Goose Story

The geese are starting to hatch out back of the shop. A few days ago while riding my bicyle home, I ran into this family of geese, mother, father and eight goslings on the other side of a cyclone fence that keeps people away from the water.  I stopped, intending to take a picture of the happy family but realized that I had forgotten my camera. I had to settle for just looking at them.  As I got closer to them, the father got into his protective role, lowered his head and hissed at me.  And then I noticed, off to the left, at a safe distance from the protective father, a crow, watching for straggler goslings and the chance of a meal. 
Coincidentally, three crows had showed up at the shop just a few weeks earlier, no doubt just in time to take advantage of the impending gosling season.
A few more days went by and a visiting friend told me of a crow with a broken wing that he had seen on the way in to the shop.  Ah, crow with a broken wing.  No doubt some unfortunate accident, but then it occurred to me that the crow might have gotten a little too bold and run afoul (afowl) of the father goose who had possibly broken his wing.  We can't know for sure, but for sure I got some pictures two days ago of all eight goslings still waddling and swimming about with their protective parents flanking them.

Bent Shaft Paddles

I've been making a number of prototype paddles at the request of a friend and promoter of my paddles.  After a number of weeks I came up with two winners.  One is a bent shaft Greenland style paddle.  The other is an Aleut style paddle with some amount of extra bend added to it.
There were some other paddles in the mix that weren't winners but they were instrumental in helping me figure out the specifics of what made the winning models work. I have made Greenland style bent shaft paddles before and quite by luck come up with the right design, but this time, I did some deviation from the winning model only to find that the original was still the best. The Greenland style bent shaft may actually have originated in East Greenland as reported by John Brand who found some examples of these paddles in museums and originally thought that they were just straight paddles that had warped over time, but after some reflection decided that they were actually made that way on purpose.
The bent shaft Aleut paddle is not completely new.  I had made two of these before for a friend but never actually paddled them myself.  This time around I did use the bent shaft Aleut paddle and found it to be a useful variation on the standard version that I usually make.

Four paddles out for a test run. From left to right, a Greenland breakdown for a customer, an Aleut with some bend in the direction of the ridged face, a Greenland style with significant bend and another Greenland style with moderate bend.

One of the key aspects of a Greenland paddle is that it is highly symmetrical, that is, no matter how you hold it, its performance is the same.  The Aleut paddle by contrast has a lower degree of symmetry. You can switch right and left blades without changing performance but you cannot change ridged face for flat face without changing performance.  The reason is that in one configuration, the face of the paddle trails the axis of the loom while in the other, it leads the axis of the loom.  Although the amount of offset is small, it nevertheless makes a difference in the way you need to move the paddle through the water to get it to work.
The same is true of the bent shaft Greenland paddle.  The slight amount of offset of the blade has it either leading or trailing the axis of the loom depending on how you hold it.
My insight while doing the testing on the bent shaft paddles was that when you pull a paddle through the water, you move it through an arc during which the angle the blade makes with the water changes.  The efficiency of the paddle is at its greatest when the blade is perpendicular to the surface of the water. As the stroke progresses, the angle the blade makes with the water changes from the vertical and the amount of force you exert that translates into forward motion decreases.  At the same time, the boat is accelerating forward and the water is accelerating backward so that as the stroke progresses it becomes less efficient.  So having the shaft bent to make the blade more vertical at entry into the water improves its efficiency.
On the other hand, when the paddle is used in a low angle cruising position, that is, with the loom held low and close to the deck then the paddle held so that the blade trails the loom makes the blade self orienting and requires less of a tight grip to keep it properly oriented.  While this stroke generates less thrust than the high angle stroke, it is more efficient at lower cruising speed and less tiring in headwind conditions or against the current conditions.
Whether my understanding of the mechanics of these paddles is correct or not, the fact is that they work in practice as confirmed by speed trials with a GPS.

l'hydroptere in Alameda

The French boat l'hydroptere is currently in Alameda being overhauled at Nelson Marine before heading to LA where the team will try to beat the world record time for the LA to Honolulu trip.  Apparently, the boat did over 45 knots in San Francisco Bay. If this sort of thing interests you, you can find full details at the l'hydroptere website.
If you go to the website, note that everyone is wearing wetsuits.  Because these boats are fast they make for lots of spray.  Sailing these boats is apparently more of an athletic event than a pleasure ride.

Here it is. The boat has a main hull and two outriggers.  The foils extend down from the outriggers.

A closeup of one of the foils, folded up from the outrigger.

And another view of one of the outriggers detached from the wing.  You can also see the steering wheel of which there are two, one on each wing.

Five Gyres and More

 I saw this photo of kayakers on facebook and the thing that popped into my head unbidden was, Plastic Gyre.  Of course this isn't a plastic gyre, the real plasic gyres are in the world's oceans and there are five of them and they are huge, and while there may be some plastic kayaks or kayak parts in these gyres, the majority of the plastic is from other sources.  So whenever kayakers decry plastic pollution, I see some irony in their stance.

 

I posted this picture before under the heading, how many kayaks are there? and this massive assembly of kayaks really does come close to being a genuine plastic gyre. And before you accuse me of being holier than thou with my wood frame skin on frame kayaks, I confess that yes,  there are plastic resins used in its construction, mostly in the skin and the lashings and the coatings used to seal the skin.  And I also wear some plastic garments when paddling and the small fibers that they're composed of break off during washing and end up in the ocean where they displace plankton in the bodies of animals that eat plankton.

Let's let the issue of whether I am a hypocrite or not rest for a moment and look at the obvious problem of plastic pollution in the world's oceans.  The organization Five Gyres has devoted itself to the problem. Click on THIS LINK to find out more about them.

Policy director Stiv Wilson of Five Gyres explains in an ARTICLE that plastic pollution on the world's beaches is not the main problem but could be a big part of the solution. While the five gyres collect plastic that has made it into the oceans, they also spit out a certain percentage of plastic each year.  Some of the plastic moves on to different gyres, but some of it also gets spit out and ends up on beaches.
If we were to stop making plastics tomorrow, and did annual beach cleanups, plastic would be gone from the world's oceans in a matter of decades.
The problem with the plastic in the oceans is not that the plastic ends up on our beaches and assaults our esthetics but rather that when in the ocean it harms the animals that live there. Inundating the world in plastic products and then expecting none of them to end up in the oceans is not realistic.  Maybe stopping the production of plastic is not realistic either but it sure would fix the problem.  What we have to decide is whether not having plastics in our lives is a bigger inconvenience than having it in our oceans. We've lived without plastics before and we can do it again.

Sausalito, Houseboats and Rowboats

A woman who will be building a kayak with me gave me a tour of her housboat community in Sausalito.  I took some photos of the houseboats and a few of the rowboats docked near the houseboats.  The nice thing about a rowboat next to a houseboat is that in the morning you can get some exercise without going to the gym.
Not much to comment about here other than that the houseboat community seems to have arisen sometime in the 60's.  Some notable folks have lived on housboats in Sausalito, among them, Alan Watts, a popularizer of Asian religions and more recently, Steward Brand, publisher of the Whole Earth Catalog.  All these names used to be household words back in the seventies.  More recent arrivals to this world may have to google them.  So without further ado, photos of houseboats --
One more thing.  I should mention that there are several groupings of houseboats in Sausalito and this is just one of them.

Some housboats are boats.  This one used to be the Mare Island ferry.

Some houseboats like this one have floats.

The quonset hut.

And this one would be at home in town with a lawn out front.

And this one looks like a tugboat expansion

And some rowboats

This is a model that students build in a class.  Each student gets to take home their model.  And all students also work on the full size boat pictured below.  I assume they get a ride in it when it's done.

This pram was just sitting there at a boatshop.

 

The boats above are famous designs whose names I was told but promptly forgot. But to my credit, I recognized the names. You would probably as well.

This one just looked bright and cheerful.

And one more cheerful set and then we have to go.

Eating Mesquite

The mesquite is a small leguminous tree that grows throughout the American Southwest.  It blooms early in the year and then, late in the year, it grows long beans that eventually drop to the ground.  Unlike the beans we typically eat, these beans stay in their pod which does not dry out and release the beans but stays whole and keeps the beans locked inside.

 Mesquite beans on the ground under the mesquite tree.  In no time at all, you can collect enough for a meal. I did collect a bunch but made no attempt to eat them until I got home.

 The collection site right behind our breakfast table.  The picture was taken in January and all the beans were on the ground.

 Back home, I tossed a bunch of the beans in a high power blender.

 

The ground up beans looked like this.  I sifted them through a colander.

The sifted meal looked like this.  The meal is a combination of the ground up hull and the insides of the beans.

 The shell of the bean itself resists grinding and gets tossed.

Animals on the other hand eat the whole thing, hull and bean, possibly doing some chewing and run it through their digestive tract and deposit the hulls on the ground.
The next step is to do something with the meal.  You can get recipes online or you can just improvise.  The mesquite meal is sweet with just a hint of sour.  You can make a rue with it and add it to soup or parch it in a pan and use it as a thickener for stews as you would any flour.  Unlike flower, it does have a distinctive taste, however which you may or may not like, mostly it is a little sour and sweet and you may need to experiment until you find where to put it into your food regimen.

The Problem with Food

Recently, a friend gave me a few packages of fresh herring.  Herring were running in San Francisco Bay and he had caught and frozen about 150 pounds.  He urged me to give away as much herring as I could and to come back for more if I was successful.  Seemed like a good deal.  Just a few days earlier I had paid $5 a pound for herring at a fish market.  I also found out that herring wholesaled for $0.50 a pound.  That's a ten fold markup from wholesale to retail.  So here was a heck of a good deal, free herring that you would have to pay $5 a pound for at the store.
I got on the phone and called some Swedish friends who I was sure would want some herring because Swedes live by the sea and are fond of eating fish, or so I thought.  Turned out my friends were not that kind of Swedes.  They told me that they didn't care for cleaning fish.  But they would ask some other friends of theirs if they wanted some of the herring.  A little later they called back and said that they would take ten herring.  I told them that they were all frozen together in a package and the smallest quantity I could give them was 20.  Reluctantly they agreed to take one package.
So much for giving away food.
I suspect the problem with food is that we have gotten used to getting it in meal sized portions, all prepared and wrapped in plastic along with instructions for how to cook it.
The average consumer with a job who can afford to buy food seems to work until very late in the day and when he or she comes home is in no mood to deal with something that needs to be cleaned, possibly filleted and then cooked, especially if they have no clue on how to clean, fillet and cook something as exotic as a herring.  Much better to pull something out of the freezer and pop it in the microwave for 2 minutes. Like breaded fish sticks with no bones in them or pictures of dead dolphins on the package or anything unpleasant.
Another problem with food, particularly at the production end is that it doesn't come off some just in time supply chain.  It tends to for the most part be the result of some natural process that delivers a particular food in great quantities more or less all at once.  Most of the year there are no herring or cherries or sweet corn or peaches and then for a short time, there are more than you can eat unless you do something unpleasant and time-consuming like canning or otherwise preparing and freezing or salting and smoking your own food.  And who that spends ten to twelve hours in a cubicle or behind the counter of a convenience store wants to do that?

Grinding your Own

 A year ago or so we ran out of coffee while camping and while in town, picked up some more coffee.  I checked the bag that the coffee was in and it felt pre-ground.  Next morning when we got up to make coffee, the beans turned out not to be ground.  Luckily, there was a large rock at the edge of the campground and the banks of the river across the street yielded a mano, the stone you hold in your hands to grind the corn. With a little practice we managed to make a fine grind and breakfast was saved.

Closeup on the grinding operation.

 Of course, grinding stuff on stone grinders is nothing new.  It is in fact quite old and just recently, we visited Montezuma's Castle in Arizona where a number of stone grinders were on exhibit.

 

 The stone grinders in the American Southwest are known as Mano and Metate, the metate being the large flat stone and the smaller one you grind with is called the Mano.

 A slightly different arrangement visible throughout California are large flat boulders that were used for grinding acorns, a staple food in much of California before the arrival of the Europeans.  Unlike the metate which is flat, the grind stones for acorns have conical pits in them.  This prevents the acorns from spreading about.  Any that escape in the grinding process can be easily swept back into the hole.

And here is a long view of the grinding rock.  Note that the rock had a number of pits in it and so had room for a number of women to go about their grinding in a sociable way.  The rock also happens to be conveniently located in a flat area surrounded by oaks.

Preparing for the Apocalypse

Screen shot from the video game, The Last of Us, published by Naughty Dog

The creative arts are often a good indicator of a culture's subconscious obsessions.  They are not necessarily a good indicator of what will happen next, but they are often a good indicator of what we are afraid of.  The apocalypse seems to be one of those things.  The apocalypse, for those that don't have access to popular media is a civilization-destroying cataclysm, often undefined as in the book and movie, The Road, but sometimes explicitly spelled out as in the game, The Last of Us, (lethal virus or some such thing).

Cover from the DVD, The Road, based on the book by Cormak McCarthy in which the protagonists have to survive in a post-apocalyptic earth destroyed by some vague menace

I don't know how wide-spread fears of the apocalypse are but they seem to exist or these books wouldn't be written or movies wouldn't be made.

On the Beach, a movie from the fifties featuring a Nuclear Holocaust

It used to be Nuclear Destruction that we feared the most, which is understandable since the government had an active policy of making us afraid of it, complete with drills and everything but that fear seems to have gone away since the real thing such as the disasters in Chernobyl and Fukushima though thoroughly awful seem to be viewed as local, survivable disasters.

Post WWII Cologne, Germany.  By the time my family moved into the area a little north of where the picture was taken, things were pretty well cleaned up, although we still had piles of rubble across the street from our apartment building.

In any case, the main reason I bring up the apocalypse is that sometimes I wonder how much my own fascination with primitive boat building technology is related to expectations of societal collapse.  I don't fear collapse, perhaps because I spent my first decade in a country that recovered from being bombed flat in WWII. I see collapse as survivable but having lived through a partial collapse I don't see it as entirely improbable either. 

Replica of an Unagan kayak from Akun, Alaska

Meanwhile, I continue to build skin on frame kayaks because I love the technology and the boats.

Sea Otters, the Dark Side

A male sea otter was making unwanted advances on a sea lion at Moss Landing, CA.  The sea lion took refuge on the back of a kayak that happened to be nearby.  Full story here. in the San Jose paper. 
Apparently, although cute, sea lions have a behavioral dark side to them. 
There might be a lesson there somehow.  So school children beware.  Cute does not mean harmless.