Glen-L Marine Designs Interview with Gayle Brantuk


Anyone with even a passing interest in amateur boat-building will have undoubtedly come across Glen-L Marine Designs, either at their comprehensive website or fom thumbing through their famous printed catalog of plans.


Started by designer Glen L. Witt more than seventy years ago, Glen-L Marine Designs has become an institution, with more than 300 different plans available—fom paddle boats to ocean cruisers to RVs. In addition to the usual printed plans and fasten- ing schedule, most Glen-L plans come with full-size patterns that can be used to trace and cut fames, transom, and other structural members, putting projects more easily within reach of the amateur builder.


We caught up with company president, Gayle Brantuk, to ask her 20


about Glen-L’s history and some of their most popular designs.


How did Glen-L start? My dad (Gayle is Glen Witt’s daughter) and his brother Elbert grew up in the depression era and loved boats but couldn’t afford to buy one. Elbert found plans for a planked outboard runabout called “Buzzer” in a 1935 Twenty Boats #2 maga- zine. Of course, dad couldn’t let his big brother do something he couldn’t do, so he found plans in Popular Mechanics for a flat bottom boat about 11-feet long. Elbert quickly ran out of money on his build, so he joined in on dad’s boat—actually, he took over. So, they scrounged old table leafs and other scrap wood and built it with a deck to look like a runabout. While building, they figured that whoever designed these boats probably had never built one because the plans were


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