Reminiscing on Little Boats and Big Ideas

First boats and my CanoeCad software

Article by Skip Johnson

I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t deeply fascinated with small boats and their design. First memories of such was as a 5-year-old riding in the car with my parents and going by a group of PBY Catalina seaplanes at the San Diego Naval Air Station. What beauties! Still are in my minds eye.

As an early teen it was model boats—the days of balsa wood, tissue paper and dope. They were mostly electric powered with a few glow-plug airboats thrown in for good measure. Early radio control systems were fairly rudimentary (first transistor type, even I’m not old enough to have dealt with the tube type.) The rudder was operated by an escapement, a device powered by a twisted rubber band that gave left with one click, right with two clicks and if you timed it just right a third click actuated a switch for a third function. On one of my last models, that third function actuated release of a depth charge. Depth charge was an M80 firecracker flung off the stern of a destroyer type model using a modified mouse trap—until the day the burning fuse didn’t burn through the thread holding the mouse trap open.

The first real boat was a 15-foot canoe—steam bent ribs covered with screen wire to hold some fiberglass cloth in place while polyester resin was applied. A little tender (aka very tippy) and slightly twisted, it carried me down many creeks and streams of the Ozarks on both day and camping trips.

Next was a hydroplane, a William Garden design around 11 feet long with a 15 Hp Evinrude outboard. Quarter-inch plywood on wood framing fastened with resorcinol glue and what seemed like hundreds of screws. My girlfriend soaped the threads of every one. Apparently that wasn’t enough to dissuade her regarding my obsession, we’ve been married now for over 60 years. I raced the hydroplane against a number of 8-foot Minimaxes for a couple of years.

College, marriage and family took center stage for some time, but we always had a boat and used it regularly. A short stint with a 13-foot Chrysler sailboat was followed by a series of outboard runabouts and waterskiing and lakeside camping year in and year out.

But the desire to design boats never went away. In the early 1980s personal computers arrived on the scene and one of the first things I did with an Osborne Executive computer was to plot coordinate pairs for super ellipses. I had done the same in college as the first architectural student to take an introductory computer programming course when the machine took up one floor of the Engineering building and had a whopping 16 kilobytes of ferrite core memory.

Practical CAD programs started to germinate shortly thereafter and I joined the Autocad bandwagon early, which helped me weather some lean times in the mid eighties. Besides architectural work, the capabilities of Autocad grew to the point that some automation was possible and I started to work earnestly to develop tools to help design boat hulls. My premise was simple and to me straightforward—since I had this burning desire to design boats there must be a multitude of like minds out there and so CanoeCad was created to meet that need. CanoeCad was a set of routines within Autocad to create canoe-style hulls with parabolic curves fore and aft with super elliptical cross sections. If you input a number of variables; LOA, beam, location of midsection… the program would print out a set of stations at your specified spacing, offset for the thickness of the planking guaranteed to be mathematically fair. I loved it, tweaked it, and realized there were an infinite number of variations possible.

So armed I ran an ad in Boatbuilder Magazine and reserved a space in the Houston Boat Show. The crowds at the boat show were impressed with the two smooth and fair boats I’d brought—(a couple of old salts almost came to tears over fairness of the shapes). But nobody paid more than polite attention to the program or the possibility of “designing your own.” It turns out there aren’t a multitude of like minds out there—the vast majority of humanity travels through life quite comfortably without this particular obsession in the back of their minds.

The Boatbuilder ad brought in a trickle of responses and a few boats were built as a result, but it was obviously not a viable enterprise. The Houston Boat Show on the other hand, introduced me to two groups that would play a large part in my life down the road. One was a slightly eccentric fellow with business connections in Belize. The other was an even more eccentric carpenter/boatbuilder by the name of Bill Collins who introduced me to the wild, weird and wacky/ world of the Texas Water Safari.

More stories to fllow… •SCA•