14 ft Rapid Robert

The 14 ft Rapid Robert is the boat Roger Fletcher calls the original McKenzie River drift boat, the one built and popularized by Tom Kaarhus, a cabinetmaker and boatbuilder in Eugene, Oregon. Fletcher took its lines off the old boats and drew them up again, and he rates it the most versatile of all the McKenzies: comfortable in Class III water, and able to get up and plane behind a small outboard of no more than 9.9 hp. Ray Heater and Cyrus Happy of Ray's River Dories still build versions of it.

Measured to the inside of the panels she is 12 ft 2.5 in overall and 14 ft around the sheer, with a bottom 44.25 in wide amidships and 65.5 in across the sheer. The plans appear in Fletcher's book Drift Boats and River Dories (pages 222 to 227) and were also sold on their own, drawn for free-form frame construction in plywood, though Fletcher notes they suit stitch and glue as well. The wide, rockered transom that carries the motor is what lets one boat work as both a rowing drift boat and a small motor skiff.