Blog Archive

Mar 25, 2007 The Coast Guard's Oldest Cutter

The Coast Guard's oldest cutter, the Storis has just retired and showed up down the street at Coast Guard island. The Storis might be turned into a museum somewhere. If not, it will probably go to join the mothball fleet in Suisun Bay. The main thing that made me post this picture is that this ship found a path through the Northwest Passage, something that eluded explorers in the 19th century. There is something to be said for diesel power over sail, at least if you're trying to push through Arctic ice.

And here's a picture of what the current crop of coastguard cutters looks like. Mostly they seem to motor around the Pacific doing drug busts to make sure that the prices don't drop too much.

Mar 25, 2007 CA Thayer

The other day while pulling the car into the lot in front of the shop, I noticed the hull of the Thayer out on the concrete just the other side of the Seaplane lagoon. Bay Ship had been over two years reconstructing her. They were apparently done, leaving only the masts and rigging to be re-installed. I watched the boat for a while, moving along ever so slowly. Then it stopped and I would check periodically to see if it had moved any more. It hadn't. Then I went to lunch and when I got back, the Thayer was gone. Don't know if it saw its shadow and headed back in the hanger or if the moving crew had picked up the pace and hauled it off to the drydock on the other side of the island.

Mar 17, 2007 Surfin' Sailboats

Last weekend, a few of us started out at Crissy Field in San Francisco and paddled our kayaks up to the Golden Gate Bridge, headed north from there to catch the incoming flood to push us back west. There is an alongshore eddy where the current runs opposite to the incoming flood. And right on the boundary of these two bodies of water, the one moving west and the other east is a confused zone with waves moving in all directions at once. In addition, swell coming into the Gate breaks here when it encounters the point of land that sticks out into the water under the bridge. Our experience was exciting but not threatening.

Past the influence of the turbulence around the south tower, the water became benign and we paddled on toward aquatic park sporting a sailing ship whose masts are just visible near the right of the picture.

While our experience of the bay that day was relatively benign, year ago, someone capsized a sailboat there. The internet being what it is has pictures of this event, of course. You can see a slide show of a sailboat rolling, getting de-masted and sinking here.

Someone else had to best this of course and sent me this link of an 85 foot motor cruiser coming into the harbor of Morrow Bay on the face of a wave. Not a good experience.

Mar 6, 2007 New and Improved

Craig O'Donnell, maintainer of the proa pages sent some pictures my way. The one above is a 19th century idea on improving on the arctic kayak. Never mind that they're different kinds of boats. Nowadays, we would probably have a picture of a plastic sit on top for the improved type. Oh well, you can probably guess what my opinion is of that.

Sail Cart

The other picture transmitted by Craig is one of this sail cart. Check out the rooster tail of dust kicked up by this baby. Appropriate technology. Unfortunately, they are pulling up track all over the place and sail carts have to run on streets. But what the heck, a quick search on skate sail will get you tons of links to people on skates or skateboards being pulled by sails and kites. More on this in the future under the heading of future technology.

The text that went with the sail cart picture follows.

Curragh Men

Tim Anderson posed for me in a boat of his manufacture, a curragh of sorts. I teamed that picture up with one of an Irishman since the two poses resembled each other.

Paddle damage

Here's an old picture of me posing with two broken paddles. Both succumbed to surf damage, I believe. One of these paddles was my favorite for a while, a lightweight Greenland red cedar paddle. But after I broke that one, I went with stronger and heavier wood subsequently.

Here's a picture of two paddles chewed up by use in ice. The top one with a corner missing ended up being one of the broken ones above. Sic transit gloria. In any case, I had almost forgotten how rough ice was on paddles. For this reason, Greenlanders edged their paddles with ivory. Back when I was paddling around ice, I liked a fairly heavy paddle because it was easier to break through new ice with a paddle with some mass to it. A light weight paddle would just bounce off the ice.

I have since refinished the paddle on the bottom with a coat of epoxy and it has gotten a new life.

The Spider Boat

Boat Nerds

While looking for some pictures of traditional commercial fishing boats of the Lake Michigan type, see above, I ran into the Boat Nerd website. Great site if you're into Great Lakes commercial ships. For myself, I liked the pictures of tug boats they have on the site. A sample follows.