| Tom Morgan Skiff(mrb)
Sandy
September 15, 2007
I drove up to Helena Montana with Tom Morgan yesterday. Tom is the former owner of the Winston Rod company, rod designer, tool maker (high tech, carbide-bladed bamboo planes) and, it turns out, boat designer. Tom designed a square-ended, low-sided, low-rocker fly fishing skiff in the early 1990s, about the same time the first South Fork skiffs appeared.....maybe even sooner. 
Tom didn’t want to have to slide seats around much,so he designed the boat to point two different ways. If there were two people in the boat, this end goes down river first, else the other end. So he had anchor pullies on both sides of the boat. And the anchor arm was built onto a welded square tube that slides down into a slot. So, to swap ends, you moved the anchor arm from one end to the other and re-theaded the anchor rope. The foot brace was an ingenious aluminum angle iron with teeth that fit into slots. So you moved that too. The rower’s seat was two parallel bars with a nylon strap wrapped back and forth, with a turn buckle at each end, so you could hand tighten the seat every now and then. He had padded, flip-top lid rod slots on each side of the boat, so you could lay two fully rigged rods down anytime you wanted. Another nice touch was strategically placed slots in the inwale, that received flexible 1/8" aluminum bars. If you bend the bars and snap them into place, they make a tight tent frame for the boat cover. When we got there (we had no idea it would be there) the owner also had a Montana Riverboats Buffalo boat he’d built 2-3 years ago. He also had an old winston rod (a rod Tom had designed) he built from a blank about 15 years ago....which he said was still his favorite rod. So a lot of unlikely design coincidences converged on that driveway yesterday. Andy said (about the Buffalo Boat) that because it had higher sides and more rocker, it was more stable in big water. So on early season trips to the Big Hole or Yellowstone he took the Buffalo Boat, else he took the Morganser. Andy also said that if he ever built another Buffalo Boat he'd probably take 2-3 inches of rocker off the bottom. Else he'd leave everything the same. Tom's boat was welded aluminum, so it was heavy. But it did have a foam-filled double floor, which keeps it surprisingly quiet when it rattles over the riffles. Tom had 8 such boats built and then gave it up. Subcontracting the fabrication (Midwest Welding in Bozeman) was not going to be a money-making deal. You could build a boat like that, with a Plascore bottom and plywood sides, and reduce the weight by half. Oh yeah, one final thought. Tom's 13' skiff had a 57" wide bottom. That far back (early 1990s) the only boats I'm aware of, that had an extra-wide bottom like that, were 18 footers. The only smaller boats with wide bottoms where Tom's innovative skiff and the MRB Honky Dory. All the 15-16' Lavros, Clackas and the various aluminum driftboats had 48" bottoms then. Wider boats are pretty common now. But they weren't then. No photos yet. I’ll try to get some pics online later today. |
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Boat cover frames
Flip top rod slot
Left side anchor
Morganser
Padded reel compartment
Quick adjust footbrace
Rainbow
Rowers seat
Tom and Jerry