The Northeaster Dory is a glued-lapstrake-plywood interpretation of the Banks dory. It is available in kit form from Annapolis, Maryland-based Chesapeake Light Craft.
The Northeaster Dory from Chesapeake Light Craft is a contemporary interpretation of the classic Banks dory, a boat of great load-carrying capacity that’s initially tender, but stable when rolled to one side or the other. There is a wide range of dory types, from the husky Banks models that traveled on the decks of fishing schooners and were used to handline for cod; to the sleek, round-sided recreational type used for racing on Massachusetts’ North Shore; and on to the transom-sterned, outboard-powered models that shed some of the type’s signature characteristics but retain unmistakable lineage.John Gardner recorded the history of the dory in his The Dory Book in 1978, tracing it back to murky origins nearly 500 years ago. This is the definitive work on the dory type, and in it Gardner states with clarity that it is materials and methods, and not hull form, that makes a dory a dory: “The dory,” he writes, “...is a wide-board type. And if it is not the only wide-board type, it is among the foremost, for dory construction is one of the easiest, quickest, and cheapest methods yet devised for utilizing wide-board lumber in building boats for a wide variety of uses. It should be well understood that it is the dory’s special mode of construction, not the hull shape, that sets it and its related sub-types apart from other boats.” After a short, pithy first part covering history, The Dory Book presents us with a primer on construction, and then a series of chapters presenting plans, histories, and descriptions of several different dories.
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One thought on “The Northeaster Dory”
The NE-Dory is surely something special. I built it in 2021 from a kit, first for rowing, and then rigged it with the sloop rig in 2022. I learned to sail with this boat, as I disliked the 420 dinghy that I bought at the same time (and sold very fast).
The NE Dory is such a beauty and absolutely unknown in Germany, so people ask about it all the time. The Dory is astonishingly fast. The handling out of the water is a pleasure due to the low weight. On the other hand, I felt very unsafe at the beginning, as it feels very tippy at every little gust. As a new sailor, you need at first to learn to trust the secondary stability. In three years I never capsized, but at capize tests it didn’t work well to be honest. No chance to get back in the boat back again with only the foam under the seats, as J. Harris describes. With three additional flotation bags from the Optimist, you can get back into the boat, when it’s nearly completely full of water. I have installed an electrical pump, but it needs 13 minutes to empty the swamped boat. The problem is the sloop rig, which can’t be taken down, so when the boat is full of water, the swinging boom submerges the boat on one side. Maybe the lug is better as you can take it down. As I sail mostly with my wife and dog, I didn’t want to imagine what would happen after a capsize in heavy winds. So in 2023 I built a Goat Island Skiff… but that is another story.
Chesapeake Light Craft
The NE-Dory is surely something special. I built it in 2021 from a kit, first for rowing, and then rigged it with the sloop rig in 2022. I learned to sail with this boat, as I disliked the 420 dinghy that I bought at the same time (and sold very fast).
The NE Dory is such a beauty and absolutely unknown in Germany, so people ask about it all the time. The Dory is astonishingly fast. The handling out of the water is a pleasure due to the low weight. On the other hand, I felt very unsafe at the beginning, as it feels very tippy at every little gust. As a new sailor, you need at first to learn to trust the secondary stability. In three years I never capsized, but at capize tests it didn’t work well to be honest. No chance to get back in the boat back again with only the foam under the seats, as J. Harris describes. With three additional flotation bags from the Optimist, you can get back into the boat, when it’s nearly completely full of water. I have installed an electrical pump, but it needs 13 minutes to empty the swamped boat. The problem is the sloop rig, which can’t be taken down, so when the boat is full of water, the swinging boom submerges the boat on one side. Maybe the lug is better as you can take it down. As I sail mostly with my wife and dog, I didn’t want to imagine what would happen after a capsize in heavy winds. So in 2023 I built a Goat Island Skiff… but that is another story.