Culture camp how to butcher a seal demo

One of the features of Culture Camp was the preparation of traditional Unangan foods, in this case, a harbor seal. Sally Swetsoff demonstrated how to butcher the seal.

The head is already off. Sally is starting to slice the seal down the middle, belly up.


Here you can see the wind pipe and the layer of white blubber on top of very dark colored flesh.

The seal is completely opened up revealing the intestines.

The judgment of some is that this is a smelly process.

The seal carcass with the intestines removed.


Sally is cutting the connective tissue between coils of intestine. Intestines are later cleaned, braided with strips of blubber, boiled and eaten.

Sally has removed all the organs and is beginning to cut up the meat.

Each pied of meat is cut so it has a chunk of blubber with it. The meat by itself is completely fat free and has no marbeling. Hence, fat which is an important nutrient in a cold climate has to be added in.

Unangam tunuu

Unangam tunuu is the Aleut name for the Aleut language. According to the Alaskan native institute in Fairbanks there are something like 2000 Aleuts and 300 speakers of the language. That's not a lot of people. Nevertheless, Knut Bergsland of the University of Oslo has written both a dictionary and a grammar of the Aleut language.
While at the APIA culture camp this summer, I had the opportunity to hear Unangam tunuu spoken and have found out how to pronounce some of the specifically Aleut consonants like the x with the hat over it x^. This particular sound is something like the ch sound in German. The APIA has also put out a CD with names of various animals pronounced.
For those interested in the names of Aleut kayak parts, see Knut Bergsland's article in _Contributions to Kayak Studies_.

APIA Culture Camp

I recently got back from the apia culture camp held in Anchorage Alaska. APIA stands for Aleut Pribilof Islands Association. The APIA is an Aleut Native non-profit corporation dedicated to education and social services. Mike Livingston and I built two kayaks there. The kayaks will be hanging in the lobby of the APIA building. (see picture above.) Unangam Ulaa means Aleut house or home in Unangam tunuu, the Aleut language. Unangan is the Aleut name for themselves in their language.

Mike Livingston in front of the culture camp poster.

Myself in front of the culture camp poster.

wood, the original carbon fiber composite

Whenever people see me working on a boat with a wooden frame, invariably, somebody comes along and wants to know if the same thing couldn't be done with carbon fiber composite technology. I generally tell them that it could be but I prefer wood and that they should try the carbon fiber composites if they think that those would be a good idea.
However, more recently, I am promoting the idea of wood as the original carbon fiber composite. See above for the molecular structure of graphite. Graphite is all carbon and the molecules are arranged in a hexagonal lattice.
Wood is made up of cellulose whose chemical arrangement is shown above. Note the hexagonal rings, similar to carbon rings of graphite. The main difference between cellulose and graphite is that cellulose has one oxygen in each ring which makes the ring a little weaker. Also strands of cellulose are held together with lignin, a natural glue. Strands of carbon fiber on the other hand need to be bonded together with epoxy, a man-made glue.
So carbon fiber composites are stronger than wood per unit weight, but not by enough to make me want to put up with the messy construction techniques that they require.
Note to Duane Strosaker - this is not a plastic mocking post. This is a post in defense of wood.
Note to everyone else - see Duane's web page on how to make carbon fiber paddles.

Other Blogs

If you're a native watercraft junkie like me, check out the Indigenous Boats blog by Bob Holtzman. Lots of good stuff there and Bob has tagged it so you can look up postings by topic. What a concept, as Yakov Smirnoff used to say.
Then there's also the 70.8% blog by Thomas Armstrong which is not strictly about native or indigenous boats but has some of that kind of content. Thomas has ads enabled so you get lots of links to boaty books on Amazon.

Culture Camps

The Aleut Community in Alaska holds culture camps every year to teach school age kids about their heritage. Various instructors teach different skills like the Unangan language, crafts, dances, cooking and so on.
A few years back I was privileged to attend one of those camps in Cold Bay, Alaska to help with the building of some baidarkas.
The picture above shows Candace, a resident of Cold Bay with one of the baidarkas that the students built. She is also holding a fur seal skin and as the wind was blowing hard, she is hanging on to her hat, another item made in the camp.
This year, I am going back to Alaska to attend another culture camp, this one sponsored by the APIAI, Aleutian Pribilof Islands Association in Anchorage. Pictures to follow.
To see what last year's culture camp was like, read the newsletter of the APIAI.

Cows in Akutan

Somewhere on my webpage I put some pictures of what I call hot spring valley in Akutan, an island in the Aleutians. The Aleutians, you will remember are the place where the Baidarka was invented. Anyway, I put up a picture of myself at the crest of the pass overlooking the valley.


And, barely visible on the valley floors are some cows. The cows were imported by someone wanting to raise them on the one thing that is plentiful in Akutan, grass. That project was eventually abandoned, but the cows stayed behind and have made the hot springs valley their home. I imagine the hot springs keep the grass accessible in the winter and also offer some refuge from the cold. I don't know if the cows hang out in the hot pools up to their necks like those monkeys in Japan, probably not because they have to eat a good part of the day. Still, here they are surviving.
And then yesterday I get an email from a guy named Sam Brown who has just started building skin boats and in the letter, he tells me that it was his family who brought those cows to Akutan. Sam currently lives in Korea and this is where he has been building his skin boats. He also tells me that some of his Korean friends have caught the skinboat bug and want to build some.
So there you have it folks. More evidence that the internet brings people together and brings people together with their cows.

Links, links & more links

There's lots of good stuff about boats out there on the internet. And other web authors must surely have links to the relevant pages. But that is not going to stop me from adding yet another list of links. I am going to put this list on my web page and also link to it from this blog. If anyone wants to have their boaty link on this list, let me know and I will add it. Put your suggested links in a comment to this post and I will get email.

pt. hope kayak skeg retrofit

Last year I built a Point Hope kayak. Probably was used as some sort of retrieval kayak. Mostly, Pt. Hope hunters used umiaks to hunt, actually, they still do for the annual whale hunt.
Anyway, I like the boat but it didn't track worth a hoot (pulled that term out of my euphemizer) until after I added a skeg. The skeg worked great on flat water, but it was too much when the wind was blowing cause the nose would go downwind. See above for original configuration.


So I trimmed the skeg down and now the boat handles just fine. A few weeks ago it was blowing 35 mph in the bay with gusts up to 40. I took the pt. hoper out paddling and it did great. It kicked up a little spray, but the upturned nose never dove into any of the short waves, lifted right up and bobbed right along.
I think I paddled into the wind for about 20 minutes and then returned downwind in about 5.

baidarkolounger

A year or so back, I built a King Island kayak and was amazed at how comfortable it was. Beam of the boat was 24 inches, depth at the rear of the cockpit was 15 inches, that is, the distance from the bottom of the keelson to the top of the cockpit rim. Length was about 15 feet. What made the boat so comfortable was the high coaming which made a very comfortable back rest.
So I wanted to make a baidarka that was equally comfortable if not more so and was also capable of some sailing but could still be paddled at a reasonable clip. Of course, as everyone mariner knows if you try to build a boat that is good at more than one thing, you're likely to end up with a boat that is good at none of them.
We'll see.
The design of the boat so far is as follows: Length of gunwales is 16 feet. LOA is about 18 feet. Beam is 32 inches. Depth to sheer at center is about 10 inches.
As the picture above shows, the bottom is pretty flat. I intentionally laid the keel out flat to minimize the amount of vee in the hull. I will be adding an external keel about 1.5 inches deep.
I don't have the sail plan worked out exactly yet, but it will probably look something like the sailplan that Ian Oughtred has designed for his interpretation of a McGregor sailing canoe.


One more thing. The length of the cockpit will be 72 inches. I will be able to lay down in this boat and sleep. Providing of course that I will have some sort of anchor. Hence the name baidarko-lounger.
I have also been reading about sailing canoes. They used to be all the rage about the time that the 19th century turned into the 20th. Then along came paved roads and everyone stopped sailing in canoes in favor of the new fad called bicycling.
Anyway, the sailing canoes used to carry substantial amounts of ballast so they could carry more sail. A 60 pound centerboard made of steel plate was not uncommon. Not only was it heavy, it placed the weight about a foot below the keel of the canoe for maximum effect. Total ballast in these boats was as much as 120 lbs. So I'm going to look into ballast.
More to come.

secondary stability revisited

The other day, I finally figured out what people mean when they talk of secondary stability.
A little bit of background: Go the the internet, that repository of all things worth knowing and you will find an absolute lack of definition for the concept of secondary stability. The truth is that everybody kind of knows what it means but nobody can define it.
Let's back up some more. There is another term used frequently by kayakers and that is primary stability. This term actually has a definition. Primary stability is the slope of a curve at 0 degrees of heel that plots resistance to heeling vs. degrees of heel. In other words, primary stability of a boatis how fast its resistance to heeling increases as you heel it over. The resistance to heeling that the boat offers is also referred to as righting moment and is measured in foot pounds. For conventionally shaped boats like a kayak, righting moment increases with degree of heel, maxes out at some angle and then decreases down to zero at some greater angle. That angle where the righting moment becomes 0 is where the boat capsizes unless corrective measures are applied.
Now back to secondary stability. When kayakers use the term it is usually used as follows. The kayaker has just tried out a new kayak, paddled it, made turns, heeled it over and braced and is now on back on dry land an offers his report on the stability of the kayak. "Primary stability is poor but secondary stability is good." What this statement really says is that although the boat has low primary stability, resistance to heeling increases to some tangible level once the boat is heeled over far enough.
If I had to specify secondary stability in terms that could actually be measured, I would probably do it as a pair of numbers, (maximum righting moment, degree of heel at maximum righting moment.) And there you have it, probably the first non-evasive definition on the internet of secondary stability.

ergonometrics in reverse

Fellow kayaker, Duane Strosaker pointed out to me that I haven't posted since forever. So here goes, more postings.
Today's topic is ergonometrics in reverse.
Ergonometrics is generally defined as using parts of your own body as a yardstick to measure lengths. Before measurements were standardized, everybody used to measure this way.
Ergonometrics in reverse is the measuring of your body with a tape measure to see how it will fit into your kayak.
In the picture above, I am lying on my back on a plank which is balanced on chunk of wood. The point is to slide back and forth on the plank until both the plank and I are balanced. Then I can measure from my feet to the balance point and record the number.
You could also do the same procedure sitting up. This would give you the location of your center of balance when sitting. When you position your own center of balance over the center of buoyancy of your kayak, then in theory, the kayak should trim correctly. The only problem is knowing your kayak's center of buoyancy. If you are a techno weenie and have a naval architecture cad program on your computer and actually know how to use it, then finding center of buoyancy is no problem. Such people do exist. I have seen them posting to kayaking discussion groups.
For the techno deficient among us, we have to proceed by trial and error. Once you have built a boat, you can simply move weight forward and backward in the boat to figure out where the boat trims correctly.
In my case, I already knew where the center of buoyancy of my next baidarka would be. Only problem was that instead of sitting in the kayak, I wanted to be able to recline in it. And that's why I needed my own center of balance or longitudinal center of mass when in the reclined position so I could position the long recliner style cockpit correctly.
I will be posting on the baidarko-lounger soon.

New Kayak Fishing Guide

Tony Mullins who built a Greenland kayak with me about 3 years ago has been training his grandson Sean in the kayak paddling arts. Sean in the meantime has graduated to fishing guide duties. Here's Sean in the back guiding his customer and uncle, Patrick. Note that Sean prefers a traditional Aleut paddle for taking the sports out to the prime fishing spots.

Also in attendance was Sean's cousin Cian in the middle of the boat. Cian is holding the net, ready to land the big ones.

New Kayak Launch

Here we are celebrating the launching of two new kayaks. Tony Mullins was the photographer. Champagne, courtesy of Sidney to the far left. Myself next to him followed by Rouben whose Greenland kayak is at the edge of the water, Don who helped his wife Suzanne in the yellow jacket build the baidarka in the foreground and at the far right, Judy who helped Rouben build his kayak. The tide was about as high as it goes. Another foot or so and the whole place would be under water. It had rained all morning so the actual tryout of the boats was in question. But I donned my gear and did the honors.


Balance brace with the Greenland kayak. I am showing this mostly so you can see what the skies looked like that day.


Here's the Greenland kayak in the resting position. Depth is quite low in back. Rouben wanted a boat that was easy to roll and yet would be suitable for paddling in real water. Unfortunately, it was totally flat that day and hard to test the boat in waves. But it felt like a fast boat. Unfortunately I didn't have my GPS along and couldn't do a speed test, but the shore was moving past at a respectable rate and I heard appreciative noises coming from the shore. So I suspect this is a pretty fast boat.


Here's the baidarka in the semi-inverted position. Yes, these can be rolled. This boat is 12 foot long and weighs 25 lbs.

Here's the baidarka in the upright position. Trim looks good. I widened out the back beyond what I have been doing and this solves the problem of the boats squatting down in back when it gets up to speed.

Contemporary Aleut Boat Builders

Mike Livingston is active in teaching traditional Aleut culture in Alaskan schools. It's not the only thing he does, but it's one of them. Besides making kayaks, Mike also teaches other skills such as wooden kayak hat construction, drum making, baidarka model making and Aleut language.


Here's Mike teaching wooden hat making to students at Aleut Culture Camp in Cold Bay. Mike is from Cold Bay. He went to school there. His dad met his mom here during WWII and decided to stay on after WWII.


Here's the older students from culture camp at Cold Bay School. Mike is to the far left. Teacher Kurt Schmidt is to the far right. Students came from a number of locations besides Cold Bay, Akutan, Nelson Lagoon and False Pass.


Here's a photo taken at the end of Culture Camp with a completed baidarka. From left to right, Mike, Kurt, myself, baidarka, Candace. We had to do some prep work ahead of culture camp, but students knocked out three boats in three days.

Aleut Boat Builders/Elders, part trois

Here are some more Aleut/Unangan boat builder photos. The first one is from a book written by Ethel Ross Oliver. She was a school teacher in Atka and wrote a book about it called Journal of an Aleutian Year. The picture is of Andrew Snigaroff standing in front of a baidarka frame he built.

I posted this picture somewhere on my website a few years ago and sometime after got an email from the grandson of Andrew Snigaroff wondering if I knew where that kayak had ended up. I did not know. And I have since lost the email sent by the grandson. I hope to find his email address again so I can find out a little more about Andrew. Apparently he was the last or one of the last baidarka builders on Atka.

The baidarka in the Phoebie Hearst Museum in Berkeley is also from Atka and looks very similar to this one, though not exactly the same. It may or may not have been built by Andrew Snigaroff. Based on stylistic differences, I'm inclined to think that it wasn't. But I'm only guessing.

The remaining pictures are all from a book called Contributions to Kayak Studies. The article was written by Eugene Arima and John Heath. The pictures were taken in Nikolski on Umnak Island in the 1930's.

The man holding the single hatch baidarka or Iqyax^ is Artie Ermeloff.


This photo is of Afenogin Ermeloff.

And Fred Bezezkoff holding an Ulux^tax^.

Bottom view of an iqyax, person holding the boat not identified.

I dont' know if any of the men pictures built any of these boats or which ones they built, but it's safe to assume that they all knew how to build baidarkas. Hats off to them all.

Aleut Boat Builders/Elders

I found some photos of Aleut boat builders/elders and am posting them here as promised. These photos and captions were posted at the school in Akutan, Alaska. I shot photos of the photos when I was there in about 2004 helping Kurt Schmidt teach baidarka building in shop class.


This is a photo of Bill Tcheripanoff ca. 1970. He's holding up a piece of braided seal or sea lion intestine. At the time, Bill was being interviewed by Joelle Robert-Lamblin, a French anthropologist about the topic of baidarkas.


Here's another photo of Bill Tcheripanoff about a dozen years after the previous picture was taken. He's holding a fox trap in his lap.


Here's the caption that went with the photo.


This one is a photo of Sergie Sovoroff and one of the baidarka models that he built.


And here's the caption that went with the photo of Sergie. By the way, Mike Livingston studied with Sergie and told me that Sergie's models are in museums all over the place, but never with his name on them.

Aleut Boat Builders

Mike Livingston asked me if I had anything on Aleut elders on my website. I told him no, reason being that I have never had a chance to talk to any of them. But I told him that I had hoped to put something about Aleut boat builders on my website. This isn't it, but I will be working on it. Stay tuned.

Genuine Eskimo Kayak For Sale

Bob Hoerger of Palo Alto brought the following ad from the November 1940 issue of Pacific Motorboat to my attention:

FOR SALE: Genuine Eskimo kayak with skin cover, recently brought from Alaska. Well constructed. Balances easily. Good for fishing and sport on river, lake, or bay. M. Lantis, Berkeley, Calif.

Some of you may recognize M. Lantis as the woman who collected the baidarka in the collection of the museum of anthropology at the University of California in Berkeley. Whether this was another kayak or the one that is now in the museum is not known. This ad was placed in 1940 and the boat in the museum was collected in 1934 and is lacking its skin. But who knows. M. Lantis may have tried to sell the boat, not found a buyer, stripped off its skin and then donated it to the museum.

Skinboat Rendezvous

We had a skinboat rendezvous yesterday in Alameda. Several skin boat builders brought their boats for review by each other and the general public. Thanks to a notice in the San Francisco Chronicle, quite a few people turned out. Fellow skin boaters Tony Mullins and Dave Browne did much of the heavy lifting. Dave Browne did the majority of the promotional work and organization of the event. I just showed up with boats and brats, that's bratwurst for the uninitiated. I got so busy talking to people and setting them up with boats that I forgot to take pictures except at the start of the event. Oh well.

Here's Tony on the left and Dave on the right unloading boats at Encinal beach.

Encinal beach wasn't far from my shop so I was able to pile a bunch of boats on top of my car without tying them down carefully.

Trinidad

No, not the one in the Caribbean, the one in Northern California.
This is where the Arcata crowd paddles. Trinidad Head, a big rock connected to the coast by a low land bridge blocks the prevailing NW swell and forms a natural harbor in its shadow.Here's the view to the northeast and the unprotected beach. If the swell is low, people can take off here with their kayaks.

Here's a view southeast, the sheltered water and natural harbor in the shadow of Trinidad head. Here paddlers can launch even when swells are running 20 feet. They can paddle sheltered water all day or nudge their way around the corner and push into the swell for big elevator rides or head for the shore for some rock gardening.

Stability, part 2

Scroll down for stability part 1. This is stability part 2. The stability of kayaks is not just an attribute of the boat, but an attribute of a conglomerate of factors. Let me list them:

1) Water conditions
2) Boat shape
3) Boat loading
4) Skill of the paddler
5) The paddle
6) Wind

About the only factors that people typically take into consideration when trying to measure boat stability are factors 2 and 3.

Stability is considered to be a characteristic of the boat and the paddler is victim or beneficiary as the case may be of the boat's inherent stability. But realistically, the paddler has to be considered a part of the boat since he/she not only affects how the boat sits in the water but is also an integral part of its stabilizing system which may include ballast and cargo, but will also include a paddle.

The paddle of a kayak in the hands of a skilled paddler acts like an outrigger and increases the effective width of the kayak from around 2 feet to about 4 to 5 feet, making the boat considerably more stable, so stable in fact that the boat need not capsize except under the most extreme conditions, and if it does, the paddle in the hands of the skilled paddler makes the kayak self righting.

Aside from the skill of the paddler, the second biggest factor that impacts stability of the kayak is its cargo and the weight distribution of the paddler. A kayak by itself is fairly stable. However, a paddler will move the center of gravity upward and make the boat less stable. The heavier and taller the paddler, the worse the effect on stability. The easiest way to counter the weight of the paddler is to add ballast in the bilge of the kayak. According to stability curves published in Sea Kayaker Magazine, ballast has a much greater positive effect on kayak stability than does hull form. But recreational kayaks on day trips are mostly paddled empty so that stability becomes primarily a result of hull form.

The only down side of ballast is that it make the boat harder to propel. Oh well.

Finally, there is the matter of the paddler's skill I will return to this topic at another time, along with the influence of water conditions and wind.

Arcata Boat Show

I went up to the Arcata Wooden Boat show in June. Just publishing photos now. Modern boats don't much impress me. I guess it's the esthetics of plywood I'm not in love with. Sure it's practical and easy and strong and low maintenance and waterproof and everything, but it has all the charm of a forest service outhouse.

So there were actually a number of boats at the show that impressed me, but here are the two highlights. Appropriately for redwood country, these boats were made out of redwood.


This boat was no longer in any shape to use, but it was a local adaptation, probably early 20th century to Humboldt bay. It was carved out of a single redwood log. The log had probably been at least 6 foot in diameter possibly 8.

Here's another redwood dugout, this one fashioned by members of the local Indian tribe. I have seen these boats in museums or in photos and they seemed hopelessly ponderous and heavy. Yes they are heavy, but they are not ponderous. They are meant to be river boats and as such have a good amount of rocker and a fairly flat bottom which lets you turn them on a dime. The boat will literally spin on its own axis like a shallow dish. Although the boat weighs about 400 pounds, it is quite nimble and moves along nicely once under way. Plus the center of gravity is so low that you can stand on the gunwales and not tip it over. Sebastian, here pictured jumped up and down on the gunwales without managing to capsize it. Appropriate technology as they say in progressive circles.

Driftwood Projects, Part 1

Here's a handy dandy kayak rack I made out of driftwood. The driftwood happend to be two by six planks of redwood that were floating around the bay. I ripped them and fashioned an A-frame style rack held together with deck screws, our culture's answer to everything, one step up from duct tape. I wanted to lash the frame together in keeping with the construction of the kayaks, but the screws were just easier. The tarp was meant to keep the sun off the kayaks, not the rain. But the setup was only partly successful, mostly because the tarp was too short. I need to work on that. There are also hellacious winds in the area. On summer afternoons, the wind blows about 20mph off the water, then eddies behind the shop and due to some aerodynamic miracle blows sideways at about 30mph which sets the tarp flapping and snapping something awful.

Arcata Kayak Building Class

I did a Greenland kayak building class up in Arcata, CA. For those of you not into CA geography, Arcata is on the north end of Humboldt Bay which is not too far from the Oregon border and right in the heart of redwood country.
Here's the group with their finished boats. Michael Morris's boat was a little over 17 feet long. Everyone else built 15 footers. They do a lot of rock gardening up near Trinidad so they thought that shorter boats might be handy.

Here's the group on the water in Humboldt bay. The bay is a little warmer than the open ocean, but these guys were more or less duded up for immersion, complete with drysuits and neoprene head gear. The water is cold up there.

Wolfgang and the Whale

I did a boat building class up in Arcata, CA. First day I got there, I joined some of the local paddlers on the water. About 15 minutes into the paddle, whales showed up, snorting and breathing deeply and flipping flukes, etc. This was my first whale sighting. No big deal for people on the coast, but my first in 8 years in CA.

It's Been a While

It's been a while since I posted here. I'm back. Been busy actually doing stuff and blogging has taken a back seat. Hard to blog when you're not near your computer and the hardware configuration starts falling apart. My Pentax optio w30 has sort of gone into the tank and I was using it as my bloggo optical recorder on account of its compact size. It still takes pictures but they look like one of the lens elements shook loose and only part of the left half of the picture is in focus while the right hand side gets progressively more out of focus. So I had to revive the old Canon G1 and buy a new battery. etc. etc. Hardware impediments.