Fourteen Foot Baidarka Rebuild

This particular boat suffered the indignity of shrinking skin which caved in a good percentage of its ribs.  So I decided that it was time to rebuild the boat.  Aside from replacing damaged ribs, I also wanted to elevate the rear deck and make the cockpit coaming level.  I had lowered the rear deck to make rolling the boat easier but as it turned out, lowering the back deck simply made it harder to get good back support. So on with the pictures.

What happened was that the nylon skin shrank to such an extent in the hot California sun that it caved in the ribs. Not only did the shrinking skin recurve the ribs, it broked them.  A few ribs at either end of the boat survived.

Slitting the stitching on the deck.

Slitting the lashings around the coaming which hold the skin to the coaming.

The skin has been slit all around, ready to pull it off.

Except for the ribs, the hull is in mostly good shape.

The first step in getting the bad ribs out is to unlash them from the keelson..

The tail fin is looking a bit ragged.  It was made out of plywood and I decided to replace it with redwood.

For some reason I added a deck beam for better foot support without taking the other deck beam out. So that deck beam toward the front had to come out.

Here,s the stuff I took off the boat, coaming, coaming stanchions, tail fin and both the fore and aft deck stringers.  I took off the deck stringers just to make putting the new ribs in easier.

Here's the extra deck beam removed and all the bad ribs.

I already added a new tail fin.

There's the hull stringers hanging out in space waiting for support from a new set of ribs.

Next we will be bending some new ribs, followed by some painting and varnishing and relashing all the stuff that came off during the deconstruction. Stay tuned.

Woman - Dog Boat

Inka Petersen launched her two hatch baidarka yesterday.  One hatch was for her, the other for her dog, Rosie.  The boat was a bit of a challenge to design since its volume was fairly small - total length 15 feet by 22 inches wide.  With low free board, proper trim becomes more important.  So we launched the boat.  I will let the pictures tell the story.

The boat empty. Trim good.

The boat minus Rosie.  Needs ballast.

The boat with Rosie in the dog seat. Trim pretty good.

Actually, part of what contributed to the trim inequity was that none of the seams had been sealed yet and the boat was taking on water fast and heading for the stern.  Still, we all were happy, christened the boat with some Anchor Steam, a local SF brew.  I was hoping for some Alaskan Amber but the supermarket wasn't handling it. Plus I got a swim in. 

Preparing for the Apocalypse

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Replica of an Unagan kayak from Akun, Alaska

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

Two New Kayaks

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.