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Burlington Free Press
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Building A Better Boat
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by
Leslie Wright
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Ferrisburgh VT—Phil
Cenzano drove for 7 hours just to spend less than 10 minutes rowing a
boat on Monkton Pond. He was apparently unperturbed by the falling snow
and raw wind that early April morning. "Wow! Wow! Out of
sight!" an exuberant Cenzano said upon landing at the shoreline,
"That thing's a rocket!" |
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The mechanical engineer from Huntington on New York’s Long Island has
taken his maiden voyage in an Adirondack guideboat, made in Ferrisburgh
by Steve Kaulback and company. The anachronistic and slightly
unusual-looking boat rides high on both ends and low in the middle. The
wide-in-the-middle profile suggests a pregnant canoe. The seats are
high-backed and caned, another oddity. |
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As Cenzano discovered, all the guideboat’s apparent quirks become
virtues when the craft is under way. The hull knifes through the water
with each dip and pull on the featherweight oars. Kaulback and his
partner, David Rosen, sold 200 guideboats last year. Their 12-employee
company is about to launch into unchartered waters. |
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Kaulback and Rosen want to take the company from $700,000 a year in
sales to $3 million in the next four years. They hope they can do it
with the ease with which their boats slice through water. Adirondack
Guideboat, Inc., started in 1979 when Kaulback was introduced to the
boats by his brother, who was attending college in the Adirondacks.
Kaulback went for a row and fell in love with the boat. |
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Kaulback returned to Vermont and decided to build guideboats on his own.
Kaulback, a graduate of Pratt Institute, the prominent art and
architecture school in New York City, modified traditional designs and
incorporated modern materials like Kevlar, fiberglass and epoxy to make
the boats lighter, more durable and more affordable. In 1985 he
introduced a fiberglass version of the boat. Today the company makes
four basic models, ranging in price from $1,800 to $14,000. The
traditional guideboat is endemic to the Adirondacks and was used by
settlers in the late 1800s and early 1900s for transportation and
hunting. Guideboats were traditionally used as a pickup truck might have
been used in a region with more water than roads. |
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Guideboats were characteristically double-ended, about 16 feet long and
3 feet wide. The wide design enabled hunters to load the boats with
their bounty. Early pictures show the boats loaded with deer carcasses.
The boats were also designed to be light enough to be easily portaged.
Today about nine boat builders make and repair traditional guideboats,
said Hallie Bond, curator of the Adirondack Museum in Blue Mountain
Lake, New York. She is also author of the book, "Boats and Boating
in the Adirondacks." |
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She said, "Steve has built far more guideboats than any other
builder." Kaulback says that he is building a contemporary replica
of the traditional guideboat, with much that can be gained in the wise
use of modern technology. "The water doesn’t know the
difference," says Kaulback, "all it knows is weight and
shape." |
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Regardless of the debate, Kaulback has raised the profile of the
regional craft, Bond, the museum curator, said. "The good thing
about what he’s doing is, he's making the guideboat available to a lot
more people." Kaulback and Rosen would like to raise the
profile of Adirondack Guideboat even further. They have considered
taking in investment money but aren't sure if that's the right way to
go. |
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Kaulback says, "I've taken the idea and the company as far as I
could go. Then I threw it as far as I could. Dave caught it and is now
throwing it as far as he can. Early on in our partnership I gave him a
nickname....PT Boats.... which sounds like a reference to the torpedo
boats of World War II....but it's really more about him being a PT
Barnum in getting our boats out there." |
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Rosen smiles and says, "Yeah, but it's really the boats that do the
selling." Some think the company is going to become the next
Mad River Canoe. The canoe company started in Waitsfield in 1971 and,
after a merger, moved to North Carolina last year. In three decades, the
light and nimble Mad River Canoe became a household word among canoe
enthusiasts. |
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Kaulback and Rosen aren't so sure, "These really aren't mass-market
boats," says Kaulback. "And we've only been able to find a few
dealers who really know how to sell them. Mostly we sell the boats
ourselves." Kaulback and Rosen are almost always on the road,
selling their boats at shows and making deliveries on trips ranging from
Wisconsin, to Minnesota, to Colorado, to Seattle and Miami. Rosen says,
"I was getting the brakes done on my car and when the mechanic
looked at the odometer he said, "This thing never sits still, does
it?" |
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Rosen laughed and said, "I never thought I'd spend this much time
on the road. Washington State gets 1 out of every 10 boats that we
build. And they've got to pay a substantial charge for shipping.
We've been getting quite a few inquiries from Texas. I think we'd better
start looking for a winter show down there." |
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The growth the company is experiencing ($42,000 in sales in 1995 --
$750,000 in 2002) won’t come from building Kaulback’s finely crafted
wooden boats, which take 300 hours to construct and sell for $12,000 to
$14,000. Only 6 or 8 of those boats are sold each year. Almost all of
the company’s boat sales are in the less expensive Kevlar models.
Rosen says, "Someone once said to me, 'It's a shame you have to
build those Kevlar and fiberglass boats.' Rosen replied, 'Are you
kidding? Those boats support the wooden boats. You can't build a company
just based on the wooden boat." |
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Kay Henry, a former owner of Mad River Canoe and now a consultant to the
outdoors industry, has traveled the waters on which Adirondack Guideboat
is about to embark. The Waitsfield canoe company started in the early
‘70s with Jim Henry’s design for a sleeker, faster canoe. "One
challenge lies in educating boaters about the boat and its
advantages," Henry said. Just as people weren’t familiar with
performance canoes, the guideboat concept is unfamiliar to most,
especially outside of New England. Mad River’s canoes were more
expensive than others on the market. A Mad River boat cost between
$1,000 and $2,500. Other popular canoes at that time cost $600. |
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"We needed to get boats into people’s hands so they could see the
difference and I think they have a similar problem," Henry said of
Adirondack Guideboat. Production is another challenge. Mad River took
advantage of technology to take the boat building process from about 30
hours a canoe to 5 hours. The material costs were higher, but Mad River
was able to produce many more boats, Henry said. Mad River also
grew by buying an accessory line. Efforts to produce a less expensive
boat under a different name were not successful because quality was hard
to control and the idea was scrapped, she said. |
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A portion of the market for the Adirondack guideboat seems to be with
aging baby boomers, a growing demographic. The classic design is
aesthetically and physically appealing to older boaters. "The
stability of boats makes them easier to get into and out of than a canoe
or kayak, and rowing is good exercise," Rosen said. "It’s
natural that folks should shift from a kayak back to a classic craft
such as ours. And then when you consider the boat's seaworthiness and
carrying capacity....." Rosen's thoughts trailed off, considering
the possibilities. |
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The challenge will be to preserve the quality and reputation of the
Adirondack guideboat while producing boats on a much larger scale.
Kaulback is determined to keep quality a focal point. "We’re
pretty stubborn about quality, it’s what brung us to the dance,
we’re not going to give up on it now." Curiously, both men say
that the quality of their boats, always exceptional, has been improving.
Rosen says, "We have three of Mad River's former department heads
working for us now. And their former Vice President of Manufacturing is
an occasional consultant for us. There is an awful lot of boat-building
talent hiding up here in the hills of Vermont." |