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

May 15, 2006. The scrounged materials Greenland kayak is done

It's done. See pictures below. I actually took the boat out the other day and paddled it and practiced some rolls as well. The boat fits nicely, the bow rises above the waves of the bay.

The wind on the SF bay kicks up every afternoon once the weather gets warm and blows up short one to two foot waves. My other Greenland boat is too straight in the keel and does not rise above the waves but rather spears into them bringing water rushing over the deck of the boat and slamming the paddler in the chest. This not only gets tiresome after a while but also slows down the boat. This particular boat handles the short waves well. I placed the chines way down near the keel. This makes for a narrow bottom and raked sides. On all my other Greenland boats I usually put the chines farther out from the keelson and higher up making for a wider bottom and little more stable boat.

All in all, the boat is pleasant to paddle, fits me snugly and does not weathercock.

May 7, 2006. The scrounged materials Greenland kayak

So far, the boat is mostly scrounged materials with just a few exceptions. I did the ribs about a week ago. Used mostly willow since it's fairly soft and bends well when green. Took one to two inch sections and bandsawed them down the middle, then peeled them and planed them down to proper size. As usual, there seemed to be more shavings than ribs when the whole thing was done. Seems like making ribs from green wood gives you 1/3 rib and 2/3 shavings. This might seem disconcerting to a first time whittler, but lots of shavings is the norm. I saw a picture in a book somewhere of an Indian whittling canoe parts and sure enough, he seemed to be knee deep in shavings. That was encouraging because at first I thought it was my ineptness that kept me from getting better yields.

When I bent the ribs, I tried bending them both bark side out and bark side in. Bark side out worked better because there was no grain runout. Willow doesn't split well, so you have to plane it and the planed side will have some grain runout which when bent will tend to split out. I suppose that if you had wood that split nicely, putting the bark side in would work since neither the inside nor outside of the split twig would have any grain runout.

Last night I sewed together a bunch of skin fabric trimmings to make a new boat skin. It took 6 pieces altogether and 5 seams to make the new skin. I used something like the seam on the inside of the leg of a pair of blue jeans. We'll see how it looks on the boat. Should be cool looking, sort of primitive. I don't know yet how the seams will affect performance of the boat, whether the welts will create noticeable friction. I hope not. If they don't, I'll be encouraged to put together more skins from fabric cutoffs. I think I have several boats worth of material.

May 1, 2006 Out the Gate

Monday, I went out the Golden Gate with a bunch of paddlers from BASK, the Bay area Sea Kayakers. John Horvers had organized the event. I was paddling my 14 foot baidarka. I was curious if this shorter boat would be able to keep up with the others which were mostly 17 footers. As it turned out, the boat did fine and I had no trouble keeping up. One thing about the baidarka is that more of its overall length is in the water so that a 14 foot boat has close to a 14 foot waterline. 17 foot Greenland style boats with their overhanging bows often have no more than a 14 or 15 foot waterline.