Tuesday 3 June 2008

A gig design by Joe Dobler

Duckworks has made available plans for another low-cost rowing gig from the board of Joe Dobler. Like the smaller Marietta Yawl, the Crestwood Gig is designed for stitch and glue construction without jigs or extreme boatbuilding skills.
The boat is 34ft long by 5ft 6in beam, roughly the dimensions of a Cornish Pilot Gig, so it would be very suitable as a training boat or as a starter boat for a club that cannot justify investing in a traditional gig before the crew is firmly established.
Dobler himself traced the ancestry of the design not to gigs but to Swampscott dories, with their flat bottoms and rounded sides.
The Duckworks article includes a delightful account of retired oarsmen and oarswomen in Houston finding love through rowing. Bless.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The New Charleston Mosquito Fleet, a group small craft enthusiasts in Charleston, SC, maintains two Crestwood gigs that are regularly rowed in the Ashley River as much as four times weekly depending on weather and who shows up for the schedule.

The boats were built in 1995-96 by adults and teens as a mentoring venture and have survived to continually provide a delightful vector for fun and exercise on the water.

Contact Edwin Gardner for more info:

esgv@bellsouth.net