In a sea of wooden boats that are out of reach for many of us, here is one that offers some respite—Dad’s Ol’ Outboard Skiff. She’s the brainchild of Michigan builder Mike Kiefer, who has been building boats and teaching wooden boat building at the Great Lakes Boatbuilding Company, for well over 20 years. Dad’s Ol’ Outboard Skiff is a glued-lapstrake plywood constructed boat with steam-bent sassafras frames and a mahogany transom. Virtually anyone with a little ambition and modest skills can build her. She offers a lot of pride for the effort.On a cool Iowa morning in mid-July, my friend George Jepson and I took the boat out for a spin on Lake MacBride. A fresh breeze off the eastern Iowa prairie kicked up a few riffles on the water as George and I motored along the pastoral, grassy shore. Dad’s Ol’ Outboard Skiff is the type of boat that conjures images of summers on the lake and Dad in his high-waist shorts. An archetypal, 1950s-style family cottage boat, it’s handsome, roomy, maneuverable, and built icebreaker-tough. With outstanding initial stability and an excellent aptitude for tracking, she is a safe and enjoyable boat, designed and built for protected waters.Dad’s Ol’ Outboard Skiff has an LOA of 14' and a 5' beam. She weighs approximately 250 lbs and draws about 6" in fresh water, a dash less in salt. Though she may look dainty perched on her trailer, step aboard, and you’ll see that she has the feel of a much larger boat. Get her on the water, and you’ll be pleasantly surprised at her performance, too. These are some of the great achievements of the design.
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Too small. I’ve owned a lot of skiffs and 16′ is the sweet spot with these boats for any kind of rough water.
A search for the plans for this boat comes up empty. The website [email protected] did not appear to be up and running.
We’ve been providing the Profiles that have only appeared in print as an extra feature and historical reference. In this case, the web site for the company that was producing the skiffs for sale appears to have been taken over by another entity. We recently updated the email address for the designer and confirmed that plans are still available.
Editor
To anyone looking for plans, Ken Workinger, the designer, can be reached via email to [email protected]. I purchased plans from him last year.
I emailed Ken twice at the above address, never heard back. Anyone else looking for similar designs might check out Paul Gartside’s #189.
This story brought me up short! It looks exactly like a mini-version of a 22’x 8′ lapstrake skiff I designed and built about a dozen years ago of spruce planking, fir and oak backbone, but with sawn frames, for salmon set-net fishing on Bristol Bay in Southwest Alaska. It was amazingly fun to build, but I decided to sell it as I was close to retirement and because I’d put so much work into it that I didn’t want to see it get bashed up against docks and tenders in the frequently rough waters of the bay. Regarding Greg Petty’s 2020 comment about this boat being too small, I delivered fish with a 14′ skiff to a cash buyer in 4′ waves. I was wishing it was longer, but the boat did fine, although this was a “don’t do this at home” kind of situation. Thanks for a great article! It brought back happy memories of building one almost exactly like it, shape-wise, if a bit larger.