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

Raid Sweden... The Movie!

I've been wondering for a while if we can post movies here, but haven't ventured to try it yet. A few minutes ago, Tom Jackson came into my office with a CD of images--and a short movie clip--of his sailing adventure in Sweden last summer. Tom, recall, writes about this trip in the current issue of WoodenBoat in a story called Sailing into the Heart of the Country. It's about a raid--a multi-day race that skips from point to fantastic point in small open boats.

This clip shows the intrepid sailors entering Karlskrona on the penultimate day of the raid on Sweden's Blekinge Archipelago. Wind was blowing 25-30 knots on the quarter; boats are surfing, only six of the twenty seven contestants were allowed to sail that day. Tom's the guy in the blue and yellow striped lifejacket in the bright-hulled boat. His boat, Olivia, is a replica pilot boat built by Bjorje Axelsson in 1999; the original was built in 1914. Mats Dalberg made the movie--from another pilot boat sailing nearby. Have a look by clicking the file below. The download time is well worth the wait. (There's no sound. Our next experiment will include sound.)

Download blekinge_2005441.MOV

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.