Cat Ketch Sharpie, Lizzie G.

23 foot Cat Ketch Sharpie Lizzie G with her owner Allan Horton at the helm

Sharpie from the 1800s

The Sharpie Lizzie G hails from Historic Spanish Point in Osprey Florida.This 29 acre site along the coast of Little Sarasota Bay is a homestead museum owned by the not-for-profit Gulf Coast Heritage Association. She's named after the wife of boatbuilder Frank Guptill, one of the original settlers. Similar but larger sharpies shipped produce out of Osprey for John Webb to ports from St. Petersburg to Key West back in the 1800s.

She was built in 1999 on the shoreline by volunteers under the mentorship of master shipwright Stan Lowe. The owner had his hand fashioning her out of local cypress and southern yellow pine. Blocks were carved from buttonwood and sails were sewn of cotton. And when the wind fails, there are square-loomed oars to propel her, or a spruce pole to ease her thru the shallows.

The Lizzie G is stepped with two masts, one well forward in the "eyes" of the bow that carries a square headed mainsail peaked up with a sprit. Both fore and aft sails use a clew sprit boom, but the mizzen's form is a "leg of mutton".
A conch shell trumpet satisfies required equipment by the Coast Guard.

She spends most her time in the water save for riding on a flatbed up here to New England in the summer. You might have seen her under sail at the
Atlantic Challenge in Rockland Maine or at the WoodenBoat Show