Too many boats?
02/08/16 05:27
Decades ago I had a conversation with a friend. I had been enjoying light craft sailing. Our church camp was developing a sailing program for campers and we had acquired a couple of Hobie Catamarans and a couple of 14’ monohull boats. I was by no means an accomplished sailor, but I was beginning to get some of the ideas of sailing in my head and had developed a feel for how to get around the cove of the lake where our camp was located in generally light winds. The experience had made me want to have a sailboat of my own and, since my available funds were limited, I was thinking about building a sailboat. I had a booklet of plans that i had studied and thought about the various techniques of building. I had not, at that time, however, ever build a boat of any type. My friend suggested that I start by building a canoe. Then, if I wanted, I could build a sail for my canoe. I had done a fair amount of canoeing at that time and I liked the idea of having a canoe. I knew that there were sailing canoes and that there were simple sail rigs that could be added to most canoes, though I never had actually been in a sailing canoe.
I ended up building a 17’ ribless canoe out of narrow strips of cedar, covered inside and out with fiberglass. There were quite a few mistakes in my construction and my eyes still go to the mistakes I made whenever I look at the boat. It is, however, a reasonable canoe for tandem or solo paddling. It has a reasonable cargo capacity and we’ve done quite a bit of paddling with three aboard. It has been down the Yellowstone River in Montana, on lakes in Idaho, Oregon, Washington, Montana, and the Dakotas. Eventually, I rebuilt the gunwales and thwarts of the boat and added leeboards, a mast and rudder. It can be sailed, but adding all of those accessories makes the boat pretty heavy and it is cumbersome to set up all of the extras. As a concept, sailing a canoe is an interesting idea. In practice, paddling is a pretty good way to get around in a canoe. With my level of skill, sailing a canoe is a fairly good way to go fast downwind and a reasonable way to get wet making turns.
There is something about the process of building that is addictive and so I decided to build a very small canoe, using similar techniques. A solo boat, designed for smooth water could be very lightweight and easy to tote around. My budget was, as usual, tight and I didn’t have a good source for clear cedar, so I made the boat out of fence-grade cedar which has a lot of knots. I did a lot of cutting out the knots and making scarf joints in the strips. The result, however, was pleasing to the eye and is a joy to paddle. It has probably become one of the most-used of all of the boats I have built. Although it is a solo canoe, it can handle an occasional passenger on calm water and I’ve given rides to family and friends when playing with the boat. Such an adventure led to getting fairly wet while paddling in the Puget Sound with my brother. We didn’t swamp the boat, but there wasn’t a lot of freeboard and we took on a fair amount of water over the gunwales.
That experience inspired me to build a kayak. A kayak is quite similar to a canoe. One has to build a deck and get the hull and the deck mated in a smooth seam, so there is quite a bit more work, but it is satisfying. Kayaks, also, tend to be narrower and have more compound curves, so the process of gluing the strips requires a bit more technique and flair. I still paddle that first homemade kayak dozens of times each year. It was the boat that taught me that paddling a kayak is significantly warmer than paddling a canoe. If you wear a sprayskirt, the lower half of your body is in an insulated chamber. I paddle the kayak exclusively in the early spring and late fall when water and air temperatures cool.
Driving around with one or two boats on the rack draws attention and conversation and soon I was meeting lots of other paddlers. As the result of one chance encounter and conversation at a gas station, I ended up with a great friend and the job of re-canvassing a 1942 Old Town Canoe. The project was pretty straightforward, but since I’d never done the canvassing before, I read a couple of books on the subject before tackling the project. I was able to obtain paint that was very close to the original from the manufacturer and I stripped and re-varnished the interior of the boat and made new seats to match the original. It was a very satisfying project. The canoe, although heavier than my woodstrip canoes, paddled like a dream when finished. It has now passed from its original owner to her son and probably will head to another generation before long.
I started to get a reputation as someone who loved canoes and that seemed to make me a magnet for people who were wanting to get rid of old boats. I didn’t respond to every invitation, but I did get the opportunity to obtain an Old Town canoe for myself. This particular boat has a wonderful story, but it was upside down on saw horses in a back yard with huge holes in the canvas. rot in the ends, cracks in the gunwales, a couple of broken ribs and a sizable hole in the planking when I dropped by to help an acquaintance evaluate the boat. After a brief examination and discussion, the owner said that the boat would be taken to the dump the next day if I didn’t haul it away that evening. I took on an 18-month restoration project and added another boat to my fleet.
A decade later, I’m aware that the time has come to begin to figure out how to get rid of boats instead of acquiring them. But the urge to build continues. There’s a project in my garage underneath two boats hanging from the rafters. There’s a home made row boat under my deck and a rack filled with canoes and kayaks in our storage unit.
There was a time when acquiring boats was a sort of hobby. As I enter this phase of my life, I think I’ll have to make finding new homes for old boats my new hobby.
I ended up building a 17’ ribless canoe out of narrow strips of cedar, covered inside and out with fiberglass. There were quite a few mistakes in my construction and my eyes still go to the mistakes I made whenever I look at the boat. It is, however, a reasonable canoe for tandem or solo paddling. It has a reasonable cargo capacity and we’ve done quite a bit of paddling with three aboard. It has been down the Yellowstone River in Montana, on lakes in Idaho, Oregon, Washington, Montana, and the Dakotas. Eventually, I rebuilt the gunwales and thwarts of the boat and added leeboards, a mast and rudder. It can be sailed, but adding all of those accessories makes the boat pretty heavy and it is cumbersome to set up all of the extras. As a concept, sailing a canoe is an interesting idea. In practice, paddling is a pretty good way to get around in a canoe. With my level of skill, sailing a canoe is a fairly good way to go fast downwind and a reasonable way to get wet making turns.
There is something about the process of building that is addictive and so I decided to build a very small canoe, using similar techniques. A solo boat, designed for smooth water could be very lightweight and easy to tote around. My budget was, as usual, tight and I didn’t have a good source for clear cedar, so I made the boat out of fence-grade cedar which has a lot of knots. I did a lot of cutting out the knots and making scarf joints in the strips. The result, however, was pleasing to the eye and is a joy to paddle. It has probably become one of the most-used of all of the boats I have built. Although it is a solo canoe, it can handle an occasional passenger on calm water and I’ve given rides to family and friends when playing with the boat. Such an adventure led to getting fairly wet while paddling in the Puget Sound with my brother. We didn’t swamp the boat, but there wasn’t a lot of freeboard and we took on a fair amount of water over the gunwales.
That experience inspired me to build a kayak. A kayak is quite similar to a canoe. One has to build a deck and get the hull and the deck mated in a smooth seam, so there is quite a bit more work, but it is satisfying. Kayaks, also, tend to be narrower and have more compound curves, so the process of gluing the strips requires a bit more technique and flair. I still paddle that first homemade kayak dozens of times each year. It was the boat that taught me that paddling a kayak is significantly warmer than paddling a canoe. If you wear a sprayskirt, the lower half of your body is in an insulated chamber. I paddle the kayak exclusively in the early spring and late fall when water and air temperatures cool.
Driving around with one or two boats on the rack draws attention and conversation and soon I was meeting lots of other paddlers. As the result of one chance encounter and conversation at a gas station, I ended up with a great friend and the job of re-canvassing a 1942 Old Town Canoe. The project was pretty straightforward, but since I’d never done the canvassing before, I read a couple of books on the subject before tackling the project. I was able to obtain paint that was very close to the original from the manufacturer and I stripped and re-varnished the interior of the boat and made new seats to match the original. It was a very satisfying project. The canoe, although heavier than my woodstrip canoes, paddled like a dream when finished. It has now passed from its original owner to her son and probably will head to another generation before long.
I started to get a reputation as someone who loved canoes and that seemed to make me a magnet for people who were wanting to get rid of old boats. I didn’t respond to every invitation, but I did get the opportunity to obtain an Old Town canoe for myself. This particular boat has a wonderful story, but it was upside down on saw horses in a back yard with huge holes in the canvas. rot in the ends, cracks in the gunwales, a couple of broken ribs and a sizable hole in the planking when I dropped by to help an acquaintance evaluate the boat. After a brief examination and discussion, the owner said that the boat would be taken to the dump the next day if I didn’t haul it away that evening. I took on an 18-month restoration project and added another boat to my fleet.
A decade later, I’m aware that the time has come to begin to figure out how to get rid of boats instead of acquiring them. But the urge to build continues. There’s a project in my garage underneath two boats hanging from the rafters. There’s a home made row boat under my deck and a rack filled with canoes and kayaks in our storage unit.
There was a time when acquiring boats was a sort of hobby. As I enter this phase of my life, I think I’ll have to make finding new homes for old boats my new hobby.