Sharpie (boat)

Sharpies are a type of hard chined sailboat with a flat bottom, extremely shallow draft, centreboards and straight, flaring sides.

In an 1879 edition of Forest and Stream, a man named James Goodsell of the Fair Haven neighborhood claimed to have built the first sharpie with his brother in 1848.

The Goodsell & Rowe Oyster Barn is shown on Front Street in an 1850 Map of Fair Haven which is now in Yale's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

Building Sharpies was a spin-off business from oystering and continued to grow, meeting not only local needs but were sold to other oystermen along the Eastern seaboard.

The sharpie type migrated south and west to other regions where shallow water prevented deep-draft vessels from operating, including Chesapeake Bay, the Carolinas, the Great Lakes (Ohio) and Florida.

Thomas Clapham used a v-bottom in his "Nonpareil sharpies", and Larry Huntington introduced a rounded, arc bottom that has been used by modern designers like Bruce Kirby and Reuel Parker.

In recent years, the sharpie, as with many traditional American small craft, has enjoyed renewed interest as designers and sailors have sought boats with the virtues of shallow draft and ease of construction.

Cabin sharpies are an acquired taste due to the space taken up by the large central centerboard case and the restricted headroom.

A sharpie does not have the strong self-righting ability of a more conventional deep keeled yacht, so it is best suited to sheltered waters.

[2] Sharpie style hulls that are developed in New Zealand are made of plywood, use water ballast in underseat tanks that empty when trailered, vertical (dagger) ballasted boards (about 80-100 lbs) type centerboards (hoisted with a simple 4:1 block arrangement led back to the cockpit) and are commonly about 20–24 feet LOA.

Oughtred offers the Haiku with either twin swinging centreboards, which give more interior room, at the expense of hydrodynamic efficiency, or a single central board, which takes up more space.

[citation needed] Phil Bolger designed a rudimentary solution to the problem of hull slap at anchor, which effects flat bottom boats, by making a 3 foot long, oval shaped anti-slap pad of multiple layers of ply about 2 inches deep, which were then rounded into a shallow arc.

Owners have found that putting extra weight in the bow and lowering the centreboard when anchored at night reduces the noise which is accentuated by thinner ply and lighter overall construction.