Special Features
What makes Leaping Trout different from all other Au Sable Riverboats? Glad you asked! It's what you get in the car of your dreams, loaded with accessories. It's what, when you see it, makes you want to own it and maybe never put it into the water. Its appropriate place is in your up-north man cave. Trust me. I've been approached by someone who is thinking about doing this!
​All riverboats have one.
Our fish box features special “catch ports” (for lack of a better term) - the opening you ease your catch thru to keep it alive in the live well - fitted with internal splash deflectors to keep river water in the box and not on the floorboards.
In addition, the box is lined with fiberglass cloth for reinforcement, an important detail when you consider that the fish box is the forward rib in a riverboat. And the fish box also houses the “Leaping Trout” cedar knot motif - created by nature and integrated into this boat.
The Live Well (Fish Box)
One of the biggest challenges in working with marine plywood is how to waterproof the laminations when penetrations occur. Our solution is not unique to Leaping Trout, but it is executed meticulously to produce a hull that will not suffer from delamination. For example - consider the thumbholes in floorboards. We bored precision holes with a Forstner bit and flooded the hole with epoxy to seal the exposed laminations. Then we precision drilled a hole in the floorboard - through the epoxy, not the wood. These penetrations will never fail!
Go to the local building supply. Buy dowels. Drill holes. Insert pegs. Uh uh!
The ribs of Leaping Trout are mahogany. Hardware store dowels are, at best, maple. Some of them are rubber wood imported from Indonesia. The rod pegs on Leaping Trout are mahogany - and so are the ribs to which they are fastened. They are critically located with a proprietary centering device we created for this purpose.
Pegs are perfectly perpendicular to the ribs - not "eyeballed."
Very Special Rod Pegs
Their Transom
Our Transom
The transom is the dashboard or instrument panel of a riverboat. Motor controls are easily accessed. A through-hole allows a variety of drag chain ropes to be fine-tuned to slow down or speed up the boat. (Our through-hole is precision-drilled with a Forstner bit, sealed with two coats of epoxy, and finished with three coats of varnish.)
Let's talk about cosmetics: Notice the bare bolt ends, washers and nuts securing the u-bolt on the outside of their transom. Our fasteners are buried inside the black walnut transom and covered with matching plugs. Their motor mount is fastened with screws and plugged with contrasting material (plastic wood, maybe?). Our motor mount is epoxied into place - no visible fasteners required. Little things mean a lot!
The bow cover (foredeck) is unlike what you’ll see on the average AuSable Riverboat. Most foredecks are flat (easier/faster to build. Not much thought goes into this). Notice that the foredeck on Leaping Trout is gently curved between gunnels - more pleasing to the eye, unique, and not-so-easily accomplished. We carefully selected five cedar boards that were “cupped” (warped across the grain, but otherwise straight). These were edge-planed, glued and clamped to form a subtle arch, then fitted to the bow of the boat (see picture).
The world isn't flat. And neither is our foredeck
Its beta-name is “Leaping Trout” because of the knot pattern of a cedar plank chosen to fabricate the aft wall of the live box (see the picture nearby of the aft fish box wall). This piece of “one-by” cedar features two knots suggesting a pair of leaping trout. The first one (just left of center) is breaking the surface to feed on an airborne fly, and the second one (at upper left) is moving on to another feeding opportunity.
We call this boat “Leaping Trout,” but you can formally name it anything you wish!