Dave Gentry's Shenandoah Whitehall

Photo Courtesy of gentrycustomboats.com.

     I was visiting my parents a couple of weeks ago when my Dad drew my attention to gentrycustomboats.com. Dave Gentry, apparently, is one of a handful of people around the country designing and building non-traditional skin-on-frame boats.  At the time, I had never heard of skin-on-frame construction, traditional or otherwise, but it sounded interesting, and Dad and I have decided to give it a try.  We've purchased plans for Gentry's 14' whitehall rowboat (pictured above), which looks perfect for what we want -- at least on paper.

     Traditional skin-on-frame kayak building involves stretching seal skins over a frame made of driftwood.  We're fresh out of seal, so we're not going to do that.  Modern versions of the old Inuit designs replace the seal skin with heavyweight nylon or polyester fabric, but still involve mortising together dozens of ribs to look something like this:

Photo courtesy of capefalconkayak.com.  I get the impression that these are great boats, but they're out of our price range.

It looks like it would involve a lot of hard work, so we won't do that either . . . but the design does have a number of advantages.  For one thing, it's very lightweight.  From what I've read, a kayak like this one might weigh 25 pounds, while similar boat made of polyethylene might weigh 70.  Gentry says that his boat, when finished, should weigh about 65 pounds, which easily light enough to transport on top of a car, and again is less than half the weight of a comparable fiberglass rowboat.

     Despite the weight savings, these boats are by most accounts quite sturdy.  I'll admit to being a little skeptical of this claim, but seeing is believing:

     Finally, these boats are supposed to be easy and inexpensive to build.  This is where Gentry's design comes in.  Besides the obvious fact of being a rowboat, Gentry's whitehall diverges from the traditional kayak design by replacing the many ribs with a few plywood frames.  You can see it in the image at the top of the page.  This simplifies the process to the point where Gentry claims that his boat can be built by anyone who has the most basic woodworking skills- no boat-building experience necessary.  Not that we doubt him, but we'll test that theory and I'll let you know how it goes.