The boats that were built by the Watts brothers are generally referred to as ‘Collingwood Skiffs’, after the town where they located their boatyard. They had been building such craft in Toronto for five years prior to the move to Collingwood, however. The earliest Watts boats are described as “about twenty feet long, sharp-sterned, and equipped with one or two spritsails” (Barry, 1978), “customarily clench (lapstrake) built” (Swanson 1982), “more or less symmetrical fore and aft (Cecil 2001), “rather straight sheered…and…quite light in construction…fast and powerful” with “shoal hulls, with…little drag to the keels” (Chapelle 1951), “a keel almost parallel to the waterline” (Joyce 1987). This could easily be a description of a Drontheim. A comparison of drawings confirms striking similarities. There seems little doubt, then, that the craft the Watts brothers built in Canada were little different from those with which they were familiar on the north-west coast of Ireland.

The Marine Museum of the Great Lakes at Kingston, on Lake Ontario, has in its possession the hull of a Collingwood type fishing skiff, which was built in 1910 by Scott Hutcheson, a fisherman of Prince Edward County. Although it had been converted, first to a motorised fishing boat, and then to a sailing yacht, the hull is largely original, the lines are indistinguishable from those of a Drontheim. It uses a great many more, and lighter frames than would be common in a Drontheim, and also has a single ‘wearing’. Two were common in the Drontheim. When we consider other possible derivations for lapstrake built fishing boats in Scandinavia or the northern isles of Scotland, however, we find that they used even fewer frames than the Drontheim, used no wearings, and had a radically different hull-shape. It seems likely then, that this craft is a closely related descendant of the Drontheim type design. The fact that ‘Hutcheson’ is a name of Lowland or Ulster-Scots derivation, and the Christian name Scott suggests the Ulster-Scots habit of preserving the female lineage by giving maiden names as Christian names, would be consistent with this. The only other builder of Collingwood Skiffs we know by name was Dalt MacDonald of Bronte on Georgian Bay (Joyce 1987), another name with obvious connections to Ulster or the Western Isles.

The Hutcheson boat, like the vast majority of Great Lakes fish boats, is fitted with a centre-board. This is a modification that was introduced in North America. At least one Irish Drontheim was fitted with a centre-board, although it was never a common modification in Ulster. It would appear that this was a case of parallel development to deal with similar problems. Photographs suggest that the adoption of a centre-board had an affect on mast placement, with the mainmast of the Great Lakes boats being placed slightly further back, to clear the centre-board housing, and the foremast being moved slightly further toward the bow to balance this.

There is no evidence the ‘sandstroke’ method of attaching the keel was ever used in North America. There would have been no need for this highly skilled technique where timber was abundant.

The Watts boats were quickly influential. According to Barry:

It is possible that builders with Scots-Irish origins such as Dalt MacDonald may have been familiar with the ‘Watts design’ before they ever crossed the Atlantic.