by Jim Kerrigan

Created on: August 17, 2009   Last Updated: August 20, 2009

In the United States we are lucky to be the recipients of a rich heritage of sailing craft built originally by working fisherman. The Sharpie; flat bottomed easily constructed and surprisingly weatherly (sailing into the wind) and surfing before the wind as no production sailboat can.

The form; Fishermen (shellfish fisherman) needed a shallow draft simple to build and easy to sail craft from which to make a living. Trial and error over a 50 year period lead to developed forms by the 1880's. These boats were built with planks and their masts were tree trunks shaved of their bark and limbs. The flat bottom gave the craft good initial stability and their sharp chines made good keels when they were heeled under the wind load in their sails. Centerboards were used and built heavily to plow through mud when their draft was lost to shallow bottoms. This mean that the sharpies could sail over sandbars and obstructions that ordinary craft could not sail over. The tree trunk masts bent over when gusts came in which allowe3d for greater recovery time for sharpie crews. The masts themselves had no stays or shrouds to hold them in place so rigging was cheap and mast could quickly be raised and lowered. When a sharpie wanted to park it just let the sheet go and the sail spun around like a wind-vane stalling the boat.

The economy for you and me; we do not have to build sharpies out of planks (unless you want to) we can use plywood. Plywood makes the project go much faster and the resulting hull will be stronger and dryer than its plank on frame ancestor. Plywood can be used in a process called stitch and glue where frames are kept to a minimum and the shapes that we cut out of the plywood (drawn in the plans we buy) stitched together with electrical wire and form the hull. We then fillet the seams with a paste made from epoxy and sawdust, micro balloons or sand. We then pull the paste flat before it cures with a playing card. once the paste hardens we cover the pasted seam with fiberglass tape and wet it our with epoxy and presto we have a sharpie hull.

Sharpies and be built from 12 foot skiffs to 30 something cruisers. The beauty for sharpies is even the 30 somethings can be driven right up to the beach and carried on trailers. But don't take my word for it just goggle "Chelsea flyer" or "Mystic sharpie" or "Phil Bolger" or "Parker Marine" and you will see that sharpies are alive and doing well 100 plus years after they were perfected.

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