Jon Boat 16 by Bateau.com

The first GF was going to be a plain Jon boat but while researching some old designs, we discovered the lines of a classic garvey listed as a duck boat in the plans catalog of the Smithsonian.

That beautiful hull shape could be adapted with some tinkering to our preferred material. We dropped the Jon boat look and redesigned the classic garvey, keeping the looks but with ease of construction as a top priority. Despite a common misconception, a pretty boat is not more difficult to build than an ugly box.

This boat will do all what Jon boats do but look much better and have a higher resale value. It can also be used as a duck boat.

We designed the GF14 first and with a small change in the building method, we were able to increase the length to 16'.

The GF16 is a flat bottom garvey. While this is easier to build, provides great stability and requires less HP for the same speed, it will not go through a chop as well as a vee hull. We minimized the pounding by keeping the strong bow curvature of the original design.

Compared to the GF14, the GF16 uses the same amount of plywood.