RudderPosts

Windfall

by Robb White

The supply of good boat building wood is a case of feast or famine these days. Back around '02, the terrible drought in the South enabled certain rapacious corporate property owners to clear-cut vast acreages of old-growth Atlantic white cedar out of the Apalachicola River swamp that had never been accessible before... stuff with annual rings about like the notches on the edge of a dime. Most of it went for siding for trendy restaurants and boutiques and such but a little of it made it into boats. I have it on good authority that some of that wood even made it to the WoodenBoat school.

Just this summer Katrina turned a world of old growth coastal wood into trash. I have a friend who lost

Small Outboard Motors

Guest Author:  Robb White

I think the invention of the small outboard motor was at least as exciting as the invention of the television set and a much better thing for civilization. An outboard motor enabled people to do something but the invention of the TV gave them an excuse not to do something. Boy, I tell you, after Ole Evinrude  figured out a better way to go get the ice cream the industry took off. If you read Peter Hunn's "Old Outboard Book" you can follow the amazing progression and proliferation of the industry. All sorts of mechanical geniuses all over the world became fixated. Every kind of possible thing that could be invented was invented. A man named Clarke even built a little motor that had the motor part down under the water driving the propeller directly off the crankshaft... didn't have to have a water pump. In the late thirties and early forties Evinrude built a four-cylinder engine with only five horsepower. About the same time old man Kiekhaefer built a tiny little motor that would blow the doors off engines that weighed twice as much. Right after the war (that's WW II... "the war") a genius named George Martin designed a motor for National Pressure Cooker Company which is my favorite. My old two-cylinder Martin 60 of 1946 is an honest 7.2 hp and only weighs 40 pounds. I have been running it for many years. Because it is two-stroke (and that is not good anymore) I gathered up my money and went shopping. Guess what? There is no such thing as a two cylinder, four stroke engine that small and no such thing as any engine with that much horsepower any where near as light as that. OMC (Bombardier) has even discontinued the old standby, weedless, two cylinder 3hp that was the weapon of choice for small skiff people for more than fifty years. Their single-cylinder engine of that size is a piece of junk compared to that wonderful old two-cylinder model. The remarkable present-day engineering of the Japanese can't beat the work of old George Martin or Evinrude back in 1946. I am appalled and dismayed at this, but I still have my money.

Accessibility

[Robb White will be joining us here on RudderPosts as an occasional guest author. Here's his first offering]

Reading about Matt down at the IBEX show in Miami got me to thinking about what the whole trouble with the boating "scene" is. It is too damned accessible is what. Any fool can sit barebutt in the cockpit of the bareboat Beneteau in the shade of magical Moorea and sip on the Daiquiri whipped up by the 12 Volt blender and call home on the cell phone. This person didn't even have to read Maurice Griffiths or the Pardeys or watch old National Geographic specials about Irving and Electa Johnson and probably doesn't even know who Joshua Slocum was. All he has to possess is credit card skill to gain access to the most remote possible places. You can probably rent a heavily insured C&C in the Straits of Magellan.