A sneakbox is a small boat that can be sailed, rowed, poled or sculled. It is predominantly associated with the Barnegat Bay in New Jersey, just as the canoe-like Delaware Ducker is associated with the New Jersey marshes along the Delaware River near Philadelphia. Railbird skiffs and garvey-like sneakboxes are other American hunting-boat types. Typically, they were all used for hunting waterfowl and marsh birds but also have been used by trappers.
Origin As with most American small craft, its origin is not well documented. It is generally accepted that Captain Hazelton Seaman invented the first sneakbox about 1836, in West Creek, New Jersey. It was usually built of Atlantic white cedar wood, known by many as Jersey cedar, which was once plentiful throughout the mid-Atlantic states. It was conceived as a low-profile, lightweight, seaworthy hunting craft that one person could easily handle in any of the weather conditions likely to be encountered in the Jersey marshes. The first printed description appeared in Forest and Stream on April 3, 1874, in a short letter from Robert B. White. White included a rough dimensional drawing that is recognizably a sneakbox.
Hunting Sneak boat hunting is a sub-specialty of traditional waterfowl hunting used for diver ducks which is done in a low profile canoe looking boat that is some times motorized and made of a unique designs to allow hunter to maintain a close position to the water in order to conceal them in open water and allow them to drift into rafts of ducks using the wind. Most laws allow sneak boats to be paddled to increase the speed need to reach open water rafts of ducks. These boats often have some type of fall-away concealment which the hunter drops down at the last second to improve the range of the wing shooting. This is a sport with a long history going back to market hunters and punt boats with small cannons mounted to them. Sometimes the boats are referred to as a sneakbox which seen great use on the Chesapeake Bay and the Great Lakes Other versions of sneak boats are called sculling boats which use a paddle protruding out of the transom of the boat allowing the hunter to lay flat while sculling the boat into rafted waterfowl. The main focus of the sneak boat is to put the hunter very close to the decoys or rafts of live waterfowl if not directly into them for additional closer shooting. This makes for very dramatic hunting scenarios where rafting waterfowl comes extremely close to the hunter and boat. Most sneak boats are used for diver duck or ocean duck hunting where an open deep water waterfowl species frequent. Sometimes they are deployed in marshes for more traditional puddle duck hunting or goose hunting. They are also referred to as sculling.
Open water sneak boat hunters are well known to be a hearty bunch and are known for operating on the riskier side of waterfowl hunting. They are known to target diver ducks such as bluebills (greater scaup), canvasback, goldeneye, scoter and eider to name a few. These boats are known to be long and sleek to cut through the water fast and have extremely shallow drafts. Boats rang from 10 ft to upwards of 21 ft on the great lakes and rivers. They usually accompany two hunters at a time using the wind to catch a sail like blind in the front of the boat while also sculling to achieve greater speed. Sneak boat hunters sometimes uses small spreads of decoys in open water while they lay and wait some distance away watching with binoculars. Once ducks have landed into the decoy spread the hunters begin their sneak. To waterfowl the boat is just some driftwood or breakaway marsh. Other sneak boat hunter use large cabin cruiser as a base and perform sneaks using several sneak boats and a tender boat to allow quick retrieval.
Notable sneakbox hunters
Nathaniel Bishop It was the 1879 book Four Months in a Sneak Box by Nathaniel H. Bishop that put this small boat on the map. Bishop went down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers and eastward along the Gulf Coast into Florida in Centennial Republic, his sneakbox. It was something of a stunt in commemoration of the nation's 100th anniversary. Nevertheless, Four Months is one of the first small-boat camp-cruising narratives published in America, where the author was not an explorer or adventurer, but simply a sportsman or boating enthusiast. Bishop was born in Medford, Mass. He had an adventurous streak, and at 17 worked his way south from Massachusetts on a sailing ship, then hiked across South America. This is the subject of his first book (1869) The Pampas and Andes: A Thousand Miles' Walk Across South America. By 1872 he was a canoe enthusiast along the lines of British canoeist John "Rob Roy" MacGregor. Bishop was for many years the Secretary of the American Canoe Association. He was one of the association's founders. He ordered the 18-foot canoe Mayeta, built by J. S. Lamson, Bordentown, N.J, and started on a two-man voyage from Quebec. The voyage was abandoned because the canoe was too heavy, and Bishop apparently didn't like company. He obtained Maria Theresa, a 58-pound paper canoe built by Elisha Waters, Troy, N.Y., and started again. Bishop rigged his canoe with rowlocks; he did use a double paddle also, which brought a lot of comments and attention from Local Boatmen. and he did not sail Maria Theresa much on his Florida cruise 1874-5, published as Voyage of the Paper Canoe in 1878. After these three books, Bishop seems to have stopped writing except for correspondence concerning the ACA; but no one yet has attempted to create a bibliography of Bishop's later contributions to boating and sporting magazines.
F. Slade Dale Slade Dale was a yachtsman who lived on Barnegat Bay. He was involved in the development of the racing sneakbox, but appreciated the cruising qualities of sneakboxes and had two special boats, Crab and Sheldrake, built for a Florida cruise. In the fall of 1925, Dale and a companion took the sneakboxes, equipped with outboard motors and auxiliary sails from New York to Florida. By Sneakbox to Florida appeared in Yachting in 1927. These were more like the working sneakbox than the racing boat, and as the photo shows, were designed to be fully enclosed with hatches if necessary. Dale's Sneakbox Sheldrake is displayed at the Toms River Maritime Museum.
Types
Cruising sneakboxes
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