Blog
Aug 29, More King Island Kayak Building
Since last I reported on the KI, I built up the deck, shown above to its best advantage. Note that the tail dips down and the nose comes up. This is in contrast to most boats which come up at both ends.
Work on the King Islander has been progressing slowly since I have been busy making paddles for people. However, today I had a chance to do a little work on the nose of the boat.
The problem, I think, was that I made the bow assembly too short and had to add in a piece to extend it further back. It's that black looking piece of wood back of the nose. The keelson is pretty straight except that it sweeps up rather dramatically at a distance 4 feet from the nose. The curve is too severe for the keelson to be able to bend to, so it has to be carved to that shape, hence the addition of another piece of carved wood back of the nose.
Aug 29, Richmond Harbor Again
Well the caption to this one should be ARK DISCOVERED IN RICHMOND HARBOR. Certainly, this is probably the ugliest boat I have ever seen in person. And if they did need an ark again, this one might certainly fill the bill. Only, as I discovered later, this thing is more like a car carrier, capable of carrying two of every make and model in case the Greenland ice cap melts.
The tour of Richmond Harbor was guided by Glen Howard and our quest was to find a disused boat ramp that the city was thinking of putting back in commission. Along the way, we encountered the Cangarda, a recently renovated Steam Yacht. Quite shiny. I thought this boat was a one of a kind, but on doing some reading discovered that before the invention of the progressive income tax, these sort of boats were quite common.
We also ran into some more humble watercraft, like this low rider.
And we did find the boat ramp which turned out to be way at the end of the harbor.
But my personal favorite floating item in the harbor had to be the Richmond Boat Works headquarters building.
Aug 29, Kite Boating
Our neighbors, Makani Inc., down the way at the former Alameda Naval Air Station are doing things with kites. Don Montague, founder of Makani Inc. was one of the primary developers of kite boarding back in Hawaii some years back. While still back in Hawaii, he also started using kites to power boats. See kiteboating.com for some videos of kiteboating. Don also has a video of kiteboarding in Hawaii on his birthday.
Anyway, a few days ago, I ran into Don and some of his crew at the Encinal Boat Ramp down the street from the shop while they were launching the catamaran con kite rig and snapped a few pics.
The only downside to the kite vs. the sail is that you need someone in the water to help launch the kite. Once the kite is up in the air, the boat swings around to pick up the kite launcher and then away they go.
Aug 10, The Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest
Joan and I spent a week camping. This trip involved no kayaks or canoes, just trees. We spent three days in the Sierras and three days in the White mountains just to the east of the Sierras.
The main motivation for going to the White Mountains was to see the ancient bristlecone pines. They are the oldest trees in the world with the oldest being around 4700 years.
What does this have to do with boating? Almost nothing, except of course, everything has something to do with boating. The question, re the ancient bristlecones that comes to mind is how they got to be so old. One reason is that they are non-competitive, choosing locations where nothing else wants to grow. In the White Mountains, that is limestone; in the Rockies, it is granite. Furthermore, they grow at high altitudes, 9000 to 11500 feet at our latitudes. As a consequence, these trees don't grow very tall and are of little commercial value.
And there, dear friends is the connection with boat building. As soon as humans developed culture, they also discovered large boats, trading, and most significantly of all, warfare and large navies. Ship building is responsible for forest clearance in the Mediterranean. Similarly, large ships of the 18th and 19th centuries required large trees for masts, all of which were cut in Europe by 1800. When Britain went to war in 1812, the US as their supply for mast size trees became inaccessible and they had to join their mast together out of shorter Norwegian trees.
So the fact that the wood of dead bristlecone pines has survived for close to 9000 years and that of living trees for up to 4700 years is that nobody has bothered to use it for firewood or boat building or hot-tubs or fencing or barn lumber or backyard decking in suburban homes.
Bristlecones survive not only as living trees, but also as dead trees. Specimens such as this one have survived for thousands of years in the inhospitable climate of the White Mountains at 11500 feet. The fact that the dead wood survives as well as the living has allowed scientists to develop tree ring chronologies dating back almost to the end of the last ice age, 10,000 years ago.
This is the Patriarch, largest of the bristlecones after which the Patriarch grove was named. This tree is a "mere" 1500 years old and in all likelihood, a collection of trees which had originally sprouted out of a single neglected cache of seeds planted by a forgetful or inconvenienced bird.
Here is another ancient tree, dead for some time, yet standing, being continually sculpted by sun, wind, rain and snow. These trees do not really decay but are rather eroded by the elements.
Here is the living part of a bristlecone, putting out new needles and cones. Cones take two years to mature. The single sharp spike at the end of scale of the cone gives these trees their name.
And here is another magnificent specimen, part dead, part alive, largely denuded of bark except for a small strip at the left of the tree which supports the remaining greenery at the top of the tree with nutrients.
Aug 0, King Island Kayak Started
I have started building a King Island kayak using John Heath's description of King Island building practices as recorded in Contributions to Kayak Studies. My intent is to build a fairly faithful copy of such a kayak with minor allowances for the fact that I am slightly larger and slightly heavier than the typical King Islander. Primarily, I will be moving the cockpit back by about 3 inches to make the boat trim better.
This will be a wide, short and deep boat. The top of the coaming will be 15 inches above the keelson. This will be an armpit boat. Primary mode of propulsion will be the single-bladed paddle. Beam will be 24 inches and the boat will be more or less symmetrical fore and aft at the sheer line.
I have made the gunwales 14 feet long which will give the boat an overall length of a little over 15 feet. A more exact replica would have made the gunwales about a foot and a half shorter to allow for the length of the bow piece which when added to the length of the gunwales traditionally added up to a little over 14 feet. Oh well. I already did all the carving and shaping of the gunwales before I figured out how long the bow piece was going to be, so too late now for making the boat shorter unless I wanted to do a bunch of more work. For what it's worth, according to Heath, the length of the bow piece was from the elbow to the outstretched fingertips. That would be about 18 inches for me, although I suspect for the King Islanders, that measurement would have been closer to 16 inches.
This is a picture of the bow end of the gunwales. King Islanders carved gunwales out of a single piece of wood and gave the bow an up-curve and the stern a down-curve. In addition, the ends of the gunwales also got wider so that there would be some wood to reach across to the other gunwale and allow for a place to lash them together at the end. I suspect that in much of the Arctic, building practices changed to take advantage of sawn lumber where it was readily available. However, King Islanders seem to have been holdouts, carving fairly complexly shaped gunwales out of a single log
I have gone the composite route, lacking appropriately large pieces of wood. I have chosen to dowel some risers to the top of the gunwales at the bow and to the bottom at the stern. In addition, I plan to add cross-pices or breast-hooks at the bow and stern rather than making them integral to the gunwales.
Heath gave anthropometric dimensions for major parts of the kayak. At the bow, the gunwales are 3 fingers or 2-1/2 inches tall.
At the stern, the gunwales are 2 fingers or 1-1/2 inches tall.
The width of the gunwales at the bottom is one thumb or 1 inch.
The width of the gunwales at the top is two fingers or 1-1/2 inches.
I have also routed rib mortises into the bottom of the gunwales. They are spaced 6 inches on center, one inch long and one half inch deep.
The next step is to start adding deck beams between the gunwales.