Ed Opheim Dories

The Kodiak Archipelago has a long, rich tradition of dory construction and use. This is a story of the rugged and capable dories built for the local fisheries by Ed Opheim.

The village of Ouzinkie is located on Spruce Island, approximately twelve miles north of Kodiak, Alaska.  In the early days of North American land appropriation, Ouzinkie became an outlying community for the Russian American Company, an official St Petersburg effort to expand settlement along the west coast of the North American continent. The Russians referred to the settlement in 1849 as "Uzenkiy," meaning "village of Russians and Creoles." In 1889, the Royal Packing Company constructed a cannery at Ouzinkie, which spurred the development of a modern fishery. This aerial photo is from 1960.

The earliest commercial fishing in Alaska was the salt cod industry. Hand-built dories used in this labor intensive effort were oar-powered until the 1920's, when small horsepower outboards were employed.
Ed Opheim, Sr. recalled that cod were so abundant around Unga, where he was born in 1910, that a red rag was all that was needed for bait.

Opheim had his own small lumber mill, processing the local spruce he used in dory construction. Hundreds of his boats were used in cod and salmon fisheries.
With his two sons, Ed Jr. and Norman, he built more than six hundred dories and skiffs from native spruce. For decades they were ubiquitous in the salmon gillnet fleet until aluminum and fiberglass skiffs replaced them in the 1980's - though his beautiful dories still ply Alaskan waters today.

Recently, I had a chance to look at an original 24-foot Opheim dory. Roy Parkinson owns this iconic piece of history and it has been fifteen years since he motored the boat to Port Townsend, WA, from SE Alaska. Roy fished this boat for several years in Alaska, everything from salmon to crab (the cod fishery has long since been decimated). His Opheim dory is outfitted with a 13hp Perkins diesel and once sported a sprit-rigged sail.

Building with solid timber has the advantage that all the parts can be replaced as needed, so as you might expect, Doryman is considering making Roy an offer on this fine old vessel. Despite years of neglect, it's sturdy carvel-planked hull is still tough, though the plank on frame bottom appears to be in sad shape. As I ran my hand along the still substantial shear-guard, years of plying the challenging waters of Alaska came to mind. This old dory as more life left in her, no doubt of that.

In his later years, Ed Opheim moved to Kodiak,
took up writing, and his books are now celebrated local lore. (Ed lived to be 100 years old.)
He wrote "The Memoirs and Saga of a Cod Fisherman's Son: Ten years of dory-fishing cod (1923-1933) at Sunny Cove, Spruce Island, Alaska", which is sadly out of print and as far as I can tell, no longer available.
If anyone knows of a copy, I'd love to hear of it.

Old photos of Ouzinkie courtesy of Timothy Smith.
Thanks to Marty Loken, boat restorer extraordinaire, for bringing this old work boat to my attention.

Alaska Dory Fishing

Time and again stories surface that distinguish the humble dory as a historically significant boat. A faithful reader named Michael contacted me recently to share his passion for these simple boats. It’s always good to hear stories of how well a dory has served its owner, often against odds. The setting for this story is the yet untamed wilderness of Alaska, in the 1970’s, when young adventurers arrived with dreams of becoming wealthy salmon fishermen.

Michael begins his tale:

“My first dory was by Grunwald of Aeolus Boatworks in Davenport, CA. It was built to the lines of the Higgins and Gifford Dory in Chappelle's American Small Sailing Craft.”




“I took it to Alaska on a boat trailer in 1972 and it's still there. A couple of youngsters made an extended camping trip in her a couple years ago but she's too far gone to be trustworthy now.”

“The plywood planks are lapped and are backed by full-length battens inside, very strong construction. I can't begin to describe how horribly I mistreated that boat in Alaska. It lived the life of a neglected livery boat most of the time. She also transported deer and packed water to a winter cabin. That dory enabled a safe subsistence lifestyle in a very remote place.”

“I used to row this dory on San Francisco Bay, often crossing at night. I picked up birds during an oil spill, in 1971.
In 1972 I towed the boat on her trailer to Haines, Alaska then by ferry to Juneau, and then motored with a British Seagull engine to a small fishing village where I began my commercial fishing career.”

“After fishing the Gulf of Alaska for a couple years, I stashed the boat at a cabin on the outside coast and a trapper found her, enlarged the motor well to make room for a great big outboard, and then lost the boat.”

“I was in California at the time arranging financing to buy a commercial trolling boat when I got a call from the Coast Guard wanting to know if I was dead. It seems a Red Stack tug traversing the Fairweather Grounds with a double tow found the boat sunk and drifting. The skipper made a circle of a mile diameter and picked up the boat, taking her to Seattle, where I found her and arranged for passage back to SE Alaska on the deck of a tender.”

This hard working and long lived Higgins and Gifford Dory, shown above, beached on the rocks, now belongs to Omen Wild, a native Alaskan.
Photo is courtesy of Omen.



Michael continues:

“This is Raven, my current Grunwald dory. The flare angle is greater than any other dory I've measured. This makes her tiddly when light, but easy to row, even in a breeze.”

“I plan to close up the motor well, install water stowage, rig for sailing, and take on a long trip in the foreseeable future, possibly Puget Sound to Cross Sound in SE Alaska.”





Michael loves dories and has plans to build another (when he gets done with a couple kayaks he has in the works). This one will be a bigger cruising dory.

“The boat I currently dream of building is R.D. Culler's cowhorn dory, rigged with a balance lug yawl or junk sail, and set up like the Atlantic rowing dory boats for long distance cruising."
"I plan to make a planking model this winter. The cowhorn dory is on page six of Skiffs and Schooners. It is the size of a St Pierre but more moderate in rocker and sheer. She is very close to a 125% scale-up of Alfred Johnson's Centennial, which John Gardner documented in Wooden Boats to Build and Use, on page 53.”


Michael has been a visitor here for some time and I’m happy to finally make his acquaintance.

Welcome to the Doryman family, Michael! We’d really like to see that model when you’re done.
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