| The Boats | |
 "Lucky" Bob Donaldson |
Our boat is a
descendant of the original Portuguese fishing dory - a flat bottomed,
splay-sided rowboat with high upturned ends.
In the Grand Canyon of the 1960s, two veteran rowers of the old Cataract boats, Martin Litton and P.T. Reilly, saw the need for a more practical craft, but wanted to preserve the dignity and grace of the wooden boat. Why not the dory? |
| They worked with
boat builders Keith Steele and later, Jerry Briggs, developing larger,
decked-over versions of the McKenzie dory. They found them to be perfectly
adapted to the rigors of Grand Canyon.
Moreover, it could carry four passengers and, below the decks, plenty of
gear. |
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Early in the 1970s, Martin Litton began rowing them commercially, founding Grand Canyon Dories. Few can resist the charm of the whitewater dory. As Martin says, "They are, in a word, beautiful." |
Each dory is named in memorial to a place of beauty destroyed by man. In the case of the boats pictured on this page, the dammed Skagit River, the heavily impacted Phantom Canyon in Grand Canyon National Park, and Columbine Falls, drown by the waters of Lake Mead. |
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Dories are remarkably stable in big water. Believe it or not, we came through this wave in Lava Falls just fine. Really. |
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But like rafts, sometimes dories flip. And if we hit rocks, well, sometimes they break. But we know how to deal with such things. |
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