Sweet & Simple

Fred Shell shares some of what he has learned over nearly 40 years of designing, building, and sailing small boats

- Greg Stone

Many years ago, Fred Shell tucked himself away with his wife and children in a corner of far-northern Vermont on the shores of Lake Champlain, settling down to a life of designing, building, sailing, and selling small sailboats.

One result is a series of simple, lightweight, inexpensive, easy-to-build small boats that have a beauty to them that stems from the flared sides and simple rig. I’ve just gotten my third boat from Fred, and it’s an updated version of the one I built from his kit some 30 years ago called a Swifty 12. The Swifty was the first boat Fred designed from scratch, and he’s produced several variations of it in different lengths.

This time around I had Fred build it for me. I just didn’t have the energy to take on the assembly project, though truth be told, the last time I did it was a very pleasant and quite easy 80 hours or so from shipping crate to river. The shipping crate—most of Fred’s thousand or so boats have been sold as kits—was quite magical to unpack and see a host of mostly flat pieces of wood that would end up in my basement, and through Fred’s incredibly simple process, come together as a lightweight, 12-foot sailboat suitable for river, pond, or lake. I would not recommend these boats in areas of high waves, such as the ocean, but they’re perfect for the kind of gunkholing I love to do around my home in Westport, Massachusetts.