Spenger's Fresh Fish Grotto

Berkeley has this restaurant called Spenger's Fresh Fish Grotto. I don't know how good their food is, but if you're ever in the area, probably to rub elbows with the area's well-to-do or to spend 15 minutes in line to get coffee ate Peets on fourth street, stop by Spengers to check out their small collection of nautical stuff scattered around the outside of the building.
The most notable item in their collection is a small dugout canoe. I thought for some time that it was local, but am beginning to doubt it. More likely Polynesian. Anyway, here's some pictures of it.
Kinda looks like the fat parts of the hulls are where the amas of the outriggers would have crossed, or is that just where the thwarts went? Don't know much about dugouts.


And yes, believe it or not, the SF bay had a whale processesing plant until sometime in the 60's over in Richmond.
And there one is on one of the last whale boats.

Hokusai's boats

Hokusai has long been my favorite Japanese artist. But for a long time I hadn't looked at his work. Recently, some new Hokusai books were published and I realized that quite a few of Hokusai's wood cuts had boats in them. By western standards, the boats all look curious, square sterned and high bowed. But they do resemble Portuguese surf boats to some extent.


Portuguese had a lot of places where harbors were missing and fishermen had to launch through the surf. As a result, the boats had high bows that would keep the surf from swamping the boats.
Japanese boats apparently had similar conditions to contend with. Makes me want to build some skin on frame small scale surf boats.


The other curious thing about the Japanese boats is the dotted lines along the edges of the planks. Were these boats sewn together like some Polynesian boats?

Oil Spill !!!

NRC dweebes are getting ready to tow a boom out to the oil spill to contain it.

We're having our annual oil spill here in SF bay. Routine stuff by now. "They", whoever they are closed all the beaches and boat ramps facing the bay here in Alameda to allow workers in hazmat suits dab gobs of oil off rocks and the beach with wads of kleenex. Other fine folks are washing oily ducks. Duck death toll so far is 22, not from being washed I presume, but probably from getting oiled.
Meanwhile, boat testing is suspended since I can't get on the water except by launching off the rocks you see in the background of that picture. There is a little beach that I could launch off, except that is closed right now while another set of contractors is cleaning up the radioactive sewer which the navy used to use to run radioactive waste into the bay. Oh well, it's a toxic world we live in.

Reality vs. Fantasy

to the right, Daniel Everett, the author of Don't Sleep .. or at least his head and its reflection. We cannot be sure if there is more to him than that.

I am in the process of reading a book called Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes. It's an account of how a Christian missionary goes to the Amazon to bring Jesus to an Indian tribe called the Piraha. The Piraha, it turns out, have the unusual trait of only taking their own experience and the first-hand experience of other living humans as evidence of what is real. This amazing trait has made them immune to 300 years of missionary attempts at conversion. In the end, it is the Piraha who convert Everett, the missionary to their view of seeing and not the other way around.
It isn't that the Piraha have a problem with Jesus, it's just that in their world view, they don't care about Jesus because they can't find anyone who has actually seen him or personally heard what he had to say. And it's not that the Piraha pick on Jesus in particular. They wouldn't care any more for the Buddha or Archimedes or Plato or Socrates or any other person long dead.
The Piraha are pragmatists in the extreme or if you will, Missourians of the Amazon. A brief side bar here about the "Show Me State:"

"There are a number of stories and legends behind Missouri's sobriquet "Show-Me" state. The slogan is not official, but is common throughout the state and is used on Missouri license plates.

The most widely known legend attributes the phrase to Missouri's U.S. Congressman Willard Duncan Vandiver, who served in the United States House of Representatives from 1897 to 1903. While a member of the U.S. House Committee on Naval Affairs, Vandiver attended an 1899 naval banquet in Philadelphia. In a speech there, he declared, "I come from a state that raises corn and cotton and cockleburs and Democrats, and frothy eloquence neither convinces nor satisfies me. I am from Missouri. You have got to show me."

So what does this have to do with boat building?
Plenty.
In the construction of b0ats, people like to make all sorts of claims based on what they've heard or read or believe.
My response, "Show Me."
In the end, there is no substitute for actually building a boat and trying it out to see what it will do. And what better way is there to quickly build a boat to see what it will do than skin on frame.

Let's hear it for the Piraha and Missouri and skin on frame.

Wooden hunting hats at Unangax^ Culture Camp

Patty Gregory Of Unalaska taught wooden hat making at Unangax^ (Aleut) Culture Camp. People were making two kinds of hats, the open crowned visor type and the full crowned type. The full crowned hat was reserved for the more senior hunters. Some kayak models show two holed kayaks where the paddler in front, the more junior of the two wears the visor and the paddler in back, the more senior wears the full crowned hat.


Here's Patty with an arm full of hat blanks and completed visors.

Mike Livingston and I went down to Poppert's milling in Wasilla to get the wood for the hats. The picture above shows a big piece of cottonwood on the saw bed ready to be sliced into 3/8 inch thick slices. Cottonwood bends well, especially when still wet and green and is therefore a good material for hat blanks.

Andrew Abyo was at the camp all week working on some full crowned hats. Here he is showing off some of his work, a visor and a mask. For more of his work, go to the Alutiiq museum site.

Here, Andrew is carving away on the blank for a full crowned hat.

Patty had a picture of Andrew Gronholt set up. Andrew was her hat making teacher.

Andrew's daughter, right in brown shirt is holding up one of her dad's hats and Patty is showing up a display board of miniature visors.

Here's the hat again.

Inside of the hat, showing construction details.

And a side view, showing the decorations.

Hat blanks heating up in a tub of boiling water.

And a visor in the bending jig, drying till the shape sets.

Andrew is explaining various functional features of the Aleut hunting hat.

The hat funnels sound. Kids cup their hands to simulate sound amplification of the hat.


Big pile of shavings left over from a week of hat carving.


Becky Bendixson with here completed full-crown hat.

Culture camp how to butcher a seal demo

One of the features of Culture Camp was the preparation of traditional Unangan foods, in this case, a harbor seal. Sally Swetsoff demonstrated how to butcher the seal.

The head is already off. Sally is starting to slice the seal down the middle, belly up.


Here you can see the wind pipe and the layer of white blubber on top of very dark colored flesh.

The seal is completely opened up revealing the intestines.

The judgment of some is that this is a smelly process.

The seal carcass with the intestines removed.


Sally is cutting the connective tissue between coils of intestine. Intestines are later cleaned, braided with strips of blubber, boiled and eaten.

Sally has removed all the organs and is beginning to cut up the meat.

Each pied of meat is cut so it has a chunk of blubber with it. The meat by itself is completely fat free and has no marbeling. Hence, fat which is an important nutrient in a cold climate has to be added in.

Unangam tunuu

Unangam tunuu is the Aleut name for the Aleut language. According to the Alaskan native institute in Fairbanks there are something like 2000 Aleuts and 300 speakers of the language. That's not a lot of people. Nevertheless, Knut Bergsland of the University of Oslo has written both a dictionary and a grammar of the Aleut language.
While at the APIA culture camp this summer, I had the opportunity to hear Unangam tunuu spoken and have found out how to pronounce some of the specifically Aleut consonants like the x with the hat over it x^. This particular sound is something like the ch sound in German. The APIA has also put out a CD with names of various animals pronounced.
For those interested in the names of Aleut kayak parts, see Knut Bergsland's article in _Contributions to Kayak Studies_.

APIA Culture Camp

I recently got back from the apia culture camp held in Anchorage Alaska. APIA stands for Aleut Pribilof Islands Association. The APIA is an Aleut Native non-profit corporation dedicated to education and social services. Mike Livingston and I built two kayaks there. The kayaks will be hanging in the lobby of the APIA building. (see picture above.) Unangam Ulaa means Aleut house or home in Unangam tunuu, the Aleut language. Unangan is the Aleut name for themselves in their language.

Mike Livingston in front of the culture camp poster.

Myself in front of the culture camp poster.

wood, the original carbon fiber composite

Whenever people see me working on a boat with a wooden frame, invariably, somebody comes along and wants to know if the same thing couldn't be done with carbon fiber composite technology. I generally tell them that it could be but I prefer wood and that they should try the carbon fiber composites if they think that those would be a good idea.
However, more recently, I am promoting the idea of wood as the original carbon fiber composite. See above for the molecular structure of graphite. Graphite is all carbon and the molecules are arranged in a hexagonal lattice.
Wood is made up of cellulose whose chemical arrangement is shown above. Note the hexagonal rings, similar to carbon rings of graphite. The main difference between cellulose and graphite is that cellulose has one oxygen in each ring which makes the ring a little weaker. Also strands of cellulose are held together with lignin, a natural glue. Strands of carbon fiber on the other hand need to be bonded together with epoxy, a man-made glue.
So carbon fiber composites are stronger than wood per unit weight, but not by enough to make me want to put up with the messy construction techniques that they require.
Note to Duane Strosaker - this is not a plastic mocking post. This is a post in defense of wood.
Note to everyone else - see Duane's web page on how to make carbon fiber paddles.

Other Blogs

If you're a native watercraft junkie like me, check out the Indigenous Boats blog by Bob Holtzman. Lots of good stuff there and Bob has tagged it so you can look up postings by topic. What a concept, as Yakov Smirnoff used to say.
Then there's also the 70.8% blog by Thomas Armstrong which is not strictly about native or indigenous boats but has some of that kind of content. Thomas has ads enabled so you get lots of links to boaty books on Amazon.

Culture Camps

The Aleut Community in Alaska holds culture camps every year to teach school age kids about their heritage. Various instructors teach different skills like the Unangan language, crafts, dances, cooking and so on.
A few years back I was privileged to attend one of those camps in Cold Bay, Alaska to help with the building of some baidarkas.
The picture above shows Candace, a resident of Cold Bay with one of the baidarkas that the students built. She is also holding a fur seal skin and as the wind was blowing hard, she is hanging on to her hat, another item made in the camp.
This year, I am going back to Alaska to attend another culture camp, this one sponsored by the APIAI, Aleutian Pribilof Islands Association in Anchorage. Pictures to follow.
To see what last year's culture camp was like, read the newsletter of the APIAI.

Cows in Akutan

Somewhere on my webpage I put some pictures of what I call hot spring valley in Akutan, an island in the Aleutians. The Aleutians, you will remember are the place where the Baidarka was invented. Anyway, I put up a picture of myself at the crest of the pass overlooking the valley.


And, barely visible on the valley floors are some cows. The cows were imported by someone wanting to raise them on the one thing that is plentiful in Akutan, grass. That project was eventually abandoned, but the cows stayed behind and have made the hot springs valley their home. I imagine the hot springs keep the grass accessible in the winter and also offer some refuge from the cold. I don't know if the cows hang out in the hot pools up to their necks like those monkeys in Japan, probably not because they have to eat a good part of the day. Still, here they are surviving.
And then yesterday I get an email from a guy named Sam Brown who has just started building skin boats and in the letter, he tells me that it was his family who brought those cows to Akutan. Sam currently lives in Korea and this is where he has been building his skin boats. He also tells me that some of his Korean friends have caught the skinboat bug and want to build some.
So there you have it folks. More evidence that the internet brings people together and brings people together with their cows.

Links, links & more links

There's lots of good stuff about boats out there on the internet. And other web authors must surely have links to the relevant pages. But that is not going to stop me from adding yet another list of links. I am going to put this list on my web page and also link to it from this blog. If anyone wants to have their boaty link on this list, let me know and I will add it. Put your suggested links in a comment to this post and I will get email.