A Cape Cod Oyster Skiff

Rosemary Wyman

Andrew Kitchen of Irondequoit, New York, had always wanted to build a sharpie, and he settled on Reuel Parker’s adaption of a historic boat recorded by Howard I. Chapelle, originating from Cape Cod. The sail reefs by being drawn to the mast.

When people rhapsodize about shapely curves in boats, they usually are taking inspiration from round-bottomed hulls, often with wineglass transoms. Doing so, however, leaves off entire sets of criteria—ease of construction, cost, practicality in use, suitability for local waters, and form stability among them—that will ultimately be in the mix, like it or not, when a boat is judged to be a success or a failure. When a full set of criteria is brought into play, it is apparent why flat-bottomed and hard-chined boats have survived the ages as well as their round-bottomed cousins. The surprise is that they can be every bit as eye-catching.Andrew Kitchen, an upstate New York resident who has an eye for quite a variety of boats, had his head turned last year by a sharpie, a historic American workboat type used far and wide. The particular model he admired was adapted by Reuel Parker as a 14-footer intended for pleasure use and published in his The Sharpie Book. Parker’s version was based on an 18' workboat used on Cape Cod for oystering and documented by Howard I. Chapelle in his classic American Small Sailing Craft. Kitchen was casting about for what would be the fifth boat in his fleet, which now ranges from a MacGregor canoe to an Iain Oughtred–designed Ness yawl. He even dreams of building a heavy Yorkshire coble of the type he grew up among in his native England. For the winter of 2012–13, he settled on the sharpie, which he could build mostly using materials he had on hand, even sewing the sails himself from a Sailrite kit. His goal was to have the boat ready to sail solo in the 2013 Small Reach Regatta (SRR) in Maine, in which he has participated regularly for many years.