Alright, I admit it: Outboard-powered rubber boats are convenient, and they can even be a little fun. We have one at the island, and it comes in very handy sometimes. We use it as a harbor-rescue craft, a tender, and sometimes as a mini tugboat. Most of the time, its quiet, four-cycle outboard starts and runs without complaint. It has its place in the fleet, and I don’t mind driving it around at all.
But for most small-boat harbor tasks, I prefer a good rowboat. Rowboats never fail to start, and they never run out of gas. They don’t spout noxious vapors or leave oily films on the water. They embody the most basic elegance in form and function. Rowing a boat is a physics lesson in action. Properly manned, a good rowboat can cut through a light chop at three knots for hours, transporting people and goods in a most efficient combination of healthy exercise and sculpted wood, and the beneficial exploitation of some serious mechanical advantage.
And rowboats can be just plain beautiful. They are best when made of wood, although fiberglass can do. (But please, leave the aluminum unit at the lake where it won’t scar anybody’s topsides.) With designs evolved for every job to which a small boat might be called, the names of the various regional types are evocative and compelling in themselves: punt, pram, pulling boat, peapod, skiff, Amesbury, johnboat, flatiron, Rangeley, dinghy, scull, Whitehall, whaleboat, wherry, dory (I know I’ve left a few out).
The dory is an icon for which there is a range of localized subcategories: Swampscott, Banks, Gloucester, gunning, Lunenburg, dory-skiff. Each type is unique to its place and purpose, adapted over time to its own particular work on the water.
I began my own seagoing life in a rowboat. It was an eight-foot plywood pram of the type that was sold unfinished in hardware stores 50 years ago. Slab-sided, lightly framed, and planked with thin fir, these amazing little boats could take you to sea for 50 bucks.
My friends (a little older and more experienced at the time in the ways of the sea) and I would drag this one down the stony beach, row out through the surf a few hundred feet, and tie her up to a lobster buoy. So secured, we could begin the afternoon’s assault on the fish. We could be safely entertained out there for hours on end by the flounder, the mackerel, the codfish – and the lively motion of that sweet little boat in the easy summer swells.
The next boat in my early life was a 10-foot lapstrake skiff, at the time only recently retired as tender to the Friendship sloop Puffin out of Port Clyde. I remember her as a properly unadorned Yankee tender with a nicely rockered bottom. She had some heft to her, and it took a while for a 9-year-old to get her up to speed. But she could cut through the harbor like a little frigate. I worked hard to master my technique while still tethered to the float. One day I was finally allowed to take her across the cove on my own, and I was hooked for good.
In high school, I was treated to a few seasons of the sublime experience of being part of a four-man crew. We raced sleek sliding-seat Pococks from Seattle made of cedar and spruce, and smelling of fresh varnish. There are few things as magical as the feel of a well-balanced shell, propelled by four synchronized strokes, lifting up and surging ahead following the unfeathering of all four blades to engage the water with a synchronized unanimous snap.
Since those early days, I’ve built and owned a lot of rowboats – from seven to 12 feet long. Used mostly as yacht tenders, the list includes a Phil Bolger Elegant Punt, two Nutshell prams, a Salisbury Point skiff, a Ned McIntosh peapod, and, my favorite, a Joel White Shellback skiff. (My patient wife will rightly point out that there have also been others.)
I equip them with the lightest spruce oars that won’t break, try to keep the bottoms clean, and trim them slightly down by the stern. I’ve never felt the need to buy any of them an outboard motor, and I hope I never will. I row to get somewhere, to complete a task, and very often just for the pure pleasure of it.
Star Island is home to a fleet of six uncomplicated skiffs that are available for hourly rental by hotel guests. These boats are flat-bottomed and flat-sided, with only a little sheer. They are tough and heavy, generally unsuitable as tenders, and absolutely unsuitable for rough water work. But they are steady, capacious, almost impossible to capsize, and nearly perfectly suited to their work in calm water carrying up to four people – even when wrangled by the righteously unpracticed. Uniquely suited to their place and purpose, they have introduced thousands over decades to the simple joy of rowing a good boat on pretty water.
On the day before last Thanksgiving – along with boatbuilder Nate Piper and a group of volunteers from the newly reborn Strawbery Banke Museum Boatshop, we brought in all six of these old boats for an overdue refit. In conjunction with Nate and the Boatshop, the work will be done by members of the Portsmouth High School Building Trades Program.
Over the winter the students will be scrape off years of peeling paint; fill gouges and dents, replace thwarts, knees, breast-hooks and rails; add forward rowing stations; and generally set the boats up for another 20 years of service around the harbor.
When spring arrives, and the boats are ready, we will invite the students out to the island for some rowing. First-timers will raise their hands and dig the blades in way too deep. Oars will slip out of the oarlocks. Boats will spin on their keels while the necessary subtleties of balance are discovered. And slowly they’ll figure it out, maybe even well enough to row across the harbor to Smuttynose.
I can imagine watching from the pier as they return, proudly displaying their good work and their new skills. I hope that at least one or two of them will feel that sense of wonder that rowing a boat can bring – and maybe even come back to row again another day. I can’t think of too many things in this complicated world that would be a whole lot better than that.
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