Bolger-thinking outside the box
By Malcolm Lambe
The Bolger Whalewatcher
Ladies and gentlemen...I present The Bolger Whalewatcher. Butt-ugly maybe...but hey it’s cheap, easy to DIY and can be trailered. You’ve got to admit it’s “interesting”. Not sure about all that glass but I guess if you’re not going offshore it ain’t much of a concern. But this design is certainly thinking “outside of the box”. Or is it?
Phil Bolger's “Whalewatcher” was designed for Chesapeake Bay (average depth 21ft - 6.4m) on the United States East Coast in the Mid-Atlantic region - separated from the Atlantic Ocean by the Delmarva Peninsula, including parts of the Eastern Shore of Maryland, the Eastern Shore of Virginia, and the state of Delaware.
Speaking of the Chesapeake. In the mid-eighties I had a leaky old timber cruiser on the hard at Gonsalves boatshed at Palm Beach. I'd bought it for the mooring fees it owed - $500 - with a “seized” motor - with thoughts of just using it as a houseboat. But we pulled the Perkins out and managed to get it going so I made the decision to make the hull waterproof.
I was working on the boat one day when an old bloke came along and stood there watching me. I tried to ignore him. Thought he was about to add the usual “Lot of work there” or “You winning?” comment. Eventually I stopped what I was doing and acknowledged his presence.
“Know much about engines?” he says in an American accent.
“A bit” I reply.
“I have a problem with my generator. Keeps throwing the belt. Smart guy like you may be able to help me.”
Uh oh. Looks like this geezer wants to saddle me with his problem.
“What boat is it?” I ask.
“Mary Blair” - 40 foot steel yacht on the mooring out there.”
Now that was interesting. I'd been admiring the lines of that boat. It was out of alloy not steel. I knew Shirley Strachan from The Skyhooks had owned it. Knew he'd done a Hobart in it and apparently scared himself shitless and sold it soon after. I was keen to have a look inside so agreed to go out to the boat with him and have a look at his problem.
It was an easy fix. The pulleys weren't lined up properly. He'd had a couple of mechanics work on it. One in Hawaii and one in Pittwater. But they hadn't fixed it. I just took the bracket off and applied some heat to it ashore to rebend it to the proper shape. Took me about half an hour.
The boat's owner – Charles E. Henderson the Third - was well pleased and offered to take me out for a sail.
“I'll just get some supplies” he says jumping into the dinghy. Comes back a short time later with a slab of cold VB and packets of chips.
It was blowing twenty knots from the Nor-East by this stage in the early afternoon so we had a great sail off the Joey and sunk half a dozen beers. Or was it a dozen? I know we were throwing them down.
“I can see you've done some sailing” he says after letting me have the helm for a spell.
We had a good long chat. Turned out he had a cattle station in the Northern Territory – Bulloo River Station. Half a million acres in the Kimberleys. He'd just returned from Hawaii with an all-girl crew and was getting the boat ready to cruise off somewhere else. With another crew of young women.
I went out again on the boat a couple of times but didn't enjoy it much. He was a “shouty” skipper. Liked to yell and scream at the crew like a Captain Bligh. ("The tougher you are on people, the more they develop strength".) Didn't do it to me. Maybe it worked on the clueless girls.
We talked a lot. He was from Virginia. Grew up on Chesapeake Bay. He told me all about his Bullo River property. How the drought was killing him. How the only thing keeping him going was letting the U.S. Army use his land for exercises. He had an airfield as well. He'd been a U.S. Navy pilot in the war. He and his 19 year old daughter shared an acrobatic plane.
Charles went in to hospital to have a routine operation and left me the key to his boat.
“Keep an eye on her. I'll be back in a week”.
He never did come back. The routine operation had complications and Charles died. I was quite upset about it. He and I got along well. Even though there was forty years between us.
Charles left his widow Sarah Henderson with a $750,000 debt. She sold what she could and used the proceeds gambling successfully on the stock market and saved the farm. Went on to write a bestseller about her life with Charles - From Strength to Strength in 1993.
Anyhow...have a Winfield. No...back to Chesapeake. The huge bay is approximately 329 km (200 miles) long with a maximum width of 48 km (30 miles) and an average depth of 21ft (6.4m). Usually a person who is 6 feet tall can wade through 700,000 acres of the bay area; however, the deep end of the bay – The Hole - is around 170 feet deep.
The Bolger Whalewatcher was designed with cruising the Chesapeake...on a budget...in mind. It only draws 10.5 inches with the leeboards up and has raised, windowed sides that give the boat knockdown recovery with no water aboard.
The boat has a large comfortable cockpit outside the cabin and an outboard auxiliary setup. Sitting headroom for tall persons on four settee berths, ample galley and storage space. Open standing room from cockpit to foremast. A huge balance-lug rig that apparently is fast and easy to handle. You are almost shoulder deep between the cabin-tops when amidships in this boxy design. A canvas cover can snap on over the standing-room in rain.
Philip C. Bolger (December 3, 1927 – May 24, 2009) was a prolific American boat designer, who was born and lived in Gloucester, Massachusetts. He began work full-time as a draftsman for boat designers in the early 1950s.
Bolger's first boat design was a 32-foot (9.75 m) sportsfisherman published in the January 1952 issue of Yachting Magazine. He subsequently designed more than 668 different boats! From a 114-foot-10-inch (35 m) replica of an eighteenth-century naval warship to a 6-foot-5-inch (1.96 m) plywood box-like dinghy. A lot of them were boxy...and ugly to my eyes.
Bolger tended to favor simplicity over complexity. Many of his hulls are made from plywood and have hard chines. A subclass of these designed in association with Harold Payson called Instant Boats were so named because they were intended to be easily built by amateurs out of commonly available materials. Bolger also advocated the use of traditional sailing rigs and leeboards.
From the 1990s, Phil Bolger teamed with his wife Susanne Altenburger, designing boats under the name Phil Bolger & Friends Inc. During this time, they emphasized the design of sustainable and fuel-efficient boats for the fishing industry. Also, they participated in a large military commission with the Naval Sea Systems Command on new designs for military landing craft.
Bolger was a prolific writer and wrote many books, the last being Boats with an Open Mind, as well as hundreds of magazine articles on small craft designs, chiefly in Woodenboat, Small Boat Journal and Messing About in Boats.
In the 1970s, Phil Bolger began a long and successful collaboration with Harold “Dynamite” Payson with Bolger designing the boats and Payson building them as well as selling plans and writing books about how to do it. 'Dynamite' called the first series of easy-to-build plywood boats "Instant Boats".
Unlike traditional boat construction which involves building of jig and full size lofting of the shape of the hull prior to construction, the Instant Boat method uses shaped plywood panels on pre-shaped frames made of plywood and standard dimensional lumberyard wood. This results in quick construction and less requirement for skilled craftsmanship, and has proved appealing to amateur boat builders as well as many later designers who have followed in his footsteps.
One of these Bolger designs might be just the ticket if you want to bang something up in your garage or workshed and tow it to your local lake. Could be fun making a model too. Maybe even something a High School woodworking class could attempt? But somehow I can’t see my old Seppo mate Charles in one of these. Not enough room for the all-girl crew. And the beer.
Bolger Whalewatcher Specifications
Leeboard cruiser - Fiberglass/epoxy over marine ply
29’ LOD, draft 10.5” boards up, 3’6” boards down.
Water ballast.
4,200 lbs cruising displacement,
Empty (trailering) weight 2,200 lbs
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