Vol. 65, No. 1 spring 2020 18


weight to windward as possible. Steering from this position created diffi culty too, and Martin gave the boat a tiller bar that slid in a metal fi tting attached to a yoke arrangement mounted on the deck forward of the rudder; another design detail that was, and still is, popular in boats of this type.


T e oversize mainsail was called a “batwing” for obvious reasons; it added an extreme amount of area by virtue of the full-length battens that held the aſt er part of the sail, the roach, in place. Battens on sails like this could be either enclosed in pockets or doubled and laced to either side of the sail, the latter being the version I modeled. A small jib completed the rig, but Fred Martin said in his catalog description of this boat that the sail plan he showed was only a suggestion and “any other may be fi tted”. I have measured about 130 square feet of sail area between the main and jib— which is a lot for a sixteen-foot hull. T e rig itself was a sliding gunter, where the mainsail gaff is hoisted by a single halyard.


2. A modern sailing canoe. Image via the author.


from Martin’s Racine Yacht & Boat Works catalog, which he published in 1895. It is reproduced from a scan of an original owned by a friend of mine… which, unfortunately he will not sell to me. T e boat, whose hull actually looks much like a kayak, conformed to the 16 x 30 class rules, of which there were only two: boats could be no longer than 16 feet and their beam had to be less than 30 inches. Everything else was completely open. T e hull form, weight, sail plan (both in area and the number of sails), and construction were leſt to the designer’s imagination. Martin came up with a round-bottom, carvel (fl ush) planked hull that looks to be seriously over-canvassed. To keep the boat upright it had, like many other racing canoes of the day, a sliding seat that the skipper could crawl out upon to put as much


Fred Martin was usually picky about detailing deck details in his drawings but here he showed no provision to get inside the hull (either by omission or design) and because every wooden hull of this type leaked to some extent it was probably necessary, although not shown on the drawings, to add a pair of drain plugs in the bottom to let out water. Martin noted that the centerboard was made of brass plate but that lack of access to the inside of


the hull


probably meant it would have a notch that sat on a pin on which it could pivot; it could then be liſt ed out to be removed.


T e boat had a cockpit (which, as Martin noted, was of “the bathtub” variety) that was clearly too small to do anything but hold lines and put one’s feet in; cockpits on boats like this are always awash with lines and the model’s cockpit is a mess with them, too. Any water that entered it drained through the centerboard slot.


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