The Seamless Skiff

It's a blast to sail, and someone with more ambition than sense could follow the videos to create something similar.

Article by Kitrick Nielson

I’m not above making an appeal to vanity. The person who achieves this might go down in the history of naval architecture. SCAMPs and Goat Island Skiffs will seem obscure compared to the design that does it right. Someone with skills and experience needs to take advantage of the incredible instructional tool that is Youtube and make a free “design and build this as a first boat” series. Pick a versatile small craft that is easily assembled. Snag a friend or young relative with video production experience. Embed all the drawings and dimensions right into the video and retire in your golden age watching a new generation of small boat builders start with your ubiquitous design. What follows is my story of how I tried it—designed, built, and sailed a 13’ skiff while attempting to document it for anybody to follow along.

It starts at my suburban home where experiments in buoyancy crowd out room for another trailer. Accordingly I’ve become interested in maximizing boats that can travel to water in other ways. Last spring saw completion of a beamy, but heavy, cartopper that my wife and I love. Next on my mind was a boat that could ride inside my truck’s six-foot bed. Like the starting point for Michalak’s Piccup Pram but longer, single-chined, and with a pointed bow. With my tailgate down, a 13 foot hull’s balance point falls within the pickup’s stowage. The length-to-beam ratio would be on the narrow side to squeeze in between wheel wells, making this a good complement to the previous wide build. Sail and row in comparable proportions. Two main mast steps and a mizzen for cat/yawl options. Generous freeboard. Room to sleep on the sole. Besides the fact that I launch and retrieve it from my truck bed with bubbles blowing out the tailpipe, it’s not a noteworthy boat. It’s the simple, versatile, easily-transported boat I wish I had made when I first started building.

The everyday utility of a boat like this got me thinking that it wouldn’t be a bad choice for a first-time builder. That’s who I was a few years ago, a dinghy sailor with heaps of ambition and zero knowhow. Those apprehensions are still familiar. Why spend hundreds on plans for something I don’t know I’ll finish? What does it really take to build it? There are plenty of free, simple designs out there, and many people document their builds on Youtube, but I'm not familiar with anybody combining the two. I wanted this project to be the accessible boat for the first time builder who had no idea where to start. Similarly wide-eyed, I set off with this ambitious goal.

Filming and editing doubled the effort and downtime. Waiting for glue to cure or digital files to transfer found my focus drifting to the impact of access to small boats, especially on young people. I teach high school in the city I grew up in, Las Vegas, and stories from my free-roaming adolescence shock today’s teenagers. Students say they wish they had a childhood before cell phones, back when boredom forced young people out into the real world. Before I aged into sailing, my friends and I were skateboarders. We spent the 90s and 00s scavenging Sin City for a place to throw ourselves at asphalt until a wooden stick on roller skates flipped just perfectly underneath us to ride away. We suffered perpetually with the hope that it might pay off for a fleeting instant. It was good preparation for work with an orbital sander.

Some traits I saw in young skateboarders are mirrored in small-boat enthusiasts. We work hard for our craft. We sew and sand, manipulate strange chemicals and fabrics. We endure discomfort and danger hoping for the priceless moment when a little vehicle underneath laps along through a magic landscape as daylight fades into a golden hour. Having a goal worth suffering for gives life meaning. This grit is required for playing with small boats, and playing with small boats develops this grit—but I worry both are fading in succeeding generations. Perseverance is hard to acquire when you grow up with the world at your fingertips.

I kept working on my little lumberyard skiff in a generational reverie. Reflecting on thousands of years of shipwrights before us who passed on their trade with limited lifespans. In my five years of sailing small boats, on local waters I’ve only once met another person doing the same. Lake Mead and Lake Mohave are excellent, but knowledge to build and sail comes from a community we don’t have. Atkins, Michalak, Payson, Gardner, Bolger, Welsford, Dix, Oughtered, and others have published excellent instructional books, but people today don’t find hobbies reading paper textbooks. It appears that soon after the turn of the century a boom of self-published websites came one after another with small-boat builds and tips.

Duckworksmagazine.com and Michalak’s newsletter are especially noteworthy, but today much of these websites show their age or are accessible only through the wayback machine—not that any young person would seek them out anyways. In twenty years the web log has come and gone. Small Craft Advisor fills a needed role of organizing content from scattered sources, and because you can’t fly a video drone into a squall there will always be a place for written content, but it is sought out by those already interested in small boats. We have to introduce tradition in a language the next generation understands, and for now that means Youtube.

TheBoatRambler, Cumberland Rover, and many others publish excellent videos of their builds, but designs are obscured or behind a paywall. I’m not familiar with anybody doing what I would consider an adequate job of publishing a free how-to-build video that includes a design, but it ought to be done. Daydreams like this are hard to avoid when you’re an island of a small-boat community. My skiff build progressed, and as I fumbled through the tangle of designing, filming, building, and editing, I snapped back to reality. I had tried to stuff my limited skills and patience into the void, but my project would also fail to clear the mark.

If the goal was to make accessible a versatile lumberyard skiff easily followed by a first-time builder, I found only limited success. The “Seamless Skiff” I made is a blast to sail, and someone with more ambition than sense could follow the videos to create something similar. Who starts building boats unless they have more ambition than sense? In other ways I failed. My inexperience made the build too complicated. My video production is crude. My technique is only occasionally a good model. Nothing makes you aware of shortcomings like filming your process for the world to see. Another, hopefully better executed, project like this might be in my future. For now my success is in proving the concept.

Two boatbuilders; three opinions. Some will disagree with a “Free Instructional Video” approach. One argument against it is that it takes too much effort. Yes. Writing about your build to submit to SCA is much easier. I found I wasn’t smart enough to think about a boat and a camera at the same time. It makes a good excuse for mistakes in the build, “If I wasn’t distracted by that damn camera….” The only other contention might be that free designs could reduce sales of paid designs, but reducing the barrier to entry can only increase a customer base. There must be hundreds of communities, like mine, where the interest in building boats is limited by access to information. A free instructional build is the way to expand into those communities. The internet, Youtube specifically, is the right tool.

If an expanded customer base and having a positive impact on the future of the world’s small boat community don’t convince you, let me come back to vanity. Michalak wrote that the best boat designer might be determined by the man with the most boats of his design in the water. This is the way to make that you. Whether you’re like me with barely enough experience to make a boat you like, or you’re John Welsford with a catalog of revered designs—the way to reach the world is to give them a free taste. Or maybe you’ll do what I did and advertise your limitations to the world. Either way it’s an interesting project worth doing, and the small boat community can only benefit from us sharing our, even limited, skills. •SCA•