Bob's Special

The canoe I've chosen to build is the "Bob's Special", as designed by Ted Moore and Steve Killing of Bear Mountain Boats.

It's based on an older boat built by the Chestnut Canoe Company that was designed as a light, small load carrying boat for active outdoorsmen. From the description on the website, I gather that the original boat was also built using an older version of cedar strip building, from a time before the use of epoxy and fiberglass. This would have used a series of ribs to hold the strips in place and relied on a tight fit and the swelling of the strips from the water to make the boat waterproof.

I chose this canoe for the following reasons:

• The offsets to draw out the plans were available for free from the book "Canoecraft" by Ted Moore, which I got from the library. (I wouldn't mind having even a used copy of this book if anyone's looking for Christmas ideas :-)
• Being symmetrical fore and aft, the canoe can be paddled in reverse by a solo paddler sitting on the bow seat without changing it's paddling characteristics. This will also allow me to add a sailing rig at a later date to turn the canoe into a proa, a sailing outrigger canoe that has to be symmetrical fore and aft to make it work properly.
• The "Bob's Special" is fairly wide across the beam for a performance canoe. This makes it fairly stable and less tippy (important for getting Sarah to get in it with me) and gives it the ability to carry a pretty good load (important for camping trips).
• Despite the fact that the the beam is fairly wide, most of this width is above the waterline, leaving the canoe a bit narrow at the water. This means that when the canoe has light load, it can be fairly fast and easy to paddle, but it still has a reserve of stability from the width when the canoe is heeled, or tipped over on it's side. As the load increases, the canoe sinks further into the water and this width creates a reserve buoancy, allowing the canoe to carry more, like say, for a long camping trip :-)
• This canoe has a moderate rocker, or curvature from front to back. The more rocker or curvature a canoe or boat has, the easier it is to turn, but the harder it is to track, or keep going in a straight line. This is important to me because the water around here is mostly flat lakes, which calls for good tracking, to go in a straight line instead of roaming all over the place, wasting energy. But, I still want it to be able to turn well in case I take on a flat water river, like those in Missouri that I learned on.
• The plans that Bear Mountain Boats sells for this canoe include an option to stretch it, making it a bit longer and increasing it's load carrying capacity (a longer boat can displace more water, increasing the buoyant forces on it) and it's speed (a longer boat has a longer bow wave, increasing it's top speed before the resistance of the water it has to displace to move forward overcomes the force the boat is able to create to overcome it). Because it has been stretched before with success, I have no qualms about stretching the boat for my own purposes.