Shanteuse

My friend Bob Williams has built more boats than I can count, or than he probably even remembers. For about two or three years, he has been talking about building a handy little shantyboat for him and his wife, Lucille to camp on the water in occasionally.

At his age (I ain't saying what that might be) he has acquired a huge collection of books and old magazines, carefully dog-eared and otherwise marked with things of interest. When Bob first gets an idea, he dives into this collection and reviews everything he has that is even remotely relevant to the new idea. Just like surfing the internet, though, this often leads to side tracks and dead ends. I think that is the main reason that it has taken a couple of years for him to decide what he is going to do.

Finally Bob wound up at Jim Michalak's Shanteuse. He figured that this would be just stable enough to satisfy Lucille's desire for security yet small enough that launching and retrieving the boat is not too much of a chore.

In this end view, Bob has the boat upside down and just clamped and screwed together to look at.

This is not a good photo, but if you look close, you can see the one real change Bob made to Jim's plans: He repeated the bow rocker at the stern. Bob figures he will never have this boat planing with the 5 horse putt-putt that he is going to hang on the transom, so the rocker aft will make a cleaner flow.

Chuck Leinweber