Small-Boat Gallery

Photos of the small-boat life from Marty Loken

Skipper Andrew Vandervelde leaving the quiet backwaters of Mats Mats Bay in the early morning aboard his Welsford Navigator. I was rowing around the bay in a dinghy, looking for photo opportunities, when I saw how sails were backlit against the morning sun. This turned out to be the best shot of the day, as small-boat skippers took part in the three-day Palooza Crooza that follows the Pocket Yacht Palooza boat show in Port Townsend, Washington.

I love being on the water anytime, but especially in the early morning. Setting out from Kilisut Harbor for a 20-mile row around Marrowstone and Indian Islands in northern Puget Sound, I ran into a surreal bank of fog. The boat was a Colin Angus-designed Oxford Wherry I’d built, and the oars were spoon-blade Sitka Spruce from Tom Regan of Grapeview Point Boat Works. The fog burned off almost too quickly that morning.

Many of us can name a boat we should have kept, but somehow let go. My personal nominee is Nord Vinden, a 13-foot canoe yawl whose lines were taken from the late-1800s design by George Holmes, a founder of the Humber Yawl Club. Nord Vinden rowed well and sailed like a dream. I loved camp cruising the boat and slept aboard in relative comfort since Nord Vinden featured a fan centerboard with shallow, 3”-tall CB trunk. I could stack a few boat cushions on each side of the low-slung trunk and sleep on a full-size Thermarest pad down the centerline. The photo was taken during a beach-picnic  rendezvous of the Port Townsend Pocket Yachters.

This just-finished 18’ 8” Buzzards Bay Sloop, designed by Capt. Pete Culler, showed up at our first Pocket Yacht Palooza, back in 2013. Arriving to set up boats in the early morning, before crowds gathered, I grabbed a few shots of the boat and its distinctive paint job. The Buzzards Bay Sloop is a big brother to Culler’s classic Concordia Sloop Boat design, intended for use in rougher waters than the shorter and more slender Concordia.

Small-boat owners tend to be a happy bunch, and I felt this image illustrated a very happy man with an equally happy boat—Dennis McFadden of Vancouver, B.C. aboard his 16’ Michalak-designed Scram Pram, Granny Smith. The Scram Pram is somewhat of a sleeper in the small-boat world: One evening we crammed 13 people aboard (and atop) the boat for drinks, and the next afternoon, out on Port Townsend Bay, Dennis demonstrated that on a broad reach and with a decent breeze he could sneak past a lot of boats with loftier sailing pedigrees. Nothing but fun.

After restoring this 20-foot Chesapeake Crabbing Skiff, a narrow but surprisingly stable double-ender, I had fun daysailing and camp-cruising the boat—but it was impossible to sleep aboard due to the long centerboard trunk and skinny hull. This image was shot in the early morning at Ericsons Bay on Lake Ozette in Olympic National Park, where we beach camped for the night. As you can see from several images in this collection, I love early mornings and calm, reflective water.

Back in the early 1980s I borrowed some watercraft from The Center for Wooden Boats fleet in Seattle, and towed them across Lake Union to a drydock where I could shoot almost straight down on the collection. Setup for the shot took far longer than taking the photo, since the arrangement had to be just so; besides using the boats’ own lines, I employed clear fishing leader to help tie one boat to another…and keep them that way. With help from my son Darren, who used our old Poulsbo Boat to keep the small boats in position, I shot from a beam high above, using a medium-format film camera. In the center is a peapod; to the right are different-sized Whitebear Skiffs, and to the left you see a flat-bottomed skiff, traditional canoe and just the bow of another (unidentified) rowboat.

The San Juan Islands are the crown jewels of the Salish Sea, in part due to their geology—rocky walls of hidden coves that have been shaped dramatically over the eons by wind and wave action. This past summer we spent two months exploring the islands, returning to longtime favorite anchorages and searching for new, hidden coves and island trails to explore. In this back bay, my partner Tina looks for sea stars along the side walls of a narrow cove, rowing our 10-1/2-foot Walter Simmons-designed lapstrake dinghy.

Elsewhere in this collection you’ll see a side view of Nord Vinden, my old 13-foot canoe yawl. This is the stern, showing the wishbone tiller that wraps around the mizzen mast, on one of those amazing evenings at anchor during a camp-cruising adventure. Mats Mats Bay is hardly a wilderness area—there are houses around the perimeter—but it’s a quiet spot at night and totally protected from strong winds…and only about 13 nautical miles south of Port Townsend, Washington. And yes, the clouds were quite something that evening!

This is another “Happy Boat Owner, Happy Boat” shot, illustrating the great times many of us have savored aboard small cruising boats. At the tiller is my buddy Josh Colvin, editor of Small Craft Advisor, aboard Scamp No. 1, taking part in a cruise we enjoyed in South Puget Sound.

Several years ago we joined other skippers for the annual Sucia Island Small Boat Rendezvous, in the San Juan Islands. This was my Iain Oughtred-designed 15-foot Whilly Boat, hauled ashore for a lunch break enroute to the day’s destination, Fossil Bay on San Juan Island. (Yes, with the calm water you see in the photo, we did a fair amount of rowing that day.)

As a follow-up to the previous image, this was a shot of Joel Bergen’s Welsford-designed Navigator, stern-anchored near the shore of Fossil Bay, during the annual Sucia Island Small Boat Rendezvous in the San Juan Islands. Small boats are the best!

This isn’t a great shot, but it was a terrific experience as we made the sometimes-sketchy 20-mile crossing of the Strait of Juan de Fuca from Port Townsend into the distant San Juan Islands. I was aboard my restored Garden-designed Eel canoe yawl, and just ahead was my friend Kirk Gresham aboard his 20-foot Flicka. Any day you cross the Straits in this kind of relative calm…well, it’s a great day indeed!

Marty Loken, Associate Editor of Small Craft Advisor, has been building, restoring and sailing small boats for more years than he’ll admit to. (He just turned 80 and he built his first small boat at age 10, so do the math.) He’s organized a lot of small-boat events, including the Salish 100, the Pocket Yacht Palooza, the Palooza Crooza and others, and despite decades writing, editing and shooting images for newspapers, magazines and books, he claims that working on Small Craft Advisor is the most fun he’s had in publishing. He lives full-time aboard a John Alden-designed 29-foot motorsailer, and is building another small boat this winter.