This boat is for Dan (Dierker), my very good friend. He ran dories for Martin and later for OARS, after OARS bought Grand Canyon Dories. We both work for Arizona Raft Adventures (AzRA), as does Dennis, who is in on this project and next in line for a similar boat. AzRA runs dories now and then, so we hope to be floating both of these and my 1972 Briggs on an August trip. Dan is following the old Martin Litton tradition of naming it after a place that's been buggered up--in this case the Euphrates, which Dan ran before it was dammed.
I hadn't planned to go into the dory business, but hoped to be building archaic wood boats instead, avoiding epoxy and glass whenever I could. But these guys wanted to build some glassy ones, so we're going half way. I get to frame them in sweet-smelling Port Orford Cedar and build them mostly out of Meranti plywood, but we decided to go with a foam floor and radiused glass chines due to the track record for damaged floors and chines in Grand Canyon. Kind of a crazy hybrid but we think they'll look awfully sweet.
We started scarfing the side panels during the last couple days of January and have been hard at it most days since then. We ran into some serious discrepancies between our plans and reality, but have managed to come out with a hull shape we really like.
I'll try to post a little more regularly now that I have figured out how.
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