Whence the Kayak?

For over a week now, I've been on this detour from working on my book where I've tried to figure out where kayaks came from. The origin of the kayak was supposed to be just a page or two in my book in a chapter on the history and evolution of the baidarka. Unfortunately, I have found out that there isn't much to be found on the topic. At least not where I've looked. I imagine if I trucked on down to the university library whereever they hide the archaeology journals, I could probably find something, but would this be worth the effort?

I'm starting to get pessimistic about the prospect. Nevertheless, let me throw out what I've found. None of this is coherent, it is more in the nature of dots that can't be connected, or maybe dots that can be connected in any way you like provided you have an active enough imagination.

So here goes – random facts about kayaks and their possible origin.

1. The use of kayaks more or less died out after WWII due primarily to a glut of cheap energy. People throughout the Arctic could afford to buy aluminum skiffs and put outboard motors on them. That plus high-powered rifles made it possible for two people, one of them steering and the other one shooting to run down just about any kind of game and bag it.

2. In the historical period, that is, from the time that European whalers moved into the arctic, kayaks were found in Greenland, across the Canadian North, Alaska and the part of Siberia closest to the Bering strait. Kayaks did not spread any farther west across Siberia than the Bering Sea Coast. I don't know much about Siberia, but it seems that a kayak along the Arctic Coast would have been a handy thing. Why then didn't these people have any? My guess is reindeer herding. There might be other factors, but it seems that the people of most of Siberia did not depend primarily on the sea for sustenance but lived off the reindeer herds which they followed and tended.

3. The kayak could have been invented in one place and then spread out across its current range from there. Or the kayak could have been invented in more than one place.

4. The kayak could have been invented by the ancestors of the Eskimo-Aleuts and brought with them into what is now Alaska. Or the kayak could have been invented after people had already migrated into Alaska.

5. Open boats are generally more handy than closed deck kayaks for just about everything other than solitary hunting. My guess is that kayaks were used primarily in places where survival depended heavily on sea mammals as food and as a source of skins.

6. People who first migrated to Alaska were of two types, people of the interior and people of the coast. These two types of people had different hunting technologies. The people of the coast traveled by water and also got their food primarily from the water.

7. It was the people of the coast that invented the kayak.

8. We don't know much about the people of the coast before 10,000 BP (before the present) because the coast that they lived on is under 300 feet of water.

9. The earliest evidence for the use of boats in Alaska is 8500 BP at Anangula. The evidence is indirect. Anangula is an island and could only have been reached by boat.

10. By 6000 BP people had moved to Adak in the middle of the Aleutian chain.

11. The people who migrated down the Aleutian chain may already have had kayaks. They had to have boats to make the migration. Most likely those were larger open boats. However, I don't know whether the open boats would have been suitable for hunting. It is possible that the ecology of those days was different and that there was enough food available for people that didn't have kayaks or that they had different hunting techniques in those days. But to venture out on the ocean in an open boat requires a pretty large open boat, one that requires a sizeable crew. At least in historical times, t he open boats were only used for whale hunting. But the Aleuts, at least in historical times, did not hunt whales from open boats.

12. There is a good deal of similarity between the baidarka of the Aleuts and the baidarka of their neighbors down the coast in Kodiak. There is also a fair amount of similarity between the baidarka of the Aleuts and the kayaks of the Bering Sea shore up to Bering Strait. Perhaps they all had a common ancestor or perhaps key design features spread throughout the whole region over a period of centuries. Apparently as early as 2000 BP, kayaks at Seward Peninsula already used the four stringer, round hulled design that is still in use today. This is based on a piece of kayak skin found on the Seward Peninsula by Danish Archaeologist, Helge Larsen.

13. The region of kayak cultures has in the past been occupied by a number of different cultures. Each culture had different technologies for manufacturing hunting weapons and other tools. As a matter of fact, it is primarily stone artifacts that survive over long periods of time and it is these artifacts that define cultures. Not much else remains to tell us who lived where and when. The existence of kayak is deduced from the type of hunting implements found. At least during the historic period, certain types of weapons were associated only with kayaks. The presence of these weapons could suggest the existence of kayaks. Kayak parts themselves are hard to find. The only thing that would survive would be deck toggles to hold weapons and such. However, kayaks were not stored indoors and it is at house sites that archaeologists typically dig.

14. Archaeology in the Arctic is paced by the number of people willing to work at it. There is still quite a bit of territory that hasn't been explored. Archaeologists had to make a choice between going out and digging or staying home and analyzing their finds and publishing their findings. During the latter part of the twentieth century they leaned toward digging.

15. The fact that the Arctic has been populated by a number of different cultures with different technologies implies that whatever boat technology existed may also have changed drastically from one culture to the next.

16. Unlike humans who in their DNA carry a record of their ancestry, nothing of the kind exists for kayaks and other inanimate objects. What you see is what you get and you can only guess where the idea to make a thing a certain way first came from. For kayaks, this sort of speculation is especially difficult because kayaks decay rapidly and little or nothing remains behind after a few thousand years. So when we look at a Bering Sea kayak and an Aleut baidarka, we can see some sort of design similarities and obvious mutual influences, but without some physical record, we have no way of knowing who came first and who influenced whom. Perhaps in the future, more digging and analysis will establish a sequence of cultures for the Arctic and the Aleutians and that sequence in time as well as in location will give us some clue how people and technologies moved around the region.

17. Recently, stone tools were found on the Island of Crete in the Mediterranean. The tools were dated at 130,000 BP. Crete has been an island that whole time. The only way that the tool makers could have gotten to the island was by boat. Boat building is obviously a very ancient human activity. There is nothing in principle that would have prevented the invention of the kayak in the Arctic from t he time that people first moved there. The question is only whether they did.

Aleut Prehistory

Prehistory is the time before written records. For the Aleuts that would be the time before the Russians appeared in the middle of the 18th century.
Trying to determine the prehistory of the Aleuts is not simple, not because nobody has tried to discover it but rather because much of the land that people occupied during the migration from Asia to America is now under water. In any case, I will share what I have found.
Language analysis suggests that Eskimos and Aleuts both shared a common language at one time which in turn suggests that they shared a single culture in the past and probably the same group of ancestors.
Genetic evidence suggests that the group ancestral to both Eskimos and Aleuts crossed over to America roughly 15,000 years ago during the early post-glacial period and took refuge in what is now southern Alaska. From there, the ancestors of today's Eskimos and Aleuts migrated north to populate their present-day territories. An earlier theory had the Eskimo-Aleut ancestors migrating to America from the Siberian interior roughly 6000 years ago.

The pink/orange area is the extent of glacier-free land during the last ice age. It is here in ice-free Alaska that the ancestors of the Eskimos and Aleuts migrated to and that they dispersed from later to settle the Aleutians and the Arctic coast of North America.

The earliest evidence of human habitation in the Aleutians was found on the island of Anangula off the coast of Umnak island in the eastern Aleutians. The site was dated 8500 BP (before the present). Occupation of the settlement was ended by a nearby volcanic eruption that covered the island in six feet of volcanic ash. There is some dispute whether this settlement was peopled by ancestors of present day Aleuts or whether it was peopled by a group that was not a cultural ancestor of the Aleuts.

In any case, whoever settled Anangula had boats because Anangula was an island even 8500 BP.
Other archaeological evidence places Aleuts in the eastern Aleutians about 4000 years ago and in the western Aleutians 2000 years ago. Migration was clearly east to west from the direction of the Alaskan Peninsula and not west to east from Kamchatka.

The island of Anangula is about a mile from Umnak which is in the center of this map. Also extending upward from Umnak you can see the edge of what is the shallow part of the Bering Sea which during the last ice age was above water and formed part of Beringia.

Regardless of which direction the Aleuts came from and regardless of when they first arrived in the Aleutians, they must have made the migration by boat. Nobody knows what kinds of boats the Aleuts used to settle the Aleutians. Did they have open boats and closed deck kayaks when they started the migration or did they only have open boats and invented the kayaks later?

Louis Choris and the Uncertainty of the Past

Over the course of the past few weeks, I have been taking artists' drawings of baidarkas and put them in chronological order to get some sense of how the design of baidarkas may have evolved between 1760 and 1849. In the process of looking closely at these drawings, I found any number of improbable aspects to them, enough to make me wonder to what extent any of these drawings can be trusted. Comparison of drawings by various artists reveals a good deal of commonality, and the weight of numbers gives us some assurance that the things that all the drawings have in common are probably true. But there are also a number of differences between the various drawings and they make me wonder to what extent the differences were actually there and to what extent they are the product of invention or poor observation.
Let us look in detail at the drawings of Louis Choris because he is typical of the expedition artists that brought back pictures of the Aleutians.
For the sake of convenience I reproduce here a large chunk of Wikipedia's entry on Choris:

Louis Choris (1795-1828) was a famous German-Russian painter and explorer. He was one of the first sketch artists for expedition research. Louis Choris, who was a Russian of German stock, was born in Yekaterinoslav on March 22, 1795. He visited the Pacific and the west coast of North America in 1816 on board the Ruric, being attached in the capacity of artist to the Romanzoff expedition under the command of Lieutenant Otto von Kotzebue, sent out for the purpose of exploring a northwest passage.

Choris is said to have "painted nature as he found it. The essence of his art is truth; a fresh, vigorous view of life, and an originality in portrayal." The accompanying illustrations may therefore be looked upon as faithfully representing the subjects treated by the artist. After the voyage of the Ruric, Choris went to Paris where he issued a portfolio of his drawings in lithographic reproduction and studied in the ateliers of Gerard and Regnault.
End of quote.

I don't know who it was that said that Choris painted nature as he found it. Had they actually compared Choris' paintings with nature, they might have changed their mind. Before we look at Choris' drawings, let's take a detour and examine what we are actually looking at.
Before the advent of various photographic processes, artists made drawings or watercolor or ink sketches. The artists' drawings were then transferred by hand to a lithographic stone or metal plate from which multiple copies could be printed. Several things are worth noting about this process. The person who did the drawing on the stone or on the metal plate was usually not the artist, but a specialist in copying drawings. If the handedness of the drawing was important, then the person doing the copy would have to produce a mirror image of the drawing on the stone or plate. Certainly, if there was any writing, that would have to be created as a mirror image since the print is a mirror image of the printing plate. Secondly, the image on the plate or stone would often have more detail than the original sketch. Things that were vague in the original had to be detailed out in the copy. If the artist was not on hand or if the artist couldn't remember the details, then the person doing the copy would invent the details. To summarize, when we look at the lithographs based on Choris' drawings, we are looking at images that may have been altered or embroidered on by the lithographer.
So without any further delay, here are the works of Louis Choris as interpreted by an unknown lithographer.



This is one of my favorite Choris drawings. It depicts and Aleut man and woman. The man is wearing his gut raincoat and wooden paddling visor. The woman is wearing a European dress and a cross. This is quite surprising since in 1816 when Choris made this drawing, the Russians had been in the Aleutians for only a little over 50 years. In any case, what is noteworthy here is that Choris seems to have done a pretty good job of depicting nature as he found it. The raincoat shows the individual seams in the raincoat running horizontally across the garment and some other details. Of particular interest are the sea lion whiskers on the man's hat. The whiskers on a visor would go on the off-side of the hunters hat so they wouldn't interfere with the throwing of harpoons or darts. This means that the hunter was either left-handed or the lithographer didn't bother to reverse the image.


Here is another drawing of a man and a woman. This time, both the man and the woman are wearing traditional garb. Only now, Choris hasn't bothered to draw the horizontal lines on the rain coat but made it look as if it was made out of a single piece of fabric. The paddle is also curious. The shape seems reasonable, but assuming typical short stature of Aleuts of the time, the paddle would be a little less than 5 feet long and the loom would barely be big enough to get both hands on. My guess is that Choris liked the idea of the man leaning on his paddle and made it appropriately short. Or he might have seen a man leaning on a single bladed paddle but decided to substitute the double bladed paddle.
Someone familiar with Greenland paddles might suggest that the paddle in the picture might work like a Greenland storm paddle. However, the blades would be too wide for the paddler to slide his hands along the blade the way the Greenlanders do.


This picture is a closeup of an area to the right of the woman in the previous picture. It shows two baidarkas, a double in the foreground and a single in the background. What is interesting is that the paddlers in the double seem to be using single-bladed paddles while the paddler in the single is using a double-bladed paddle.
So the question is, should we take Choris at face value and accept that the Aleuts at one time had short paddles, perhaps for special conditions or that Choris was being inventive? Let's look at some more pictures before we decide.


This picture shows a paddler approaching a colony of Stellar sea lions. Most of the picture looks quite reasonable but two things don't. The first unreasonable thing is the way the paddler is holding his paddle. His left hand is overhand and his right is underhand. That is the way you would hold a canoe paddle. The only reason for making a double bladed paddle is that you can put both hands on top of the loom and shuttle the paddle from side to side without losing time changing the grip as in a single bladed paddle.
It is possible that Aleuts invented double bladed paddles without realizing that they could put both hands on top of the loom. Certainly, the invention of photography eliminated this particular kind of grip.
The second unreasonable thing is the length of the kayak's back deck. It appears as if Choris shortened it up to fit in the frame of the picture. If we take Choris at face value, we would expect the back of the kayak to sit much lower.
Choris is guilty of two things here, the grip on the paddle is the result of poor observation. The shortness of the back deck makes Choris guilty of distortion for the sake of composition.


This picture shows two baidarkas, a one holer with the skin on and a double with the skin off. The one holer seems to have been drawn from life. The frame of the two holer appears to be a work of the imagination. Choris was probably in the Aleutians for only a brief period and then only in the summer when the baidarkas would not have been without their skins. While the drawing of the double seems correct in some ways, it seems wrong in more ways than it is right. Choris may have briefly stuck his head inside a baidarka to see how they were put together. He got the longitudinal stringers and keelson right, but the spacing and placement of the ribs look like works of the imagination. It's hard to see in this small reproduction, but Choris also put the stringers inside the ribs. If you covered this imagined frame with skin, the ribs on the outside of the stringers would make bumps in the skin and a very slow boat.
The drawing of the single is actually pretty good. In a larger reproduction you can see three ribs inside the cockpit, evidence that this part of the lithograph was actually based on a sketch of a live baidarka and not the artist's memory and imagination.


Finally, here is a picture of two men in a double. Again, both of them are using the canoe grip on their paddles. The baidarka seems to have reverse sheer, the line of the gunwales being highest in the middle of the boat and dropping off toward both ends. This picture is a combination of a static shoreline and the dynamic kayakers in the foreground. It is most likely a union of two different sketches, a detailed study of the unmoving shoreline and an invented view of the two kayakers based in part on memory and in part on sketches from life.

In summary, I would say that the drawings of Choris do a good job of pointing out the problems of attributing historical significance to the drawings of any artist. A drawing is simply not the same thing as a photograph. The artist has certain limitations which are difficult to overcome. For one thing, drawings take some time to produce. They can be quite accurate if the artist is drawing a static subject. If the scene that the artist is trying to depict is dynamic, the artist has a number of options. He can do quick sketches of parts of a scene and then combine them to create a unified whole. All this takes time and the sketches may be all that the artist had time to make. The final product may not have been produced until the artist returned to his studio after the trip was complete.
Once photography was available, artists used it widely to get recordings of details that were too difficult or cumbersome to draw on the spot. Back in the studio, they would create their composition and fill in the details using the photographs.
Prior to the invention of photography, artists had to rely on their sketches to record factual details. Where they hadn't recorded the details, they resorted to their imagination or memory.
When people build replicas of baidarkas in artists' drawings, they might want to ask themselves how accurate these drawings are. Worst case, a baidarka based on an artist's rendering will simply be a bad boat and evidence of the artist's deficient skills of observation. Best case, a baidarka based on an improbable looking drawing may actually reveal useful design features that have been lost to following generations.

Wind-powered baidarkalounger

I don't know how much I already revealed about the baidarkalounger project, but here's a recap and update on recent developments.
Recap: The concept was simple - build a baidarka that is wide enough to be stable but not so wide that you can't paddle it. The baidarka should also be large enough so you can move around in it without capsizing and the cockpit should be large enough so you can lay down in the boat if you want to. In other words, I was going to build something on the order of a partially decked over canoe. This basic concept was then expanded to add features to the boat to make it sailable, namely, rudder, mast steps and lee boards.
Update: Here's the story in pictures.

Here's the cockpit coaming, 24 inches wide and 6 feet long,
long enough for just about anybody to lay down in the boat.


Here's the completed frame. As you can see, plenty big and the back of the cockpit is high enough to lounge against.


The boat with the skin on. Total length, 18 feet of which 6 feet is cockpit.


The boat set up with a sailing rig courtesy of Time Anderson. The sail was cut down from a wind surfing sail.


The boat floating empty. Note both the bow and stern clearing the water.


The boat with a paddler. Note that the stern no longer is out of the water. Correct trim with a single paddler is with the paddler forward of the back of the cockpit.


With the paddler sitting all the way to the back of the cockpit, the bow comes up some. That's Joe Karr doing the test drive.

And here's the boat running before the wind. Both lee boards are up to reduce drag. The sail is reefed. I'm still not real bold with the sailing, given that the water is cold right now and I wasn't wearing a dry suit. Maybe next time, dry suit and full sail.


Closeup on one of the lee boards. For now, the apparatus is held to the gunwales with C-clamps. Once I figure where the ideal location is for the lee boards, I will rig up something more elegant. As this sail test revealed, I also need a bigger rudder.


And here it is, sailing done, lee boards strapped to the roof. I suppose they'll help the car track better in a beam wind.

Conclusion so far: The sailing rig needs more testing. I am already thinking of making a 15 foot long version of this design. At 18 foot it's a lot of work to push along with a paddle. It will go 4mph. With two people, it will go 6mph, but both paddlers have to paddle in synch or the paddles will clash. Great boat though for taking out a few kids or the family dog or a few hundred pounds of camping gear.

Giving Credit

model of three-hole baidarka by Sergie Sovoroff at the Alaska State Museum

Mike Livingston, Unangan (Aleut) boat builder has been working on bringing more recognition to traditional Aleut kayak builders, especially Sergie Sovoroff who was one of Mike's teachers. Sergei made models of baidarkas, complete with paddlers and all the accessories that went on the baidarkas. When I went to the Alaska State Museum in Anchorage with Mike last July, he showed me one of Sergie's models on display, and sure enough, the label that came with the model made no mention of Sergei.


In defense of the museum, we might point out the the people who donated the model to the museum may not have known who made the model and so the curators at the museum put what they knew on the label, namely the name of the donor.
But things are changing. Native artists are signing their works and are being represented by galleries and are starting to get paid reasonably for their work.
But if you're not an artist and just a person who makes stuff you still don't get to sign your work. The corporation puts their logo on it, but that's it. The only commercial product that I've seen with the name of the person on it who made the thing is cardboard boxes.
Moral of the story: if you want to be recognized for your work, put your name on it.

Indigenous Boats and the Indigenous Soul

Bob Holtzman's Indigenous Boats blog deals with, you guessed it, indigenous boats. The purpose of this blog entry is to link the indigenous boat to the indigenous soul. The indigenous soul is a term that I had not encountered until yesterday in an article written by Martin Prechtel.
Here is a link to the article on the Indigenous Soul.
The article offers some insights on how indigenous cultures view and deal with technology. Though the article does not deal expressly with boats, the ideas expressed in it nevertheless apply. Boat building echnology is after all technology.
One idea that Prechtel presents is a mechanism that limits the amount of technology that the indigenous soul will allow. I have personally found something satisfying in building indigenous boats that I don't think I would get from building them in a more modern fashion. But I could never quite justify why I felt that building a skin on frame kayak might be better than laying up fiberglass and resin in a mold. Prechtel offers a justification from the perspective of indigenous culture. Essentially, in an indigenous culture, every extraction of a resource from the earth must be paid for in ritual. The ritual pays the debt we owe the earth for extracting that resource. The ritual is one of thanks. Prechtel proposes that the Mayans would never have built anything as complex as a car because the amount of ritual that would have to go into paying for the debt that its production creates would simply be prohibitive.
The building of a skin on frame kayak probably creates as much debt as a single individual can pay off in a reasonable amount of time. Aleuts, for instance took a whole year to collect the materials needed to build a kayak. That was probably enough time to pay for the debt that was incurred.
Prechtel also introduces the idea that the creation of something beautiful is another way that we can pay off debt. Hence, the importance of building boats that look good. Simply by making a good-looking boat, you have much less debt to repay than if you build an ugly one. I personally always thought that making an ugly boat was a crime against nature.
I may have more to say on this topic in the future.

David Zimmerly

David Zimmerly was one of the early researchers in the field of kayaks and surveyed a whole bunch of them. His research is summarized in his book Qajaq. Zimmerly also has a website with a whole lot of information. The link will take you directly to the page that has a whole bunch of drawings of kayaks in pdf format. Zimmerly also wrote a how-to book on the topic of the Hooper Bay Kayak and a number of articles for kayaking magazines. All in all a prime resource for the traditional-kayak builder. It was off Zimmerly's drawings that I built my first baidarka.

Tim Anderson, Multihull Sailor

I first met Tim Anderson a few years ago when I was out front working on a boat and he just happened to be driving by and stopped. Turns out he was working only about a mile away on whatever. Whatever covers a lot of ground, but the part of whatever that I was interested in was boat building. Tim builds boats after a fashion. I say, after a fashion, because he doesn't build boats the way you see it done in books. Tim seldom starts from scratch. Someone somewhere is always discarding boat parts like for instance, sails, spars, hulls, aluminum tubing, shopping carts, you name it, and out of these things, Tim builds working boats, mostly outriggers.
You can follow Tim's adventures by going to his website. The first link on the page will take you over to the instructables site. What is instructables? Goofy name, sure, but it's mostly a how-to website with how-to stuff contributed for free by the community. Tim has over 200 how-to's published there on a variety of topics, lots of them on the subject of boats and sails. Tim is nothing if not innovative and never shy about repurposing. He is a true 21st century boat builder, kickstarting the salvage economy.

Old Town Canoe Restoration

The canoe with the old skin before restoration. Turns out that Old Town actually covered this model with polyester to keep the weight down.

I have been doing a restoration on a 15' Old Town Trapper and am more or less finished. What remains? An old-town tag on the stern needs to be mounted and the hull needs a coat of wax. Plus the boat needs to be set in the water for a leak test. Other than that, it's done. And I'm glad that it is. Restoring this particular boat took way longer than I thought it would.
Main problem was that somewhere after the start of the restoration, we had to move our shop and after that, it was hard to maintain any kind of momentum on the restoration. There was always something to fix on the new shop.
Plus, this time I put canvas on the canoe instead of polyester like I did previously. Way more work. First I had to put on 3 coats of filler. Then I had to sand that. Then it took three coats of sanding primer on the filler to make the hull smooth. Then it took three coats of paint to make the final coat look respectable. Painting the polyester was way easier. All it took was a coat or two to fill the weave, then two coats of paint. Done, minimum of sanding. For one thing, the polyester was a lot smoother than the cotton so filling the weave took almost no effort at all.
Anyway, it's done. Pictures follow.
And I should mention that I re-caned the seats and repaired some rot damage to the ribs. All that takes extra time, of course.

The new skin is on and the inside of the boat has two coats of satin varnish.

After I helped to varnish some rowboats at the Dolphin Club, I decided that gloss varnish shows off the wood much better.

The decals were puzzling to me. I assumed that they were the old kind that you soak in water and then slide off the substrate. It was only after I soaked the decals in the water and nothing happened that it dawned on me that these were self-adhesive. Way easier to install.

Indigenous Boats

Years ago, some friends and I started an organization called The Native Watercraft Society. Our intent was to research and document native water craft or as Bob Holtzman calls them, Indigenous Boats. The Native Watercraft Society eventually died due to the fact that it was too much work to put out a publication - those were the days before free blogging on the internet.
Well, it seems that probably without knowing it, Bob Holtzman has picked up the baton where we dropped it and is doing a heck of a job documenting indigenous boats from all over the world. See the link to his blog on the right. Not only is he putting out a whole bunch of good information, he has also provided an index which lets you access blogs by boat type. Very thoughtful and useful. I will have to try to follow his excellent example.
So if indigenous craft trip your trigger, make your way over to Bob's blog.

Sandmarks

I first met Mark Sanders at TAKS a few years ago. Mark not only has the camera gear but also knows how to use it. For some spiffy kayak photography, go to his website - Link off to t he right of this blog. See above for a picture of me being eaten by a wave at San Simeon.
And in an effort at shameless self promotion, here is a link to a Flash sequence of myself in the surf at San Simeon shot by Mark.

Roll or Drown

Roll or Drown is Duane Strosaker's website. See links at the right hand side of this blog for how to get to his site. Duane, in case you don't know him is one of those people who paddles ten times as much as anyone else. I think he has paddled to more of the Channel Islands in recent times than anyone else. I think he said that he has paddled to all but one of the islands out there. Duane will no doubt correct me if I'm wrong.


The reason I say that Duane has paddled to more of the islands in recent times is that BWM, that is, Before White Man, the Chumash Indians used to paddle out to the Channel Islands from the coast using their plank canoes.
Besides being an avid paddler, Duane is also a builder of kayaks, paddles and practitioner of the Greenlandic arts of rolling and rope exercises.

Toxic Cleanup Part II

While doing some research on the Aleutian Islands, I ran across this little tidbit on the Aleutian Pribilof Islands Association site. Looks like Alameda isn't the only place where the government is doing toxic cleanup. A ways back, the gov was doing nuclear testing on Amchitka. They have since stopped and are now cleaning up. Here is an excerpt of the text from the APIA site:
"The U. S. Atomic Energy Commission created a nuclear testing facility on Amchitka in the early 1960s. Three underground nuclear explosions occurred in the 1960s and 1970s. The first detonation was the "Long Shot," an 80 kiloton bomb. The second was "Milrow," a one megaton device exploded on 2 Oct 1969, 4,000 feet below the surface of the island. The third device, "Cannikan," weighing in at 5 megatons, was detonated on 6 Nov 1971. It was the largest underground nuclear explosion in U.S. history. This facility was closed down in 1994, with on-going U. S. Government cleanup of the radioactive, chemical, and other hazardous waste. While there is an airstrip on Amchitka, it is currently restricted to U. S. Government flights only."
Question: How do you clean up after detonating 6 megatons worth of nukes? Given that only government flights can land there, cleanup must be iffy. At least they stopped doing above ground testing.
Advice: When planning your next Aleutian kayak adventure, avoid Amchitka.

Unangam Tunuu - How to pronounce it

If you're curious about how to pronounce Aleut words such as the ones you might find in Bergsland's article on Aleut kayak terms, click here.
I have not yet found a site where you can actually hear Aleut words pronounced, but you can order some CDs from the APIA (Aleutian Pribilof Islands Association).

Knut Bergsland and Aleut Kayak Terminology

Knut Bergsland, Norwegian linguist contributed an article entitled "Aleut Kayak Terminology" (AKT) to a book called Contributions to Kayak Studies. I have finally gotten around to working my way through it.
AKT is not an easy ready, mostly due to Bergsland's forbidding syntax. Still, it's worthwhile reading the article even if you need to sit down to it with a notepad to diagram the sentences before you can be sure what Bergsland is trying to convey.
The information in the article is twofold. One type of information derives from the literal translation of Aleut terms for kayak parts. For instance, we learn that the third deck beam of a single-hatch baidarka is also the place where the paddler braces his feet. The fifth deck beam is referred to as the back rest. But interestingly, the fourth deck beam is just referred to as the deck beam next to the opening, that is, the cockpit. The implication is that this deck beam had no relation to the paddler's anatomy, that it was not used by the paddler to brace his knees or thighs.
The other type of information in this article is from what I can tell, the most complete enumeration of Aleut kayak accessories to be found anywhere. For instance, we are told not only that the Aleut paddler carried with him a repair kit but also what its contents were. We are also given a detailed list of hunting implements, everything from sea otter darts to whaling lances.

How's the toxic cleanup coming?

Glad you asked. As everyone probably knows by now, former military bases are the equivalent of toxic waste disposal sites. The military, at least on US bases has cleaned up its act and complies with various environmental laws. Overseas is another matter. But for now, let's focus on the US, more specifically on the former Alameda Naval Air Station (Alameda, NAS) where my shop is.

In the past, the military dumped anything and everything liquid on the ground or down the sewers and after that, it was out of sight and out of mind. Back then, dilution was the solution.

Nowadays, things have changed. The stuff the military dumped in the ground or down the sewers is still there, clinging, slowly dispersing, looking for a place to go.

Meanwhile, the cold war ended, Clinton closed military bases and the department of defense looked for buyers for their decommissioned bases. Developers vied to tilt up condos and strip malls on the abandoned bases. But wait .. enter, stage left, the lawyers. The military has them and so do the developers. Somebody discovered that there was BAD STUFF in the ground and lawyers got wind of that. The long and the short of it is that the military's lawyers determined that stuff in the ground meant lawsuits down the road. Build a house on top of the toxin infused dirt and somebody's kid gets cancer. Kid's parents file a lawsuit, find a sympathetic jury and the military owes way more money than they sold the base for.

Enter the cleanup crew. The lawyers said, no lawsuits. Hence clean it up before the military sells it. Expensive, but what the heck, cheaper than a lawsuit. So here we go.

Coming back to the Alameda NAS, not only did the Navy dump fluids in the ground, they also flushed various radioactive materials down the sewer. Again, this was small scale stuff, like the radioactive material that went into military instruments to make the phosphors in the various gages light up. But there it sat in the sewer line, waiting for a lawsuit.

But, the lawyers found out and the cleanup started. It will be over soon. The fences will come down. I will have access to the water once again. Pictures to follow.

That little sliver of water to the left has a little beach abutting it at low tide. The Navy put up a chain link fence to keep people off the beach. Reason? Apparently, the sand and mud of the beach is saturated with toxic chemicals. If people play on the sand, the toxins get into the water when the tide comes in.



There's signs in at least four languages telling us not to go near the water or eat fish or shellfish that live in it. This sign is in Chinese. Other signs are in English, Spanish and Vietnamese.



The yellow building to the left is our old shop building. We have been kicked out of it. The white building to the right is the source of solvent contamination. The solvents are in the ground, working their way in the direction of SF Bay. The white trucks are there to transport contractors who put probes down in monitoring wells to find out how far the solvents have gotten.


Meanwhile, on the other end of the seaplane lagoon, the radioactive cleanup is going on. The fence at the left which is converging toward the horizon runs parallel to the sewer line that drained the radioactive materials into the bay.


Here's another view, this one of the guard shack at the far left and blue water containers to the right of the shack. The water containers fill up spray trucks which run back and forth and keep everything wet so radioactive dust does not get blown about by the wind.


Here is a pile of toxic dirt. It has been sprayed with something that binds the surface and prevents the wind from disturbing it.


And here is the last of the work to be done. Beyond the fence is a trench in which the new sewer line has been laid so that it can now drain clean, unradioactive water into the bay.

Postscript:
Actual radioactive material that got into the sewer is probably minimal. Nobody on the site is wearing lead suits. The whole thing is probably a boondoggle with the prime beneficiary being the toxic remediation contractor. Nevertheless, we, the taxpayers benefit from all this activity because it is still cheaper than a lawsuit.

Meanwhile, I am waiting for it to be all done so the fences can come down and I will once again have a nearby place to launch my kayaks.

Feeding Frenzy

I don't have any photos of the feeding frenzy because as is usually the case, I don't have my camera with me when interesting stuff happens.
Anyway, I drove down to the seaplane lagoon yesterday to see how the radioactive cleanup was coming and noticed an unusual number of pelicans crashing into the water. (more on the radioactive cleanup some other time.) I thought maybe the pelicans were bulking up in preparation for their migration to where ever they go in winter, Mexico probably. But then I noticed that there were a whole bunch of other critters cruising the surface of the water in a purposive manner that they adopt when they're fishing.
Seems like some sort of small fish was in the bay in large numbers, probably to spawn and the fish eaters were following the school. In addition to the pelicans there were about a hundred cormorants, all low in the water, a bunch of unidentified ducks, a few terns, gulls and two seals. Would be cool to see this scene from below, fisheye view.
Side note - when pelicans hit the water, it splashes up in a way that always reminds me of this one particular David Hockney painting. See below for painting. I guess that is one of the marks of a good painting is that it makes you see something that you otherwise wouldn't have noticed.

Followers

I know that two, possibly three people follow this blog. Now you have a chance to announce the fact that you follow this blog. Announcing yourself gives me some idea of who's reading the blog and gives me a chance to target its content at a given audience. See followers gadget in the right margin for details. Click somewhere and see what happens. Haven't tried it myself so I'm not sure how it will work.

The Dolphin Club

The Dolphin Club in San Francisco is a repository of wooden row boats besides also being a place where members do their swimming in SF Bay. Their row boats are used by members to escort other members who want to swim outside the protection of the cove in front of the club house. The escort system was started after a member was run over by a motor boat back in the sixties. How the club got hold of so many wooden row boats, I don't know, but now that they have them, they need to maintain them. All boats get sanded and re-varnished every five years. Given the number of boats that the club has, they have to do about 5 boats a year.
So every Tuesday night is boat maintenance night. Here are some photos taken this past Tuesday.

This week's boat all sanded down and ready for varnish.

The same boat with a new coat of varnish. Four coats to go.


And some more boats, these seating four. Sometimes club members just row. Obviously, these boats are too big to take out just to accompany a single swimmer.

Spenger's Fresh Fish Grotto

Berkeley has this restaurant called Spenger's Fresh Fish Grotto. I don't know how good their food is, but if you're ever in the area, probably to rub elbows with the area's well-to-do or to spend 15 minutes in line to get coffee at Peet's on fourth street, stop by Spengers to check out their small collection of nautical stuff scattered around the outside of the building.
The most notable item in their collection is a small dugout canoe. I thought for some time that it was local, but am beginning to doubt it. More likely Polynesian. Anyway, here's some pictures of it.

Kinda looks like the fat parts of the hulls are where the amas of the outriggers would have crossed, or is that just where the thwarts went? Don't know much about dugouts.


And yes, believe it or not, the SF bay had a whale processing plant until sometime in the 60's over in Richmond.

And there's a harpoon on one of the last whale boats.