Description

Our composite Adirondack Guideboat is a blend of the best in design and modern boatbuilding technology with the highest caliber of traditional wooden boat building skills. Each row boat is handcrafted to order. In designing our rowing boats, company founder Steve Kaulback said, “I borrowed the ends from J. Henry Rushton’s, the middle from Dwight Grant.” He then faired everything to his own sensibility, creating a better boat with the traditional shape of the Adirondack Guideboat.

PLEASE NOTE THAT THE PURCHASE PRICE IS FOR THE BOAT ONLY. PLEASE CONTACT US FOR DELIVERY OPTIONS WHICH ARE AN ADDITIONAL COST.

Using one of his 15-foot wooden boats as a physical template, Steve molded a boat with a composite of Kevlar and fiberglass. The boat building process, which had previously taken months, could now be reduced to a week.

Without intending to, Steve became the most prolific Adirondack Guideboat builder in history. The blending of a relatively ancient hull shape with space-age technology produced lovely rowing boats with properties on the water and on your shoulders indistinguishable from our wooden Cedar Guideboat.

Now, with the globalization of website sales, we’re selling our boats across the United States and in England, New Zealand, Sweden, Norway, Holland, Denmark, Scotland, Korea, and Germany.

The Adirondack Guideboat influenced commerce, culture and developed rowing sport in Lake Region of New York’s Adirondack Mountains. The boat was built with local pine, spruce and cedar and 8,000 tiny tacks and screws. Guideboats flourished for perhaps 60 years with a peak perhaps in the 1880s and 1890s. With the advent of the automobile and access roads, the Guideboat was no longer needed for regional transportation. But the design of the boat was held in high esteem and the Guideboat found a new position in recreational rowing.

A picture is worth 1,000 words so watch this beautiful six minute video, by Martha Stewart, tells a good story about her boat and our company, and the evolution of one of the world’s finest rowing boats.

A customer story:

Recently we were making a delivery in the Florida Keys­­… a rough job, but everybody has to be somewhere in February… where better than the Florida Keys? We shot some video footage of our Guideboat…. a new owner bringing his boat back to the dock for the first time. To the casual observer there isn’t anything interesting in this video. But boat-heads will easily see the boat’s relationship to the water. This new owner is barely doing anything… yet the liveliness of the boat is clear.