Building the Open Chub River Dory

This is a six-day course.

With the 2008 publication of Roger Fletcher’s Drift Boats & River Dories, these highly maneuverable shallow-draft boats have undergone a huge surge in popularity. Originally designed as fishing boats on Oregon’s McKenzie and Rogue rivers, river dories have found admirers on shallow fishing streams and whitewater rivers around the world.  During the past decade our team at Fretwater Boatworks, adapted the classic Briggs Grand Canyon Dory to several sizes with more contemporary proportions, from the 9’ one-man Doryak to the 15’6” commercial-sized Babe. They are incredibly stable and maneuverable, but more importantly, just plain fun. Recently the Fretwater team has taken these designs back to their roots with an open design without decks or hatches, more akin to the McKenzie River drift boat

This year we will be building the Open Chub River Dory, a 13’6” family-sized dory capable of carrying a boatman and three friends down the river. Students will be building the Chub as a traditional plywood-on-frame boat, but assembling it in the more modern free-form method without forms or strongback.

Glade and Cricket have been building, rowing, crashing, repairing, restoring, and researching river dories in the Grand Canyon and the West for about a decade. They’ll begin this course by having students loft the design and expand the frame patterns, then create the frames, transoms, and stems. You’ll also scarf together sheets of marine plywood into full side panels.  Students will assemble the hulls, install chines and gunwales, and build the seats and floor boards. With luck, you’ll float her at the end of the course. The lucky winner of the lottery will take the Open Chub home for the cost of materials.

During the course you will gain the knowledge and skills to build your own open drift boat of any size. You’ll learn lofting, scarfing, fabricating parts, free-form assembly, and outfitting, as well as many arcane arts you’ll use along the way.  Few fancy tools will be used, relying more on adaptation and improvisation. Cricket and Glade will also discuss maintenance, storage, and repair.