Lit’l Petrel

Nick Owens

The diminutive pram, less than 9’ long, has remarkable carrying capacity. A centerline seat allows the person rowing to choose from two stations, depending on the boat’s fore-and-aft trim.

A thing is right,” Aldo Leopold writes in A Sand County Almanac, “when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” On my bookshelf, Leopold shares space with worn volumes of those other writers more familiar to the boating community, among them L. Francis Herreshoff, Pete Culler, and John Gardner. Small boats do, in fact, represent a “biotic community” of sorts, and Sam Devlin’s Lit’l Petrel design is, to use Leopold’s evaluation, “right.”

Three years ago, my son acquired a magnificent 1959 William Tripp 32' sloop, FREYA. Mahogany-planked over oak frames, she has beautiful lines and vast amounts of professionally maintained varnish. Promising him an appropriate tender as a “boat-warming” present, I began my search for a dinghy worthy of such a companion.