post 22, INTEGRITY taking shape

INTEGRITY taking shape, 1981. See also posts 03 ,09, and 17. You can see that the top two strakes are a lighter color then the original mahogany hull of the old lifeboat. Rot had crept down from the cobbled up plywood deck and cabin some fisherman had added, so I had to replace those two top strakes. In the process I had to sister up the ribs, of course, so I did a strong job of sistering and just ran the ribs right up to the top of the new cabin I was putting on. My sistered ribs were good air-dried oak because they had to be strong, but all my added planking was kiln dried doug fir. Doug fir is a respectable boat lumber, but kiln drying takes the life out of any wood. But you have to live with what you can obtain. Good boat lumber is terribly expensive. It didn't make sense to spend a fortune (which I didn't have anyway) for rebuilding such an old boat.

To compensate some for any weakness of the kiln dried planking, I kept my design very strong. The decks were flush with no weakening cockpit that might turn into a bathtub. This proved to be a godsend. In mid-Pacific with an exceptional wind from astern, three times in one day we had ankle deep green water washing over the entire after deck. This didn't bother us in the slightest. We weren't even apprehensive. But it might have been serious if we had had a cockpit there to fill to the brim with water and make us top heavy.

Also, the cabin design, rising right up from the sides on the sistered ribs (and no windows), was strong. We were caught one time on the treacherous Columbia River Bar, "The Graveyard of the Pacific", with breakers flush with the very top of the cabin pounding our beam. The sturdy boat lived up to her name.

I was not an experienced boat builder. The only previous boat carpentry work I had done at that time was messing with old 22 foot SCHOOLMARM during the couple of months just before obtaining INTEGRITY. But I did dig up whatever books I could find, and I went on a crash-learning course. If you want the memories when you're old, you've got to "just do it" when you're young enough to.

post 21, Jumping Fences

Fence jumping, 1988. See also posts 01, 03, 06, 10 and 16. When I worked with the untrained burros before the trek I realized that Oregon's High Desert was crisscrossed by BLM fences and that gates might be ten miles apart. The wires are always under high tension. If you cut one you would need a wire stretcher and spare wire to repair it. Even if you had good intentions to repair, you would make instant enemies of the ranchers if you cut a fence wire. So I spent some time and effort training the burros to jump fences before I started the trip.

Of course, there's a limit to how high a little burro can jump. I carried an all-purpose fencing tool with me. They're combination pliers, wire cutter, hammer and staple puller. When I came to a fence, I would undo the wire from maybe six posts. Then I would push the wires down and tie them in a bundle as low as I good get them. I would wrap a saddle blanket around the bundle for insurance and then the burros would jump over the wires. Since they had been taught this trick during their initial training, they did it willingly, with no hassle. After crossing the fence I would re-position the wires at their normal height. The fence had not been damaged in the least.

I apologize for not remembering the name of the young lady in the photo. A friend had driven the three burros and me to the third annual Glass Buttes Knap-In, which is held during Easter Spring Break each year. When the gang learned that I was going to head off on a compass course for the little hamlet of French Glenn after the Knap-In, this girl asked if she could join me to learn a little about trekking with burros. Of course, I agreed. She was a good camper and we had a great trip. We only had one area of disagreement, and I'll discuss that in a later post.

post 20, Working Sinew

Working sinew during the Columbia River canoe trip, 1987. See also posts 01, 04, 07 and 13. In post 13 I showed a quicky bow and arrow and one of the fish obtained with them. There is a hierarchy of Stone Age weapons or tools for obtaining game progressing from the club to spear to atlatyl to bow and arrow.

A club is the least effective, but it's the easiest to acquire. I've killed porcupines with clubs (actually, a club is the best weapon for porcupines--I'll elaborate on that in another post).

A spear is the next easiest to obtain. I've just read a news account of chimpanzees making crude spears and getting bush babies with them. I also used a spear and I did catch fish with it, but it was a short-range weapon, and I found it quite difficult to stalk the fish and get close enough to use it.

An atlatyl is a stick used as kind of an arm extension for throwing spears a greater distance. Inuit (Eskimos) and Australian aborigines used atlatyls until fairly recently. But I can't imagine anyone preferring the short range atlatyl if they had the proper materials and knowledge for making the longer range bows and arrows. Inuit had the knowledge for making bows but they seldom had suitable wood in the far north.

Just having the knowledge of how to make something does you no good if you don't also have suitable materials. The usual obstacle to quickly making an effective bow in a survival situation is the lack of a suitable bowstring. Vegetable fibers, such as from nettle, may be available in the local area--but only at certain times of the year. There is commonly a processing procedure that takes time. Also, most vegetable fibers available quickly in the wilderness just aren't strong enough.

The best natural bowstring material that I have found, it's just as effective as the synthetic polyester, is sinew. But here again, you're not going to find any ready to use and just laying around out in the wilderness. When you do kill a large animal, or come across the carcass of one recently killed by a cougar or such, you must cut out the sinew and carefully hoard it for future use. (And the rawhide as well.)

Sinew is tendon. The thickest pieces of tendon come from the lower leg, and you want to extract that tendon in pieces as long as possible. The muscle on a deer's back is covered with a thin shiny sheet of the same material, and you also save this in pieces as long as possible, but this back tendon is too valuable for splitting into sewing thread to use for most other things.

After acquiring from a carcass, the leg sinew must be dried thoroughly, and of course, that takes a little time. In the photo above, a piece of dried leg sinew is shown on the right. Then you lay the dry sinew on a solid log--or a big smooth rock--and you take a husky club and beat on it. You have to really put some muscle into this. Sinew is tough.

When the thick piece of sinew is pretty well squashed, you use your thumbnails to pull long fibers off of it. Those soft fibers will typically have a hard lump right at the end where the sinew was originally cut. Those lumps must be pulled off with your thumbnail. If you can't pull them off, your fiber is too thick and it must be separated into finer pieces. Each fiber should taper to nothing at each end.

Commercial cordage and rope is typically composed of three strands twisted together. That makes for nice round rope, but it's difficult to do in the woods. Aborigines settled for two strands. To start, you take six or seven of the sinew fibers (pictured on the left side of the photo) and at the center of the fibers you twist them tightly together for a couple of inches. Looking from either end, the twist should be clockwise. (Reverse all these directions if you're left handed.) Then you fold the ends toward each other. The twisted center part tries to untwist and it locks itself into the start of a two-strand cord with the two strands twisted together counterclockwise. What holds the cord together is the counterclockwise strands fighting the clockwise fibers.

To make your embryonic cord longer, you add fibers to each strand. You hold the point where the two strands merge to become a cord between the thumb and forefinger of your left hand. You take the fibers of one strand between the thumb and forefinger of your right hand and twist the fibers clockwise. At the same time, you pull that twisted strand over the other strand in a counterclockwise direction and snug it under your thumb to hold it twisted. You just keep doing that until you have a nice long bowstring as is pictured at the center of the photo.

Aborigines made a lot of cordage for various uses and they often laid the fibers of both strands on their thigh and twisted them simultaneously by rolling them against their thigh with the palm of their hand. The twisted fibers then automatically twisted the strands together. For a bowstring I think it's stronger to twist with the fingers.

post 19, Designing COMPROMISE

Designing COMPROMISE, 1991. See also posts 01, 02, 05, and 11. You can see that the setting is ideal. Essentially the whole back wall of the room is glass with a wonderful panoramic view of the mouth of the Columbia in front of Astoria, Oregon. Thru the middle pane you can see a freighter steaming upriver toward Portland. There was always a steady stream of boats of all types to watch and dream about.

I have occasionally lived in fancy houses, but none of them were mine. At the time pictured, my own home was a dilapidated big work van, like a bread truck, with a sheet of plywood for a bed and a tiny one burner propane hotplate for a cook stove. The house in the picture was the getaway house of Bob and Dorothy Miles. Their normal residence was a condominium in Portland. Bob had bought an old church high on a hill in Astoria. He then tore out almost the complete back of the church and replaced it with glass doors and windows, and he then remodeled the church into a modern house.

In posts 07 and 14 I told about my good friend Joe Pindell. Bob Miles was a mutual friend of Joe and I. Like Joe, Bob didn't actually do anything with boats--he just dreamed about them. When he first bought the old church he had vague thoughts about building a boat in it. In the photo you can see the telescope he set up for watching boat traffic. On the second floor he built into the church there was a drafting table with the same wonderful view of the river. I drew up my plans at the drafting table with many referrals to the library of boat books in the shelf at my elbow.

I rebuilt the balcony just outside the window for Bob. At the back of the building on the steep hillside the balcony was about 20 feet off of the ground and there was rot in the supporting structure. I also did some roof work on the old building. In exchange, Bob and Dorothy let me house-sit the place and do my design work on COMPROMISE. But it wasn't a business relationship. They were just great friends helping a fellow dreamer achieve his dreams.