2011 Urban Unangax^ Culture Camp in Anchorage - Update

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More Unangax^ (Aleut) Paddle Mysteries

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.