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| MARY H All photos supplied by Chris George |
Lord, it was day and night and night an day work when in season!
- Some Old Salt
MARY H
Guest Post by Chris George
The design already existed in Howard I. Chapelle’s classic American Small Sailing Craft as the Cape Cod Bay Pound-Net Scow. In the old sailing days, these boats mainly fished herring - and fished the species out! They look like the TRILOBOAT StudyPLAN SANDBOX, but evolved slightly curved sheer lines helping with the “roll to the sea, as there often is on the Cape shore” and historically carried a pile driver. I sent to the office of ship plans at the Smithsonian and for $60 they sent me a tube full of diagrams of old scows -including Great Lakes types - along with Chapelle’s lines, taken off in Provincetown in the 1940s. To start I had Dave’s blog, Chapelle’s book and an awesome picture I found on the internet of a model built locally off the same plan, credit Rob Napier.
The original boat in the plan is 36’ and I determined for the scope of the project, and town mooring regulations, to scale the build to 20’ - though I did wonder if proportions would get weird later on. So off this poster-sized plan I made a table in my notebook with an engineering ruler and scaled all the points of measurement for 20’. I also set about making an 8’ mock up with a couple scrap veneer plywood sheets and a cardboard model. Making the model was fun just tracing the plan onto cardboard and adding a chopstick mast and paper sails; at that size my old G.I. Joes look like a person of 5’4’’ height.
To build the boat I had written some pay into the funding to hire skilled help. I hired a friend of mine, a retired roofer and now bricolage artist with whom I had already worked on a few building projects. The first thing we did was to locate a tree for the mast and let it cure for about a year. It’s a beautiful mast! We found a very straight white pine of about 24’ in the woods on a neighbor’s property. Stripped it with a machete (held like a spoke shave) and then coated it with wood preservative and hung it in my garage.
Severely squeezed into my garage, the actual assembly and building went straight down the lines of “Instant Boats.” Dynamite Payson virtually dictated the techniques that I would modify. Cutting out the main pieces from plywood was most of the early work. I referred to the notebook table a lot and because the math was simpler to convert inches in decimal (remember the engineering ruler), I made sure to make an extra column for the conversion back to 1/16th inches for my measurements on plywood, transcribing the height of the sheer above bottom. The one caveat is that this measurement required another column in the table because the Pythagorean theorem had to be applied to account for the flare of the hull as the Chapelle plan just shows a profile view. No lofting though! A Kreg brand T-square was used constantly. I made a useful misstep while building the mockup that helped me realize to account for flare because I paid a printer to just proportionally enlarge the plan and I used it like a template. When assembling the mockup (which I may still employ as a standup paddleboard) using stitch and glue with zip ties, it felt scrunched down. This effect was not noticeable at the tiny size of the model. The actual cross section of MARY H is 5’ across the bottom with a 5’6’’ beam on deck.
The winter months were spent in the garage with a space heater cutting and edge joining the plywood with epoxy and fiberglass. The gunwales were constructed in this way as well as five transverse bulkheads for holding the structure together like a ladder. Striking the fair curve of the bow and stern were the most ancient and nautical feeling part of the process. It was accomplished by laying the measurements on the plywood with nails and bending a piece of PVC edging around them. The curve was hand cut by eye with a buzz saw through the skill of my roofer friend.
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Building a boat was a lot to ask of my family, three children and one an infant. I did a lot of work after bedtime into the night and tried to involve the children as much as possible. One problem spot occurred while attaching the bottom to the sides for tape and glue. We decided to attach the bottom with the boat upright, bending the kerfed bow and stern up with shims and two-by-fours at both ends. The shape of the boat would be held in place for gluing with bar clamps and screws edgewise above the waterline. The deadflat was easy enough and all joints were bonded with epoxy fillets and fiberglass strips. But the ends had to be done in one fell swoop laboriously levering up the ends of the boat like flaps over the piles of shims while running around to make everything even as sealant set between the seams. We went way over time and things were starting to fail as my wife pulled in with all the kids. Seeing them all it was such a sacrifice not to be able to care for my baby at that time. But I left it in the care of my friend and somehow he finished the bottom single handedly.
With the hull still upright I built the centerboard box up out of clear pine boards and more marine plywood, splurging on bronze screws. Now looking boatlike, I got a group of friends together to help flip the hull over onto its transoms for sheathing the bottom. All were promised fresh clams or oysters. I sheathed the entire hull on the outside only with one layer of thick fiberglass cloth bedded in epoxy. Once painted the same crew helped me flip the boat again onto a trailer which I picked up reasonably from the USACOE via the GSA, a good resource. The garage doors were popped off the hinges and the boat was carried out by hand. I had lined the trailer with an old foam mattress that I saved for this purpose so she would have a soft landing onto the rollers.
Outside in the Spring I built deck stringers out of clear pine strapping and built the mast step of extra fir from the skeg. The boat was filled with 100 empty soda bottles for buoyancy with some sealed plastic water cooler carboys for good measure. The deck was cut from the same ½’’ marine plywood as the rest of the boat and laid as efficiently as I could manage. Between every seam I shot marine sealant or sometimes silicone caulk. A somewhat big mistake was not better sheathing the deck somehow because it leaks during rains. It has to be pumped out after rain and storms now while on the mooring. The hull is tight however so the water inside is “fresh.” One splurge was for EVA foam faux wood decking. Rolls of this stuff were moderately expensive but are a big facet of the historical look, and napably soft. Many people have stopped by the boat and remarked they thought these were actual planks. Rub rails are made of super cheap highly sacrificial lengths of furring strip.
Rigging is piecemeal. I got about 100’ each of tan synthetic rope for the halyards and great thick faux hemp nylon rope for the main sheet, also a historical touch. I made a forestay with hardware store steel wire and shackles. Chafing gear is cut garden hose. The sail was made at a sailmaker in Falmouth, Massachusetts. The proportions are kind of weird as the boom is a real deck sweeper. It will help to reef when I sail the boat more in earnest. At this point she sailed down wind, in the lightest winds three times in the Summer and Fall of 2025. Yet, when I put the sail up, down wind, in the lightest wind, it is still hard to deny we are under sail. And that feels great! I am looking at a potentially life long learning curve so there is plenty of time to perfect it. For electric propulsion she hangs two five horsepower German Torqeedo engines off the stern with some Chinese ePropulsion stick engines for backup.
MARY H now sits on the hard waiting for the 2026 season coming up at the end of March. All the people who helped were essential: a landowner letting us search for the mast, friends and relatives who flipped the boat or shot screws or gave friendly advice, authors - I owe them all a ride or at least some oysters. Spiritually, there have been few journeys as rewarding for me as building this boat. At the Christening, the bottle was smashed by the real Mary H.
