Gartside’s Centerboard Lugger

About 20 years ago, Long Island, New York, boatbuilder and designer Paul Gartside was commissioned by Steve Doherty, a publisher of marine books, to design a boat he could build in his retirement. Steve lived on Shelter Island on Long Island Sound and, Paul told me, “was a bit of an Anglophile and loved the British workboat types, so the resulting design is just a typical small beach boat of the type that was common throughout the British Isles, especially in the West Country, 100 years ago.” Typically, those boats carried mizzen sails, mostly to help them tack, and didn’t have centerboards. “It did concern me,” Paul noted, “that without a board, it would be slow to windward and there would be too much reliance on oars.” So, the addition of the board was the only significant difference in Paul’s design. As it turned out, Steve never got around to building his boat, and it is only recently that the first one built to this design has been completed.

Photographs by the author

The square hole in the transom is for the mizzen's boomkin, which extends 4' from the transom. The forward thwart is designed as a rowing station, though oarlocks are not installed here. The line at the aft end of the centerboard trunk is the tail end of a gun tackle on the port side of the trunk, which provides the mechanical advantage needed to raise the galvanized steel-plate centerboard.

When Kate Abernethy enrolled at the Boat Building Academy (BBA) in Lyme Regis, England, she arrived with an old Wayfarer dinghy that she hoped to restore as a course project. But when the Wayfarer was found to be beyond repair, she decided that she would build a new boat. Kate wanted something that would be trailerable and around the same size as the 16′ Wayfarer, and she liked the idea of a lugger. While searching online, the Gartside Centerboard Lugger, Design #124, caught her eye. “It just looked perfect,” she said. It would be well suited to learning about building boats as “it had all the boatbuilding joints you would want to know. It would be challenging with lots of problem solving.”