Trending

We've been without internet for almost a week now at home.  I could claim that's why there hasn't been much news here lately, but I'd be lying.  Despite the lack of distractions, I haven't made much progress on the hull recently, and now we've got Weather rolling in that should keep me from doing anything with epoxy for the foreseeable future.

So it's a good time to talk briefly about something that amuses me greatly: the trendiness of outrigger canoes.  I noticed not long after starting this build that there were images of outriggers cropping up here & there in popular culture.  I didn't think much of it at first, but then I saw the Patagonia catalog for summer 2011, which prominently featured this gorgeous photo (and a few others) by Trevor Clark of outriggers in the open ocean off Hawaii at sunset.  Most of the shots were of paddling outriggers, but there was one in the catalog of a sailing outrigger as well.

I've seen a few other cultural references to outrigger sailing.  The great and recently deceased navigator Mau Piailug drew some attention as he worked to re-establish traditional navigation skills in the Pacific.  And Hawaiian-style outrigger racing and outrigger surfing began to crop up in the mainland USA.  As a windsurfing friend explained with regard to the stand-up paddleboarding craze, Hawaii has always had a periodic influence on fashion in the USA.

Fast forward....  Today I was faced with proof that outriggers have Arrived, and that I'm participating in a Trend.  The proof?  A US quarter dollar coin with a sailing outrigger on the reverse.  It turns out that  a series of 6 non-state entities were honored with coins in 2009, presumably to mollify them after a decade of state quarters rubbing their collective nose in their political non-entity status.  Among them were the Northern Mariana Islands (the one I'd found), and Guam, both of which featured crabclaw sails in their artwork.  The NMI coin shows a tacking outrigger, while the Guam example uses a proa.  Both cultures mentioned pride in their ancestral seafaring and navigation skills as reasons for including the vessels on the coins.

So I guess I'm a hipster now, building an outrigger canoe like all those other trendy, Patagonia-catalog-reading, US quarter-spending boatbuilders out there.  Who knew we were so commonplace?

If you'll excuse me, now, I need to stop borrowing internet connectivity from the office, and gear up for the bike ride home through the falling snow.  Maybe I'll do a little work on my sail before I go to bed.  It would be nice to have some progress to tell you about next time I'm able to get online.

I'm Back! Also, Prehistoric Pacific Navigation

If you looked at the long lag since my last post, you might think I'd died or given up on the boat or some similar tragedy.  But no, I've just been away off & on since late June, visiting Maine for my grandmother's 90th birthday and, a month later, her funeral.  In between, my wife and I took a few weeks to drive to Maryland and back to visit other family and show the kids around our alma mater.

Along the way, I've been lugging around a copy of We, the Navigators by David Lewis.  It's a scholarly (i.e., thorough and somewhat dry) treatment of the various ways that Pacific seafarers managed to get around without charts, magnetic compasses, or any other modern instruments.  Like any other indigenous culture, it all boils down to thousands of years of accumulated wisdom about surviving in their part of the world.  Such knowledge is difficult to keep alive these days, and not something you can fully understand if you're not of the culture that produced the body of knowledge.

But Lewis sailed thousands of miles with Melanesian, Polynesian and Micronesian navigators to better understand their skills.  He does a great job of breaking down the various facets of their navigational techniques, and explaining each.  I think I got a few ideas that might help me with my much simpler coastal navigation tasks on our next charter. It was also inspiring to see what they were capable of, these people behind the indigenous design I'm building.

---

Meanwhile, I've resumed work on the boat.  I epoxied the butt joints in the side panels yesterday, which went... so-so.  I clearly should have used more epoxy; I fear that there are some voids in the joints, but they're not so bad that it would make sense to rip them apart and try again.  Note to self: for critical points in the build, let's not be stingy with the material that keeps the boat together.

I still have the bottom panels to join, and there's a funny story there.  I've been puzzling over the rather extreme flex that's put in the bottom panel, wondering how people manage to do that.  My confusion lasted longer than any reasonably intelligent boat builder could explain.... Eventually, I realized that the bottom panel as I have it cut out is actually supposed to be halved longitudinally.  So I'll be digging out the ol' saw one more time to do that cut, then joining the fore & aft sections of each of the bottom panels with more butt joints next. 

---

Finally, I came across a very nice Flickr set from Tom Puchner, an Austrian builder.  I'd seen a photo or two of his Melanesia launch party, but had missed his construction shots.  They're great, as are the very artistic shots from his recent test sail with a new, hollow ama.  Any time I feel my motivation flagging, I'll take a look at the beautiful  photo to the right and let it work its magic: keep at it, and this could be you sailing home as the sun disappears beneath the waves.