The Building Of OHM

The Electrifying Story of an 18-foot Solar Canal Cruiser

- Doug Wade

Back in 1978, early in my teaching career, I needed a relax-ing evening distraction and decided to build my first boat. I borrowed a library book written by Percy W. Blandford and selected a plan for a single-seat skin kayak. Building this boat taught me that building from plans allows alterations and in my case I had to change the dimensions so that the boat would slide out of my basement window. For the next few decades, life and children intervened. I retired in January 2006, and now had time to pursue a long-suppressed interest in boat building…deciding my dream would be to build a plywood canal cruiser. But, lacking confidence for such a large project, I thought my practice boat would be a plywood stitch-andglue Glen-L Tubby Tug. I built this boat in a 16-foot-long single-car garage over a period of three winters and about 600 hours of work. I enjoyed every minute of this build and was now hooked.

It was now time to select plans for the next project. After much research I chose another Blandford design, this time a 1950s 16-foot plywood canal cruiser called Nomad. I wanted a boat that would be efficient in displacement mode and Nomad is designed as a semi-displacement hull for about a 6-hp outboard. I also liked the looks of its double chine hull, even though this did increase complexity.

The boat has a cabin and is small enough to be towed by my diesel Volkswagen Golf. Also, It could be stretched to 18 feet and this was important because people are clearly larger in 2018 as compared to 1950. The longer waterline would give a slightly higher cruising speed and allowed a proportionate increase in cabin height to give comfortable sitting headroom. The plans were initially unintelligible, but after many hours of study they began to “talk to me” and I became confident that I could build this boat. A single deck knee was made and placed on a shelf, officially meaning the boat build had started!