Five Great Boats for Rowing Adventures

By John C. Harris
June 2025

 

The 18'3" Expedition Wherry

 

The 2025 "Seventy48" race finished last week. This is a race for human-powered boats that winds 70 miles up Puget Sound from Tacoma to Port Townsend and, as the name suggests, must be completed in 48 hours. This year's edition included a whole bunch of Chesapeake Light Craft boats, which gives me an excuse to take a look at these designs in the context of rowing adventures.

When it comes to covering a lot of ground—or racing—under oar power, boat designers have to juggle two criteria: speed, and what I'll call "sea-keeping ability."

(Rant: Because the word "seaworthy" is so overused, and misused, it's time to retire it and start all over again. By "sea-keeping ability," I mean the qualities of a boat design that cause it to stay upright and not be full of water—assuming, always, that the crew understands their personal limitations, and those of the boat. Too many people use "seaworthy" to describe the mythical powers of a boat to rescue the crew from their own stupid decisions. End rant.)

Push the slider-bar towards the "speed" option and you get a boat that is long, skinny, and light. In other words, a rowing shell. Rowing shells can be desperately fragile things, found only on flat water, and apt to capsize if you sneeze. Push the slider to the "sea-keeping" side, and you'll find dories and skiffs and Whitehalls. Wide, stable, heavy, dry.

 

 

The CLC boats in this year's Seventy48 included three Expedition Wherries, two Northeaster Dories, an Annapolis Wherry Tandem, a Skerry, and an Oxford Shell II. We'll take a tour of those designs and ponder the pluses and minuses.

 

 

Mike Cirineo and his CLC Expedition Wherry in the 2025 Seventy48 Race.

The Expedition Wherry juggles speed, stability, payload, and handling in waves.

CLC Expedition Wherry

The first thing you can do to make any given rowing boat more capable in choppy water is to put a lid on it. Decks are heavy, and come with the need for bulkheads, hatches, and some head-scratching over the size of the cockpit. We'd been selling the open Annapolis Wherry for 15 years when the Expedition Wherry came along. The famous Annapolis Wherry was optimized for the kind of conditions one finds in lakes and bays.

With the Expedition Wherry, my calculation was that as long as we were going to introduce a decked-in wherry, I ought to optimize its hull shape for handling in rougher conditions. I gave the Expedition Wherry a lot of rocker, and a spoon-shaped bow that was carefully tuned to resist submarining in waves. It's the first sliding-seat rowing boat in my experience that doesn't scare me to death in the kind of short, steep chop one encounters in coastal conditions, or anywhere with enough fetch to build up a nasty wind chop.

Along the way to making the Expedition Wherry handle well in waves, the design gained enough freeboard, stability, and volume to be a good payload-carrier. Thus, the "Expedition" appellation. The rockered underbody shape that contributes to rough water handling ALSO offers low resistance at cruising speeds. It doesn't take much power to maintain high average speeds in the Expedition Wherry, which is what you want if you've got a lot of ground to cover. But you don't get something for nothing. Sprint speed suffers compared to a skinnier, less-rockered shape.

Mike Cirineo finished in the top 20 in his Expedition Wherry in this year's Seventy48. He writes:

[The Expedition Wherry] did a tremendous job of getting me to the finish line in 17 hours straight, despite rowing directly into 12-knot winds with one-to-two foot waves for the last three hours. This was with all my camping gear and supplies [aboard] in case I needed to stop—-which I didn't.

That's pretty much the Expedition Wherry's design brief, right there.

 

 

The 19'10" Annapolis Wherry Tandem is an open shell, wrapped around a pair of sliding-seat units.

CLC Annapolis Wherry Tandem

A straightforward enlargement of the Annapolis Wherry single, the Tandem was designed around a pair of drop-in sliding-seat units. There's no deck, because decks are heavy. The Wherry Tandem has enough freeboard to manage a foot or two of chop. The wave height will make the sliding-seat stroke awkward before the waves actually start breaking over the rail. Thus the crew gets the message to head back to sheltered waters before they have to start bailing. I've seen quite a few of these with a canvas spray cover over the bow to extend the performance threshold in chop, and to keep provisions dry.

This is a lakes-rivers-and-bays hull shape. It's very fast.

It has never occurred to me to fasten a deck to the Tandem. One good thing about a deck is that it adds a lot of hull stiffness. You can make the hull a lot lighter for a given stiffness if it's designed with a deck. Thus, the Expedition Wherry has a hull thickness of just 4mm. The Annapolis Wherry, lacking a deck, needs a 6mm-hull to manage dynamic loads. Adding a deck to that hull would make the Tandem pretty heavy. You get a feel for the kinds of tradeoffs that are made in engineering.

The Annapolis Wherry Tandem speeding along in choppy conditions.

The Annapolis Wherry Tandem was laid out so that it could be used as a single, with a sliding seat moved to the center. The scenario I envisioned was rowing with a passenger, or "beach cruising" with overnight gear and provisions aboard. I've had to actively combat the assumption that, all things being equal, the 19'10" Tandem Wherry will be faster than the 17'10" single Annapolis Wherry. All things are not equal. When your "engine" is a human with a power output equivalent to a tenth of a horsepower, wetted surface is the big variable. No doubt there are seven-foot-tall rowing giants out there who could flog a Wherry Tandem to higher speeds than they could in the Single. But the average one-person crew will go faster in the Annapolis Wherry single.

 

 

The 20'10" Oxford Shell II is the archetypal high-performance "rec shell."

CLC Oxford Shell II

The Oxford Shell II is optimized for speed. It's skinny and has low wetted surface. There ARE people who use boats like this for overnight expeditions, but it's more commonly used as a fast exercise machine.

As a so-called "rec shell," the Oxford Shell II has more stability and freeboard than a racing shell. It's also sturdier than a racing shell, and sealed up tight from bow to stern by decking. The Oxford Shell's ability to handle waves is in direct proportion to the skill of the crew. With practice, you can keep one of these punching through lumpy waves, moving fast. Definitely a skill you'll have to build up to, but I was not at all surprised to see one of them in the Seventy48 race. It can really eat up the miles.

 In practiced hands, the Oxford Shell II can manage rough conditions.

 

 

 

The Northeaster Dory. A round-sided dory right out of the textbooks.

CLC Northeaster Dory

The Northeaster Dory was always supposed to be an excellent rowing craft, period, and a lot of them are built just for rowing. These hulls also make excellent sailing craft, which is a feature of the classic 19th-century round-sided dory type. But as a designer I started out to create a handy fixed-seat rowing boat.

If you hold up a sheet of paper and screen off everything in the drawing above the waterline, you'll observe that just a sliver of a boat intrudes into the water. A narrow, shallow sliver that takes little effort to propel through the water. Above that, the hull flares sharply, creating great reserve stability, and the buoyancy to carry heavy loads if desired. And...that's the classic dory formula.

You can—and I have—rowed the Northeaster Dory all day. With two rowers in tandem configuration, it'll really eat up the miles. If the two rowers trade off, 30 minutes on and 30 minutes off, essentially never tiring, 40-mile days are possible without killing anyone. I've also been surprised at how nimble and fast the Northeaster Dory is with a sliding seat installed.

Still, we're talking about 2-1/2 to 4 knots. Not rowing shell pace, but somewhere between a fast walk and a jog on land. What you get in the bargain is a lot of payload, and a hull shape that excels at staying upright and dry in rough conditions. That was true for the Grand Banks fishermen who used these things in the 1800's, and it is true now.

Northeaster Dories have placed on the leader board in races like the Blackburn Challenge and the Everglades Challenge, so it's no surprise to find a few of them on the Seventy48 race course.

 

An easily-driven hull shape, with one, two, or three crew.

 

 

 

The 15'0" CLC Skerry is a 50/50 rowing-sailing design.

CLC Skerry

I don't think I'm betraying any confidences to describe the 15-foot CLC Skerry as an American dory, more or less. It's double-ended, and the styling flavor is more Kristiansand, Norway than Gloucester, Massachusetts, something we've played up in marketing for the last 25 years. Nevertheless, what we have here is a nice round-sided dory, with all the dory advantages of low resistance, big payloads, and sea-keeping qualities.

Like the Northeaster Dory, the Skerry was meant to be a 50-50 rowing/sailing craft. There have been epic Skerry adventures (including a finish in the Seventy48). John Guider rowed his decked-in Skerry thousands of miles.

A hull with a waterline this short ought not work with a sliding seat, but many have done it, with a substantial speed increase. Either as a fixed seat or sliding seat rowing craft, the Skerry is a boat I've enjoyed rowing for hours at a time.

Rowing is one of the things the Skerry does very, very well.