The Water We Eat

One of the things that traveling does is give one a broader perspective on the world than is available from staying in one place.  My recent trip to Kings Canyon National Park was no exception.  One insight I had on this particular trip was about water, where it comes from and where it ultimately goes.

We spent most of a week camping right next to Kings River which drains all the water that collects in Kings Canyon. The river at this time of the year, October, does not carry much water since it hasn't rained all summer and the melt-water from glaciers higher up in the Sierras is minimal. 

Still, he water of the river is cold and clear even late in Summer when temperatures during the day still rise into the nineties.
And as is usual for me when staying in a place for a while, I become curious about it, specifically about the Kings River.  Where does it go?  I don't remember where I got the answer, but the answer is, into a reservoir downstream in the foot-hills of the Sierra from which the water goes to the city of Fresno and to the surrounding farmland for irrigation. And so, the water of the river next to which we camped never reaches the ocean. And even before the reservoir was built and before the land in the valley was farmed, the river seldom reached the ocean. Most year it drained into the shallow Tulare Lake which most years had no outlet. Only in unusually wet years did the water of the lake overflow into the San Joaquin River which flows into San Francisco Bay.
But now, the Kings River irrigates farm land and the water that first fell as snow in the Sierra Nevada range ends up in almonds, peaches, plums, oranges and other produce, much of which is trucked out of the state via interstate highways and gets consumed far from its origins by people who have no clue that the water in the peach that they are eating may have also cooled my body on a hot day in October.

The Giant Sequoia and Some Random Thoughts on Trees and Wood

It is one thing to see wood at a lumber yard and it is quite another thing to see it in the form of a living tree.  Unlike the stuff in the lumber yard which gives little evidence of where it came from, the living tree obviously speaks for itself.  It is not a product but an individual being with a considerable amount of character that makes it distinct from others of its kind, especially when old.
The musings I am about to deliver on the nature of wood were prompted by a trip to Kings Canyon and Sequoia National Parks.  The two parks are adjacent to each other, with Sequoia to the south and Kings Canyon to the north.  The only way to approach these parks by car is from the Central Valley of California.  Kings Canyon is adjacent to the city of Fresno and Sequoia is adjacent to the city of Visalia. Giant Sequoias can be found in both parks, although Sequoia National Park has more of them. Coming from the Central Valley which is flat and almost devoid of trees except for fruit trees in the orchards, it is hard to imagine that one is about to enter a mountainous zone where the huge sequoias live. 
But on to some pictures. I would like to say off the start that it is impossible to convey the massiveness of these giant trees in photographs.  The best one can do is show part of the tree with a human or two next to it for scale.  But even then, the photograph cannot capture the sense of presence that these large trees convey. Nevertheless, here are some photographs.

This trunk of a Sequoia has been hollowed out by fire and decay and so it is possible to walk through and along the trunk. 

 

Here is another sequoia that has fallen.  Someone cut a hole through it that one can walk through. The hole by the way is about seven feet tall.

Here is a picture of the tree named the General Sherman.  This is the world's most massive living being.  It is suspected that some of the trees cut down when logging first began were larger than this, but General Sherman is currently the largest individual.  Its diameter at the base is in excess of 30 feet. 

 

 And here is the root ball of a recumbent sequoia, 30 feet from side to side.

 And using a deer for scale.

 And more humans for scale.

 And a tree hugging human for scale.

Even the branches of these trees are huge.  This one fell off a tree and the park service left it laying where it fell to give people an idea of their large size.  The largest branches on the General Sherman are about 7 feet in diameter.

 

The sequoias are not the tallest trees in the world.  That distinction goes to the coastal redwoods.  Neither are they the oldest trees. That distinction goes to the bristlecone pines of the White Mountains, one valley to the east of the Sierra Nevada.  But the sequoias are the most massive trees. Their trunks seem to be columns of almost constant diameter rising some 300 feet into the air and then seeming to end abruptly in the older specimens.  

Someone took a slice of a sequoia trunk and propped it up at an angle for the edification of the public. This slice represents roughly 2000 years of growth.  Age is determined by counting the annual growth rings.  The age of standing trees has to be estimated because there apparently is not any equipment that can remove sample cores of the requisite length, roughly 18 feet needed to count all the rings from the center of the tree to its edge.

 This is a side view of that specimen.

 

And here is a closeup of the growth rings in that slice.  The top of the picture is closer to the center of the tree where the older wood resides.  The crack running horizontally through the picture is a fire scar.  Moving downward toward the crack, the growth rings get ever closer together, an indication of ever diminishing growth.  After the fire, there is an explosion of new growth that again diminishes over time.  Apparently, fires burn the vegetable matter on the ground and release nutrients into the soil which spur new growth for a few decades until most of the nutrients are once again tied up in vegetable matter until the next fire comes along.  Also, note the little circular impressions just above the crack.  These are probably cores taken for carbon 14 dating and then plugged. 
When botanists try to estimate the age of trees based on diameter, they look at slices like this one and try to get an average count of growth rings per inch since as this picture shows, ring density changes with every fire and also with annual precipitation.

There was no sign indicating what sort of wood these park benches were made out of, but I suspect that they were made of sequoia wood. Yes, they haven;t stopped logging sequoias.  Not all of them are protected. Some of them are on private property and some of them are in national forests which are administered by the US Department of Agriculture which regards forests as cropland meant to be harvested. Not an editorial comment by the way. If we want to make stuff out of wood, we have to cut down trees.  More on that at the end.

Here the park service has done a prescribed burn or someone dropped a cigarette. In any case, not much damage was done.  For a long time, the park service used to suppress fires but found that periodic fires are better than monster fires fueled by debris on the ground that has accumulated for too long.  Also, they found that sequoias will not reseed very well without fire.  Fire turns vegetable matter into ash, releasing nutrients for the seedlings to grow.  Fire also kills off young trees that would otherwise shade out the new seedlings. And fire also opens up the cones to release seeds.  So now the park service does prescribed burns which do little damage but reduce the amount of fuel that could produce more dangerous fires.

This picture shows young sequoias coming up with the older fire scarred sequoias in the background.  The ash and the light also allow ferns to grow.

Another view of the burned ground.  Yes the ground burns since the top six inches are a compacted mass of needles and small branches.

Almost every old tree shows fire scars. As a matter of fact, I have never seen so many burned trees as I saw in Kings Canyon National Park.  In the national forests, fire scarred trees are more rare since those are logged over on a more regular basis and fires tend to be suppressed because the trees are regarded as a crop, not a part of an ecosystem in which fire plays a beneficial role.

This is a side view of about eight inches of fibrous sequoia bark which lacks resin and therefore does not burn readily.  Bark on sequoias can be up to two feet thick and this is what lets them grow old in an environment where fires occur naturally every seventy years or so.

Here the fire burned into the trunk of the tree but the segment at the left is still alive.  Every yearn the bark spreads sideways to cover over scars and in time will cover them completely.

 

Here is a segment of  a branch. The heart wood is red and the sap wood is a lighter color.  The heart wood of the tree is dead.  The sapwood is the part of the tree that is still alive and growing and is where the tree adds more wood around the outside of the tree under the bark. For purposes of lumber we want heart wood because the sap wood decays more readily.
So I was curious what kind of wood sequoias are made out of or perhaps more properly, what kind of wood they grow.  Right on the ground near this broken branch above I found a small piece that had broken off when that branch came down.  It was red in color like that branch but on carving some off, I found that the red color was mostly a product of weathering and that the wood was a lighter color.  It was also surprisingly light, similar to redwood but with a consistency that felt more like cedar.  And then it occurred to me, why not?  If you are going to grow large, why not build yourself out of light wood.  Since most of the weight of the tree is in the trunk, the lighter it is, the larger you can build it.  Sequoias and other conifers don't have huge spreading branches like oaks and so most of their strength is needed to resist the compression of the mass that piles up on top of the roots, mostly in the trunk.  Hardwoods like oak on the other hand that put out large lateral spreading branches need stronger wood to resist bending forces and stronger wood is heavier.  And so boat builders like conifers because they produce long straight trunks that can be cut into long straight boards.

As a boat builder I use wood. And as a paddle maker I also use wood, especially wood from older trees since they are the ones that have the wood that is clear of knots. But to use wood without a knowledge of what happens to the forests where that wood is taken from is akin to buying a pork chop in a supermarket without knowing that one needs to kill pigs in order to make that pork chop.

The impact that the visit to the sequoias had on me was to see trees as individuals.  Young trees a few decades old, especially in large quantities tend to be rather similar in appearance and lack distinction as individuals.  Every tree seems to look like every other tree and so one can more readily regard them as a crop to be cut for use as lumber.  Old trees however, tend to be distinctive, each one different from the next and since in the case of the sequoias they may have been around for perhaps two thousand years or more, one is forced to realize that cutting one of those trees for human use deprives the rest of the world from the presence of such old trees for another two thousand years.  And so it seems that to cut such old trees is rather frivolous because the gain in lumber does not make up for the loss of the presence of the individual.  

And yet, as a wood worker, I use wood.  And since I make objects for other people, I want to give them a good product free of flaws and blemishes.  I want to give them something that looks like wood is something that is extruded by a machine. 
Perhaps I need to rethink my approach.  If I do not want to participate in the cutting of old trees, then perhaps I need to figure out a way to make paddles from younger trees whose wood is not quite as perfect and blemish free as that of older trees.  Stay tuned, I have some younger trees in mind that I will experiment with

Kayak Models

A while back, an article on kayak models appeared in the journal Qajaq. The gist of the article was that models are not to be trusted since most of them were made for sale in the tourist trade and that craftsmen making boat models for the tourist trade soon learned that making an accurate scale model of a kayak takes way too much time for the money it payed, so they learned to take all sorts of short cuts.  I believe the article was written mostly about kayak models built in Greenland.  The concluding sentiment of the article was that models were worthless for serious anthropological study.
And the article has some merit.  But recently, in looking at models of Unangan kayaks, I am of the opinion that a good deal can be learned from them. The things you can learn from models is probably endless, but let me point out just a few things by way of specific examples. But first, just a few general comments.
The most obvious and recurrent lesson to be learned from kayak models is the overall view.  Models show us how the whole thing was put together.  We get a picture of the whole ensemble which we seldom have a chance to get in any other way.  The way artifacts are collected is usually one item at a time, or a bundle of items without any clues on how they all fit together.  Then the museum stores them by  category and breaks up all the things that belonged together at one time.  Harpoons here, paddles there, hats in a drawer, kayaks on a rack and so on.  Everything is split up.  Models fortunately allow related items to stay together.  Other clues are more statistical and can be informative if we look at a number of models.  For instance, what sort of kayak was most common, one hatch, two hatch or three hatch?  What sort of hats were kayakers wearing when the models were made?  What sort of game were hunters going after based on the implements on deck? And so on.

 

Not much in the way of a deck load and the paddles have gone awol.  But there is a bailing tube on deck. Also, the lower ranking paddler, the one in front is wearing an open crown visor while the paddler in back is wearing a full crown model. And the hair of both paddlers is long and white and both men have beards. 

This model is of a three hatch kayak and shows the man in the bow holding a dart and throwing board.  This model also shows where the darts were stored, what their relative size was, how they were painted and so on.  The paddles are also very nicely carved and appear to be in scale.  Just behind the bow paddler is a wooden canteen, an item that I have never seen in a museum but that appears frequently on models.

This batch of hunting implements has gotten separated from its boat, but the museum has fortunately kept the pieces together.

This boat model is a particular favorite of mine.  Lots of stuff on deck.  The hunters appear to be wearing western head gear.  They have a fish on the line and we can see colored trim on both the kayak seams and the seams of their waterproof skin jackets.

And this model gives us a nice view of two paddles with different paint jobs.  Again, the paddles seem to be accurately proportioned and carved by someone who also made the full scale version of the various deck paraphernalia.

Unangan (Aleut) Kayak Accessories - Sprayskirt and Kamleika

Spray skirts on Unangan kayaks were affixed to the cockpit coaming of the kayak and stayed with the kayak when it wasn't in use. When the paddler wanted to take off in his kayak, he stepped into his kayak and sat down and then pulled up the skirt and threw the strap that held it up over his shoulder. The top of the skirt had a draw string that the paddler could tighten to minimize entry of water. According to Jochelson (1925) some kayakers had a way of tying the shoulder strap by means of two rings which allowed the kayaker to quickly disconnect the shoulder strap in case of a capsize.

Back view of a kayak model showing the spray skirt and the single strap that goes over one of the kayaker's shoulder to hold up the skirt.  The bottom of the skirt is tied around the rim of the cockpit coaming and the top of the skirt has a draw string that the paddler can tighten to minimize entry of water into the kayak.

This model shows the paddler wearing his rain jacket  in conjunction with the sprayskirt.

Unangan hunter fitted out with a water proof gut skin rain coat that also doubles as a paddling jacket.  He is also wearing a bent wood hat and water proof boots that would allow him to get in and out of his boat just off shore  to prevent damage to the skin of the boat that might occur if he ran the boat up on shore to get in and out of it.

The sprayskirt worked in conjunction with a raincoat that everyone wore both on land and while kayaking. The raincoat reached below the knees and was also fitted with a hood.  In addition, in times past kayakers would wear wooden head gear while out in their kayaks.
In the rest of the Bering Sea region, kayakers wear gut skin jackets similar to those of Unangan kayakers.  However, in the Bering Sea, skin jackets are fitted with a draw string on the bottom that fits directly over the coaming and eliminates the need for a separate spray skirt.  Part of the reason that Unangan kayakers did not use this method may be that their cockpits were relatively small and a jacket fitted to the smaller cockpit would have made the bottom of the jacket too narrow to walk in comfortably.

Paddlers on shore with their kayaks drawn up on the beach.  Spray skirts stay attached to the coamings of the kayaks. These kayakers are relatively modern and have adopted Western style hats to replace the bent wood hats and visors that they would have worn in the past.

If the kayaks were being stored for a little longer time, the sprayskirts could be cinched up at the top and held up with a stick to form a roof over the cockpit opening to keep the rain out.

The Americas Cup

The Americas cup is one of those sailboat races that has been going on for a long time and happens again and again at various intervals.  Seeing as it involves large sailboats, only the very rich can compete, albeit with hired crews.  This year the race or part of the race is happening in San Francisco Bay on which I live and so the news about it reaches me.  I have nothing to offer on the merits of the race but it did happen that the Swedish race team is working out of an aircraft hangar close to my own modest boat shop and so on the way to work or going home from it, I see the boats that compete in the event.  So I want to offer some photos of the Swedish boats because I find the boats interesting.
By the way, I understand that the current crop of boats are a short version of what will be in the final competition.  And all the boats were built in New Zealand by the same builder to the same specs so that he race is about who has the best crew and not about who has the best boat.

 This is one of the two Swedish boats tied off to a buoy in the Seaplane Lagoon.  In the background, one of the maintenance hangars from the Naval Air Station days.

 The boats and the sails are moved in and out of the water by a crane.  They are not that heavy as boats go, around 3000 pounds. 

 Here is the boat itself, without its rig.  Dagger boards are in their retracted position.

 And the America's Cup logo and Swedish flag.

 The boat has a wing and a jib.  The wing is symmetrical about the center plane unlike an airplane wing which is usually flatter on its bottom face.  

 And there are the Swedes, out on the bay doing their stuff with their support boats motoring behind them.

Unangan (Aleut) Kayak Terminology

Unangan kayak terminology has been set down in an article written by Knut Bergsland, Norwegian linguist, now dead, in Contributions to Kayak Studies, Eugene Arima, editor. I think that's the most commas I've ever put in a sentence.
I've been wanting to do an illustrated version of that article for some time, but what has discouraged me is the messy nature of the information in Bergsland's article.  The information is messy because there was never just one official way of naming kayak parts in the Aleutians.  For one thing, Unangam Tunuu, the Aleut language had multiple dialects, at one time, probably as many dialects as there were tribal groups, something like nine, possibly more.  Along came the Russians, consolidated settlements and moved people around and a number of dialects disappeared.  The documented dialects remaining were the Eastern Aleut, the Atkan and the Attuan dialects. Then during WWII, the Japanese invaded Attu and moved the Aleut community there to Japan while the US moved the remaining Aleut population to the Alaskan mainland.  After WWII, Aleuts were repatriated, Attuans moved to Atka and so the only two dialects that were still alive were the Atkan and the Eastern Aleut. 
So when Bergsland collected his list of kayak terminology, he had some historical sources available that documented Attuan terms and speakers of both the Atkan and Eastern Aleut dialects. Not surprisingly, documented Attuan terms are fewer in number than for the other two remaining dialects at the time that Bergsland did his compilation. 
And terminology varied over time so that some kayak part may have been called one thing in the 19th century and then something else in the 20th.  Keeping all of this straight is not an easy thing. 
On top of that, we have to deal with Bergsland's dense and sometimes cryptic writing style.  I give one example here.
"On top of the taamx^aax^, on the right side in front of the hatch, there was a hook for holding the paddle when not used, made of wood or baleen, or sometimes ivory (Atka 1952), possibly in the shape of a sea otter (Jochelson 1952:131), called in western EA (1909, 1950) x^aach(a)g^iilux^, in AA (1840, 1952) haachachag^iilux^, derived with the suffixes -g^i- + -alug^- 'place for having -' from the above-mentioned term for paddle, EA (1778-) x^aasi-x, AA Au hassi-x."  inhale.  and so on he goes.  So you rub your eyes, go back to the start of the paragraph, try to match up the English with the Aleut term the two of which are invariably separated by a string of parenthetical phrases and hope you don't miss the period that lets you know that you have finally arrived at the end of the sentence.  By the way, the AA, Au and EA sprinkeled liberally around the sentence are abbreviations for the dialects respectively, Atkan Aleut, Attuan Aleut and Eastern Aleut. 
You get the idea.  I thought it might be nice to have a version of this that puts the Aleut term right with a picture of what it is referring to. 
I might put the pictures and words in this blog if I can make that work, the problem being that the blog software controls the size of the pictures, (small) and the layout of the text. Stay tuned.

Paddle Dynamics

Three Greenland style paddles on display at the boat ramp where I just got done testing them. The breakdown paddle on the left had the tips thinned. The one in the middle had the varnish touched up. Note that the paddle in the middle has a more curved face than the one on the left which has a flatter, thinner face. The one on the right, the long one, is one I just finished carving.

I recently did some maintenance on two paddles for a client of mine.  One of the paddles was just worn and needed a little sanding and a coat or three of fresh varnish.  The other one was making noises in use because the tips were too blunt so I made the tips sharper.  Before returning the paddles, I took them out to test because that is the right thing to do when you make a repair and charge someone for it.
Oh yes, there was also a third paddle, one that was supposed to be a blank for a paddle making class that a prospective student's wife had given him as a Christmas present.  Three years or more passed and the student still hadn't managed to arrange a class date to finish the paddle, so I finished it just get the thing out of my shop.  And so while I was testing the other two paddles, I thought I would test this one as well.
Things got off to a slow start.  The boat I used for a test vehicle belonged to someone else and had very slack deck lines that made it hard to keep spare paddles on deck but after some experimentation, I managed to figure out a way to carry the spare paddles while testing.
Paddle testing for me is usually comparative.  Given my testing tools which consist of myself as motor and test evaluator, a gps as speed indicator, a kayak and some suitable body of water to float the boat and offer resistance to forward progress, the tests tend to be subjective and relative.  That is, I don't have absolute numbers at the end of the test.  I take several paddles, paddle back and forth and compare the performance of the paddles under more or less identical conditions.  The two things I can measure are speed and the amount of effort I put into paddling.  Effort is hard to measure so it usually means that I try to make the boat go as fast as I can with a given paddle.  And when I am going as fast as I can, I measure the speed with the GPS.
Usually what happens is that one paddle feels better than another or one paddle gives me a higher top speed than another.  And in general, results tend to be vague impressions more than anything rigidly scientific.  But some good can come out of even an unscientific test, as happened in this case.
Let me share my observations.
As expected with the three paddles pictured above, the long paddle gave me the best top speed. This paddle was 98 inches long.  The two shorter paddles were both 84 inches long.  Normally I like a paddle that is somewhere between 88 and 92 inches long so I expected the 84 inch paddles to be slightly underpowered.  As it turned out, they produced top speeds not that much slower than the long paddle.  Acceleration with the short paddles was lower than with the long paddle, but by and large, once I got the boat going, the short paddles did pretty well.
What was happening was that the hull speed of the boat was the limiting factor in the test and not the paddles.  That is,  the short paddles were adequate for getting the boat up to hull speed but couldn't push the boat much beyond that.  And that's probably adequate for most situations.  The long paddle with its greater blade surface could push the boat beyond its hull speed but at the expense of greater effort.
So the problem with testing paddles using a GPS and a slow boat is that just about any paddle can push the boat up to hull speed and further effort even with a larger paddle produces little extra speed so that measurement of top speed are more an indication of the boat's limitations than any measure of the paddle's effectiveness.
It would be nice to have a meter that could measure the speed of the boat, the resistance offered by the boat and the power needed by the paddler to keep the boat at that speed.  If such a thing were available, it would be able to offer a good comparative test of different paddles' effectiveness.  Even if two paddles were able to bring a given boat up to the same speed, the one that requires less effort by the paddler would be the better paddle.  However, since there is no good way to measure that effort, it is hard to make meaningful claims about the effectiveness of one paddle vs. another and the question of which of two paddles is the better one remains largely subjective.

Old Boat, Reverse Sheer

I know what you're thinking. That boat was warped on account of that concrete pillar coming out of the cockpit. But not so. The concrete pillar coming out of the cockpit is an accident of framing.  I could tell when I was taking the picture that maybe my framing was not that good, but I was not in the mood to reposition the boat just for a picture.
Anyway, what I am trying to show here, and it may be more obvious if you click on the photo to see a larger version of it, is that the sheer line has gone into reverse, that is, the sheer is higher in the middle than at the ends. And the bottom of the boat has flattened out to the point of almost no rocker. 
The sheer line for the non-nautical is the line made by the tops of the gunwales, that is, the two boards that form the edge of the deck.
This was not a boat I built, but I am sure that when it was built, it had more sheer and rocker and that the downward movement of the bow and stern with respect to the middle of the boat was the result of the nylon skin tightening up over time. 
The other thing I noticed when I build boats is that since both the keelson and the stringers are bent into place over the ribs, they exert a downward force on the ends of the kayak that combined with the force of a shrinking skin will tend to make the keel line of a skin on frame boat more straight over time.
I am theorizing here, but the Unangan (Aleut) builders always built their keelsons in two or three parts and the parts were carved into a curved shape, not bent into place to avoid this kind of downward pressure on the ends of the boat. 

Old Kayak, Bent Ribs & Buckliballs

 

In my previous post, I described how one of my kayaks spontaneously changed shape in response to a shrinking skin.  While this type of response would generally have been regarded as mechanical failure, researchers are now trying to steer this kind of phenomenon to make it perform useful tasks, that is by creating a variable shape that can adapt to conditions.

Buckliball changing from large to small (left to right) in response to external stress

Paraphrasing here - One stress makes you larger, one stress makes you small, and the stress that mother gives you don't do anything at all. Never mind.  Pause for groans to subside.

geodesic dome assembly

By the way, if you didn't grow up in the sixties, which is likely, you probably missed Buckminster Fuller and his geodesic domes and also buckyballs which he invented and which I suppose buckliballs is a pun on.

Old Kayak, Bent Ribs

I've got one more set of photos on deck for the old kayak series.  Not that I don't have more old kayaks or old kayak photos, but it's a matter of being able to find them.

Today's tale of woe is all about the lethal combination of heavy nylon fabric and a boat left out in the sun for too long.  Nylon, if you don't already know, contracts with high temps and as you can see in the photos, pushes down on the keelson and bends the ribs into a reverse curve.  This isn't that bad, mostly it makes the hull a little flatter.  What is worse is the end to end shrinkage of the fabric which compresses the keelson which responds by taking on something of an S curve when viewed from above.  This makes the boat pull to one side.  But even that is not lethal and I managed to fix it with a rudder.  It's just that the boat is not the elegant craft that you started out with. So beware of heavy nylon combined with heavy sun.