Cinnamon Girl - The Missing Years

I've written a lot about Cinnamon Girl, a two-sail crabbing bateau (deadrise skiff) built by Kevin Brennan in 1993.  Based on plans of a bateau built at Cambridge in 1910.  I'm building one myself, here.  I wrote a detailed profile of Cinnamon Girl here.  What's missing in that story is a period between the time Kevin sold CG in 2007 and when I first saw her at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum (CBMM) around 2020.

One clue to the "missing years" was an article I found in Messing About in Boats, Vol. 9 No. 7, July 2009, p. 30,  The author had acquired Cinnamon Girl and showed her at the Richardson Museum in Cambridge, Md.  But the by-line was missing - author unknown.  I contacted friends who had volunteered at the museum.  No one remembered the boat or the author.

Concidentally, I was contacted about the same time by Mike Moore, who had read the online record I publish for the CBMM small craft conservaton volunteer team. We had just restored and re-launched Cinnamon Girl (work I described here).  Mike wrote that he had owned Cinnamon Girl, and I learned that he was the author of the 2009 MAIB article.  (The full text and photos are reprinted below.)  Mike filled in the blanks and sent me the text and photos that appear below.

Thanks to Mike for sharing his story.

P.S. I Love You

CG's Builder Says Good-Bye

Excerpted from
Messing About in Boats
Vol. 30 No. 11, March 2013, p. 33

Slip Jig
By Kevin Brennan

The thought of building a new boat in 2006 had not even entered my mind when David Moreno sent me a link to John Welsford's Navigator and Pathfinder boats. That simple link planted a seed that would soon germinate into something special. The fact of the matter was that I was quite content with my crabbing skiff, Cinnamon Girl, that I had built 14 years before. It had its limitations, which I had come to accept, but darn that Navigator looked good and comfortable, too! ...

With twangs of guilt my beloved crabbing skiff was placed up for sale in the spring of 2006. With my daughter heading off to college in the fall I needed the proceeds from the sale in order to build another. Money was tight, real tight. I would have preferred to have seen and sailed a Navigator in person, but since there were not any in the vicinity, I went out on a limb and ordered the plans. ...

Now that I have five years of sailing in [Welsford Navigator] Slip Jig I feel that I have learned how to sail her and I am not disappointed.

To start with the boat is extremely comfortable and dry with a surprising amount of room for just under 15'. There is an ample number of flotation chambers that double as stowage for gear. While she doesn't point as high as a modern Marconi rigged boat, she does have a good turn of speed. I've even had her surfing waves downwind. With the low center of effort of the yawl rig she tends to spill the air before she ships water, although that has happened on occasion. Her two reef points in the main can really tame her as the wind pipes up and I can still sail and make windward progress under jib and mizzen alone if need be. What I really like is that I can go out in conditions that would have kept the crabbing skiff on the trailer and still sail with confidence that I will get there and back without too much white knuckled sailing.

Reprinted from The Mainsheet
Newsletter of the Delaware River TSCA