Want to build your own beautiful boat?
You can! We’re here to help
Welcome to Brooks Boats Designs
Welcome. We are John Brooks and Ruth Hill. John designed and built his first glued-lapstrake boat (Rozinante, a 15’ light, fast rowboat) in 1987, and we have been designing and building glued-lapstrake boats together since 1990. For more than a decade, we ran our own shop building custom boats to our designs and those of others, including Iain Oughtred, Doug Hylan, and Harry Bryan. During that time, we published plans for two of our boats, the 12' Ellen sailing dinghy and the 18' Peregrine fast picnic rowboat. Over the years, we have had many requests for plans for more of our designs. We’ve finished two so far this year, and many more are coming!
NEW Somes Sound 12 1/2 plans. The long-awaited plans for John’s design (above) for a glued-lapstrake cousin to the Herreshoff and Haven 12 1/2s are done. Many photos and more information, as well as direct downloads for the study plan, lines, sail plan, are now here on the site. We’ll be adding more photos of details and the building process, and quite a few other useful things, as time goes on.
NEW Compass Harbor pram plans. If you’re wondering if you should start with a nice little boat first, we’ve designed the Compass Harbor pram plans to make it easy to learn as you go, one step at a time, from ordering materials to launching day. More than 20 of these boats have been built, as kits in WoodenBoat School classes and from the plans, by home builders and also in WoodenBoat School classes.
Ellen 12 sailing and rowing boat and Peregrine 18 fast rowboat plans. Our popular, capable and fun 12' Ellen daysailers and 18' Peregrine fast light rowboats have been built by many home builders and WoodenBoat School students, and are now out there in many parts of the world enjoying waters salt and fresh.
New designs. Just for fun John counted up all the designs filling his sketchbooks and notebooks, and got up to seventy boats easily. We are steadily working on new designs. We’ll keep adding drawings, photos,and info on designs that are in the works to this site, and also talking about boat designs, ideas, and dreams on our notebook blog: www.brooksboatsdesigns.blogspot.com.
The book. If you would like a copy of our book, How to Build Glued-Lapstrake Wooden Boats, you can order from us if you’d like a signed copy—or follow the link to Amazon to save some $$ for the boat.
New directions, new design studio & shop, new site. We’re back to being Brooks Boats Designs full-time. Now that we have our new site up and running, we’ll be regularly adding new and helpful things to help you build your boat and learn more about glued lapstrake and boatbuilding—and also some things just for fun. We’d love to hear your ideas; zap us an email and tell us what you’d like to see, what would be of the most help to you for your projects. Thanks!
New blog. New in the blog library: a shop notebook blog just for building details and related matters: www.brooksboatsdesignsbuild.blogspot.com. We’ll be posting photos and notes as we finish out the Somes Sound 12 1/2 now in the shop. As mentioned above, our original blog, www.brooksboatdesigns.blogspot.com, will return to being our discussion notebook for designs and related matters.
Where have we been doing these past six years?
In 2003, we moved to West Brooklin from Mount Desert, Maine. We finished up the last of our own boats for customers, then John spent a season working at Doug Hylan’s shop on the Coquina, among others (if you check out Doug’s great photos for the Coquina, you’ll find John.) An opportunity to join the crew at Brooklin Boat Yard opened up, so John took it and spent the next five years working on several beautiful and amazing yachts including Seminole, Aphrodite, Anna, Ginger and the 90’ yawl Bequia. (John recorded the building of the latter: BBY Bequia blog.) John continued to teach at the WoodenBoat School, and we managed an article or two for WoodenBoat. And John kept filling his notebooks with boat ideas, boat designs, new building techniques, and, as always, more jigs. Along the way, our family grew from one to three when our two sons joined our family. We’re now well settled in Brooklin (the design studio and shop in West Brooklin) and very happy to be working together—now as a family—as Brooks Boats Designs.
