Benjamin Mendlowitz
EIDER is a 1961 Penbo that recently returned to Maine after a winter in the Bahamas. The boat is a “one-couple cruiser,” a label coined by her co-designer, Carl Lane. She measures 36′ LOA, 11′4″ beam, 3′4″ draft, and displaces 8 tons.
Penbo cruisers are unique in the annals of wooden yacht building. The company that built them, Penobscot Boat Works (aka Penbo) of Rockport, Maine, was founded by the father-and-son team of Carl and Bob Lane in the early 1950s to build wooden runabouts. At the time of the company’s founding, Carl was already well known as a writer of maritime fiction and nonfiction and an avid powerboat cruiser, and he brought to the boatbuilding endeavor a refined taste and sensibility for boats he liked to call “one-couple cruisers.” Bob distilled these ideas, doing the design work.