Wooden Boats--Back to the Basics
The Snipe office receives approximately five calls a week from Snipe
sailors who own, are contemplating buying or want information on how
to build a wooden Snipe. One of the most recent calls was from a group
of current fiberglass Snipe sailors in Florida who want to build a
wood Snipe together. Jerry Thompson, Frances Seavy and Carlos Bosch
have all restored wooden Snipes.
Snipe Legend Francis Seavy and crew Kevin Guido on the cover of the
June 1990 Snipe Bulletin sailing his beautifully restored Snipe number
6995 "Honey" in the 1990 Midwinters in Clearwater, Florida.
Jeff Lenhart can be seen racing a wooden Snipe. The Brazilian and
Argentinian sailors still sail wooden Snipes. If you are interested in
building a wooden Snipe, plans are available from the Snipe office for
$20.00, and Hal Gilreath's 1962 "Building a Plywood Snipe" instruction
manual, still a valuable tool, is also available for $20.00. Following
is a letter to the editor from a fellow Snipe sailor regarding
building a wooden Snipe.
Dear Ms. Biehl:
I offer this bit of information to the SCIRA membership in the event
there is interest in building wooden Snipes:
The Wooden Boat School, Box 78, Naskeag Road, Brooklin, Maine, phone
(207) 359-4651, for the past 2 or 3 summers has offered a course in
building a Snipe.
I was a participant in that course this past August and I give the
school, its staff, the course and the instructor the highest
marks. The class in which I was enrolled was made up of 10 persons
(the class limit), age 16-75 years.
It was a great surprise to me that I was the ONLY person in the class
who had ever sailed a Snipe and one of the few who had ever seen
one. The other students were there to learn to build a wooden boat,
which happened to be a Snipe.
The instructor was Joe Norton, a professional boat builder and
restorer from Green Lake, Wisconsin, who sails his own wooden Snipe
which he built single-handed with no help from his shop employees. He
also builds and sails DN iceboats.
Several years ago I ordered Snipe plans from SCIRA. After
considerable study of those plans, I decided that even though I have a
lot of woodworking experience, I did not have the boat building
knowledge required to execute those plans successfully and I put them
back until I felt better about undertaking such a project.
I am happy to report the Snipe that Joe Norton has designed is much
simpler to build and, in my opinion, should be an equally strong and
stiff boat. It has vacuum-bagged foam core frames and hull beam, solid
wood centerboard trunk keelson, keel, sheer and chine strips, 5,8'
plywood hull, deck, transom and cockpit, is totally epoxy glued and
coated (WEST system), and is self-rescuing. In addition, it's a
beautiful boat, minimum weight and measures in, although it has not
been checked for minimum MOI.
I believe Joe offers kits consisting of the frames, hull beam,
centerboard trunk and lines drawing. He will be teaching the course
again next summer at the Wooden Boat School, His phone number is (414)
294-6813.
Enrollment in the class certainly provides a good opportunity to learn
to build a "HiTech" wooden Snipe in a beautiful setting. In addition
there is sailing everyday after class.
It is my understanding the course schedule for 1994 will be published
soon after the first of the year.
Yours truly,
Frank Clevenger
Snipe 20648
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