Dec 04, 2005
Boat maintenance and black helicopters.
Photos, videos and paddle blanks.

April 11, 2006. It's been a while

It's been a while since I posted anything here. REASON: I went to Alaska in March and kind of lost momentum on the blog. Cold Bay, AK. Alaska Peninsula. Just about at the end of the peninsula. See pictures here, Google map here. Blue to the north is the Bering Sea. Blue to the south is the Pacific. Sorry, MAC users. I understand you may not be able to do Google maps. No big deal. Look at a paper map.

Didn't know what to expect. Hadn't seen snow since I left Wisconsin in 2000. Actually, it turned out that their weather was pretty much like Wisconsin's that time of year. I don't know, still had some trepidation about being warm enough. But the body remembers. Didn't even wear gloves the whole trip. You don't really need gloves til the temp drops down to 10 degrees. I used to not wear gloves in the winter since I drove a car most of the time and you don't need gloves in a car. Except one time I got a flat in winter and had to change the tire with one of those jacks that had a metal crank. Cold metal. After I changed the tire, I noticed that the skin on my hands was white where it was in contact with the crank. Mild frostbite I guess. Anyway, Alaska. That's why no Blog.

Meanwhile, back in the lower 48

I read in the Alameda paper today that people have been stripping the buildings of Alameda point of their copper wire and pipes. Alameda point is the former airbase, now civilianized where I rent shop space. I don't know what this means, except of course that mining the urban landscape for minerals is kind of an economic depression thing. Are we in a depression? Some of us must be.

Fabric

Post Alaska, I got my fabric order in and it arrived and I am skinning the baidarka double. The boat is shown here with the first seam sewn. This process reminded me once again that I can forget things faster than I can learn them. To wit, when trimming the fabric in the cockpits, I trimmed a little too ambitiously so that I had to really pull and tug to make the fabric reach the coaming. Oh well, I think that I'll remember that one next time, but probably forget something else. So this ability to forget lessons learned keeps boat building interesting.

Retro Joinery

Been experimenting some with the kind of deck beam to gunwale joints Greenlanders did before they got steel tools. See more here.

April 13, 2006. Canoe?

My brother visited the other day and we took the canoe out for a little bit. The wind was blowing 20 mph or so and there was a little chop, enough to put the boat through its paces. The boat performed nicely only it's a little tippy without ballast. The hull is a fair amount more round than a traditional canoe. I've been considering an outrigger. Saw the Hawaian canoe club at the boat landing the other day. they lash their outrigger to thwarts on the canoe with inner tubes. That might sork for me. Also considering a sailing rig for the canoe once I get the outrigger.

CSS

I am starting to embrace CSS technology, that's cascading style sheets for those of you not into web technology. Last time I looked at css and wanted to play with it, browsers still weren't supporting it. Now they are and lots of formatting instructions that you can currently do in html will no longer be supported by browsers of the future which means that web code has to migrate forward. So css, here I come.