Columbia and Catspaw Dinghies

Tom Jackson

The Catspaw dinghy, Joel White’s adaptation of an 1899 Nathanael Greene Herreshoff design, is an excellent all-around daysailer that is stable, sails well, rows well, and tows well.

Good boats almost never fail to beget more good boats. Here’s a pairing of ancestor and offspring that proves the point as well as any could: the Columbia tender developed by Nathanael Greene Herreshoff in the last year of the 19th century and the Catspaw dinghy drawn by Joel White in the 1970s. The similarities are striking, but the differences are clear—nevertheless, either boat would be a fine choice for construction and use.The tale must begin at the beginning. N.G. Herreshoff worked up a fine yacht tender—with lifeboat-style watertight chambers forward and aft—for COLUMBIA, which won the America’s Cup in 1899 and 1901. Amid the hoopla, somehow the lifeboat was so universally admired that it became a staple offering of the Herreshoff Mfg. Co. in Bristol, Rhode Island, for decades. A dizzying array of variations were built. Mystic Seaport in Connecticut has two of them in its watercraft collection, one a 1929 boat 12' 6" LOA with a 4' 10" beam with lifeboat-style chambers and the other an 11' 6" open boat from 1905. The latter was documented and replicated by Barry Thomas, then of the museum’s staff, in a noteworthy 1977 pamphlet, Building the Herreshoff Dinghy: The Manufacturers Method. For a grateful audience of small-boat craftsmen and for posterity, the book also recorded a surviving Herreshoff boatwright’s memories of the building technique and some specialized tools he used.