Favorite boats, dream boats
The ones I'd sail if you twisted my arm, the ones I'd rather build, and the one this whole page is secretly about.
Favorites
Coquina
Nathanael Herreshoff's own boat, 1889. Sixteen feet eight, lapstrake cedar over oak, a gaff cat-yawl with a tiny mizzen behind the helm. Near enough a double-ender. He sailed her longer than any yacht he ever built, summer and winter, then handed her to his son. Lost in the '38 hurricane. Plans still sold by Hylan & Brown and WoodenBoat; a replica sits in the Herreshoff museum in Bristol.
Fishers Island 31
Sidney Herreshoff's one-design for the Fishers Island summer crowd, 1928 to 1930 and one straggler in 1946. Forty-four feet on deck, thirty-one on the water, six feet of draft, 856 square feet of fractional sloop. Fourteen hulls, eleven finished. An absolute masterpiece, and one is preserved in Bristol.
Kathleen
A very beamy gaff catboat, a day sailor, and gorgeous. Twenty-eight feet on deck to C.C. Hanley's 1917 lines, built by the Beetle shop in 2006 for Tim Fallon, 910 square feet of sail on a boom longer than the boat. I dream about her to this day. I would rather build one than sail one, and I would sail one if you twisted my arm.
Dream boats
A log bronc
The little steel tugs that push logs around the booming grounds of the Pacific Northwest: fifteen to eighteen feet, a cabin the size of a phone booth, a Detroit Diesel 6-71 that outweighs the rest of the boat, teeth welded along the bow. Unsinkable, absurdly powerful, terrible at towing. Finished out like Goliath below, with a varnished wheelhouse, a heater and a coffee pot, it's the boat for a rainy Sunday in Puget Sound when nothing else wants to go out.
Professional Mariner on log broncs · a builder still making them · the tugboat race
A forty-foot yawl
The one in my heart of hearts. Something in the Finisterre or Concordia line: a mizzen for balance, a boat that heaves to and looks after you, and a course from Newport to Bermuda. That page is here.
