Skinboat Journal

Hot Springs Village Archaeological Site

2012-01-24T10:38:00.000-08:00

Since we just got done looking at traditional Unangan beliefs I thought I would mention a website that features amulets from The Hot Springs Village archaeological site. The site lets you rotate the pictures so you can view the amulets from all sides. If you're interested in carving your own, this is a great place to go for source material.
As the home page indicates, the source culture of the amulets is uncertain. Apparently the place where they were found is right on the border of the Alutiiq and Unangan territories and so which culture made the amulets or whether more than one culture influence them is uncertain. All the same, there they are, regardless of who made them.

Traditional Unangan (Aleut) Beliefs

2012-01-24T09:44:00.000-08:00

Jeff Dickrell who teaches history at Unalaska High School in the Aleutians has been working on a history of the region. The following material is an excerpt (with permission from Jeff) from his as yet unpublished book on the topic of traditional Unangan (Aleut) beliefs.

This carving was collected by archaeologist William Laughlin, probably near Umnak Island. . It is possible that the groove was used to attach hair to the head of the figure.

As I read the list of beliefs, it occurred to me that beliefs and ritual or religious practices and charms and amulets were as much a part of paddling a small kayak on a large ocean as the more mundane kayaks and paddles themselves. Obviously, the paddler's craft and personal skill and strength did much to keep him alive on the ocean, but in spite of this, people still drowned or were blown into oblivion and so, the prudent paddler sought out help from the supernatural realm to augment what help there was from the natural realm.
So, without further ado, here is the excerpt from Jeff's book. The excerpts are followed by a set of notes on the origins of various quotes which are followed by a bibliography.

Aleut Traditional Beliefs
(Jeff Dickrell, Author)
The superstitions of the Aleuts were innumerable. Every activity or undertaking and almost every step required its own and often elaborate signs and talismans[1].

Mixing Different Elements
Like all other cultures on earth, the Aleut people had an elaborate array of spiritual guidelines to assist them in thriving in a harsh environment. This, of course, extended to kayaks and their owners. There were things to do to assure success in hunting, things not to do to stay on the good side of nature, things to carry to bring luck but probably the most important guideline was to keep pure by never mixing different elements together.

Separating Environment and Gender
There were two main elements that required separation, environment and gender.
This meant could not be mixed, nor could things from the sea and things from the land. For example, stones which came from the land and were placed in the kayak for ballast, had to be returned to the beach.

Never Throw Ballast Stones into the Sea
It is regarded as a sin to throw the ballast into the sea. The stones must be brought to land from where they were taken, otherwise the boatman, it is believed, will be drowned. Even when the load of the skin-boat becomes too heavy from the returns of fishing or hunting, the stones have to be brought to the shore.[2]

Clean Feet Before Entering Kayak
This meant that when a kayaker was leaving the beach he had to make sure he wasn’t inadvertently bringing grass, sticks or any vestige of the islands. Often washing the bottoms of the feet was part of the preparation ritual. In 1909, Arseniy Kryukov of Umnak, told Jochelson that sea otters would not be afraid of a hunter who, in the early morning before he went hunting, rubbed himself with seaweed or shellfish, or at least walked the shore.[3] This would allow the hunter to blur the line between the sea and land.

Keep Anything Female Away from Hunter and Kayak
Just as important as keeping the land and sea separate, was keeping anything remotely female away from the hunter and his boat. This means physical things, like hair, which, if sewn into the seams (sometimes intentionally) of a boat’s skin or his kamleika, would cause him to have bad luck in hunting. It was said that if a bit of woman’s juju remained on a hunter, a sea lion would bite out the offending piece, and perhaps a chunk of the paddler as well.[4] Merck noted the same was true if a man’s hunting gear was in the vicinity of a childbirth.[5]

Men Sew the Last Seam of the Kayak
One counter to this, since women sewed the skin of the kayak, was for the man to sew the last seam after the skin was pulled on the frame. This seam, just behind the cockpit, is very noticeable when looking at museum specimens. All the other seams are beautifully done, flawless in their lines, tufts of wool or feathers sewn into them and then ‘man’s’ seam, sloppy, wandering and obvious.

Women Are Very Powerful
A woman’s sexual organs were so powerful that it was forbidden for females to even step over a kayak, exposing the boat to the negative powers. A woman who experienced her first menstruation was so powerful that she was quarantined so that she would not inadvertently contaminate anything. Interestingly, such an isolated girl could relieve seasickness by warming the patient’s food in her hands.[6] Subsequent to the first menstruation, women were considered unclean during their periods, and were to be avoided, especially sexually.

Abstinence Before Major Undertaking
Having sex with a woman was considered taboo before a major undertaking, “otherwise frightful misfortunes and a cruel death befell the transgressor.”[7] That is, unless you were going sea otter hunting,

Only the sea-otter hunter was not subject to such penalties, but he had no luck in the event. Even when surrounded by sea otters he could not kill a single one. The sea otters, as it were, mocked him. Cavorting around his baidarka, they would tease him and splash him with water but they would not let him hit them with a [cast]. The sea otters do exactly the same to him whose wife, during his absence, does not remain faithful or whose sister, before her marriage, does not preserve her virginity.[8]

Share with Your Kayak
If a man did have sex the night before he was to paddle, there was a very important ritual that had to be performed the next morning. An important obligation of the hunter was sharing his sexual life with his kayak. After having slept with his wife or other female the male hunter was obliged to "rub" his kayak the next day. Failure to share the experience resulted in damage to the kayak and failure of the man to return to shore.[9]

The Little Thing She Gave Me
There was a way to have your cake and eat it too, that is have sex the night before a sea otter hunt and still be successful. In 1909, Isidor Solovyov told Jochelson about a hunting trip, the night before which he had had a woman, “as his wife”. But the next day, while hunting, he killed six otters. The difference, “the little thing she gave me”, was an amulet of some kind.[10]

Powerful Amulet
Amulets or talismans were carried or worn by the individual. They could be crafted, or something rare from nature, a stone or piece of animal or the most powerful, something from an esteemed elder or better yet, a deceased strongman. They could be something made, given or found, something shown or something hidden. Many of the things had ying and yang characteristics, if great powers were derived from the amulet, it may reduce one’s lifespan.

Mysterious Belt Knot
According to Veniaminov, the most common was “a belt, plaited of sinew or grass, spoken over [with an incantation] and with mysterious knots”.[11] According to Laughlin, one of the most powerful was, “was the caul in which a person had been born: this was carefully dried and, important, kept dry”.[12] Khlebnikov stated in 1823 that, “Pieces of hematite were used as amulets under the name of a’xsix’. They were worn by every hunter, and are said to have the power of attracting sea-mammals particularly whales and sea-otters”.[13]

Cagax̂
Khlebnikov compiled quite a list of cagax’ used by the Aleuts. Some of these were put on fishing nets, carried while fox hunting or tied to a fishing pole. Herbs were tied to fishing hooks, and incantations spoken over them. [14]

Bird Feathers
Feathers or wings of birds such as the Albatross, Rosy Finch or the beaks of a raven were carried or attached to spear points.

Falcon Feathers
They believe the feathers of falcons have special attraction for the otters. Whoever has these feathers attached to the outside of his boat is unusually fortunate on the sea otter hunt. But it happens very seldom that anyone has these feathers, because they fear killing the falcon, because of their taboos. Not only are the otters supposed to be without fear of boats, which are adorned with such feathers, but they are actually supposed to be attracted to that boat.[15]
The power of the falcon’s feathers was evident when Vitus Bering first encountered Aleut’s in kayak off the Shumagin Islands. They were approached by two men in single boats, one of whom raised a staff with two falcon’s wings tied on the end. With a laugh he threw the staff into the water towards the Russian ship.

Chimkiix
A stone found on the beach called, chimkiix, was “exceedingly rare and therefore very highly prized”.[16] It was shaped like a turnip or sea urchin, and was hollow and smooth on the outside. There were two color patterns, white with yellow stripes (considered the male) and red with white stripes (female). Stones found inside sea lion stomachs were kept as used as talismans.[17]

Amber
Amber, which is naturally found on just a few islands, was highly prized. On Umnak Island, it was collected in a unique way. The method of procuring it was as follows: on massed baidarkas, they approached the very wall of the cliff, and by use of long poles dislodged the amber from above, letting it fall onto sea otter skins, spread over the baidarkas, fur-side up.[18]
This source of amber was highly desired and was fiercely guarded by the local Aleuts and trespassers were killed.[19]

Sea Otter Rituals
As sea otter hunting became the most important economic activity, it developed many rituals. Because sea otters were considered transformed humans, they were attracted to things humans liked so, “they made every effort to decorate their baidarkas, their kamleikas, and spears as finely as possible, supposing the sea otter, loving women’s handiwork, would come of his own accord to the hunter who is a dandy”.[20]

Sea Otter Amulets
In addition to looking good, sea otter hunters must be pure, disciplined and shun women. One of the most common elements of the sea otter hunt was a small, four-inch or so, carved figure of a sea otter on its back, hands to its face. These carvings of bone or ivory are placed inside kayaks, on the deck or carried by the hunter himself. There are many samples in museums around the world.

Asxinan
All sources agree that the most powerful talismans that could be used were pieces of the asxinan, the departed ones, sometimes called ‘the dried ones’ or as we know them, mummies. Entombed in caves and secreted away in nooks and rock overhangs or buried under house floors, the mummified bodies of deceased Aleuts were full of immense power.

It is from these corpses that the hunters sought especially to cut off a portion of the body, preferably a joint of a hand, or the small finger, or at least a fragment of clothing. The person who possessed this item was, indeed more fortunate in the hunt, but he almost always died prematurely and a horrible death, his body beginning to putrify while he was yet in his best years.[21]

After a prominent person had died, they would have been eviscerated, placed in the fetal position and wrapped in skins and placed in a protected place, sometimes even within the house. A bentwood bowl was placed underneath to collect the dripping. This too was used as a talisman.
The fluid obtained from the tissues of a dead body was regarded as a most powerful charm. A man whose hands were anointed with such a fluid was able to fight everything and everyone, but this charm was harmful to its owner -his life was short.[22]

Part of the ritual process of gaining power from the supernatural was to have a secret spot to store the amulets away from contamination by women (especially menstruating women) or moisture.[23] These places must be accessed only stealthily, so that no one sees the hunter accessing it.

Audagadax (Sacred Sites)
In addition to the hiding places, each village had its audagadax, or sacred sites which were, …some mound or an off-shore rock or some outstanding feature, on a cliff, which were strictly prohibited to all women and young men. Particularly prohibited was taking even a blade of grass or taking a pebble from there. If any young man, either out of audacity or curiosity, violated this restriction, such a person did not escape punishment.[24]

According to Veniaminov, these sites were used on occasion for the giving of offerings. Individuals (mature men only) would usually leave skins to receive luck in war or hunting. Other offerings were the feathers of rare birds for more general blessings of safe journeys or the calming of the wind.

The rite itself consisted in the following: the [person who] made the offering, having taken the indicated feathers, dipped each one in a pigment, mostly green or red, and threw them toward all four quarters. Each time when he threw a feather, just then he made his request to the invisible spirits, that is, asked for success either in war or in the hunt or for calming the wind, etc. Then he tossed a feather into the air, exclaiming, “nung aqasaxtxin”, that is, “Bring me or Give me”.[25]

Weather Ritual
In 1791, G. Sarychev took a kayak trip around Unalaska. When he got to the small village of Kashega, the weather turned bad. The storm lasted several days and the villagers took action.
The Aleutians becoming at length quite tired of bad weather, they one day collected themselves together, men women and children, and repaired to an open field, where having lighted a fire, and turned themselves towards the wind, they clapped their hands and screamed with all their might, quietly returning in the full expectation of a favorable change.[26]

Shaman Weather Ritual
Just to be sure, later in the evening a shaman and the toions beat a drum and danced in the barabara to change the weather. Merck observed a similar ritual. [27]

Russian Orthodox View of Aleut Shamans
The role of the Shaman in the Aleutian kayak culture is unclear. They existed, to be sure, but did they, “enjoy great respect,” as Netsvetov, the priest at Atka in the 1830’s recorded, or were they, “not held in great respect,” as Veniaminov, the priest in Unalaska at the same time”?[28] However, Veniaminov admitted that, “[Shamans] were asked for good luck in hunting, longevity, miraculous rescue from dangers at sea, the calming of storms and winds, etc”.[29] As the resident priest, it was in Veniaminov’s best interest to diminish the importance of the shamans.

This may have been why he also stated, “They have no temples or idols.”[30] In the same volume, he notes several examples of destructive idols which shamans placed in caves in central Aleutians.[31] Shelikoff noted that while the Aleuts had no concept of an Omnipotent God, they had belief in a spiritual world.

They have no conception of Divinity, although they say that there are two beings in the world or two Spirits, the one good the other evil. However they have no images of them, nor do they worship them, in other words they have no idols. All they say to describe the two spirits is to say that the good one taught them how to make baidaras and the evil one how to damage and break them.[32]

Kaathaagaathagh (Deity Figure)
The idea Aleuts didn’t have some sort of idols was dispelled by archaeologist William Laughlin working on Umnak island from the 1930’s-1970’s. There he found a carved ivory figure about six inches tall called a, kaathaagaathagh, which was identified by Afenogin Ermeloff in 1948[33].
According to Ermeloff, these were deity figures which were suspended from the ceiling of a house and that, “the hunter spoke to the image before venturing out on the ocean and the image spoke back with useful information about weather and the hunt”. The oldest of these figures is 4000 years old. More were found dating up to the Russian period.

Sin of Pagan Ancestors ~ Visiting the Dry One
Another Russian priest, Laverenty Salamatov who was in Atka in the 1860’s, had trouble with the old ways.[34] In the summer of 1862 thirteen men from neighboring Amlia were drowned while hunting around Tanaga Island. They requested a requiem mass form the priest. With my sexton, Aksenov, I went to Amlia……I was met by weeping and wailing inhabitants who were mourning the loss of their brothers, children, husbands and other relatives. What was I to do? All came to me for consolation and I wept with them and consoled them with the words of the Holy Scripture and examples from the lives of certain saints…

But there was a problem. The priest found out that the men, who had been fox trapping on Kanaga Island, visited a renowned mummy cave there, and “were guilty of pagan superstition. I am recording this case as it was reported to me.” Always being afraid of some kind of misfortune befalling them on their enterprises, some of those Aleuts (who were drowned in the sea) committed a sin of their pagan ancestors, namely, they went to visit the Dry One.

The pagan Aleuts paid the same homage to these mummies as to their idols and brought sacrifices to them. When anybody wished to learn about the success of a hunting expedition, he prepared himself with strict fasting, even keeping away from his wife for a definite time; then washed in the river and dressed in his best clothing, he went to the Dry One.

Approaching the cave of the mummy, he cried loudly, “I am coming to you to find out about so and so.” Show me what is to be” He proceeded fearfully to the cave, carrying with him a gift to the Dry One. (Sparkling black paint or ochre and a wing or a feather of a hawk was usually brought as a present) Devotedly he put the gift before the Dry One and left the cave for a while.
The Dry One was supposed to display objects, which, upon his return to the cave, the man observed as signs indicating his future.

Salamatov took the opportunity to preach sermons against paganism and false idol worship.
Finding seal’s hair in the mummy cave the Aleuts concluded that they would have a successful seal hunt before returning home to Atka. Consequently, from Tanaga Island they went to Ulak Island. The forecast of the Dry One did not materialize and they all became victims of the sea. Thus God punishes for the disobedience of his Commandment!

Another parishioner confessed to having consulted the Dried One, “out of curiosity and to find out whether the ancient pagan tradition was correct”. It was, and the priest, “laid a penitence on him and I told him not to believe, not even to listen to, the superstitions and to keep others from doing so.” This penitence lasted nine months.

Charm Seeker
One of the stories recorded by Jochelson in 1909, told by Isidor Solovyov, was called, “The Charm Seeker”. In it, a man, a “weakling”, went on a quest to obtain some “charms”. To do so he paddled to a village, hid his kayak and pretended to be a dead body washed ashore. When the people there brought him into their house, he created a distraction, then leapt up and grabbed the charms from a ceiling beam. He quickly paddled home. From then on, he stayed away from the villagers from whom he stole the amulets. But relying on the charms, he became a successful hunter. “Being paid attention to as a provider, he enjoyed catching sea animals, and his wife was happy too, and his child was happy.”[35]

[1] Veniaminov p. 222
[2] Jochelson p 55
[3] Narratives p399
[4] Laughlin in Cont. p.200
[5] Merck p.175
[6] Laughlin p104
[7] Veniaminov p. 225
For instance, a whale-hunter who violated this rule, before the whale he had wounded died, was immediately afflicted by violent nosebleeds, then swellings over his entire body. Ultimately, he lost his mind and died.
[8] Veniaminov p.225
[9] Laughlin in Cont. p. 200, Narratives p. 225, Old Time Stories p. 209
[10] Narratives p. 81
[11] Veniaminov p222
[12] Laughlin in cont. p. 179
[13] Jochelson p.77
[14] Veniaminov p. 223
This is contradicted by Khlebnikov 1823 p.77
[15] Merck p.171
[16] Veniaminov p.223
[17] Litke p.114
[18] Veniaminov p.75
[19] Veniaminov p.204
“As not everyone could or wanted to buy or exchange these for something, many attempted to get them by stealth. Consequently, the owners of these localities, by right of possession, guarded them and killed the trespassers.”
[20] Veniaminov p 224
[21] Veniaminov p223
[22] Jochelson p 77
[23] Jochelson p77
Veniaminov p218
[24] Veniaminov p. 218
The punishment was, “without fail, a terrible savage disease or speedy death befell him. At the very least, he lost his sanity”
[25] Veniaminov p218
[26] Sarychev p. 67
[27] Merck p169
Young men and women engage in a vigil after sundown. They steal away from the hut with some coal and a few handfuls of straw. A short distance from the hut toward the sea they light a small fire. Around the fire they hop and dance very fast. And as they do they clear their throats with loud shouting as if to frighten the strong storms, or to resist them. And the great calm after the howling of the wind is attributed by them to the great effect of their strenuous activity.
[28] Veniaminov p. 219 and p.367
[29] Veniaminov p. 219
[30] Veniaminov p. 219
[31] Veniaminov p. 366
[32] Shelikoff p. 56
[33] Laughlin in Cont. p174
The ending of this Aleut word, aathaagh, is a diminutive, which implies it is a smaller version of a larger deity.
[34] Documents Relative to the History of Alaska (Vol. II) manuscripts at UAF Polar Collection
[35] Narratives p. 89

Veniaminov: Notes on the Islands of the Unalaska District
Jochelson: Archeology of the Aleutians (reprint) by Waldmar Jochelson
Narratives: Aleut Tales and Narratives by Bergsland and Dirks
Laughlin in Cont. : Bill Laughlin writing in “Contributions to kayak Studies”
Merck: Siberia and northwestern America, 1788-1792 : the journal of Carl Heinrich Merck
Laughlin: Survivors of the Bering Land Bridge
Khlebnikov 1823 Notes on Russian America
Litke : A Voyage around the world, 1826-1829
Sarychev : Gavriil Sarychev Account of a voyage of discovery to the north-east of Siberia, the
frozen ocean, and the north-east sea
Shelikoff: A Voyage to America, 1783-1786
The priest who admonishes his flock is from:
Documents Relative to the History of Alaska (Vol. II) manuscripts at UAF Polar Collection

John Wesley Powell Descends the Colorado River

2012-01-17T08:12:00.000-08:00

This year we visited the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River, a place which gets about 4.5 million visitors a year. Most of these visitors never descend into the canyon and until a century and a half ago, most of the canyon had never been traveled by anyone. Indians of the area descended into the canyon and even farmed and lived there in certain areas, but they were not able to and did not travel along the bottom of the canyon for any distance. Travel at the time was in and out of the canyon but not along the canyon.

John Wesley Powell changed all that. The American Civil War had just ended and Powell who had been a Major in the Union Army organized an expedition to explore the Colorado River and its tributaries. The US was still relatively young. Americans were still moving west and if the movement west was going to go forward in earnest then transportation routes were needed, not only to bring people into the region but also to export resources out of the region. Major Powell was the man to find those transportation routes.
I knew the basics of Powell's story but after my own trip to the Grand Canyon, I pulled Powell's report of his journey off my book shelf where it had sat unread by me for a number of decades. It was time to upgrade my knowledge of this piece of Western history.
I have not finished Powell's book so this is an incomplete report, but this being a boat related blog, I will focus on Powell's means of transportation, that is, wooden row boats.

Powells boats with one or two exceptions were 20 feet long, made of wood with extra frames added for strength. The front and back ends were decked over and closed off to form water-tight compartments in which food and gear were stowed.

The journey began on a tributary of the Colorado river in territory where the canyons were not yet as imposing as farther down the river.

The expedition's first camp is shown here. Notably absent from the picture is any kind of plastic, a substance without which modern camping and river travel would be unimaginable.

As the journey progressed, the canyons became deeper and the expedition encountered falls and rapids. The picture above shows one of the options for dealing with rapids, that is, to run them.

Other options for dealing with rapids were lining the boats down the rapids and portaging. In either case, the usual method was to assemble the boats on shore at the head of the rapids and secure them while scouting the rapids. Where possible, the boats were lined, that is, led down the rapids with lines tied to both ends of the boats.
If the rapids were too severe the boats needed to be unloaded, the gear carried to the bottom of the rapids and then the boats. All this took time and lots of work.

Powell and his crew explored new territory and also inadvertently invented a new sport: river running. This sounds like not that big a deal since totally inexperienced travelers now do this trip every year albeit with experienced guides. But what made it different for Powell and his crew was that none of them knew whether their boats would survive the rapids or what the severity of the rapids would be. They also lacked modern gear and were cut off from civilization for most of the trip. Conditions were sufficiently horrid to make some of the men quit.
Photos are from the National Park Service site.

The iqyax^ and the Sea Otter

2012-01-17T07:24:00.000-08:00

A few years ago, a friend of mine gave me a bronze model of an Unangan kayak. This year, my wife gave me a bronze sea otter. Coincidentally, or perhaps not, the sea otter was made to roughly the same scale as the kayak and so I put the sea otter on the deck of the kayak where it looks nice and appropriate and also cute.

The notion of a sea otter on the deck of an Unangan kayak is mostly a fantasy. Sea otters were hunted by Unangan men in the service of the Russian fur traders aka promyshlenniki and later under American rule until the hunt was outlawed in 1911. Apparently, it dawned on somebody in the government that sea otters were near extinction.
So, perhaps coincidentally, the sculptural assemblage of kayak and sea otter is a belated celebration of the one hundred year anniversary of the cessation of the sea otter hunt.

To modern urban sensibilities, the notion of hunting sea otters is abhorrent since they are so indisputably cute even as full grown adults.
But sea otters were hunted for practical reasons, that is, for money that the Chinese were willing to pay for their fur.

The Chinese needed the fur for their aristocracy which needed the luxuriant fur to trim their aristocratic robes as shown above.

The fur, when not attached to an imperial Chinese robe looks like the above. Legal note: Only Alaskan Natives may possess sea mammal furs in the raw. Non-natives may possess art or crafts objects that incorporate sea mammal parts if created by natives.
The Spanish in America, specifically in Baja and Alta California, received mercury in payment from the Chinese for sea otter furs. The mercury was then used to extract gold from ore and the gold was shipped back to Spain to finance wars against other European nations. And so it goes.
Sea otters are safe for the time being. Oil has been found to be much more vital to economic well-being than mercury or gold.

Sail Powered Wheelbarrow

2012-01-04T08:04:00.000-08:00

Seems like at one time or another, humans have tried putting sails on just about everything including, apparently, wheelbarrows. The online Low Tech Magazine has a cool article on just such technology.
Apparently some of the sails were quite sophisticated, not just pieces of cloth, but battened junk rigs with control lines running back to the handles of the wheelbarrow. This allowed the wheelbarrows to sail at an angle to the wind.

The Chinese wheelbarrow differed from the European wheelbarrow not only in the size of the wheel, bigger, but also in its placement. The load was balanced on the axle of the wheel which meant that on a level surface, the barrow driver only had to overcome friction. The total weight of the cargo was being carried by the wheel. On a European barrow, the kind that is still being sold here in stores, the weight is centered between the axle of the wheel and the handles, which forces the barrow driver to carry half the weight, limiting the use of the barrow to short trips.

In any case, check out this and other articles in low tech mag.

Which reminds me, every once in a while, you will see articles on wheelbarrow boats in the small boat magazines.

Unfortunately, the wheel is usually on one end of the boat and is small, which limits its use to short distances. With a larger wheel placed in a centerboard trunk, the boat could be transported a good distance. Of course we are now talking integral boat trailer, something which probably doesn't work as well as a conventional boat trailer and results in a boat which doesn't sail as well as a boat without an integral trailer. Perhaps I should just quit thinking about this concept. This sort of one thing does many things poorly design is something best left to the military procurement people.

wild food, additional thoughts

2012-01-02T07:16:00.000-08:00

If you've read any survival handbooks, you're probably aware that they are not written with the notion of survival becoming a way of life. Survival handbooks assume that due to some accident, you find yourself temporarily isolated from civilization and in need of food, shelter and water. And while you're waiting for the search and rescue team to come and get you out of the pickle you find yourself in, you'd like to stay alive.
Let's assume that you find yourself in a reasonably warm place with water. You probably don't have to do much of anything to stay alive. Drink the water and find something to distract you while you're waiting to be rescued. If you have shelter and water, you can probably get by without eating for a week or more. If there is wild food to be had, collecting and preparing it is probably as good a thing as any to keep you occupied until the helicopter shows up.
But the notion of long term survival in an unfamiliar place is an optimistic one. Let me give my reasons. To stay alive anywhere, you need a good deal of knowledge about the place you are in and the support of your community. If you are lost in the wilderness, chances are, you don't know anything about it and you lack the support of a community. Even if wild food is plentiful and you can recognize it, long term survival depends on knowing how to prepare the food and preserve it for times when it isn't plentiful. A good deal of native knowledge consists not only of what plants and animals are good to eat and how to collect them, but also how to process and preserve them and store them against times of scarcity.

Inupiat Plant Food

2011-12-18T15:44:00.000-08:00

When someone mentions Eskimos or Inuit or people of the Arctic, the stereotype that most often comes to mind is snow houses and people in fur parkas eating whale blubber. However, as short as summer in the Arctic might be, people there eat plant food along with animal food. As a matter of fact, people of the Arctic eat a wide variety of plant foods. And we are fortunate to have a book with an extensive list not only of what they are but also how to prepare them.

The book is called, "Plants that we Eat." Although the book focuses specifically on plant foods that are part of the Inupiat diet, the listing for each plant also includes a map of Alaska that shows the range of the plants. And although different Alaskan Native groups probable had their own preferences and their own unique ways of preparing plant foods, we can assume that many of the plants listed in this book were eaten by more than just the Inupiat. For that matter, many of the plants listed in this book can be found in the temperate zones of the lower 48.
If you are interested in wild foods, this book would be a good addition to your book shelf.

How to subscribe to a blogspot blog

2011-12-18T15:25:00.000-08:00

ok, soon as I put out a post on how to sign up for a blogspot blog, I changed the format and everything in the previous post no longer applies. So, never mind.
Now, if you want to sign up or follow my blog, go to the box with all the little pictures of followers and click where it says "Join this site" and you will be subscribed in some form or other, at least until things change again which I'm sure they will.

Aleut/Unangam Masks

2011-12-18T09:28:00.000-08:00

Earlier this year, I had the opportunity to visit the town of Sand Point on Popov Island in the Shumagin Island group. The Shumagin Islands lie off the southern coast of the Alaska Peninsula close to the eastern boundary of the Unangam territory. Popov Island is now the only Island in the Shumagins with a substantial permanent human population.

Unga Island in the background. Popov Island in the foreground.

But until recently, neighboring Unga Island was populated as well. And before the invasion by the Russians in the years following Bering's discovery of Alaska in 1741, Unga had a vibrant culture of which little has survived, save some masks.

I am guessing that Aleut culture on Unga was vibrant pre-1741 based on the fact that they made these stunning masks. The making of art generally is impossible without a certain prosperity that affords people the leisure time to create art. But besides the minimum level of prosperity, the making of art also requires that a culture have pride and confidence in themselves and their way of life.

Two more masks from Unga. Several things about these masks are worth mentioning. The masks have holes bored into their chins and foreheads, an indication that hair or something else may have been attached to the masks at one time.
Another point worth mentioning here is that masks are usually provided with eye holes so the person wearing the mask can see. As is apparent from the pictures there are no holes where the eyes are. The person wearing these masks used the holes bored in the nostrils for eye holes. This means that the masks are quite a bit taller than a human head.

The mask in the lower left corner may be a good indication what these masks may have looked like with all their added decorations in place.

If we compare the Unagam masks with those of Yupik people we can see right away that there is a good deal of difference in them. Yupik masks are seldom purely human but often show additions of animal features or blends of human and animal features. It appears that they depict transformations of fusions of humans and animals. The mask from Unga by contrast show strictly human features, albeit, big-nosed humans.
Unfortunately, little is known about how the masks of Unga were used. Unlike the Yupik culture which had little European influence until the 19th century, the Unagam culture was impacted by the Russians almost from the start of the Russian invasion. As a result, pre-contact religious practices and the manufacture of accompanying parephenalia were stopped. And the number of generations that intervened to the present day did not carry knowledge of traditional practices forward.

Food Gathering, a Communal Affair

2011-12-18T08:19:00.000-08:00

One of the things I realized in writing about wild foods is that someone lost in any kind of wilderness whether it be arctic, woodlands or desert and finding food and surviving has the odds stacked against them. Finding wild food requires not only knowledge and good timing, but perhaps most importantly for long term survival, community.

Mono women processing acorn meal.

It is one thing to be out in the wilderness for a few days or even a few weeks and getting by on wild food one can find. It is quite another thing to live in the wilderness on a permanent basis. Permanent wilderness living just like permanent living in civilization requires community. Without community, living is simply more difficult than living in a community.
What is apparent in reading about food gathering in pre-industrial cultures is that while they all ate lots of different wild foods, they also invariably had some staple that became available seasonally and that everyone pitched in to gather when it became available and then worked to stockpile it for the times of the year when little or no food was available.


Acorn storage structures - note the stilts to keep the storage baskets off the ground and away from easy access to would-be competitors.

Given that communities living off wild food stockpiled against lean times, the chances of someone wandering into wilderness during the lean time of year and surviving on wild food are pretty slim. The reason is simply that at certain times, there is no wild food to be had.
People living in a community had the resources of the community at their disposal, that is, the stockpiled food. Once people left the community, for instance to go on raids or extended voyages, they typically took some traveling food with them. Barring that, they subsisted on some sort of food that was readily available and more often than not went hungry. Long trips and raids consequently had to be made during times when some sort of wild food was readily available.
But the role of the community in wild food was not just in gathering, but also in processing. Many wild foods need a good deal of processing before they could be put up against lean times and that generally required all available hands. Even the gathering of surpluses required the whole community. If the human community didn't collect the acorns or nuts or whatever, the animal community would.

How to subscribe to a blogspot blog

2011-12-18T07:08:00.000-08:00

One of my readers pointed out that it's less than obvious how to subscribe to my blog with the new interface that the google blogspot people have created. I suspect the problem is one of visual and verbal semantic confusion. I will explain in a moment, but first, the pictures.

To get started, click on the house icon on the far right of the black menu bar that stretches across the page near the top right under the blog's banner. As you can see on the lower left of the image, or as you might see if you magnify the picture, this will take you to blogger.com/home. So whoever named the files called the page home and so put up a little icon of a house, but when you get to the blogger.com/home, the title of the page has changed to dashboard. Maybe this is confusing, maybe it isn't.

In any case, this is what the dashboard looks like. To sign up for the blog, scroll down a bit till you get a screen that looks something like this:

And there it is, the ADD button down in the lower left of the page. Press that, and you're subscribed. I think. Maybe it's that easy. Maybe it isn't. If you don't have a google account, you probably have to create one first to get a dashboard.
Let me know if your experience is different from mine.
Meanwhile, I think I'll go and subscribe to indigenousboats.blogspot.com so I can see how this subscribing thing works.

Long Boats in Surf

2011-12-17T07:45:00.000-08:00

Human powered displacement boats should be long and narrow for maximum efficiency. However, when you try to paddle one of these boats in surf or breaking waves, they tend to shoot over the top of the wave. The stern stays in the water and the bow heads out into thin air, that is, until the boat's center of gravity moves past the crest of the wave. At that point, the bow feels gravity and comes crashing down.

This is a photo of one of Ralph Frese's replica fur trade canoes out on Lake Michigan when some swell was running from the north. The canoe isn't quite up to its center of gravity, so the guy in the bow has a ways to go yet before he comes crashing down. Ralph told me that when the canoe did come crashing down it shot water twenty feet up in the air, but not a drop got into the canoe.

Here is a similar situation with an Indian boat in the Kerela region.
But scary as it looks to paddle a long skinny boat into breaking waves, paddling them down a breaking wave is even more scary since a long boat will try to broach if the wave is moving faster than the boat.

Boats and Oxen

2011-12-17T07:24:00.000-08:00

This post is dedicated to the use of oxen on and around boats. I am not suggesting that people with boats should go out and get a team of oxen but if you already have a team of oxen, you might consider putting them to good use around your boat.
Oxen used for surf launching and landing

This picture shows a team of oxen standing by to pull this Block Island Cowhorn up the beach and out of the reach of the surf. Pulling boats up on the beach used to be common practice in places where there were no suitable harbors. Coming in through the surf had to be an adventure and you also had to have a boat built for the task. Don't try this with a keel boat.

Here's the same scheme in Portugal. Picture apparently supplied by António Fangueiro and lifted from http://indigenousboats.blogspot.com/.
And finally, a vaporware concept for the use of oxen directly on a boat. This one by an unknown Roman writing sometime around 400 AD.

At first glance, it might not be apparent what our Roman conceptualist was proposing, but if you take some time to study the picture you will see that two teams of three oxen are harnessed to two capstans which apparently are linked to paddle wheels at the side of the boat.
The picture comes from a post by Ugo Bardi on the collapse of the Roman Empire. Ugo did not suggest that schemes such as this made the Roman Empire collapse. Rather, he suggested that when the Roman Empire was collapsing, people were proposing to solve the apparent problem with fanciful technology like the oxen in the boat.
Here is an excerpt from Ugo's article:
"The author described all sorts of curious weaponry. One that you can see here is a warship powered by oxen. Of course, a ship like this one would never have worked. Think of how to feed the oxen. And think of how to manage the final results of feeding the oxen. Probably none of the curious weapons invented by our anonymous author would ever have worked. It all reminds me of Jeremy Rifkin and his hydrogen based economy. Rifkin understands what is the problem, but the solutions he proposes, well, are a little like the end result of feeding the oxen; but let me not go into that." And we have to consider transmission losses and the added weight of the oxen, etc. etc.
So, the long and the short of it is that history has shown that it is best to keep the oxen on the beach.

Indian Wild Food How To Books

2011-12-16T10:49:00.000-08:00

This current post was inspired by my own earlier desert survival posts. What I realized in the process of writing was that living in a particular place is not really survival. The term survival implies that one lives in spite of various hardships. I don't really think that Indians who lived in the deserts of the US southwest were merely surviving. I think that for the most part, they were living comfortably. Surviving is what you end up doing when you don't know what you're doing. So toward that end, I thought I'd look at some of the books on my shelf that dealt with how the Indians made a living, where they got their food and how they prepared it. Theoretically, if one reads these kinds of books, one might figure out how to live in the wild. So let's look at the books.

Survival Arts of the Primitive Paiutes is really a pretty good book in spite of the overly dramatic title. I guess this kind of title grabs more attention than Natural Economy of the Pre-industrial Paiutes. The book tells us, among other things that the Paiutes had multiple tribes and that each tribe tended to be named after their main food source, for instance Trout Eaters or Cattail eaters. Today we would call them locavores, people who eat only locally grown food. But back then, everyone was a locavore by necessity.
One important fact that comes out of this book is that availability of food was seasonal. Pine nuts appeared in the fall. Cattails were at their best in the spring. Fish came out of the lakes and ran up streams to spawn the same time each year. And there were lean times like the dead of winter when people ate what they had stored. What is apparent when you read this book is that one cannot simply walk into a wild region and expect to find food any time of year. The Paiutes, like any moderns society needed to store food to survive the lean times of year. Even the ground squirrels and wood rats and birds had to store food against the lean times.
The book also has a chapters on various Paiute technologies such as the construction of traps, the processing of food, making of cordage and nets, the building of tule reed boats and more. While these descriptions probably leave a few things out, they are detailed enough that someone wanting to replicate the Paiute technologies would at least have a place to start.

Indian Uses of Desert Plants is a survey of plants most commonly used by Indians of the Mojave and Sonoran deserts. Several things stand out. One is that the plants in this book are all fairly common. They are all plants you will have seen even during a casual stroll around the perimeter of a road side or from the edge of a hiking trail. While deserts will have small micro-environments around springs and water courses, by and large, the number of different plants growing in the predominantly dry areas isn't large so that even a casual observer can quickly learn all the main plants.
What struck me about this book was that just about all the plants one commonly sees in the desert seemed to be listed in this book. It appears that there was hardly a plant in the desert that wasn't used by the Indians for something or other. Every plant in the desert, even the most insignificant looking ones were good for something, tools, food or medicine.
While this book does a good job of listing plant uses, it is only a survey book and not a how to book. You won't find recipes here for mesquite bean soup, only the fact that the Indians ground mesquite beans into a meal and ate it in various forms.

This is a book similar to the book about the Paiutes and even has a similar sounding title, only it is more detailed and three times as fat as the Paiute book. The focus of this book is more on various technologies of the California Indians than the foods that they ate. But even with its 448 pages, a book like this can only be a survey, at best, or selectively detailed since California probably encompasses more bioregions and Indian tribes than any other state in the US. In any case, while this book cannot do justice to all the Indian technologies of California, it does do a good job of covering those that it does focus on. Bow and arrow making, pottery, weaving and traps are covered in good detail. This book is highly recommended for anyone interested in Native technologies.

Early Uses of California Plants is a small book and avoids an overly dramatic title like some of the others reviewed here, but is thorough and detailed in what it does cover. It only addresses plants, gives a picture of each for identification, along with some color plates bound into the center of the book and describes each plant in detail. My favorite entry was on acorns, perhaps the most important food for California Indians in the regions where the oaks grew. We are told that a family in Mendocino county would collect as much as 500 pounds of acorns in a year.
The book covers food plants as well as medicinal plants. Details on medicinal plant use are generally slim other than to mention that they were used for certain conditions. I guess you can't expect to become a medicine woman or man by reading a 104 page book. Still, lots of good info in a small package.

Before California is about history and archaeology of the state of California before it became the modern political entity that it is today. The book isn't primarily about food and technology of California Indians but does provide some good perspective on how lifestyles of California residents changed over the millennia. I personally had always thought of the human past as having had two distinct phases, the historical past where humans invented civilization and the time before that. The time before civilization always seemed to be invariant for thousands of years on end.
But if you look at a narrow region like California as Brian Fagan does, then you discover that the climate and population density of the region varied greatly over the time that people first appeared on the scene about 10,000 years ago. Perhaps not surprisingly, people first entering California ate all the best stuff first and ate the less desirable stuff only after the best stuff was gone. We now think that the main food of the Central California Indians was the acorn, but Fagan tells us that this wasn't so. Acorn processing only started some 1000 years ago. Acorn processing takes quite a bit of work and although California Indians knew about it for longer than 1000 years, they didn't bother eating acorns because there was enough stuff around that took less work to collect and process, like grass seeds.
Do Californians eat acorns now? No, they've stopped because it's easier to buy food that somebody else made.

Wild Food, Does the Bear Eat in the Desert

2011-12-11T06:45:00.000-08:00

I was going to call this post desert survival, part 2, food, but changed my mind. The chances that someone would need to find food in the desert is remote at best. Furthermore, the chance is slim that anyone would find wild food in the desert if they were not schooled or at least self-educated in finding wild food. For that matter, someone who has never shown an interest in wild food is not likely to find any in an emergency situation.
Still, wild food fascinates me and wherever I am, I am always on the lookout for it. So anyway, today's post is about wild food and some possible clues about what is edible and what is not given a situation where you might want to eat some wild food but don't have the local wild food guide handy.

Rule number one is not to look for food where there isn't any like in the place above. Food is usually associated with water though not exclusively. Water supports vegetation and vegetation attracts animals. So use your water finding skills.

In this case we walked downhill into a valley where we found evidence of water. If you see cotton woods in the desert, you can be sure that you're near water.

Another clue is to see what the other critters have been eating. It passes through them and they leave deposits, in this case something with a lot of seeds in it. At the time I saw these piles, I had no idea where the seeds had come from, but just a ways down from the piles there was a grove of mesquite trees and mesquite bean pods littered the ground. Aha, someone had been eating mesquite beans. I chewed on a mesquite pod and found it to be tasty. Slightly sweet and if ground and maybe roasted a little, tasty.

Finally, here is a shot of a pond of water with cattails growing in it. Euell Gibbons claims that the white core near the bottom is edible. I have chewed on them and found them to be tasteless and unappealing, but if you were hungry enough, you could probably make a meal of them.
And there were frogs in this little pond as well but they would take some skill to catch unlike cattails which sit still.

Water in the desert

2011-11-26T10:14:00.000-08:00

I've been out of town for over a month and am now getting back in the swing of things. Time to spin up the boating fly wheel again and do more boating and boat building.
But before I post more boating news, I thought I would make a brief detour into the desert where I spent a good part of the last month.
So what does a boat guy know about deserts? Not much really, but I thought I would make some comments on desert survival, a skill that has something in common with survival anywhere, namely, paying attention to what's going on around you.
To survive in the desert, you need the same three things that you need anywhere, namely, food, water and shelter. So here it goes, my take on desert survival, part 1, water. The observations are based on locations in the Mojave and Sonoran deserts.
A desert, by definition is a place where there is little rainfall. However, it doesn't mean that there is no water in the desert at all. It does rain in the desert occasionally especially at higher altitudes and if you know where to look, you might be able to find water.

This is a lava flow, a common feature of Western deserts. No water is in evidence. Even if it does rain here, the water disappears into cracks and becomes inaccessible.

However, right at the border of the lava flow were these sandstone formations. Still no water in evidence.


But there were depressions in the surface of the sandstone that collected water during a recent rain. If you were desperate, this water could keep you alive. If you are carrying a water purifier, even better, but then, who walks around the desert with a water purifier?

A pervasive feature of deserts are dry water courses. You can plainly see that water has run here at some point and will again next time it rains. But it isn't raining right now and the bed of the sometime water course is dry. But oftentimes, the water has simply gone underground, and oftentimes, the dry stream bed crosses a section of impermeable bedrock that brings the water close to the surface. If there is water close to the surface on a more or less permanent basis, water loving plants such as sedges or willows will grow there. So keeping your eyes open for these plants might lead you to water. You might have to dig to get at the water, but you might not have to dig far.
Animals can also be an indicator of water. If you see tracks converging, they might lead you to a water source. Birds will also know where water is and will congregate there.


The white diagonal streak is a sometime water course. It looked dry, but then I noticed birds flocking to a dark spot right near a cliff, and sure enough, there was some surface water there.

Deserts will sometimes have rivers and creeks, especially near mountains which capture the rain at higher elevations and then drain into the valleys.

Here is the desert landscape at the Burro Creek campground in Arizona. No water is in evidence here.

But a little ways downhill into the canyon there are plenty of water loving cottonwoods and willows.

And a little walk leads us to enough water to swim in.

Of course, the easiest way to find water in the desert is to know ahead of time where it is. Before the advent of civilization, horseback travelers had to plan their routes to take advantage of water holes. Nowadays, you just need to drive to the nearest filling station to get your big gulp of soda water.

Playboat Camera Angles

2011-09-22T10:25:00.000-07:00

As usual, when students build new boats I try to take some pictures. Once again, I am reminded that taking good pictures is work. The problem is not only one of lighting and camera angles but also what else is in the picture that you don't want to be.

This is a good angle. Makes the kayak look really good. What I've found in general is that shots from the ends of the boat emphasize the rocker and longitudinal curvature of the whole hull. Shots of the deck are usually much more boring. Only problem is that the kayak seems to be glued to the underside of the VW van.

This angle not so good and again, van placement is unfortunate. Kind of makes the kayak look like one of those Greek creatures that are half one thing and half another.

Same problem here as the previous picture, only now the kayak looks like one third bush, one third kayak and one third shadow.

Baidarka-Iqyax^ Interior

2011-09-22T10:14:00.000-07:00

Inside of the baidarka, newly built with the sun coming through the skin. Sure is pretty.

Play boat demo

2011-09-22T10:00:00.000-07:00

It was launch day, Mandy and Andre launched their latest creations. Foreground, Andre turning his playboat on a dime. Beautiful day. Summer in Alameda, finally.

Low Entropy Boat Building

2011-08-23T08:57:00.000-07:00

Entropy has generally had a lot of bad press. Entropy is seen as something undesirable, as a general increase of disorder in the universe. But, as people like Nobel Prize winner Ilya Prigogine have been pointing out, order in the universe is created by burning energy and creating entropy. You get a local decrease in entropy or increase in order and organization by a larger net increase in entropy.
So things like culture and technology arise from the burning of energy and the creation of entropy. So if more entropy also means more order and organization, why should we opt for low entropy boat building? That is, why should we do things like build skin boats instead of plastic roto-molded boats? Interesting question, I think. While hi-tech (high entropy) boat building produces some fabulous boats, lo-tech (low entropy) boat building is a hedge against energy scarcity. That is, sometimes it is interesting to design boats for low energy scenarios, for environments where energy is scarce, or for some reason or other, you just don't want to use a lot of energy for esthetic reasons like you don't like the noise that high entropy machinery makes.

Why Aleuts don't build kayaks any more

2011-08-23T08:15:00.000-07:00

Aleuts build kayaks up to about WWII and maybe a little after. Today, the practice of building kayaks in the Aleutians has stopped. There are many reasons why the building has stopped, but the primary one no doubt is economics - the kayak has become economically irrelevant in the lives of the Aleuts. Other kinds of boats have replaced the kayak. This becomes apparent when one spends any amount of time in an Aleut village like Sand Point. The major activity nowadays is fishing and to make money at fishing in today's world one needs a commercial fishing boat, not a kayak. See evidence below.

There is also the fact that if you spend a good deal of time out on the water in your fishing boat, you are not likely to want to go out in a kayak in your spare time. But if you are working in Anchorage at a desk job, then maybe going out in a kayak on weekends might seem more attractive.

What is possible, contd.

2011-08-23T07:53:00.000-07:00

On our last day in Sand Point, we found some dry suits airing out on the railing of the motel we were staying at, the Anchor Inn. At first we thought they belonged to some kayakers, but in talking to the owners of the dry suits, we discovered that they belonged to some jet skiers who were using jet skis to travel from Seattle to Nome. The trip is apparently being financed by a cable TV network which will air a show on the trip sometime in 2012. Partial video below.

After talking to the jet skiers we went down to the harbor to look at their rigs.


Expedition logo

Here's the jet skis and Mike Livingston for scale.


Due to the general unavailability of gasoline en route, each ski had six extra 5 gallon tanks.

After Sand Point, these guys were headed for King Cove and after that to False Pass where they would cross from the Pacific into the Bering Sea.
So OK, it's a stunt of sorts to travel from Seattle to Nome by jet ski. For one thing, there aren't enough places to get gas. At one point, these guys had to get gas flown in to them, but other than that, doing the trip by jet ski isn't much different than traveling somewhere by motorcycle.
So does this mean that we will now start seeing jet skis being used for long trips along our coasts, or to cross to Hawaii from LA? Who knows. It is possible no doubt long as you can get someone to bring them gas.

What is possible?

2011-08-22T10:11:00.000-07:00

The current boat I am working on is yet another iteration of what I like to think of as my version of the perfect bay boat, bay kayak, that is.

One version of the bay boat, a canoe with outrigger for stability. However, too slow for long distances.

The perfect boat, for my current purposes at least is a boat that is fast enough to do a six mile bay crossing in a reasonable amount of time. The boat also has to be car-toppable and be human powered, that is propelled by oars or paddles. By reasonable amount of time, I mean that I want a boat that I can paddle at 4 mph. Average speed will be less due to aimless drifting and beverage breaks, but if I can push the boat at 4 mph without making it an athletic event, then I will be happy. The boat also has to be reasonably stable, that is stable enough that I can stop and rest or take a photograph without having to do fancy bracing with the paddle or put another way, a boat that does not require my constant effort to keep it upright.

The outrigger canoe afloat. On flat water, it is stable enough to stand up in.

Of course, speed and stability are conflicting requirements in a boat and so they need to be balanced for the proper compromise. The canoe with outrigger pictured above is not a proper bay boat because it is too slow. But it would make an ok fishing platform. In any case, I am sure that the boat I am currently working on will be a reasonable bay boat.
Which brings me to my main point, namely, what is possible?

San Francisco, six miles distant.

What I would like to do is periodically paddle over to San Francisco, in a boat that can do the trip in an hour and a half each way. If it is summer and the trip over is started before 11, there will be little wind. The trip back on the other hand will have lots of wind, although it will be a tail wind, 20 to 25mph being common. So if I start at home, drive to where my kayak is, launch it, that is half an hour added on to the 1.5 hour trip over for a total round trip of 4 hours. If we add another hour for lounging about at the destination, perhaps to have a cup of coffee, then the whole trip will be about 5 hours. If we add another hour for dallying along the way, then the total trip will turn into a 6 hour event, that is, 6 hours to go to San Francisco for a cup of coffee.
And once again, we have to ask ourselves, what is possible? It isn't the physical constraints that make a paddle to San Francisco for a cup of coffee such a rare event. It is more a matter of how much time it takes. I can take a one hour paddle by launching off the boat ramp which is half a mile from my house. Total elapsed time for launching and landing is half an hour. So I could do a one hour paddle in 1-1/2 hours.
I do in fact do the short paddle near my house fairly often and the paddle to San Francisco only rarely. What is possible in part has to do with how much time I allow myself for paddling. When I think of the people whom I know that do more extensive paddles, they are invariably single people with few responsibilities other than to themselves. So what is possible? Perhaps what we allow ourselves.

Polynesian Boats in SF Bay

2011-08-06T10:24:00.000-07:00

There's a bunch of Polynesian boats that have just showed up in SF Bay this past week. I went to visit them yesterday and here's some pictures I took. Their website is http://www.pacificvoyagers.org/
The hulls of the boats are fiberglass and resin, but the decks and other topside trim is wood.
The venture was financed by a German philanthropist including the building of the boats and all else that is involved, but the people on the boats are from the traditional canoe voyaging countries and it is great to see them undertaking such a voyage. Apparently they have GPS on board, but it is used as backup - navigators on board try to come up with the right course to sail which is then confirmed or corrected by the GPS.

Here's a part of the steering oar. When under way, someone has to hang on to this. It's about six inches in diameter and a hunk of wood, but balanced so the person steering isn't supporting all the weight.

the amazon book store

2011-08-06T10:05:00.000-07:00

I notice I still have the Amazon book store banner up at the top of my page. Some of my readers have software that blocks that sort of thing so they probably never even noticed in the first place.
In any case, the state of California is going to try to extract state sales tax from online vendors selling stuff in California. They will approach Amazon and say, hey, how much have you sold in CA this year and how about handing over the sales tax. Amazon is balking and one of the things they did is discontinue their program of paying a percentage of sales generated through links to people who live in California. So if you do click on one of the book links I have put up and buy a book from Amazon, I no longer get a percentage. Still, I may keep the book store up there because it's a convenient place to list books that I have found interesting or useful.
But discontinuing the commission program seems like a bad idea. Perhaps Amazon was hoping that people like myself who have made a buck fifty in the past year will write impassioned letters to their legislators. Probably won't happen. It's probably good for Amazon to pay taxes. We buyers will pay more for our stuff, but on the other hand, Amazon will have less of an unfair advantage over local retailers. And California won't have to lay off so many teachers and librarians.

Sand Point bent wood hats

2011-08-05T10:10:00.000-07:00

Here's a few photos of bent wood hats made in Sand Point. Bent wood hat instructor for the camp was Peter Devine. He had inherited some of the bending jigs made by Andrew Gronholdt who was one of the key people who revived the art of Aleut bent wood hat making. For more on Andrew Gronholdt, see the wikipedia page.

This is a selection of Peter's designs.

This is a bending jig for short visors made by Andrew Gronholdt.

Peter was also experimenting with using baleen as hat making material. The source of this baleen was apparently a minke whale that had washed up on the beach. Although the baleen is dark, the frayed fibrous edges are essentially blond.

A student adding feathers to a short visor he had made.

Hats are carved from quarter inch thick cotton wood which is thinned out in selected places for easier bending. After the hat blanks are carved, they are soaked in boiling water and then bent on a form. Stones hold the hat blanks under water. The smooth stones were found by Peter in the stomach of a sea lion. The darker rough stones are from Atka.

And finally, a student wearing one of his finished hats next to the finished iqyax^ (Unangan kayak.)

Aleutian China

2011-08-04T23:21:00.000-07:00

Sand Point has one restaurant and two cafes, both of which seem to be closed more than open, at least when we needed them. Above, the sign for the Aleutian China, which you might guess serves Chinese food. Throughout the week we were fed our three squares at culture camp, but on weekends, that is Saturday and Sunday we were off and had to fend for ourselves, so our choice was primarily, the Aleutian China. I was prepared for the worst, but the cooking at the Aleutian China was actually pretty good. I have tasted worse here in the SF bay area.

The Aleutian China is locatated in the same building as the AC Value Center. The AC Value Center is both a super market, check cashing center and general merchandise emporium.

This sign here indicates that the Aleutian China is open for business.

Here is John sucking down a milk shake for desert.

And finally, a view of Unga Island out the window.

Sand Point, Alaska

2011-08-04T22:53:00.000-07:00

I've just gotten back from Sand Point Alaska where I spent the last two weeks at the Sand Point Culture Camp. I had hoped over the period of the last month to post dispatches from both the Urban Unagax^ Culture Camp in Anchorage and the culture camp in Sand Point, but in both places, days were long and the internet connections were problematic, so that the dispatches just didn't happen. So here they are, retroactively. I should mention that I traveled to Sand Point together with Mike Livingston and John Petersen. Mike was the person instrumental in getting John and myself to Sand Point. John is a fellow kayak builder and he and I built an Unangan kayak. Mike taught model kayak building.
Photo above is one of many views of Sand Point in the foreground and Unga Island in the background. Unga Island is considerably larger than Popov Island where Sand Point, town of roughly 900 people is located. Unga was probably more important as an Aleut living place before the arrival of the Russians, but today, Unga is uninhabited.

Weather for the first week was mostly cloudy with frequent rain and only intermittent sunshine. Temps were in the fifties. On this, a fairly typical day, the clouds thinned a little around 9 pm when these pictures were taken and the sun poked through to dramatically light up selected portions of the landscape. Looks lovely of course and is somewhat cheering after a full day of low hanging clouds and persistent gloom.

Here's another view of town from a sea-level vantage point. Shortly after taking this picture, a woman came out of a nearby house and we talked to her for a while. Turned out she knew me. We had met in Akutan a few years ago. Then she went back in her house and brought out some smoked salmon for us to take with us.

Here's John with his smoked salmon in front of a portable smoke house. I don't know exactly how this smoke house works or why it is on wheels or what the function of those racks on the side of the house are, but the discoloration to the left and top of the door are a pretty good indicator that smoke leaked out the door at some point.
So that's it for today. Much more to come soon. Like a report on the boat building, the launch, a hike on the island, fishing and more.

2011 Urban Unangax^ Culture Camp in Anchorage - Update

2011-07-14T23:24:00.000-07:00

Just a few photos from this year's culture camp. Just finished up yesterday. Days have been long. 9 am to 9 pm. Trying to catch up on sleep now.

Working backwards here from the last day. Potluck at lunch time. Clockwise from left - smoked salmon, stewed seal, dried salmon, berries in seal oil, pasta salad, lettuce salad, salmon pie, potato salad.

Here's how you eat dried salmon, sort of. Normally, you dip it in seal oil, but lacking seal oil, you make a sort of a layer cake of seal, seal fat and salmon.

Meanwhile, back at the kayak shop, kids pretending that they're in kayak jail.

The very youngest kids did not participate in the kayak building but got a tour of our progress. Here they are demonstrating the light weight of the kayak by lifting it up.

And then we took all the kayaks out to the Alaska Native Heritage center where the Orthodox priest blessed them with holy water.
More to come

More Boat Strength

2011-06-30T10:44:00.000-07:00

I got my copy of Boat Strength in the mail. Gosh, it's hardcover. Editing has gotten looser than it used to be. In cursory reading I found two mistakes. Nothing fatal. Stuff like a missing hyphen when a word is broken at the end of a line and continued on the next. Still, it indicates that other errors could lurk in places where it matters. I'm nitpicking here. 15 years ago when I last had to deal with a publisher, the guy who was editing my book, The Aleutian Kayak was telling me how the publisher wanted them to edit more books every year. Ideally, from the publisher's standpoint, editors could be replaced by computers. I think the publishers are now trying to publish books with minimum human input other than that of the writer and it's starting to show.
On to substantive matters.
As I suspected, kayak builders can dispense with a book like this, but if you want to build anything more ambitious than a kayak, this book might be of help. Wooden boat building gets about a hundred pages. Fiberglass, steel and aluminum gets the rest. I suppose that if you wanted to build a kayak in steel plate, you might find some useful info in the metals section. But the books has various nuggets of useful info, like what kinds of aluminum alloys can withstand salt water, in case you want to build a George Dyson Aluminum frame type kayak.

There are other nuggets of wisdom in this book, like the tradeoffs between weight and strength and cost of various materials. For instance, aluminum is not as strong as steel, but is lighter so the strength of steel can be had by using thicker aluminum and total weight will still be less. But then aluminum costs a lot more than steel and the savings in weight come at a cost of more money. Nothing comes for free after all.
So, as I suspected, not a must have for kayak builders but a good addition for the library of someone with higher ambitions or a simple love of boat building knowledge.

Strength of Materials

2011-06-23T14:11:00.000-07:00

I just ordered a copy of this book and hope to report on it in more detail later. I have read most of Dave Gerr's other book, The Nature of Boats and found that one helpful. So I'm hoping that this one will be as well.
Dave Gerr is a professional boat designer and explains the major issues that a boat designer has to deal with in easy to understand terms in the Nature of Boats. In this particular book, he gets into the details of how strong you have to make boat parts so the boat doesn't break.
Strength isn't much of an issue for kayak builders. Long as you follow traditional guidelines the boats will be strong enough. Most of the time, most kayak builders that I know want to make their boats as light as possible for ease of transport. You can push that envelope all you want. If a boat breaks, it's no big deal for the most part since you didn't put much money into it in the first place and with a skin on frame boat, breakage of frame parts is seldom catastrophic or life threatening.
Not so if you build bigger boats. More money is at stake and maybe lives and cargo and professional reputations, so it behooves the big boat builder to have some notion of how strong is strong enough.
The book will soon be on its way and I will report on whether any of the material in it will benefit the average skin on frame kayak builder.

Don't Let Others Plan Your Future

2011-06-23T13:06:00.000-07:00

I've been reading the latest article at Low-tech Magazine. I read that kind of stuff because skin of frame technology is relatively low-tech and I'm always curious what other sorts of low tech activities people are attracted to.
So, having explained that, let me get on to my main point which is other people's conception of what the future will be like and how to plan for it.
Low-tech mag imagines a post-carbon future, one where cheap carbon fuels will not be available. Whether you believe that a low carbon future is imminent or not is more or less irrelevant. The point of low tech mag is to imagine how we would deal with it. We can join in on that exercise whether we believe in a low carbon future or a future of ever increasing bounty.

So getting back to the magazine, their latest article focuses on bicycle powered gadgetry, like this bicycle-powered grinder. Not a bad idea, really, assuming that in the imaginary carbon-less future you will have access to all the component parts you will need to realize this low-tech vision.
Now on to the scary part of this particular low-tech vision, using bicycle power to generate electricity. This vision isn't scary in and of itself. Using one bicycle to generate electricity isn't all that bad. I used to have a bike with a headlight that ran off a generator. It made pedaling harder, but you didn't have to replace any batteries.

Someone has imagined what looks to me something like the slave-galley of cartoons, rows and rows of haggard men in chains pedaling away for hours a day to generate electricity for someone else. Here is the statement from the people who envisioned this scheme:
"electricity could be generated in large pedal powered electricity plants, and then distributed to houses, shops, public spaces and factories. This is more efficient than doing it in each house separately because you can do away with the batteries and still offer electricity 24 hours a day. Power plants would simply add more pedallers when demand is high (such as during peaks hours) and send them home when demand is low (at night, for instance)."
And who the hell would want to work at this job? Certainly not the guy who thought of it. Imagine what your butt would look like after 8 or twelve hours of sitting on one of those milk crates. Thank you, no. I would rather have a post-carbon future without electricity if this is what it takes.

Wooden Boat Building Books

2011-06-05T13:51:00.000-07:00

I've listed a whole bunch of wooden boat building books in my Amazon book store. Not that I'm interested in traditional wooden boat building all that much. Traditional wooden boats weigh too much. You either need storage on the water or a boat trailer and trailer storage to own one of these boats.
But traditional wooden boats were powered by human power or wind and therefore had to be efficient and will potentially lend themselves to skin on frame construction by which almost any small boat can be made to come in under 100 pounds.
So, traditional wooden boat designs lend themselves to building in skin on frame. There are certain limitations which you have to overcome or simply avoid, but since wooden boats were built by bending wood over a framework, the shapes of wooden boats are possible to emulate in sof. You won't find any curves on a traditional wooden boat that can't be copied in skin. In addition to giving you plans of wooden boats, these wooden boat books also give you advice on what sort of environments these boats might be good for.
Maybe I'm a little too optimistic on the topic of adapting wooden boat designs to skin on frame, having only built three sof boats that were based on wooden originals and two of them boats with bark for skin instead of wooden planking, but still, I think the idea is a good one.
Only one major caveat needs to be mentioned. Being lighter, an sof boat will sit higher in the water and have less momentum than its wooden skinned original, something you might have to correct with ballast. But heck, as Pete Culler once wrote, experience begins when you start building.

Native Art at the Alaska Native Medical Center

2011-06-05T08:42:00.000-07:00

The largest assemblage of contemporary Alaskan Native Arts and Crafts that I've seen is not at any museum but at the Alaska Native Medical Center, ANMC. If you go there, find the elevator. Take it to the top floor of the center, then look for the stairwell. Walk down and you will find displays in the stairwell as well as on every floor. Lots of wonderful stuff. Everything from model sleds to dolls to beadwork to ivory walruses. And there's a gift shop. You should check for hours if you actually intend to buy something. According to a friend, their prices are considerably better than commercial galleries. Not cheap by any means - This isn't 1930 but good values are to be had and the stuff is top quality, no painted rocks or spirit catchers.

2011 Urban Unangax^ Culture Camp in Anchorage

2011-06-05T08:17:00.000-07:00

Should you find yourself in Anchorage during the week of July 7-13 stop by the Urban Unangax^ Culture Camp at the APIA headquarters. Lots of stuff going on, including Mike Livingston, John Petersen and myself building traditional kayaks. Don't stop by on Sunday because nobody will be there. But any weekday or Saturday we'll be there.

Check out the video for an overview of the doin's.
Check out the APIA Web site for more info on the APIA.
The APIA headquarters is at 1131 East International Airport Rd.
Anchorage Alaska 99518

Deep Thought

2011-06-03T11:02:00.000-07:00

I created a subject category in my Amazon book store called "Deep Thought." I thought it might be worth explaining what I mean by Deep Thought.
First off, I should disclose that Deep Thought, (deep thought from now on - I hate typing upper case) is not my concept. One of the news sites that I follow occasionally groups various articles under that category.
What is now called deep thought is what used to be called thought. But with the advent of the internet and infotainment, what passes for thought has degraded to a melange of received wisdom, prejudice, rants and simple running of the mouth. And so, legitimate thinking of any kind had to be promoted to deep thought. Well, OK, I'll play along.
So why would a kayak builder need deep thought? Well, it comes up for me whenever I feel the need to justify the building of kayaks with traditional technology. Why, my detractors ask, would you restrict yourself to building kayaks, an outmoded form of technology with more outmoded technology? The true answer, "because it appeals to me," isn't particularly satisfying to most people. So I feel compelled to explain in terms of some sort ideas that they can relate to. Or at least, I can try to snow them with so much academic falderal that they go away quietly.

The question of why use one type of technology rather than another is one that intrigues me. And it's one that leads me to thermodynamics and complexity a subject covered by Ilya Prigogine in his books. I'll get back to this topic in some future post. Since it requires thinking rather than just typing, it may be a while till I get to it.

Then I have also listed Aldo Leopold's Sand County Almanac under Deep Thought, not so much for the deep thinking as for sentimental reasons because Aldo Leopold's cabin was near an island in the Wisconsin River where I spent a good number of summer weekends camping and swimming and fishing. I have read the book, but it was a while ago and I can't remember any deep thoughts from it. Will have to try again.

Finally, more deep thinking by a man named Rod Swenson. Rod has published a number of articles, some available HERE that answered some nagging questions I had about thermodynamics, specifically entropy which is all about a trend away from order and life, technology and culture which are trends toward order. This again relates to the topic of technology and what makes one kind of technology better or more successful than another. I will get back to this topic as well, but here's a quick teaser: The deciding factor of which technology wins at any given moment according to Swenson is the law of maximum entropy production. The winning technology at any given moment is the one that most quickly uses up available energy in a given environment. Again, more on this at a future time. And in case you're wondering, is skin on frame building technology the one that best burns available energy? The answer is no. But I think it's more complex than that, so stay tuned.

Further Kayak Musings

2011-06-01T11:51:00.000-07:00

In the process of selecting books for my Amazon sub store on this blog, it became apparent to me that I wasn't picking any stitch and glue or strip building books. It became apparent to me that I have no interest in that sort of thing. What I like about skin on frame building is its spontaneity. Want a wider boat? Pry the gunwales apart with a longer stick, and so on all along the way. You make changes on the fly. Strip and stitch and glue seem to take more planning and forethought. Not a bad idea to decide what you want to build before building it, but for a guy like me who has no real schooling in boat theory and hydrodynamics, the seat of the pants approach is more appealing. There is also an excess of epoxy and fiberglass and sanding involved in strip and stitch and glue building, at least for my taste. I'll leave these things for others.

Skinboat Journal Store

2011-06-01T10:27:00.000-07:00

I've added an Amazon.com store to my blog. It's a subset of stuff that Amazon sells. For now it's mostly books about kayaking and boat building that I have read and found to be useful. I intend to add tools and other kayak related hardware. Stay tuned. If you buy something from Amazon by way of my store, I get a small percentage. Ha. Not quite enough to retire on I'm sure.

The only downside to this scheme is that I can't add my own review for store items except directly on the Amazon site. So you get to see my opinion on an item along with all the others. The reason I mention this is that for the most part, I only list things that I recommend but in some cases, I list things as examples of stuff you should steer away from. So if an item falls into the steer away from category, I would like to have some way to alert you to that fact. Maybe I'll create a steer away from sub category.

unimak.us

2011-05-23T10:31:00.000-07:00

A new website called Unimak Area has been erected. Lots of info on the Eastern Aleutian region. Enjoy.

More Unangax^ (Aleut) Paddle Mysteries

2011-05-18T10:39:00.000-07:00

Suzawa Ikunori of Japan has shared some pictures of paddles from the Kuril Island of Simushir. As I mentioned in a previous post, the Aleuts who made these paddles were probably brought to Simushir by Russians during the Russian colonial period.
What is unique about these paddles is that the blades have ridges on both faces although the ridge on one face is more distinct than the ridge on the other. The ridge that is less distinct is on the face of the blade that is normally flat.
Although it isn't obvious from the photo, Suzawa has pointed out that there is a slight tilt to the axis of the blade in the direction of the more pronounced rib. That is, the paddle is a bit of a bent shaft paddle. Whether this bend is intentional or a result of use or an accident of storage is not known. If you click on the photo to enlarge it, you can see the upward trend of the edge of the blade of the paddle viewed edge on.
In any case, this paddle does nothing to clear up the mystery of how the Aleuts held their paddles. But I should point out that the loom was egg shaped as in other Aleut paddles.

Aleuts Kayaks around the Pacific Rim

2011-05-18T09:37:00.000-07:00

Ninety miles north of San Francisco on the Pacific coast stands Fort Ross, southernmost outpost of the Russian empire in North America. The fort was an attempt to raise crops and animals to supply the Alaskan posts with food and leather. The Russians brought Aleut kayakers and their kayaks with them. The kayaks were used for mail runs to Bodega Bay and San Francisco and also for some occasional hunting and foraging. Some of the Russian presence but none of the kayak paraphernalia has survived.

On the other side of the Pacific, between Kamchatka to the north and Hokkaido to the south lie the Kuril Islands.

The Islands were mostly under Russian control prior to 1855. Just as the Russians brought Aleuts and their kayaks with them to North America, they brought Aleut kayakers with them to the Kuril Islands. As in America, the Aleuts in the Kuril Islands were no doubt pressed into fur hunting and general gofer work. In 1875, a treaty between Japan and Russia moved the boundary between the two countries north to Kamchatka. In 1945, the boundary moved down to Hokkkaido. Unlike in America where nothing of the kayaks remained, in the Kuril Islands, the Japanese managed to collect some of the Aleut kayaks and their paraphernalia. These objects are now preserved in Japanese museums.

And in closing, a picture of a three hole kayak by a Japanese Artist.

Whose kayaks are best?

2011-05-17T22:39:00.000-07:00

Somewhere around 1824, Father Ivan Veniaminov wrote that the kayaks of the Eastern Aleuts were vastly superior to those of their neighbors. I am paraphrasing. This is not a direct quote. Veniaminov wrote in Russian which I neither read nor write. But I digress. The reason I bring up Veniaminov is his assertion that one kayak is better than another without giving his criteria for making that judgment.
And the problem persists. Or perhaps it has even gotten worse. Actually, I'm sure it's gotten worse. The problem as I see it is that in the old days when a kayak was a hunting craft, its excellence could easily be judged. The best kayak was the one that got the most seals given local conditions.
Almost two centuries have passed since Veniaminov's pronouncement on the excellence of the Eastern Aleut kayak. The kayak is predominantly a recreational craft and determining which is the best is next to impossible because there are no agreed upon standards for judging recreational value.
Which kayak is the best? Is it the shiniest, the cheapest, the fastest, the most stable, the ruggedest, the lightest, the best rollingest, the most comfortable, the roomiest? Who knows?
Any kayak is better than no kayak. If it gets you out on the water then it's good.

Aleut Cockpit Size

2011-04-27T11:00:00.000-07:00

Someone on one of the facebook groups I'm on posted a video of an Aleut paddler paddling his kayak around in a circle. The video is a copy of a movie segment shot by a US Navy cinematographer in the early part of the 20th century. Mostly, the video is unremarkable. Unfortunately I can't share it. But several things about it are remarkable. The first is that it may be the only movie footage of an Aleut paddling. The second is that it shows the paddler getting in and out of his boat. The third is that the paddle is quite long.

This is a still photo, possible of the paddler in the video.
What I found eye-opening about the video was the way that the paddler got in and out of his boat. Although Aleut kayaks seem to have had a more or less standard cockpit size of about 24 inches, a size that requires me to sit on the back deck of the kayak and carefully slide forward with my legs straight out before me and lower myself into the cockpit by the strength of my arms.
What the video makes apparent is that whatever the size of the paddler and the size of the cockpit, the combination was such that the paddler could just step into the cockpit with one leg, sit down and then pull his other leg into the cockpit and extend it. The way he got into the kayak looked pretty much the same as someone getting into an open canoe or a modern recreational kayak with a long cockpit.
Large cockpits have some disadvantages, mostly that they require large spray skirts that are harder to keep secure in rough water with waves breaking on the kayak than smaller skirts, but getting in and out of a kayak easily is a distinct advantage for launching and landing on a beach where waves are breaking.
The other thing worth noting about the video was that the paddler both launched and landed with the kayak floating in the water, not resting on the beach. He was wearing long boots that allowed him to step into the water without getting his feet wet. He also seemed to have quite good balance and agility so that he could step into and out of his kayak without a doing a lot of bracing with his paddle the way I have to do.

Scavenging

2011-04-26T10:39:00.000-07:00

Call it what you will. Call it scavenging which has a negative connotation and calls up visions of vultures, or call it re-use or re-cycling or re-purposing, all of which are more fashionable terms for the same thing. Regardless, of what you call it, once upon a time, it was the one and only way to get materials to build a boat, especially in the arctic where boat materials did not grow and had to be scavenged on the beach.
You can view scavenging as an act of desperation or opportunism or some other unsavory name, but whatever you want to think of it, it is still going on as illustrated in the following photos.

Fellow kayaker, Tony who launches his kayaks at the Encinal boat ramp told me that he met the guy who has been removing steel fence posts from the rock wall next to the boat ramp. Supposedly he got a few hundred bucks for them. First he strips off the fencing.

Then he uses a pipe cutter to cut the poles. Then he hauls them off to a scrap metal dealer.

And when he's all done, more of the fence is gone. I must admit the rock wall looks better without the fence.

Meanwhile, just on the other side of the wall is what is left of the sunken boat. Someone has been sawing sections of it off. I'm sure it's not the plastic hull they're after. I imagine it's the stuff that's bolted to the plastic that they want like jam cleats and winches and whatnot. Easier to disassemble back at the garage.
Just recently, I read somewhere of a theory that says essentialy that nature favors processes that speed up the work or entropy. Left to the strictly physical processes like oxidation and abrasion, the fence and the sunken boat would probably have been sitting as is for another few decades. But with the aid of scavengers, the job of entropy has been favorably accelerated.

Ask not for Whom the Bell Tolls

2011-04-20T10:32:00.000-07:00

Some time back, a memorial appeared on the fence near Encinal boat ramp. The fence is on one side of the jetty that juts out into the bay. The jetty is used by people to fish from. Fellow kayaker Tony had heard that the memorial was for one of the fishermen who had died of a heart attack at that place. Yesterday was the first time I looked closely at the memorial.

The man's name was Suli.

He was apparently not very old.

The wind was blowing when I took the pictures and the chimes were tinkling.

Suli was a fisherman and so there were fish.

And while I was shooting pictures, someone came up and poured some beer into that cup. Suli was his friend. They had fished together. I asked if that was Suli's cup. It was. But Suli was not a coffee drinker. He liked beer and brandy. Hence the refill his friend was giving him.

Suli's kids and wife. Suli knew he was in trouble and had tried to call his wife from his cell phone. He got her answering machine and sang her a Tongan love song before he died.

Suli, rest in peace.

Boat Salvage

2011-04-20T10:07:00.000-07:00

The saga of Tiller the Hun continues. As you may remember, Tiller the Hun dragged its anchor in a winter storm, ran into the rocks and sank. There were some salvage efforts encouraged in part by extreme low winter tides that exposed a good part of the Tiller's hull. But those had ceased.

Yesterday, I passed the Tiller again and discovered more activity around the Tiller. At first, it looked like another boat had tried to sink itself in the same spot as the Tiller.

Fellow kayakers Glen and Tony were in the area and had spoken to the person that the apparent new wreck belonged to. Apparently, it was not a wreck at all, but a salvage attempt.

According to Tony, the owner of the salvage vessel was hoping to drag the Tiller into shallow water where he could dismantle it at his leisure and without having to put on diving gear. So the salvager tied his salvage craft to the Tiller and waited for the tide to come in. Apparently, he misjudged the weight of the Tiller because once the tide came in, his boat, instead of lifting the Tiller had one end of it dragged under water.

At one point, the salvager jumped up and down on the dry end of the salvage boat, perhaps to shake something loose, but failing at his attempt, abandoned the salvage effort for the time being and went ashore on his rubber raft.

I didn't stick around for low tide to see how things would go. The transom of the Tiller was entirely gone.

And the back end of the salvage craft was sticking out of the water like a duck feeding in the mud. Well, almost.

The Mariner's Catalog

2011-04-19T12:38:00.000-07:00

Before there was an internet and the world wide web, there was the Mariner's Catalog. The Mariner's Catalog was something like a Whole Earth Catalog devoted entirely to things nautical. Along with reviews of tools and other nautical gear, the catalog had short articles by people like Pete Culler and John Gardner along with musings and commentary by the editors, Peter Spectre, George Putz and Dave Getchell.

Along with photos of the products the catalogs also contained lots of the kinds of old engravings that used to adorn books and magazines before the invention of photogravure. The net effect is altogether charming and engrossing.
This kind of publication no longer makes sense in the age of the internet. Everyone with an opinion or even those without have a blog to voice them and online shopping has made these catalogs redundant. Still, I find them charming and just bought the first four volumes on the internet.

Aleut Paddle Orientation, Again

2011-04-19T12:15:00.000-07:00

I had previously seen this photo of Unangan (Aleut) paddlers in George Dyson's book, Baidarka. But most recently for the first time, I saw a high resolution version of this photo on David Zimmerly's web site. And sure enough, the two paddlers whose paddles are showing both are paddling ridged side of the paddle forward.

Same with this group. They are also both paddling ridge forward. You can't see the ridge on the back paddle but you can see the elevated part of the loom facing forward.
So, is there a right way and a wrong way to hold an Aleut paddle? The answer is still no I think, but perhaps we can say that for a cruising stroke, ridge forward and flat side back was the most common orientation. When I paddle with an Aleut paddle, I sometimes switch back and forth between the two orientations because they stress different sets of muscles and I can give one set a rest by switching.

Double Baidarkas

2011-04-11T11:46:00.000-07:00

Sebastian Von Nagel recently finished his latest double Baidarka, ulux^tax^ in Unangam Tunuu. Some pictures follow.

Sebastian with three of his skin on frame boats. The framework of the playboat in front was built almost entirely from recycled IKEA furniture. Sebastian's son Julian did the building under his father's tutelage. Just back of Sebastian is the double that he and I built together and all the way in back is Sebastian's latest double creation that is an evolution from the first double and incorporates a number of Sebastian's innovations.

One of Sebastian's innovations was the use of epoxy as a sealer for the hull material. Not that epoxy as a hull material is an innovation in itself, but the use of epoxy on top of a nylon fabric is something of an innovation. I had always avoided epoxy under the assumption that it would be too stiff, but one or two layers on top of a flexible fabric maintains flexibility.

Sebastian combined an opaque colorant with the translucent epoxy which makes for an interesting effect when viewed from the inside of the boat.

Here's a view of two doubles together. Two things worth pointing out. One is the position and spacing of the cockpits. The other is the upturn of the nose forward of the front cockpit.

Here's another view of the latest double. Note both the upturn of the bow and the long fore-deck.

Which gets me to the point where theory ends and practice begins. A boat no matter how good in theory needs to perform on the water. Let me enumerate the features and how they impact performance.

Perhaps one of the most obvious innovations of the ulux^tax^ is the positioning of the cockpits. The back cockpit is close to the stern and the spacing of the cockpits is far enough apart so the two paddlers can paddle without having their paddles collide. One of the problems with a double where the paddlers are too close together is that both of them have to be synchronized. This is a good idea in theory, but unless the strength of the two paddlers is matched to their paddles, they will most likely be wanting to paddle at different cadences.

Placing the back cockpit far back allows the front cockpit to move back as well while at the same time maintaining good separation between them. Having the front cockpit far enough back tends to keep the front paddler drier. The upturn of the bow also keeps the bow from spearing into steep wave fronts. Sebastian and I took his latest double out on SF Bay on a day when the wind was blowing 25 mph and the water was choppy and any water thrown up by the bow would have blown into my face. But thanks to the upturn of the bow, this didn't happen and the ride was remarkably dry.

The upturn of the bow also elevates the keel line at the bow so the first two feet or even more of the baidarka are out of the water. While this reduces the length at the water line, it makes it a little easier to turn such a long boat. The far back position of the rear paddler also makes it easier to turn such a long boat.

The ulux^tax^ was also well tuned to rough water paddling. The relatively narrow hull sits fairly deeply in the water and when Sebastian and I paddled sideways to the waves, the boat seemed practically indifferent to the waves. There was none of the pitching from side to side that you normally get with a wide, flat bottomed boat in rough water.

When the ulux^tax^ is pointed into the waves, the two feet of bow that hang in the air on flat water act as reserve buoyancy and get to provide lift without burying into the face of the wave. Anytime you bury the bow of the boat in a wave you lose more momentum than if you don't. Not burying the bow also avoids throwing water into the air which then doesn't get picked up by the wind and thrown into the front paddler's face.

One final point. The volume of a kayak also becomes an issue in rough water and strong wind. Any part of the kayak above the water line along with the bodies of the paddlers act like a sail and retard forward progress against the wind. Kayakers need to be able to maintain forward motion or risk being blown into a hostile shoreline. Double kayaks are great for long trips because of their large carrying capacity, but when paddled empty, they can easily have too much sail area which then becomes a liability in a strong wind.

San Francisco Old and New

2011-04-07T18:18:00.000-07:00

When viewed from Alameda through binoculars, San Francisco appears to be made of two parts, an old part and a new part.

The old part, visible behind one of the towers of the Bay Bridge is low to the ground and lets you see the landscape beyond and the shape of the land beneath it.

The new part is composed of tall buildings that obscure everything but themselves.

I prefer the old part.

An Afternoon on the Estuary

2011-04-05T23:08:00.000-07:00

Saturday I spent some time on the Alameda-Oakland estuary. It's a narrow body of water that separates Alameda from Oakland.

The postcard looks eastward down the estuary roughly 80 years ago. The white arrows show my route, a circumnavigation of Coast Guard Island, formerly, Government Island. Oakland lies to the left and Alameda to the right.

The Alaska Packers salmon fleet used to overwinter here.

Wooden sailing ships preceded the plastic version.

Jack London kept his boat, the Snark here prior to taking off for the South Seas and writing The Cruise of the Snark.

A little ways up the estuary is the Archer Daniels Midland flower mill.

Which was formerly the Sperry Flower Mill. Apparently Californians at bread even a century ago.

On Saturday, the estuary was more calm and less crowded with boats than in the post cards. Coast Guard Island lies just ahead. The view is to the west. Normally there would be three or four Coast Guard cutters docking at the island, but this week they seem to have gone somewhere.

Here is the bridge that connects coast guard island to Oakland. Just off to the right is a marina and between the marina and the bridge is an area that is out of the shipping lanes and a place where boats can moor. In the past, there were seldom any boats here, but about a year ago, boats from the marinas would start anchoring here, apparently no longer able to pay the rent.

One of the boats was tied up to a pier for a few weeks and then sank or was scuttled. It's been like this for a year now.

But perhaps because of hard economic times, the free, mobile and unencumbered fleet of derelict boats is increasing. In all, there were about 8 boats moored here without benefit of access to electricity or water. But the rent is cheap.

And when you need to get to land, you use this improvised dock with water bottle floatation. I think this counts for post-apocalyptic.

And tied to a ramp is a raft or punt.

I don't think it sank. The tide was just high. The fellow who owned it tied it just a little too tight to the dock and when the tide came in, the side of this beauty was caught under the ramp. Note the outboard motor mount at the back of the raft.

And when you don't have a motor or gas, there's locks for oars. The whole thing was quite well constructed but abandoned and appropriated by the free boat crew.

And then I stopped taking pictures and got busy paddling, once around Coast Guard Island.

Got Radiation?

2011-03-26T21:00:00.000-07:00

March 11, radioactive fallout from the reactors in Japan hit California. I suspected that after crossing the Pacific, not that much radioactive dust would be left, but you never can tell. We get measurable amounts of pollution from China. So I went on the internet to see what I could find. The first thing I found was a website that posts radiation readings. Here's what the map looks like. Readings above 100 are supposed to be worrisome. California never got much above 30. The reason I wanted to know in the first place was that it was raining and I was going to go paddle my kayak and I didn't want to do it if there was going to be a bunch of radiation coming down with the rain the way it did in Kiev after Chernobyl blew up and the people were just walking around in the rain because nobody told them that there was a problem.

The way the site works is that they have people all over the country hook geiger counters up to their site and then they display the readings on that map.
The site also lists a bunch of geiger counter models that their software is compatible with. So I looked one of them up. Mostly I was curious what it would cost to have your own geiger counter.

The pocket sized DX1 model is only $259. Not bad. Only thing is, they're all sold out. Seems like curiosity about radiation levels is way up.
Quoting the home page of the geigercounters.com website:

We are SOLD OUT!

Update 3/25/11, 8:30 A. M. It will be weeks to months before we will have Geiger Counters for sale again - sorry! Read below.
Update 3/17/11, 5.03 A.M. We are no longer accepting orders for Geiger Counters of any sort. If you have already placed an order, it will eventually get filled, in days, weeks, or months, depending on when you placed the order. If not yet filled, your credit card has not been charged, and will not be charged until your order is ready to ship, and you may cancel your order at anytime up until then (do so by email only and put the word Cancel in the subject line). We are generally not answering emails, and if you must contact us, make sure it is urgent, and call us by phone, but please be advised that the time we spend on the phone takes away from order fulfillment. Thanks.

Yikes, looks like the geiger counter folks are going to have windfall profits this year. It also tells me that a number of people don't trust their government or their TVs or the internet, all of whom have put out fairly reassuring messages, i.e. nothing to worry about.

El Condor Pasa

2011-03-26T19:55:00.000-07:00

It's a song title and it's an opportunity for me to trot out yet another Condor picture.

After spending 5 days at the Pinnacles in February, I went back to our local library and looked up condors. Found two books. Condor books are about as rare as condors themselves, actually more rare in our library than actual condors. I checked out the one called In Condor Country. Finished reading it today and right near the end found this quote by Ken Brower:

"When man and condor meet today, it is with a glance of mutual appraisal, each to see whether the other is yet extinct."

Tony and Big Al

2011-03-26T11:53:00.000-07:00

Tony Mullins likes long paddles. A year or two back I made several long ones, based on some photos that Jeffrey Dickrell of Unalaska, AK had sent me. The photo above shows Tony with a regular length Aleut paddle in his left hand and a nine footer that he calls Big Al in his right hand.
I took the photo right after a paddle that Tony and I had done on a windy day. Water in SF bay is choppy and unsteady in high winds and a long paddle acts partly as a balancing pole and partly as a source of extra leverage for better control in the high winds.
But Tony has his own story to tell of how Big Al, the nine foot paddle helped him get through some rough swim escort duty the previous Friday. Various organizations put on various swimming events in San Francisco bay throughout the year. The events usually end up at aquatic park which features a sandy beach and a sheltering pier that protects the beach from boat traffic. Tony's story in italics:

Friday, March 18th, two other paddlers and I volunteered as kayak escorts for a San Francisco Bay swim from the Golden Gate Bridge to Aquatic Park, a distance of about 2-1/2 miles. On that Friday morning there was very unstable weather that included high winds, heavy rain, a water spout off of Ocean Beach and a tornado 60 miles to the north.
I was paying close attention to the weather forecasts in the days before the swim & was most concerned about the high wind warnings. So, I decided to replace my “short” 8’4” Greenland paddle with my longer 9’ Aleut “Big-Al” because I wanted to get as much leverage as I could for the potentially high winds.

The swimmers were originally scheduled to jump into the water to the west of the bridge but were repositioned to just east of the bridge at about mid-span because of large swells…Almost as soon as they entered the water, the relatively large but even swells turned into troubled waters. Almost immediately my swimmer and I got caught in a whirlpool which spun my boat in complete circles several times. I was very glad to have Big-Al to help punch me out of the swirl, although with my increasing anxiety I probably could have gotten out using bare hands! From then on all the way down to Aquatic Park, the winds became stronger and at times straight into our faces along with pounding rain as we paddled southward into the beach.

I’ve liked relatively long paddles for the past several years, but I liked Big-Al even more after it got me out of trouble on last Friday's swim escort!

Tony and swimmers on the beach at Aquatic Park. Behind them in the distance, Alcatraz. The Golden Gate is off to their left and out of the picture.

Iqyan in Akutan

2011-03-16T09:33:00.000-07:00

Back in 2004 I was up in Akutan, AK helping Kurt Schmidt and his junior high and high school class build some skin on frame baidarkas or iqyan in Unangam Tunuu, the Aleut language. After I left, Kurt and class finished a bunch of the baidarkas.
Just the other day, Kurt sent me a picture someone had taken back in 2008. Apparently the baidarkas are still cruising around on their home ground.
And here's some photos from 2004.

Students out front of the school facing the bay.

Students out front of the school facing the school

Karen, the first to finish here baidarka trying it out.

Baidarka a little ways down the bay. The red spot behind the rock is a buoy. They get away from the fishermen.

DonJon in his Baidarka in the gym where all the baidarkas were built.

DonJon and friend trying out the new sleds.

And standing them up.

kayak trailer 2.0

2011-03-06T13:09:00.000-08:00

Diane got release 2.0 of her kayak trailer off the ground. This one works much better than Release 1.0. It's a basic off the shelf bike trailer with minimal mods, the main one being an extended tube connecting the trailer to the hitch.

The kayak is held in place by two bicycle inner tubes.
Next project, how to get this rig on the trans-bay ferry.

More Sunken Boat

2011-03-06T12:57:00.000-08:00

Fellow kayaker Tony sent me the following pictures of the boat that sank during a recent winter storm in SF Bay. See my comments on that sinking in my two years before the mast post. Anyway, boats and rocks is a bad combo and no good comes of it. So the more distance we keep between boats and rocks, the better.

Hard to imagine the bay could blow a boat off its anchor when the sun is out and the water is flat on a day like this.

Another Iqyax^

2011-03-06T12:46:00.000-08:00

My friend Patty, Unangan bent-wood hat maker sent me this photo. Sharon, the young woman in the picture made a scale model iqyax^ by following the instructions in my book. The iqyax^ was in the UA Fairbanks Native Arts Exhibit.

California Condor

2011-02-25T05:57:00.000-08:00

This past weekend we went camping at Pinnacles National Monument. A national monument is like a National park only it's been established by a president rather than a congress. Pinnacles was established by Teddy Roosevelt who was a president.
As you can see from the photo above, Pinnacles is a rugged place. It features along with exposed rock, some of the few remaining specimens of the California Condor. At one time, the condor tribe was down to 20 some individuals. Now it is up to about 300 individuals.
When we went to the Pinnacles, a place we had never been to before, we hoped to see some condors but figured that we would have to be extremely lucky to do so.
Well, we got lucky, or maybe you don't have to be all that lucky because condors love the Pinnacles. Condors don't like to flap their wings or otherwise exert themselves. They prefer to land in a spot from which they can launch into space and then just steer for an updraft which will elevate them to a height from which they can see something large and dead.

On our third day at the Pinnacles we did the hike up to the top of the Pinnacles a place from which we might be able to spot some condors according to the rangers. Up we went, and there sitting on a rock was a large bird the looked like it might be a condor.

I took some pictures, put the camera in playback mode and zoomed in and sure enough, this bird had a number on it, a sure sign that it was a condor.

This is a picture of the condor in flight. You can see the wing patches - white on the black feathers. This is still number 43. Now I need to point out that there are also a lot of turkey vultures around and at a distance, condors are hard to tell from the vultures. Once you've seen a condor, you can tell it from a vulture. And if nothing else, if you've got good binoculars, you can tell them apart because condors have numbers on them.
Imagine you have to teach an alien how to tell football players from ordinary humans. Probably the easiest way is to tell the alien that football players have numbers on them.

One last photo. Condors have 9 foot wing spans.

Post Script:

I just went to the library and checked out a book on Condors. It was written at a point when the Condor population was down to twenty some birds. I hope to find out more about what their chances are for survival on their own. Keeping them alive right now is a multi million dollar effort. A lot of that money comes from private donations. And I hope the people who are working on this project are successful and get to put themselves out of a job.

Grow your own Boat

2011-02-24T19:23:00.000-08:00

The grow your own boat project is going well so far. All the willow twigs I have stuck in the ground along the fence line at the shop have sprouted except for the ones that shop neighbor Tim's dog Shasta has dug up. Shasta loves to dig up ground squirrel burrows. So, at last count, I have something like 50 willow plants growing. There will probably be several withes per plant, probably enough total to make a basket. I think boat rib size twigs take at least two years to grow. We will find out.

Here's a typical sprout. I have one row growing north south of which this is a specimen. I have another row growing east west which is getting shaded by ice plants and is a little slower coming up.

And here's a shot down the east-west row, an attempt to show more than one plant at a time. Problem is that green is a marvelous camo color for a green background.

And among all this stuff, a mushroom pops up as well. Don't know what it's called, but a mycelium is a good thing to have in a plot where you are trying to grow something. That white thing next to the mushroom is a piece of plastic foam. Don't know what the significance of that is other than that plastic is ubiquitous and we need some plastic eating mushrooms.

post apocalyptic homeless flesh eating zombies

2011-02-17T14:47:00.000-08:00

Here we go.
If you are at all into post apocalypticism, check out the March issue of Harper's magazine. William Vollman, author of numerous books has an article about camping out with homeless people in Sacramento, CA, his home town.
Just about anyone who is into post apocalypticism can probably find some homeless campout spots in their home town. These seem to be more popular in California where the weather is mild. It's raining right now and gets near freezing at night but at least, there's no snow on the ground. If you want to do some post-apocalyptic exploration, you can probably spend a night in some homeless camp and see whether you really like the idea of post apocalyptic living or not. Or you can just buy the Harpers issue and read about it. Or you can forget about the whole thing and watch the trailer about flesh eating zombies.

Two years before the mast in a post apocalyptic kayak trailer

2011-02-17T14:17:00.000-08:00

I was checking the stats on my blog and I found that the kayak trailer blog entry had the most hits lately followed by post apocalyptic look and feel followed by two years before the mast.
Now I think what happens is that people search for certain things and then they follow the links and when the link takes them to my page, I get a hit. I suspect that most of these hits are sorry, wrong number kind of hits. What I'm posting about isn't really what they're looking for.
For instance, people searching for kayak trailer probably are searching for something you can tow behind a car, not something you can tow behind a bicycle. And people searching for post apocalyptic are probably searching for who knows what, perhaps descriptions of the rapture? Flesh eating Zombies?
Come to thing of it, I should do at least one blog on flesh eating zombies and see what happens to my page hits. Two years before the mast with flesh eating zombies. I will work on that. Have to get some video or at least photos.
stay tuned

Two years before the mast

2011-02-16T21:33:00.000-08:00

Two Years Before the Mast is Richard Henry Dana's account of collecting cow hides in California between 1834 and 1836. The book is considered a classic. I read it for the first time about a year ago. If you've never read the book or never even heard about it before, you can go on the internet to find out more about it. If you have a Kindle, you can even get a free copy of it. Or you can go to your library. I'm not trying to plug the book, mind you. If you live in California, the book probably holds more interest for you than if you live in say, Iowa. In any case, I live in California now and so the book has more interest to me than the average citizen of Iowa because it talks about places that are more familiar to me than to the citizens of Iowa.
A little side note here before I go on with this narrative. Perhaps because Dana's book is out of copyright, publishers can't make much money on it so they don't want to pay extra to get a picture of a boat that actually resembles the one that Dana sailed on. Dana sailed on a brig which is a two masted, square rigged vessel. Good luck finding one of those on the cover of his book.
Things were different in the California of 1834 than they are in the California of today. The gold rush had not started yet. San Francisco was not a city yet. Nothing was the same as it is now except for the weather.
Dana writes about the winter storms, south-easters. They brought rain and high winds. They still do. We just had one of these storms. Dana tells us that when his ship saw a south easter coming on, the captain would take her out to sea. The coast was not safe. California has few natural harbors. Far off the coast was the safest place to be in a storm that was blowing landward. It still might be.
When I got to the shop today, one of the guys told me that Eric, a guy who lives on a sailboat had been looking for me. His boat had just sunk. I don't know why Eric was looking for me. The guys in the shop hadn't taken good notes.
So when I was done doing what I had to do at the shop, I drove down to where Eric's boat had been anchored. Sure enough, Eric's boat was up on the rocks and had a big hole in it. Eric wasn't around but some other people were working on his boat, pumping water out of it. A bunch of his gear was piled up on shore, including the rowing scull he used as a tender.
And then I was wondering, what kind of sailor was Eric? Didn't he know about the dangers of a lee shore, hadn't he read Two Years Before the Mast? Maybe he thought he was in a safe anchorage. But he wasn't.
And last year another boat was anchored in the same place as Eric and about the same time of year, a winter storm came in and blew his boat into the rocks and sank it.
When I first moved to the Bay area, I was surprised that people called rainy weather a rain storm. It never really rains all that hard but I guess it blows hard enough to drive boats up on the rocks just like 200 years ago. Maybe I'll give the next guy that anchors off that rock wall in the winter a copy of Two Years Before the Mast.

Bill Samson Builds Baidarka

2011-02-16T14:37:00.000-08:00

Bill Samson posted a trailer on youtube for a video he did on building his latest baidarka replica. Watch now.
The video can be ordered at the address posted at the end of the trailer.

Springtime

2011-02-16T14:25:00.000-08:00

Springtime is approaching in the northern hemisphere, at least it seems to be at some latitudes. Hard to believe in some parts of the US where people are still up to their armpits in snow. Still, the earth is persisting in its peregrinations about the sun. And sooner or later the earth will be tilted toward the sun sufficiently where the trees around latitude 45 will get the message and start pumping sap up their trunks and people of that region will be tapping them to get their sap which they will boil down and put into bottles which other people will take to pour the contents on their breakfast arrangements.

I am thinking of this mostly because I am packing for a camping trip and in looking for bottles to transport such things as soy sauce, I have run across a little bottle shaped like a log cabin that once contained maple syrup from New Hampshire where the sap will soon be rising.
If you are snow bound, take heart. Spring is near.

That post apocalyptic third world look and feel

2011-02-10T10:59:00.000-08:00

I'm working on the part of the Aleutian Kayak that has to do with bending wood. And so I went and took some pictures of old steam boxes down at the shop. They're not really that old. They've been used maybe a dozen times. But they've sat outside for a year and the effects are starting to show.

Which got me to thinking, what is it about them that makes them look third world. Certainly, pictures like these don't inspire confidence in someone from a first world culture who is used to shiny plastic tools and chrome etc. There are even whole websites devoted to making fun of people who improvise temporary or permanent solutions in the home fixit department. And I don't know if it's still on the air, but there was this TV show out of Canada called The Red Green show about two guys who did a lot of fixes with duct tape.

Here's another picture, this one a closeup on an 8 foot long steambox for heating wood for coamings.

So why do these things look so third world? I suppose the duct tape is a big factor, as is the foam insulation, as is the weathered look from sitting outside. The foam is starting to come apart, the duct tape is failing and the wood is turning gray and splitting.
So what is it that makes us contemptuous of this sort of thing? All I can say is that it has to do with money. The rich have contempt for the poor. The poor manage as best they can given the resources that they have. The rich hire someone to do things for them. And they have money for big houses with lots of storage and big lots for erecting sheds that keep stuff out of view and out of the sun where it starts deteriorating.
The third world builder on the other hand has to store some stuff outside because he has no inside storage and so the sun and rain start to go to work on his stuff.
And the third world builder is not that interested in the stuff itself. His stuff is a means to an end, not a status symbol.
So what's my excuse for having steam boxes that look distinctively third world? I guess the reason is that a lot of the stuff I build is provisional. It is a first cut. I build, not being sure if the thing will even work, so I don't invest a lot of time and resources in it. The steam boxes were made out of whatever was laying around at the time. The long steam box was made out of 3/4 inch lumber and some 1/4 inch paneling. The 1/4 inch paneling was too thin and leaked out too much heat so the box never got hot enough. Hence the insulation taped to the outside of the box. It is now fully functional. But it has spent some time outside after the latest move and the sun is starting to do its work.
So what's the lesson here? One is that 3/4 inch wood or even better, exterior plywood all around is optimal, both for standing up to the steam and potentially, outside storage and for holding the heat in. The foam insulation works as well but starts looking shabby after a while. So freshen it all up with duct tape every so often until it falls apart. So the life span is maybe half a decade with a minimal outlay of time or money.
If I wanted to go to the lumber yard and get 3/4 inch plywood, that would give me a steam box good for at least a decade, if not more. The downside is the trip to the lumberyard and the pain of lifting a four by eight sheet of plywood. That stuff weighs a ton and is the kind of thing that leaves your back hurting for days after you lift it on top of your car. So who knows, the third world solution has a lot of appeal, not the least of which is that your scrap pile gets smaller, not bigger as it would if I went to the lumber yard and picked up a full four by eight panel of plywood.

Kayak Transport

2011-02-06T08:00:00.000-08:00

Former shop mate Sebastian just mailed me a bunch of pictures from our move a year ago. We had a bunch of kayaks to store temporarily till we got our shop set up. Neighbor Dean graciously offered us some space back of his building which was just next door to ours. It was close enough so that we could use the bicycle trailer to move kayaks, as it turned out, we could manage 4 at a time.

And then we had to move the kayaks from behind Dean's building to our new shop, a little too far for the bicycle cart, so we used the Honda instead.

ume

2011-02-04T15:29:00.000-08:00

It's spring time in Alameda. The ume (Japanes apricots) are blossoming, first time since we got them. Perhaps the blossoms will turn into fruit. Then we can pickle them. Stay tuned.

New Chapter of The Aleutian Kayak Released

2011-02-02T11:51:00.000-08:00

I have released the deck building chapter of The Aleutian Kayak. Check it out

More Kayak Sailing

2011-02-01T07:16:00.000-08:00

Here we go again. More kayak sailing attempts. I was using my friend Tim Anderson's lug rig to test out kayak sailing for myself, but he took it back so it was time for me to make my own rig using John Bull's book, Sail your Canoe as a guide. I'm starting out with a lateen rig. I have two kayaks with mast steps and fair beam, 32 inches and 30 inches.
My approach to rigging the kayaks for sail is to hack away at the problem without any good idea of what I'm doing. Ideally, I would have done a design first. I know the basic principles like how big the sail should be, where it should be on the boat and so on. And I have some books that describe the different sailing rigs suitable for a small boat.
But that's not how I did it, at least not this time around. I made a sail based on John Bull's book using materials I had available to me. The sail ended up being about 8 feet on a side because that was the length of spar material I had laying around, redwood from reclaimed deck lumber that my friend Steve had donated. I know that nobody ever uses redwood for boat applications. Apparently too soft and doesn't hold screws well etc. Still, there it was, lovely old growth redwood with tight grain and a marvelous deep color. It would have been a shame to not use it for something nautical. If you're going to cut down an old growth tree, better to use it for something less earthbound than fence posts or rain gutters. And friend Tim had donated a several damaged wind surfer kites from which I salvaged sail material for a new life as a kayak sail.

The kite construction is very ingenious and I tried to borrow some of the technology for my sail, like instead of punching holes in the edge of the sail and putting grommets in the holes using straps or string sewn to the edge of the sail to make loops through which I ran lines to attach the sail to its spar. We'll see how that works out. I mean, it works for now. The question is how it will hold up over time.

And here is the same approach used on the corner of the sail, a loop instead of a grommet. My guess is that grommets go back to the days of cotton sail and hemp lines neither of which were as strong as more modern materials.

And here is the rig deployed on the boat. One thing I learned is to test out rig configuration back at the shop with the boat sitting on the ground. My old method was to haul everything down to the beach only to find out that things didn't fit together whereupon I had to haul everything back to the shop to "resolve the issues" as they like to say in the corporate world.
The center of effort of the sail looks to be a bit far forward, ok for going downwind but in need of an additional sail in back to bring the center of effort back far enough where a leeboard deployed somewhere around the middle of the cockpit would do some good.
The other problem with this configuration is that the mast step is a bit far forward of the front of the cockpit so that tending the sail is difficult. But we're learning.

In any case, there the boat sits on its bed of ice plans dreaming of its impending outing with the new sail.

Paddle Storage

2011-01-30T20:25:00.000-08:00

I finally came up with a scheme for storing my paddles at the new shop location. There they are tucked away in the rafters of the mezzanine I built. One thing about making your own paddles is that you always have enough or in my case, I can always think of more variations that I want to try out. The perfect paddle is ever elusive.

staying warm

2011-01-30T20:15:00.000-08:00

I just ran into this photo on the internet and was reminded of some similar photos I took a few years ago of my own cold weather paddling gear.

This is a photo someone took of the clothes that someone from the Canadian Arctic would wear in winter. There's a parka there, boots, gloves, fur pants and even a pair of long johns.

This is a photo I took a few years ago of the gear I would wear back in Wisconsin to go paddling on Lake Michigan in the winter. We used to go paddling as long as the temperature stayed above 15 degrees F, that's about -10 degrees C. When it got any colder paddling became difficult, mostly because ice would build up on everything from the boat to the paddle and clothes became stiff like cardboard to the point where movement became difficult. But mostly the multiple layers made immersion in the water possible. The water, of course never got below 32 degrees F (0 degrees C).

And there's my paddling jacket flanked by boots and gloves and at the top, a hood. We always used to go to dive shops for the neoprene gear because they had heavier duty stuff than the kayak stores.

The Dorset Culture, up the Arctic without a Kayak

2011-01-30T08:56:00.000-08:00

The Dorset culture is named after Cape Dorset, the place in the Canadian Arctic where the first artifacts from that culture were found. The Dorset are thought to have occupied the region from 500 BC to AD 1500. A small subgroup of the culture is believed to have survived in Newfoundland until 1903.

The Dorset are believed to have had a fairly complex stone tool technology but lacked drills, bows and arrows, dog sleds and possibly also kayaks. Whether the Dorset did not use drills, bows and arrows, dogsleds and kayaks by choice like the Amish who make conscious decisions about what technology to adopt or whether they abandoned certain technologies for practical reasons like access to sufficient sources of wood or whether knowledge of these technologies were lost as the result of some disaster is not known. It

Twentieth Century Inuk with bow and arrow, a technology that the Dorset lacked.

What is interesting is that the Dorset were able to survive without all the technology which we tend to think of as quintessentially Arctic. Apparently, the Dorset were especially well adapted to hunting on the ice and thrived in an era of great cold when ice could be found year round. So lack of a kayak may not have been a problem. Apparently, the Dorset culture went into decline when the climate became warmer starting around AD 800. There was less ice to hunt from and Dorset groups had to migrate farther north to find year-round ice. If the Dorset culture had adapted especially to hunting from the ice, they would not have had any use for kayaks.

An ice-based seal hunter of recent times, using a hunting method that the Dorset may have taught to the newly arrived Inuit.

Around AD 1000 Thule Inuit also started migrating east from Alaska. Whether they displaced the Dorset or whether the Dorset went into decline for other reason is not known. By AD 1500, the Dorset culture was essentially gone except for the small remnant that survived in Newfoundland until 1903.

Ancient People of the Arctic

2011-01-30T07:44:00.000-08:00

You can't really click to look inside. You will have to go to Amazon to do that, but that's the cover of Ancient People of the Arctic, Robert McGhee, author, a book I would highly recommend to anyone interested in the prehistory of the Canadian Arctic. The title is a little misleading since it suggests that it covers all of the Arctic. It doesn't. Its focus is on present day Canada. Still, you will find lots of good stuff here. There isn't much about kayaks here, but plenty of other amazing stuff.
The main insight that the book offered to me was the notion of what makes a place a good place to live. Why would anyone choose to live in the Arctic? The answer apparently is availability of food. The Arctic was a place where you could catch lots of sea mammals and therefore have a diet rich in protein and fat. Climate was a secondary consideration. Nowadays, we think of places like Southern California as desirable places to live, based mostly on year-round pleasant temperatures. Perhaps, now that we can ship food from elsewhere and move water around to raise crops in the desert, but two thousand years ago the Canadian Arctic may have looked more attractive to a people that had the appropriate technology to exploit the food resources of the region and stay warm. Californians meanwhile were subsisting on a diet consisting mostly of grass seed and the occasional rabbit or deer.
The Arctic may well have been a homeland of choice rather than a consolation prize for late arrivals unable to move into territory already occupied by paleo Indians.

Blackwood

2011-01-30T07:13:00.000-08:00

I'm thinking the coppiced tree behind our shop is a Blackwood. See here for lots of pictures. Seems to be an import from Australia that thrives in California's coastal climate.

The picture above is from the cited site. Picture of local blackwood below:

It's not in bloom yet but you can see the flower buds.

Boat Launch Party

2011-01-29T09:29:00.000-08:00

Diane organized a picnic to celebrate the launching of her boat. A number of her friends came and a bunch of other skin boaters came an brought their boats. Christian is in the background with the boat he built at the same time as Diane.

Tim trying out Diane's boat. Riding low due to occupant exceeding design displacement. Good for sneaking up on wildlife though.

Here's Joe in his low profile Greenlander.

And Joan giving it a whirl.

And Nobuto with noise maker to drive off bad water spirits.

Diane up close to her new boat. Note green grass, an indication that it is winter in California and has been raining.

Inside the cockpit.

And people brought babies.

Christian (l) and Stefan (r) hauling off Christian's boat. Boat's nose sharing cab space.

And here's the zoomed out view. Bye.
Good time was had by all, thanks to everyone who brought food and drink and good cheer.

Kayak Trailer

2011-01-29T09:13:00.000-08:00

Diane built a ten foot kayak partly for ease of storage and partly for light weight and partly because she wanted to be able to trailer it behind her bicycle, her primary mode of transport aside from walking. The kayak will be her primary mode of water transport.

The base of the kayak trailer is the undercarriage of a folding baby buggy.

Linkage to the bike is via a piece of plastic tubing and of course bicycle innertube lashings.

Only problem with release 1.0 of the bike trailer is that the kayak sits up too high and the springs in the buggy suspensions enable a back and forth oscillation in response to the pedaling action of the bike rider. Release 2.0 coming up soon.

Inadvertent Coppicing.

2011-01-20T09:41:00.000-08:00

The other day I was out front of the shop looking for twigs and I zeroed in on this particular tree in the corner of the lot. It looked like a volunteer, seeds blown in or dropped by birds. I have no idea what the species is, some sort of non-native evergreen whose seed escaped from somebody's yard.

Anyway, when I examined the tree more closely, I found out that someone once before had decided that they didn't want the tree that close to the building and had chopped it down leaving a 6 inch stump protruding out of the ground. The root system was still intact and of course sent up new sprouts which now are two to three inches in diameter and 15 feet tall. Inadvertent coppicing.

The Lashomatic Video

2011-01-20T09:21:00.000-08:00

I took this video a few years ago. Quality is so so, but it gets a few points across. The main point is that the lashing of hull stringers to ribs does not need to be odious or tedious. The key is to have a good lashing pattern and to have one hand inside the boat and one outside the boat. If you watch closely, you will see that this particular lashing pattern is quite simple. What makes is simple is that the string is constantly moves in a counterclockwise direction. Sometimes it backs up on itself to cinch the previous turn down but the overall motion is consistently counterclockwise. There is no magic to the counterclockwise part. You could just as well do this lashing clockwise, especially if you are left-handed.
The other thing that makes this lashing fast is that you have one hand inside the boat and one hand outside the boat. That way you just pass the string back and forth between hands. The only thing that goes back and forth is the string. The hands stay in place, and that's what makes this lashing fast. How fast? Under one minute. The camera I had at the time, a Canon G2 would cut out after thirty seconds of video. That's all it would do. Back then memory was more scarce.
What gets cut out at the end of the video because of the thirty second time constraint is the tying off of the string. Three half hitches and it's done. You throw your hands in the air when you're done like in calf roping and the clock stops.
One thing about this lashing pattern is that it's not particularly immobilizing, but that doesn't really matter. The point of the lashing is just to hold the parts in place until you get the skin on. Once the skin is on, it provides the pressure to keep the stringers from moving around. And if you want really immobile lashings, just paint your handiwork with water based varnish when you're all done. That stuff is like glue and will make for more immobile lashings than more fancy and more cumbersome lashing patterns.

New Baidarka (Iqyax^) Model

2011-01-20T08:48:00.000-08:00

I am working on a model of an Unangan (Aleut) kayak. The model is half scale which means that the gunwales are 7 feet long. Half scale sounds pretty big, but then that's only linear scale. If we're talking volume, it's one eighth scale.
Anyway, half scale works pretty well for kayaks. It's big enough that you can use most of the same tools you would use for a full scale kayak, but it's small enough that you can put it in your living room or den or wherever it is that you keep boat models in your house.
I'm not really a big fan of boat models from both the maker side and the consumer side. From the maker side, an accurate model is almost as much work as a full scale kayak and when you're done, you can't use it, except as a knick-knack.
From the consumer perspective, a kayak model is an expensive knick-knack. Usually, the consumer is reluctant to pay for what it costs to do the model accurately, so the maker cuts corners and produces something that superficially resembles the real thing. If you do collect boat models, the thing to do is to get models made for the early boat loads of tourists. The makers didn't know any better yet and made accurate models. Then they found out they could make superficial models much more easily and sell more especially if they cut their prices.
But that's not really relevant here. The reason I make boat models is that it is a way of exploring the construction process. If the model turns out to be a clunker, nothing much is lost. Actually, making full scale clunker kayaks is not about what you have lost, but rather about what you have gained, namely a kayak you don't want to paddle. It then becomes a storage problem or something you are reluctant to unleash on the public. Svend Ulstrup, Danish boat builder used to solve the problem the Viking way, he set boats on fire. I don't have the heart to do that.
So stay tuned for more photos of the model in progress.

Sticks and Boat Hooks

2011-01-14T10:49:00.000-08:00

I'm about to make more boat sticks, having given the last two away. Boat sticks come in a lot of forms depending on what you want to do with them. The one shown above is a retrieval stick that I had carved about 15 years ago when I went on a camping trip on Lake Michigan. You can put hatches on the deck of a skin on frame kayak, but I don't bother. I prefer to jam stuff into the boat from the cockpit. Only thing is that to get stuff back out of the kayak, you either have to turn it on end or you have to make yourself a retrieval hook. And if you're smart, you packed stuff in bags that have some kind of loop on them for the retrieval hook to latch on to.

Here is a picture copied from Edward William Nelson's book, The Eskimo About Bering Strait. These boat hooks were used for a variety of purposes, from pulling your kayak up to an ice floe to dragging a seal to your kayak to getting it back out of your kayak after you've stuffed it inside. Designs varied based on application and local preferences.

And then there is a third kind of boat stick, a plain one with no hook on it. I use them to get into and out of my kayak. Usually people just use their paddle to steady the boat but that is hard on the paddle. Sometimes when you aren't paying attention, your paddle breaks when you put too much weight on it. So a stick is good. six foot is a good length. Exact diameter depends on the wood. Whatever it is, it should be strong enough for you to lean on it without breaking it. I'll post pictures as soon as I make another one.

The Aleutian Kayak

2011-01-10T15:32:00.000-08:00

I'm finally putting out a second edition of my how-to book, The Aleutian Kayak. It is an online edition for now, kind of a stripped down version of the original but with improvements.

You can look at my progress so far by going HERE.
So far, I've got an introduction up, a chapter on planning and a chapter on making gunwales. A chapter on building the deck will come next. And before you know it, the whole book will be there.

How's the cleanup going? part n

2011-01-09T09:33:00.000-08:00

The Navy is still cleaning up the former Alameda Naval Air station. It is a sight to behold, something on the order of the building of the pyramids. Doesn't involve nearly as many people, but we have machinery that can do the work of hundreds if not thousands of people.

Here is a view of the seaplane lagoon from the top of our shop in building 29. The bottom of the lagoon is reportedly lined with mud that has considerable amounts of toxic solvents and a small amount of radium in it. At some point, contractors will pump the mud and the toxins it contains up onto land and then haul it off someplace else where it will still be toxic but not near any people who have access to a politician.

So the scheme as it appears, is to pump the mud out of the lagoon, but to keep the toxins from re-entering the ground when they get on land by making the ground impervious. Hence, the concrete will be topped off with asphalt, shown here in large piles.

Here's the crew with a paving machine with an asphalt truck backed up to it.

And here is the paving machine putting the asphalt down on a layer of plastic sheeting. I suppose the sheeting will make it easier to pull up the asphalt when the job is done.
Mind you, I am not critical of toxic cleanup. What I am critical of is that we are focusing on cleanup and not on prevention. Regardless of how well we manage our toxins, they will end up somewhere once we create them. So why not think twice about manufacturing them in the first place. Can we do without the stuff that we need the toxins for?

Sailing away

2011-01-09T08:52:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, I went out paddling with Joe Karr, the Bohemian Blacksmith. He couldn't get to his kayak, so I put him in my junior baidarkalounger, the one with 30 inch beam. Joe has been working on a sail for his Greenland kayak so I brought along the George Dyson style sail that my friend Steve Kaspar had given me. I figured Joe might like to play with this particular sail and kayak combo till he gets his own going.

There was no wind to speak of. Still, Joe was doing about one knot, enough to get some sense of the mechanics of the sail.

Setting sail was initially a failure. Since there wasn't any wind when we started out, I just threw the sail with all the lines all tangled up in the bottom of the boat and then later, when we were on the water, I tried to rig the contraption on the bow of Joe's boat from the kayak I was sitting in. Getting all the lines untangled proved to be just too much from the narrow deck of my kayak. So we paddled over to the beach where we were able to manage the untangling. Part of the problem with sailing, too many lines. This sail had six separate lines that you had to tend to. One sheet to control sail angle, a halyard to raise the sail and a third line for reefing the sail and the same thing on the other side. Good when it finally works, but a real pain when it's laying in the bottom of the boat with the lines all tangled up and you're trying to deploy it from a confined space with minimal mobility. Best to get it working at the dock.

And here he is from another angle. This was also my first chance to see this particular boat in action, to see how it trimmed. It worked pretty well actually.
But the best part was just being out, even though it was cold by Bay Area standards, 40 degrees maybe. But ideal paddling weather. Usually when the sun is out, the problem is getting overheated when wearing any kind of wetsuit or drysuit.

A tale of two boats

2011-01-05T10:47:00.000-08:00

We did a float test on the ten foot pseudo-baidarka the other day. Here are some photos and comments.

The boat on the left was inspired by the one on the right. Diane built the boat on the left.

Here's a rear view of the two boats. I added a skeg to the one on the left to make it track better. The one on the right, the new one has an integral skeg.

Here's the new boat afloat. It is covered in linen with several layers of varnish. It's still wrinkled here. After we paddled it we found that the fabric still wasn't completely sealed so it was leaking. But once wet, the wrinkles went away. That's the good part about plant fibers, they tighten up when wet unlike nylon which does the reverse, namely loosens up. How annoying.

The two sisters on the beach, about to launch.

Here's the boat in action. Plenty of freeboard. Should be interesting to see how it does in some windblown chop. Hard to find that this time of year.

I tried the boat as well. I am a little heavy for it just as I am a little heavy for the other ten footer that inspired this one. I would either need a little more beam or a little more length for my weight. I would also go a little wider on the stern, maybe ten inches instead of six. But for a person under 150 pounds, a ten footer with a 24 inch beam can be a reasonable boat. It is certainly light and easy to get around corners.

Two New Kayaks

2011-01-01T18:38:00.000-08:00

Over the last month or so, students built two new boats. These turned out quite nice. Both are baidarka variants, that is, inspired by an Aleut kayak design.

Christian's boat in the foreground and Diane's boat in the background.

This is Diane's boat, all of 10 feet long.

Diane's boat again from a different angle. Christian's boat in the foreground.

A view of the inside of Christian's boat with all the ribs in place.

Christian with the completed frame, 15 feet long.

Christian's boat with the skin on.

Diane wants to be able to sail her boat down the road so we put in a mast step. The round dowel is a temporary stand-in for the mast. Diane was opting for linen lashings.

Diane's boat with its skin on.

Closeup on the nose.

Boat lumber

2011-01-01T18:10:00.000-08:00

About a week ago, I planted this year's willow crop. Just stuck a bunch of sticks in the ground and am waiting for them to root and in spring, start sprouting. After that, it will be up to them to find water. If they grow, the shoots should be useful as boat ribs and maybe hull stringers.

This one is a pussy willow, already fixed up with roots, given to me by a friend. It should do well.

These are some of the unrooted willow twigs that I just stuck into the ground. I planted maybe 50 of them. If they all go, or even half of them, it will be quite a plantation. The willow twigs are circled by the white loops. I found it necessary to add those because the willow twigs against a green background are almost invisible.

jangada?

2010-12-31T18:04:00.000-08:00

Somebody suggested that the post apocalyptic boat from the last post was a jangada, a design native to Brazil. Could be. Here's a picture of a jangada.

Hull shape looks similar, but all the jangada pictures on the internet show them rigged for sailing. Who knows. Ongoing mystery.

postapocalyptic I can haz cheezburger boat

2010-12-31T07:46:00.000-08:00

If you've never been there, the I can has cheezburger site is a place where people post pictures of their pets and put funny captions on them. The captions are written in a babytalk/imaginary pet language with its own orthography. In any case, they have branched out into other realms. I am posting a photo from that website here because it is obviously a prime example of post-apocalyptic boat building. If you want to see it in its original environment, go here. Then you can also look a funny cat pictures.

Some points worth mentioning: The upright rowing posts and the oarlocks, a piece of rope or rag tied around both oar and post and the fact that the boat is rowed by the rower facing forward place it somewhere in east Asia. Normally, the person rowing is standing, but who knows, maybe they need a break sometime, hence the lawn chair.

ok, I'm turning on the word verification thing again

2010-12-13T12:52:00.000-08:00

The no word verification thing on comments was good for about a week or two. I don't get huge amounts of spam, but enough to annoy me after two weeks. Spam is bad enough, but having it archived on a hard disk somewhere in my comments section goes against my basic don't waste principles. And I don't feel like monitoring comments or cleaning out ridiculous stuff.
Some examples here of stupid stuff that you probably don't want to read any more than I do,

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Aleut Bent Wood Hat Making":

Wow, indeed nice article. How can I get this RSS?

Mary Swift
London Latin Escort

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Appropriate Technology???":

è stato molto interessante da leggere. Voglio citare il tuo post nel mio blog. Si può? E voi et un account su Twitter?

etc.

Planting Boat Parts

2010-12-09T20:51:00.000-08:00

So today I went out to this willow patch and got some willow shoots to plant behind the shop. Chopped them up into foot long sections and stuck them in a bucket of water. In a week or so they should be sprouting roots. I know this works because one time when I had harvested more rib stock than I could use right away, I put the excess in a bucket of water to keep them pliable and after a week or so they sprouted roots. Once they have roots I will plant them. I know they will survive into spring. Who knows what happens after that. I can water them for a while till their roots get thoroughly established. After that, they will be on their own. They will either send roots down till they find water or they will dry up. I hope they make it.

I also stopped by the quince trees. I don't know why they are where they are. They are not native. Someone may have planted them long ago before this was park land. The quince were all gone. I got there a little late. The deer ate them all. There's deer tracks all around the trees. Maybe the deer munched the quince when they were younger and got them to send up all those skinny straight shoots. They bend nicely. Would make some good boat ribs.

Reinventing the Folbot

2010-12-09T20:28:00.000-08:00

A while back I picked up this book called Fabulous Folbot Holidays at the local used book store. I got it mostly for the pictures, I thought. I loved the vintage 70's era photos. I took the boat home and stuck it in the bookshelf and didn't look at it for a year. A week ago I pulled it out again for whatever reason and started reading it. Really quite entertaining. It's part stories and testimonials by people who owned Folbots and part advertising copy for different Folbot models like this one following.

Hey, it's the 17-1/2 foot Super. Looks a lot like my first baidarkalounger which comes in at 18 feet and is 32 inches wide. Only the Super is 37 inches wide. If you click on the photo, you'll get a large view and can probably read the specs and the advertising copy. So what I discovered was that a boat that big is too much for one person to paddle casually, though I've done it. It's not impossible. It's just not desirable, It's just more work than I typically want to do.

So then I built another baidarka, this one a little shorter, 15 feet and 30 inches wide. And wouldn't you know it, Folbot had a 15 foot boat as well. They called it the Sporty and made it 32 inches wide. You might almost say that I was channeling Folbots for a while there.
I don't really know how these things happen. I wasn't thinking of Folbots when I made my baidarkas. They just turned out proportioned like slightly slenderized Folbots. I was really taking my inspiration more from sailing canoes of a hundred years ago, at least on a conscious level.
And then I started thinking that yes, back in the 60's my dad had a Folbot and I used to paddle that but it didn't make any kind of impression on me that I could tell at the time. Never had a desire to own a Folbot, but here I am building baidarkas that are shaped an awful lot like Folbots. The workings of the boat building mind are truly mysterious.
And the weirdest thing about these Folbots is that they really are not bad boats. They are a little wide by today's standards, but they are stable and probably paddle a heck of a lot better than plastic sit on tops. Who knows, I might be tempted to build a real Folbot, one that fols up into a bag.

more thoughts on coppicing

2010-12-09T10:52:00.000-08:00

I picked up a copy of Eric Sloane's America at our local used bookstore the other day. What becomes apparent if you read even a little of the book is the prodigious amount of wood consumed by the early European settlers. There were so many trees to cut that they didn't have to bother with twigs. As Kilii points out in a comment, native dwellers did coppice, most likely because given the tools they had, it was easier to collect twigs than to cut down whole trees and split them. And Kiliii and his crew are keeping up the tradition. So I am happy to hear that somebody beside myself collects twigs for boat building.
And finally, here is a picture of pollarded willows.

The picture is from the back cover of a book I had read as a kid. It shows a medieval German landscape. Willows grow here and there next to the road. But they are entirely lacking in branches. Every winter, the thin shoots are cut for basketry and brooms and whatnot and every spring, the willows put out new shoots with enough leaves to nourish the tree and keep it alive for another year.

dry ride in an ulux^tax^ (two hole baidarka)

2010-12-09T10:25:00.000-08:00

Dave Wilhelm asked me if I had any thoughts on how to build an ulux^tax^, an Unangan (Aleut) two-holer in which the bow paddler stays dry. I gave him a brief reply and told him I would post some pictures here for the benefit of a slightly larger audience. So here goes, a picture.

The really apparent thing here is that the front 3 feet of this boat are sticking out of the water. This seems to be an extreme case. Most of the time only the front 2 feet of a double would stick out of the water, but you get the idea.
What makes for a wet ride in a double is that the bow spears a wave and the water on deck douses the bow paddler. The trick is to prevent the bow from spearing into the face of a wave. Elevating the bow is one way. Making the boat flexible is another. A long stiff boat with some momentum to it has no option except to spear into a wave unless it has a good deal of rocker and enough volume forward to lift the bow. Having flex lets an ulux^tax^ pick up rocker as needed.
Although much has been written about the flexibility of baidarkas, little has been said about the role of the skin. My observation is that regardless of how flexible the frame is, a tight skin with little stretch to it will limit flex of the boat as a whole considerably. I have no experience with hide-covered boats, but I suspect their ability to stretch would have affected how flexible they were.

monetization

2010-12-05T06:21:00.000-08:00

I got some feedback on whether to turn on monetization or not. Nobody seems to care, so the next time I'm in the mood for jumping through the requisite hoops, I may turn it on. I got thumbs down on word verification for comments, so I turned that off. We'll see how many spam comments that allows in. What the heck, bad attention is better than no attention at all.

coppicing and pollarding

2010-12-03T06:21:00.000-08:00

You don't hear much about coppicing and pollarding in America. And right now, as I'm typing this, the editor is putting red squiggly lines under both of the words because they aren't in the editor's dictionary. So, in case you haven't figured out what coppicing and pollarding are, let me tell you. Coppicing is the practice of sawing off a young tree at ground level. All the roots of the tree are intact so next year, it puts out several shoots from the stump you have left behind, and in a few years, how many, depends on how big a piece of wood you need, you have several straight pieces of wood suitable for things like fence posts, hurdles and other application.
Pollarding is similar to coppicing, except you prune all the branches off an older tree and just leave stumps. Next year, the stumps put out new branches, each one a straight shoot especially suited for things like basked weaving.
I really don't know why coppicing and pollarding isn't practiced much in America, but I know that it is in England.
The reason it is practiced there, I am theorizing, it twofold. One is that coppicing and pollarding works best with certain species of trees which seem to like the British climate. The second reason is that Britain has been densely populated for a long time and so mature logs are not as plentiful as in North America. As a consequence, the British have come up with a way to quickly raise useful wood in less than full tree dimensions.
And as I already alluded, coppicing trees looks like a good way to grow boat parts like ribs or stringers, and for small boats, even gunwales. What appeals to me is the idea of growing boat parts to the proper dimensions so all you have to do is peel and trim which is a very low tech way of processing wood. No running full grown trees through a saw to produce lots of sawdust and a few usable planks. Anyway, I'm looking to do some coppicing provided that I can find some suitable wood species that will grow locally.
Stay tuned.

The west end of Alameda, a former salt marsh topped off with dredged fill, mostly sand. Will anything tree-like grow here? It's raining now & I can probably get some willow shoots going. But no rain from March to November. Who knows what will survive.

Coppicing Wood to make a Yurt - a Shamans Life - by Youtubeshaman.com

2010-12-02T07:07:00.000-08:00

So as a seamless segue, here is a guy showing how to cut wood to make a yurt. Same concept would work for gathering kayak materials.
Certain locales work better than others, but even here in the SF Bay area which has an arid climate, there is water in low places that favors some growth of sticks suitable for boat wood.

И. Растеряев. Моя деревня Раковка - My village is Rakovka.

2010-12-02T06:43:00.000-08:00

a few posts back I put up a little youtube video clip of a Russian Aleut accordion player. So most recently, I got a friend invite on youtube from sunfish737, another Russian accordion player, not Aleut though. Check him out. he has a bunch of videos of himself playing accordion. sort of a punk sensibility. The accordion seems to be to Russians what the guitar is to Americans, a medium of proletarian expression.
But OK, so what does this have to do with boat building? Check out the background in this video. It is what the British call a hurdle, I think, a fence made of small diameter sticks woven around verticals stuck into the ground. Anyplace that can grow these can come up with wood for a skin on frame boat.
Anyway, enjoy the accordion playing.

everything is connected

2010-12-02T06:35:00.000-08:00

everything is connected - a corny concept, perhaps somewhat discredited by blatant overuse by the new age crowd. Nevertheless, if you have an active mind, you can connect everything and anything with anything else.
So in short order, I have managed to connect the Russian Aleut accordion player with another Russian accordion player with coppicing with boat building with new age thought.
Anyway, the idea of connectedness was not invented by new age thinkers, it was simply revived by them. The central concept is animism, I think, that everything has spirit which is the substrate that connects all things. So there we go. Animism is still the major explanatory concept throughout most of the world, much more popular than materialism which is what drives industrial cultures.
I don't know if this is a valid connection, but it seems that where materialism is the intellectual substrate of industrialism, animism is the intellectual/spiritual substrate of pre and possibly post industrial societies.
So here is my proposal for the day: animism is the driving force of post-apocalyptic boat building.

A Visit to the Hearst Museum

2010-11-24T09:49:00.000-08:00

No, not the Hearst Castle, the Hearst Museum at the UC Berkely campus. Named after Phoebie Hearst, philanthropist mother of William Randolph Hearst the newspaper man and creator of the Hearst castle and the inspiration for the Orson Wells movie, Citizen Kane.
This place used to be called the Lowie museum, named after an anthropologist. Something must have happened to trigger the name change, probably a gift of money. That's usually what motivates change.
So anyway, Mike Livingston was in town and he had never seen the baidarka frame at the museum before, so we went to visit it. Mike also arranged for us to see a bunch of baidarka models that were in the museum storage.
I wasn't expecting to see much new stuff since I had been to the museum twice before. And models tend not to offer much insight either. So all in all, my expectations were low. But as it turned out, I did learn a bunch of new stuff and noticed things that I hadn't noticed before. So overall, this turned out to be quite an enlightening trip.
A few photos and some brief comments follow. This is not a full analysis of the situation which I hope to work up and post somewhere but just a quick overview of what I noticed.

Here is a picture of the bow of the Aleut kayak from Atka. Of special note is the lashing at the top that ties the deck stringer to the bow plate. You might have to click on the photo for a larger view to see it clearly. Anyway, the string goes through the deck and then through a hole in the vertical part of the bow assembly.
What I noticed was that this was one of a number of modifications to the boat made by someone other than the original builder. My suspicion that it was other than the original builder who made the add-ons is based on two things. The original build was of very high quality and workmanship. And the builder didn't paint the frame red until all the building was done, including the boring of holes. What makes me think that the bow lashing was an add on is that the holes are rougher than the original lashing holes and that they are not painted, that is the boring of the holes exposed fresh wood.

The same goes for the stern. A new lashing was added to tie the tail fin into the stern cross block. Not shown here are three more additions that would reduce the flex of the frame. Apparently, the add ons were made to stiffen up the boat. Why would someone want to stiffen up the boat? Apparently to sail it.

Here is the mast step add on lashed to the ribs. We saw the sail that was used with this boat, but didn't take it out of its plastic bag.

We looked at a bunch of baidarka models as well. For some reason, all but one were two-holers. No singles. As I already mentioned, I wasn't expecting much since models are usually not to scale and distorted for ease of building, but these were quite accurate. The detail on the deck gear and paddles was especially revealing. What sets these models apart from some others I have seen is that they were apparently made by men who had also done the full size boats and gear, so the detail was quite authentic. I especially noticed the paddles. The one pictured above and below was of the short loom variety. I don't think that all paddles of that period had short looms, but some definitely did. Looms were on the order of 18 to 20 inches and blades were on the order of 40 inches.

Here is a picture of a guy holding his short loom paddle. I think that paddlers held these paddles like Greenlanders held their short loom paddles, that is, thumb and forefinger curled around the loom at the root of the blade and the rest of the hand sitting on the root of the blade.