RudderPosts

Signature Seattle

This report, from Eric Sorensen, recently arrived at the RudderPosts weather desk. Eric, recall, is the fellow who wrote about Sam Devlin's new cruiser-runnabout for WB No. 188.

“For nearly 30 days now the Pacific Northwest has faced one of the key features of living on the lee shore of the Pacific Ocean: rain. Often, the region's reputation for wet weather is misplaced; in the warmer half of the year, the climate is downright Mediterranean. But the winter rain gets even, with storm pulses coming in daily. Puddles are growing puddles. The ground is a gumbo, sliding off hillsides and dissolving trees of their moorings. On the waterfront, boat covers and spring lines are growing green with moss. Sailors, facing the eternal choice -- sail or work on the boat -- are defaulting indoors to refinish oars or strip varnish from a hatch. The stove in the work shop at Seattle's Center for Wooden Boats is on a steady diet of scraps. Foot traffic on the docks is so light that the resident heron sits for hours unfazed, using the pilot gig DAN as a perch. With so much water, boats and shore birds are all the more in their element.”

Lightering

Art Hall sent these photos over from Bath, Maine, yesterday, with this commentary:

"I wish I had better details. These were forwarded to me by a buddy who is the docking master on a floating offshore oil platform (FPSO) off the coast of Angola.  He works on a rig called Kizomba (you can google that up if you're curious).   I understand it's located about 100 miles offshore.  This appears to be a lightering operation for getting supplies out to the platform or just general cargo to some small African town with no deep draft port. I see land in the background so it's not that far offshore.

"Mostly I think it's a good representation of the third world and their ability to improvise and make do with limited resources. I showed this to one of the naval architects here in the office and he just shook his head in disbelief.... I shudder at the thought of an inclining experiment.

"I can't quite figure these boats out.  Perhaps built just as lighters or retired fishing boats. They don't appear to have power. The lack of deck beams is a testament to their robust construction. Not pretty, but they do the job."

As you know, you can click the photos to make them larger. Anyone care to add detail or insight?

Meet the Editorial Assistant

This is Betsy Powell, WoodenBoat magazine's editorial assistant. She joined the company in 1988, after she and her husband, Jack, moved to Maine from Pennsylvania. She began her career with us in the WoodenBoat Store, helping with the Christmas rush, but someone soon recognized her organizational talents and courted her away to the editorial department, where she's been ever since.
   
Betsy keeps us organized, and she's also an eagle-eyed proofreader. Many of you have corresponded with her, as she responds to many of your Launchings submissions—and other editorial correspondence. She comes by her interest in the topic of wooden boats honestly: she and Jack, before moving to Maine, restored a 1948 27' Elco powerboat, and cruised it on Chesapeake Bay. Their most recent boat, which they sold just a few years ago, was a Bahamian-built Albury launch—a strip-planked center-console outboard-powered boat. Jack's made a second career of painting yachts and houses, and this boat was always impeccably kept—as are WoodenBoat's editorial files, thanks to Betsy.

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.

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.

Turkey

Here's a common autumnal sight here at WoodenBoat and surrounds--one that makes us lay down our rabbet planes and shop aprons to don square-toed buckle shoes and high black hats, and take to the fields with muskets. I counted eleven, but I heard someone outside my door say eighteen. (The image, appropriately, is cropped, for the colleagues of these three birds were darting about, and all blurry.) The flock seems to grow each year.

Forecast

Apparently, Flintstonian references, unlike hurricanes, can be forecast with some certainty. 

Wiiillllmaaa!

Yes, the title is a Flintstonian reference. I'm in Miami right now, at IBEX. IBEX is the International Boatbuilders Exhibition and Conference--a show founded by the staff of our sister publication Professional Boatbuilder about 13 or so years ago. We're all watching the weather, as a hurricane called Wilma is forecast to rake the state right after the show closes and then to track up the coast--perhaps following us home to Maine.   

IBEX is primarily concerned with composite boatbuilding. It's in an immense hall filled with the stuff of modern boatbuilding: resins, cloths, core materials, hardware, gauges, goops, windshields, decals, robots, electronics, engines, tanks, controls.... And some wood. It's open only to the trade: only those involved in boatbuilding and related fields are allowed in.  There's an active seminar series, and one track of this series is dedicated to construction in wood. Steve White of Brooklin Boat Yard and Ethan Cook of Rumery's Boat Yard gave a presentation this morning, for example, on the construction of modern yachts inspired by traditional designs. Tomorrow, Sam Devlin and Ethan will give a 1 1/2 hour talk on the concept of "running plugs"--that is, pulling fiberglass molds from prototype boats (rather than building a throw-away male form--a so-called "plug." Friday's talk is on robotics in the small shop, and will focus on the CNC machine called the Shopbot.

"Composites," essentially, means resin and fabric. (Back in the day, it meant steel frames and wooden planks.) It includes exotic materials like carbon fiber and Kevlar.  I'm a newbie when it comes to that stuff. This is not the goopy, Herreshoffian vision of "frozen snot." There are some brilliant innovators in this field, doing things like resin infusion (in which resin is drawn into the mold by vacuum); eliminating "print through" (when the weave of the fabric shows through the boat's finish); and cutting parts with computer-guided routers. I admit a certain fascination with such thinking, though I'm more at home with cedar shavings and enamel paint.

The LeDonnnes are here, by the way.They're the family that built YNOT, our cover boat for the September/October issue. It's finished in AwlGrip, and it's the centerpiece of the AwlGrip display. It was also prominently shown in our own WoodenBoat Show in August, in Newport. It's good to have that sort of cross-pollination--a boat that fits at both IBEX and on the cover of WoodenBoat. The rising tide of innovation lifts all… never mind. That's not an appropriate metaphor right now.