Adirondack Guideboat by Warren Cole

The Adirondack Museum at Blue Mountain Lake, New York, houses the world's largest collection of Adirondack guideboats. All of the boats offered here are in that collection, as is the Grant-built 16’ x 3' 6" VIRGINIAN (57.229.1), which was documented meticulously by John Gardner in Kenneth and Helen Durant’s The Adirondack Guide-Boat. Speed and light weight drove the evolution of the guideboat type as summer camps and resorts brought recreational fishermen, hunters, and rusticators to the Adirondack Mountains in the decades after the Civil War. Results in open-water racing indicate that guideboats are the fastest North American single-rower fixed-seat pulling boats. More interesting, they can handle far worse seas than the Adirondack lakes routinely produce. Still, they need careful handling. They use pinned, non-feathering oars, with considerable overlap. To their surprise, rowers accustomed to feathering their oars in the rough open ocean have found that this overlapping, non-feathering arrangement can be used in rough water, even though the boats were intended for more sheltered water use. From 87 Boat Designs by Ben Fuller. Boat is owned by the Adirondack Museum (57.192.2).  Plans drawn in 1984.