One of the first designs I fell in love with was L. Francis Herresshoff’s Rozinante. There was one being built at the “Boat School” in Lubec when I arrived there in 1973. Reading L. Francis’ Compleat Cruiser fleshed out the story behind this wonderful craft. It’s fitting that when I want to focus on writing stories about designs as I am in this series, that I return to this design and to this type.
Over the years other canoe yawls have held a special place in my heart. I was fortunate to have the opportunity to design WoodWind, a design I’ve called the Beach Point 18 after the place where I grew up on Cape Cod. This boat is a bit compressed, a tendency for shorter hulls than ideal that’s been an outgrowth of cost-cutting and been exacerbated by trailer-sailing. In this particular circumstance, it came about due to her owner’s need to fit WoodWind in his garage while he undertook finishing construction after I’d built her major structures in my old shop.
Most recently I’ve been brought back to my love of Canoe Yawls by Thomas Armstrong’s series featuring Constance on his blog, 70.8%. This Albert Strange Wenda design, recently built by Fabian Bush, is also featured on the relatively new site, Canoe Yawl.org. This second view of Constance sailing, combined with the other of her resting in a tidal estuary fills out the picture of why these boats have such a powerful appeal.
Canoe Yawls embody the double nature of many of us coastal sailors. We are drawn to the shore and spend whatever time we can afloat, but we are not sea creatures, more amphibians. These boats are so well suited to estuarine sailing as to be a wonderful expression of that dual nature. They are equally at home afloat in choppy tidal waters as snug amongst the reeds high up a winding marsh.
I grew up between a bay-side beach and a brackish marsh. Beach Point lies between Cape Cod Bay and Pilgrim Lake, the old East Harbor – before the railroad, and then a highway, closed off the lagoon and made it an isthmus. The smell of marsh mud at low tide is among my most cherished olfactory memories. Some might say the same of the smell of a stable…. It is the aroma of supreme fecundity. It’s from marshes and estuaries that so much of the sea’s life gets its start. These lobed structures with winding passages branching down from brachia to alveolae are the ocean’s lungs, just as the Amazon is the atmosphere’s. The tides are their diaphragm, pumping sea-water in and out to mingle with fresh water and to lie in bright warm sunlight as a nursery for so many types of young who later follow that tide seaward to a wider life amidst the perils of the open sea. This was my first and greatest teacher, as well as my home.
Rozinante tied in for me with the whaleboat, her direct ancestor. This tied in not only with my home’s heritage, but also the pivotal role reading Moby Dick had for me as a youth. Albert Strange’s Canoe Yawls tie in to another literary influence of long-standing, Erskine Childers and his Riddle of the Sands. I’ve been captivated by this glimpse into a life, a time and a place, that connects so much with aspects of my own youth while gripping me with Childers’ image of an amateur, sidelined from the establishment, and keen to make a difference when presented with what Arthur Davies calls, “My chance.”
The main point I’m trying to make in this ramble is to illustrate the way boats act on our imaginations and the way they can connect with us intimately at a primal level. Our involvement with them, whether it is just reading and looking at them or if it involves designing them, building them, or sailing in them; are all routes back down to what has been called in other circumstances, “the better angels of our natures.” Our time spent with them strengthens our connections with the natural world, and its rhythms, and also with aspects of our cultural histories. In both cases these engagements feed us. This was the intent behind the term recreation, and the activities that grew up around it. L’ Francis knew this, Albert Strange knew this, Erskine Childers knew this. Melville was so far ahead of his time, he probably knew it too!
The prime conditions for what is now a quaint, traditional activity have past us by. If there ever was an ideal moment and place, Albert Strange’s life and Arthur Davies’ fictionalized existence probably came closest. Since then, the means to what had been considered a relatively modest form of boating, well outside of fashionable wealthy yachting, has receded as a realistic possibility for more and more of us. At the same time, the onslaught against estuaries and marshes has seriously degraded almost all of the world’s shallow waters. Any outing, instead of simply nourishing us with an immersion within the bounty and strength of the natural world, now either depresses us or demands that we turn a blind eye to its condition. Those of us who still care about such things are in retreat along with the Fiddler crab, the Mud Skipper and the Woodcock.
These conditions have a direct impact on our lives. They do so for everyone, but we are more likely to notice, to feel it in our bones. This is a good thing. Mourning over a loss, even the anger we may feel towards the senselessness of the destruction wreaked in our name, are healthy reactions; much preferable to a numbed paralysis sleepwalking as the destruction continues.
The intersections of all of these currents around boats, and in this essay, on Canoe Yaws and their significance as I see it, is what drives me to continue to persist in the folly of pursuing the design of small craft. This brings us back to Rozinante. She was named after Don Quixote’s wispy mount after all. L. Francis, the son of the great Nathaniel Herresshoff, was keenly aware that the moment for such things was already on the wane in his day. He knew that our choices were to either admit defeat in the face of overwhelming odds or to stand and tilt at our windmills, that in doing this we at least stand witness to what was and what might be again someday.
This is far from a call to nostalgia. Those of us who look to the past for guidance, and look askance at promises of utopian futures held out as if baubles in front of children, are used to this charge. It is far from what is required. The root of remembering comes down to mean an act of putting together again: re-membering. We look to the past and the present that’s grown out of it for lessons of what has endured and what has failed to endure. We take those lessons to heart. We then restore what can be restored and fashion out of what is at hand a new circumstance to bring what we value to life. We don’t re-enact the past. We don’t fall for visions of perfection in the future. We just want to express our natures and find ways of engaging with what matters to us. That’s all.
That may be all, but it is a daunting task. Just as Childers felt in his day, on the eve of immense disruption and danger, somehow small boats and those of us who love them should have a “chance” to do our part.
What a nice surprise to read this…and on my birthday!I too have read Herreshoff’s “The Compleat Cruiser” over many times (bought a copy in 1968 from John Atkin) and, like you, fell in love with “Rozinante”. Far too expensive for me (clergy salaries are not wonderful) but great dreaming material. Your 18 footer seems more in line with the money I might possibly be able to pull together and, as you note in this essay, I am of the shoreline and bays, not the open ocean. Herreshoff and Francis B Cooke have been my inspirations and I like the simple way they did things…oil lamps, simple rigs, etc. Another source of enlivenment has been the Ransome “Swallows and Amazons” series…again for the themes of simplicity and self-reliance and big adventures in small waters. I have had two boats in my life – both of them to Ted Brewer’s “Grand Banks 22″ design…nice little vessels in just about every way, but circumstances (mostly my wife’s health issues) conspired to interrupt the whole thing. But one may still hope… and you seem to feed these hopes. Thank you.
Thank you David!
It’s a bit of whiplash to just finishing the homey little tasks of putting a blog post “to bed” and to find an enthusiastic comment waiting!
You’re so right about Swallows & Amazons. I came to those relatively late, but they are right up there!
There’s value in the dreaming…
I think the canoe yawl is my favorite sort of boat so far. Lovely.
They are lovely!
One more thing that didn’t fit into the essay that I wanted to mention about Constance. The colors of this boat are wonderful. I like to call these shore colors. The hull is the green of the marsh grass surrounding her in her berth. Her bright-work is the color of old dry grass. The deck and housetop are pale lilac, one of the colors found on the inside of spider crab shells here in New England. Some are a pastel yellow, some buff, some a pale green, and some pale indigo. This lilac tone, as with all the others, only lasts a short while in the sun before bleaching away to white. These colors reflect her surroundings and are soft and subtle enough to change with the light and the weather. Look at how the deck matches the mud in the first image and then the cloudy sky in the second.
A boat is a canvas. It’s a shame when that’s not taken into account when their colors are chosen. That’s not to say that Rozinante’s austere white with a red bottom isn’t appropriate. It’s wonderful in its own way. The forms of the sails and of the hull are abstracted in white so we can see their shape clearly and note the rhymes between air and water. The deep red of iron, of hemoglobin, or rust; anchors the hull in the water. Her bright-work and spars share the same tones and tie it all together and back to he materials from which she was made.
You see boats through an artist’s eye and write of them as a poet. I pause again to see more than I did before: mesmerizing.
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It’s a bit of a conundrum. So many of us love canoe yawls, and so few of us choose them. This shape seems to reverberate on a couple of levels. First I think is the strongly feminine nature of the form which strikes us at a deep, visceral (even mystical) level. Another is what Geoff Kerr, introducing Ian Oughtred at Mystic this summer, posited as a kind of genetic memory of double enders, and challenged the small crowd to raise their hand if there was no Scandinavian blood in their heritage. Not a hand went up.
Yet another connection to these boats, for those aware of it, is the fascinating development which took place at the turn of the 19th C.in the Humber estuary. The Strange/Holmes nexus, it could be called, but other designers were involved, and the whole lot paralleling and feeding on the development of decked sailing canoes, which had developed into a sort of prototype mini canoe yawl.
I suspect a major reason these boats are not as often built as transom stern boats are has nothing to do with seaworthiness (canoe hull are legendary for their seaworthiness)but more to economy and utility, a transom boat is likely easier to build and has more usable space per LOA. Another intelligent and gently provocative post Tony, thanks.
ps. One of my favorite canoe stern boats is Chuck Paine’s ‘Frances’, and her little sister ‘Carol’, both of which could and should be adapted from their Bermuda to a yawl rig, gunter, gaff or, dare I say it, lug. The flush deck versions are stunning.
You are right about the mismatch between the affection so many have for the type and its relative rarity. How much of that is due to marketing bait & switch?
There seem to be many things we tend to consider “too beautiful,” or “impractical” for us. As Wayne would put it, “I’m Unworthy!” The focus on undigested practical considerations that you bring up – not that you haven’t considered them in context – in most discussion about boats is one of the reasons I’ve taken up this challenge and begun Boats for Difficult Times as a mouthpiece. Unless we allow ourselves to see past truisms like “double-enders are more expensive,” and allow ourselves to feel and articulate the deeper incentives that tie us to boats, we may continue to miss the mark. As boats once again grow dear, this becomes a greater concern.
This isn’t to say there aren’t grains of truth in the old saws we bandy about. It’s just that unless we put them in perspective, they do more to confuse us than to enlighten.
I’m not bringing this up to criticize your comments, only to point to the need for a broader perspective in the general discussion about boats. Your site, 70.8%, does address boats from many angles and give room for many voices.
Tony, I don’t take your comment as criticism at all, but rather a call, as you say, to take a wider view. Over the years a boat that pleases will, in terms of the whole economics of the boat relationship, factoring in fulfillment, personal pride, emotional attachment and involvement, prove far more economical in terms of maintenance(it’ll more likely get done), use, satisfaction and reward.
First, the project undertaken with an eye to monetary savings trumping the hearts desire is probably doomed from the start, may not even be finished and will never prove a satisfying meal, used less, maintained less and possibly ultimately discarded. Your ‘savings’ just vanished. It may be that what you are pointing to is that in difficult times we don’t have the luxury of that kind of mistake. The axiom here may be, do the research, gain the knowledge, and build for the long term, consider it a marriage. Which it is. Indeed, I’ll refer back to the inner boat of our earlier conversations and name it anima or animus, depending.
Not to imply that quick and dirty or instant boats don’t have their place, experimentation is very healthy and lots of ideas would never see the light day otherwise. I’m all for proving grounds, and evolution. But most us want to build (ourselves) or commission, a long term relationship. So in good times or bad, take the time to know what you want, what you need, and figure out how to make it happen, rather than be constrained by false economics.
This discussion is fascinating. The late Joel White said that beautiful boats were loved and looked after when homely boats were neglected (or words to that effect)in his article mintroducing the “Sallee Rover” to “WoodenBoat” readers years back. I fully agree. There is something so satisfying on working to bring out the beauty in a boat that is designed as a work of art from the beginning. Canoe yawls are a type that stimulates that creative urge in an owner. And the earliest canoe yawls were, I believe, much more like your 18 footer than the later, heavier, full keel versions that Albert Strange developed and of which Herreshoff’s “Rozinante” is a most romantic evocation. Their owners would load them onto a railway car and transport them to where their desired sailing location was…early “trailer sailing”, I suppose. Albert Strange’s little “Cherub II” makes your design seem almost luxurious by comparison.
What a lovely article! Of course, I’m a bit biased, because the Rozinante you show (named, fittingly, Rozinante) is now in my custody. (The photo in your post is of her under her former owner, Michael Reid, a wonderful shipkeeper who did much to maintain and restore her.)
I think I fell in love with Rozinante–the design,not the particular boat–when I first saw a photograph of one. Surpassingly beautiful. What I have realized since having one is that they are very practical, too, within their limits. The double berth in a Rozinante, for instance, is far more commodious than you would find on any other boat of her length, and this despite her narrow beam. The trade-off is that the berth takes up the majority of the cabin space. But this, like all canoe yawls to my knowledge, is a boat to sail, not to live aboard. And sail they do!
Thanks for this blog on canoe yawls. If you recall I contacted you in my pre email days regarding Tart. Since then there has been a lot of water under the keel. I joined up with the Albert Strange Association but never got one of those lovely craft.
We went to Marthas Vinyard last fall and loved it seeing the traditional boats. This year we will again head up in that direction.
I still have my Marieholm Folkboat in the UK and in a moment of craziness decided to buy a motor launch ( lovely old woody with a near canoe shaped displacement hull ) because we were getting less mobile with time. I dont say my sailing is over because I will have a sailing dingy on deck. Thanks.
Great to hear from you Jonathan! Glad to hear you’re still on the water.
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