I was soon going to sail. I varnished and painted the boat—including an optimistic waterline—but my dad helped me paint on the name Swallow, as I needed that to be just right. A school mate, Bill Nunn, worked a few hours with me to finish her off and he was soon equally engaged. Within a year, he’d build his own identical boat, so in due course, Amazon would be launched.

To get Swallow to the water involved quite a hike, and of course no one had a car, let alone a trailer. So I found a long tree and fabricated a crude cross beam, and with two small bike wheels made up a rickety trolley. Bill and I then lugged the rig one-and-a-half miles to the nearest water and, with suitable ceremony, launched her in a small creek that ran into the River Stour, that ran eastwards a couple of miles to meet up with the River Avon just at the start of Christchurch Harbor. She leaked quite a bit and the caulking never did quite stop that, so a few months later, dad bought some wood laths to screw over the joints and that fixed it.

Six months later, she sprouted a sailing rig made from Egyptian cotton lifeboat sails that my mom dyed blue for me. The mast was homebuilt with multiple rope whippings around it, and the spars were spruce.

I did, indeed, have many adventures in my three summers with that boat. I’ve built more than 20 boats since then, and they were all better, but you never forget your love affair with the first one. (Besides a career designing commercial ships of all types, I’ve always sailed and raced small boats, and now specialize in designing and sailing small trimarans. See www.smalltridesign.com )

By George Lemmolo: In 1949 my first boat was a 20-foot canvas-covered 1930 Old Town Canoe outfitted with leeboards and a lateen sailing rig. I was in my sophomore year of high school in the Bronx, New York City, and was in the habit of making summertime trips to Old Orchard Beach by bus via City Island. Somehow during my trips, I became friends with some old salts at the City Island Canoe Club. In short order I was the proud owner of my own canoe. The boat needed rib repairs and a total refinishing, but that was only part of the excitement. Once she was seaworthy and floating I was tutored by the old salts in the art of sailing. From then on every weekend during the summer I was sailing from City Island to Old Orchard Beach, spending weekends overnight at the beach picnic area.

I was hooked and have been sailing since. (I’m 85 and plan to continue sailing until I am 90, if possible.) My current boat is a Montgomery 15, on Pine Lake in Indiana, where my daughter’s family lives.

By W. Travis Votaw: The first boat I built was when I was 11 years old in August of 1947. A weak hurricane had blown some of the roofing tin from my mother’s washhouse. I found a piece that was not bent very badly, folded one end and used a piece of 2x4 for the stem. I folded the stern around a wooden apple box end for the transom. I heated some tar my dad had and sealed the cracks. A couple of spreaders held the sides apart.

There was a cow-pasture pond not far from my house and that’s where I first launched my creation. I wanted to have a sail, so I rigged up a closet pole for the mast and used an old cloth window shade for the sail. I made an outrigger using scrap wood. (Of course, it would only sail downwind, but I could paddle it back to the upwind side of the pond. And, I was impressed with how well she moved under sail.)

Thus began a 70-year love affair with small boats and boat building.

By Bob Weiss: Our first boat was a Sunfish that my wife-to-be got for her birthday. She taught me how to sail it in the late 1960s on Lake of the Oaks in Missouri. Three boats later (Chrysler Mutineer, Hunter 18.5, Rhodes 22), and 46 years of marriage, I love my Rhodes, but I think she still yearns for the simplicity of the Sunfish. (But the Rhodes isn’t as crowded.)

By Trevor Akin: Back in 2009, with a new baby in the house and a full advertising and marketing workload on my plate, I decided I wanted to learn to sail on the weekends. The closest lake with sailing classes charged quite a bit for a couple of weekends of lessons, and I’d also have to rent their Catalinas to do so. I was way too poor, so I ended up building a Phil Bolger designed Elegant Punt, and teaching myself for half the cost of lessons. I spent the summer of 2010 sailing any chance I had on various Southwest Missouri lakes and even made it to the first Sail Oklahoma messabout that fall.

I outgrew the EP fairly quickly and the following year built a 16-foot Gary Dierking-designed Wa’apa outrigger canoe to replace it. I’ve also gone on to own a Sea Pearl 21 and build a half dozen skin-on-frame kayaks, canoes and standup paddle boards, mostly Dave Gentry designs.

By Mary Kugel: My first boat was a strip-built outboard runabout, powered by a 22-hp rope-start Johnson (this for a 12-year-old girl). It leaked like a sieve after spring launch even though my non-handyman father tried coating the hull with a liquid rubber product. My mother made a cover for the motor and my uncle made a nameplate. Eventually, the Johnson was replaced by a gear-shift Evinrude.

We water-skied, fished and just plain loved that boat! It was the first of many.

By Brad Kurlancheek: I called it Goop. The massive quantities of epoxy it took to construct the boat were daunting—hence, the name. I never was sure whether Goop was a he or a she, but would have to side with “he,” though maybe it was a gender all its own. All I know is that one late night while working on Goop, three-quarters finished and months into the project, utterly flummoxed by its numerous imperfections, mistakes and edifications, I was seconds away from taking a hammer and destroying this, my first scratch-built boat. Going out and just buying one would be far too easy and convenient, but it was proving so difficult to turn this mish-mash of thin plywood and epoxy into a 12-foot skiff, that I about had enough.

I’d never sailed before. Never been on a sailboat. Yet I was making one, and it was turning out incredibly imperfect. So imperfect, why not just forget about it (I said to myself, red-faced, with hammer in hand). And then it hit me, a revelation from out of nowhere: Goop didn’t have to be perfect. I mean, who really cared? All Goop had to do was float. That’s it. If Goop floated, then we could surely sail too. It was easygoing from then on. Imperfections galore. Who cared? I didn’t—not anymore. Like humans, boats are imperfect, and yet glorious, too, all at the same time. Goop and I learned how to sail, together.

By Keith Smith: My first boat was when I was a teenager, living on the coast in Mississippi. The boat was a 12-foot aluminum jon boat with a 5-hp Sears outboard. I was allowed to take it out of the bayou and into the Gulf of Mexico, up the coast about a mile to the Pascagoula River where I would spend the whole day fishing and exploring the estuary. I really got a feeling of freedom on those trips.

Around the same time my sister and I took sailing lessons at the Pascagoula Yacht Club. I don’t recall the type of boat we used in the lessons, but they were open wooden boats. Later we bought a Sunfish that we sailed along the coast at Dauphin Island and saw bottlenose dolphins swim right beside the boat just beyond the breakers. I still remember them within arms reach, looking at me.

I’m sure those two early boats influenced me a great deal with out my knowing it. When we left Mississippi I did not do any boating, other than canoeing for many years later, until I got the boating bug again. My wife and I took sailing lessons, chartered a Dana 24 in the San Juan Islands, and we’ve been hooked ever since. I’m currently building my second wooden boat, a Welsford Penguin that we hope to take on many more adventures.

By Scott Henderson: I was 11 years old, had a paper route and saved enough money to buy a Kool Sea Snark for $88. (A lady at the 7-11 where I bought Slurpees was nice enough to give me a Kool box top for proof of purchase.)

I loved that boat and put together a little trailer so I could tow it to the nearby lake on my bicycle. Two years later I was on my first ocean race to the Bahamas. I presently own six sailboats, a canoe and a kayak. I gave away Kool Kat to a kid in the neighborhood when I went away to college.

By Jim Graves: The first boat I could use was a 55-gallon barrel, cut in half lengthwise. It was found by a few of the other kids, and was brought to a pond in the woods near our house. It was a different world then, about 60 years ago: Our dogs ran free, and there were tracts of unused land all around. Two of us kids got in the barrel-boat, and used a small log for a paddle. We made it about halfway across the pond before the barrel rolled and sank. The water was only up to our chests, but the bottom was gooey. Not sure, but it was probably pirates who caused the sinking.

By Marlin Bree: The lateen rig was an eye opener for me: The mast didn’t stand very tall but its long spars sported 82 square feet of red, white, and blue Dacron that sat on a plastic covered Styrofoam hull that was 13'-9" in length. The lightweight Sears Jetwind was a kind of board boat, a lot like the ubiquitous Sunfish, with your buns only sitting inches above the water and likely to get doused at speed, but you were part of that boat and close to nature.

The 4'-4" beam didn’t give you an awful lot of stability, but a bold skipper could still take the small craft out in storms and high winds with some degree of confidence that the boat would bring you back safely to shore. Maybe you’d be a little wet, but still you’d have a great time and be smiling. At times I actually had that little hot rod planing, its centerboard humming and its bow out of the water. I wished I had a reefing method on the lateen sail, but I learned to keep the mainsheet in-hand ready to let it out as needed—a rough sort of reef. Best of all, I could, by myself, hoist the hull, mast and lateen spars atop my old Volkswagen Beetle, with the ends hanging out over the front and rear bumpers, ready at moment’s notice for our next foray. The sight of a boat atop a VW sometimes elicited a snicker, but that was all right with me. They just didn’t understand. Pound for pound, inch for inch, I don’t believe I have ever had a small craft that was so much fun.

By Andrew Bell: My first sailboat was an often-borrowed Sunfish that belonged to my neighbor Jim. It was really just a Sunfish mast and sailing rig that an ambitious high school woodshop student had attached to their “project boat” in the early 70s…found by Jim at a yard sale. But to me, at age 13—when you know a lot about nothing, but you know it really well—it became a passport to another dimension. I dinked around with it in the knee-deep shallows until I thought I’d figured out how it all worked. My first real sail was solo after dinner one night. I paralleled the lakeshore for a few miles and caught the evening offshore breeze as the sun was setting behind the hills. The magic of non-motorized movement was incredible, as was the feeling of new freedom within my teenaged mind. I was absorbing the feel of that small craft heeling in the push of the wind and that low humming sound that a cruising Sunfish makes. The hypnotic sight and burbling sound of the wake peeling off her stern simply captured me. I was hooked.

I caught up with Jim and his family a few years ago. We met for a meal in a brewpub near Lake Bellaire, where we’d all had summer cabins 30 years ago. I asked him: “Hey, whatever happened to that old Sunfish I used to sail?” With comedic deadpan, Jim replied “Carpenter ants. They ate the whole thing!” •SCA• (As first published in SCA #107)

We’d love to hear about your first boat as well. You can mention it in the comments below of course, but if you want to write a bit more about—maybe even have an old photo to share—please send it along to josh@smallcraftadvisor.com. If we get a few responses we’ll share them as a follow-up article. —Eds