Why am I doing this? Part 2

I think I need to explain a bit about my relationship with water. At 18 mos old, my neighborhood in Stockton, California built a community pool. My Dad placed me in the water and I took off, swimming like a frog under the water. Parents of squeamish children would point at me and say, “Look! Look at that little baby swimming around in the water. GET IN!!!”. My apologies to those kids. At 2 yrs, my parents got me swimming lessons because they were worried about my submariner technique.

My father was principal at Edison HS in Stockton in the early 1960′s and a workaholic. About the time I was 3-5 yrs old, he’d go to work on Saturdays and take me along. He’d always find some unfortunate to “lifeguard” me while I swam about in Edison’s indoor pool. I got my Jr. lifesaving certificate in 3rd grade in Birmingham, MI and, when we moved to Des Moines Iowa in 1967 and I was 9, I started swimming competitively. That continued through High School, including water polo and stints as a lifeguard at public pools and wherever else they needed someone like me to watch the waterfront. I was a good swimmer. Someone once called me a “swimming machine” and I regularly put in several miles of laps in the pool a day. I was ranked somewhere in the top 6 freestylers in Iowa in the mid-70′s and helped a couple relay teams break state records in High School.

When I was a senior in high school we moved backed to California. I was recruited by the Naval Academy at Annapolis and offered a swim scholarship to Occidental College in LA, but ended-up, for several reasons, leaving competition and went to a State U. in California. But I never left the water.

I’ve sailed, surfed and now I kayak. I love the water. I think I feel more at home in it than anywhere else. While friends bask on the beach getting tan, I’m swimming out past the breakers, diving and flipping and floating. My Dad used to joke that he had to throw me into a tub of water occasionally lest my gills dry-up.

If you surf, you know what happens after a long session of sitting on your board looking for the right waves. For hours afterward, when you close your eyes, you see the outline of the horizon rising and falling, like lungs breathing in and out, like your heart beating. There’s such a strong attachment between humans and that place from whence we came. The great petri dish. The womb.

So, the kayak isn’t just a thing to build and satisfy my creative desires. It’s a lifeboat.

Deck Sheers

Tonight was not real exciting – well, not as breathtakingly exciting as the tedium described thus far. I epoxied the deck sheers. These are two 1″x1″ wooden stringers that will be glued at the top of the side of the hulls and planed by hand. They provide a frame to the top of the kayak’s hull  – the rigid lip of the “peapod” opening of the hull – and provide a ridge to glue the top deck pieces to and to screw into for all the various hardware on the deck.

The goal here is to turn 3 pieces of wood into a single longer piece and to do that twice so you have a couple one inch by one inch board that’s about 18 feet long. Like I said, not real exciting.

This wasn’t very tricky. There are three pieces on each of the two sheers, so two glue points on each stretch of sheer. You do need to clamp down the end pieces so when you clamp the diagonally-cut scarf joints they don’t slip.

Here’s what it looked like:

The joints that were epoxied with the cellulose/epoxy blend won’t show so I didn’t have to worry about much besides alignment and NOT gluing the two sheers to each other. Note the generous use of wax paper between the sheers and the worktable and between the two sheers at each glued joint to keep from creating a solid mass of glued wood.

The next step is to glue these sheers to the top of the upper hull pieces, so they extend a 1/4″ above the top of the hull like a turtle neck. This will be trickier and I’ll get Jeannie to help me with it this weekend. It’s a technical gluing along about 18′ of hull and it’s important to make the 1/4″ offset consistent to help make the sides straight and not warped.

Why am I doing this? Part 1

Why are you building a kayak? That’s the usual question. Even people who know me fairly well have asked that. If I were restoring a 1968 Camero, they wouldn’t ask that. This is different. It makes me look like a boat nerd or something.

I’ve always loved creative things that involve a start-to-finish process. My first love was photography. I set-up my first darkroom when I was eleven and even worked as a professional photo tech for awhile. The act of picking a film type/speed, taking the photo, developing the negatives (always sort of a challenge), then choosing the best shots, exposing and developing test prints, then creating the finished product was absolutely awesome. That’s pretty much lost now and I don’t miss it. The first (and last) time I destroyed a roll of negatives at work made me think, “Gee, wouldn’t it be cool if all of this was stored magnetically, magically somewhere I couldn’t dump a glass of water on and ruin?”

Back to why. I always struggled with school. My standardized test scores put me in the top 3%, but my ability to stand for the “I talk, you sit and listen” approach to education was low. It wasn’t for me. I have always needed to touch, manipulate, envision, create, destroy and produce. This is a common problem for males. Our current education system caters to the more feminine, verbal, connection style of learning and boys find themselves sitting at a desk in the hallway for being “disruptive”. We’d do well to separate boys and girls in school and teach them differently rather than punish one set and call them “bad” and point to the other as “good”. They’re just different. I don’t say this flippantly or with anger towards girls and women. I say it with sympathy for all the little boys who suffered like me. I was almost tossed out of school in 1st grade and tried to leave high school as a sophomore by getting into an apprenticeship program in photojournalism at a local newspaper.

Ironically, after casting about in college, studying just about everything, I went on to be a middle and high school math teacher, but, again, found it really difficult to exist within the education system. I had many students who told me I was the best teacher they’d ever had and was offered a full-time position at SF’s prestigious Lowell High School a couple years after student-teaching and subbing there, but it wasn’t for me.

What the heck does all that have to do with building a kayak? Everything. It is through the end-to-end process of creation that I learn things, that I meditate, relax and feel good about myself and the world. Thank goodness Jeannie, my wife, gets this. She often listens intently to me and says, “My god, no wonder you’re tired – you think about everything all the time.” So, a project like this is the ultimate escape and centering experience for me.

A bit more about me. The following is my response to one of those Facebook chain-letter type things that all your FB friends do, and get you to do as well, called “25 Random Things About Me”.

1) When I was very young (5??), my grandmother snapped at me for adding and subtracting backwards. I still do that and I can do basic math faster than most people I know.

2) As a child, my job preferences were spy, stunt car driver or under-water demolition expert. My mother insisted I had a death wish.

3) I am attracted to women who like to cook and am now married to a pastry chef.

4) I am afraid of heights.

5) I put together my first photo darkroom when I was 11 yrs old. My first trial, I forgot to dilute the stop bath and all my photos came out a spectacular shade of pee yellow.

6) I cry easily during the emotional parts of movies. Stanley Kubrick and Ridley Scott are my favorite directors and I cried when HAL got unplugged in 2001 (just kidding about that last part).

7) I wish I had 5 children and lived on a farm. As it turns out, I have 1 child, 3 grown-up step-kids and live in the coastal suburbs. Close enough!

8 ) I love my wife dearly and have finally found the best friend I looked for all of my life. I mean that. There’s nothing better then getting to be yourself in your marriage and having your spouse still think you’re cool, still care about you and want to kiss your face.

9) I’m a neat freak, though I create messes. After I create the messes, I spend hours reorganizing and tidying, labeling, boxing, painting, patching…perhaps this is more OCD than neatness?

10) I manage my life with checklists. I admire people who don’t have to make lists, but I suspect I get a lot more done than they do. Check!

11) I’ve eaten snake. It was very good, but the snake bile liquor we drank with it made us all very drunk.

12) My son is awesome, but he needs to stop worrying so much about what people think of him. Isn’t that the trick in life? He’ll figure it out eventually and in the meantime, I hope he doesn’t give a damn that I worry about this aspect of him.

13) Of all the places I’ve lived, Des Moines, Iowa is by far the best. I miss it and will move back there some day, regardless of the arctic winters, spring floods and summer humidity. The 35 days of fall make it worth it.

14) Though I’ve had many great cats, I’m really a dog person. Dogs bring out the best in us, remind us of our duties, our promises and love us even when we forget about those things. I particularly like herding dogs, their intensity and workaholic nature, but I’m getting to like the tenacity and humor of terriers, thanks to my current pooch.

15) I would never have suspected, in my youth and even into college, that I would love business as much as I do.

16) Life is like baseball. It’s about getting hits and getting on base. The rest takes care of itself. People obsessed with home runs miss the point.

17) It seems to me that we all overuse sports analogies and metaphors.

18) A CEO at a start-up once asked me a single question in an interview: “Are you a winner or a loser?” I admit that I was stunned and couldn’t muster anything snappy, though I got the job. He was only 35 years old and the board of directors insisted he “retire” a few months later.

19) It’s very odd how provincial we all are. No matter how small the differences between two groups of people, those inevitably become the focus. I’m sure there is some evolutionary explanation for this, but my suspicion is that it will be our undoing unless we learn to move past it.

20) I have an innate ability to tell when people are lying. It’s in the eyes. Unfortunately, most people lie most of the time.

21) Before I had a baby boy, I had a very large, fast motorcycle and drove it 140 mph down 280 one early Saturday AM. I like speed a LOT.

22) One of my dreams is to design and build a house one day.

23) I read to my son every night, before bedtime, until he was 11 years old. Those were some of the best books, the best discussions and the most tender times I’ve ever experienced.

24) During the last few years, since my mom’s death, I’ve formed a much better relationship with my dad. It had nothing to do with him changing, but me becoming better at accepting him for who he is and calling him on the stuff that really bugs me. I’m sorry it took so long to get to that point.

25) When I was 14 years old, I would take my parent’s cars out and drive around town while they were busy with their jobs and clubs. They never found out, but were amazed at what a “natural” I was when they taught me to drive a year or two later.

I hope that number 26 is “I built an 18′ wooden kayak in my garage once”.

Expoxy. Cool stuff.

The first significant step of constructing this kayak is to glue the hull components together to make the larger pieces. Last Sunday I epoxied the hull’s four main sections together from 12 pieces – 3 pieces each to create the 18′ hull components. This created two bottom halves – the keel – and two side halves. These four sections will form the hull.

You run a string down the center of your work surface to give you a reference line to get the side sections “fair” – straight and aligned, not crooked before gluing.

Then you separate all the pieces, after lining-up the like sections on top of one another to assure they’re symmetrical, with sheets of wax paper so you don’t glue them all together into a sandwich.

You glue them together using expoxy, hardener (2:1 ratio) mixed with cellulose to give it some thickening. The consistency of mustard. That way you get a nice thick, plastic adhesive that fills in all the gaps and strongly sticks the wood together. The epoxy mix is painted on the wood pieces across the joints with a small, cheap, disposable paint brush. You then use scrap boards to screw the pieces to the table making a very even and tight clamp.

The epoxy takes about 24 hours to “cure” (harden completely) at 70 degrees F. At 60 degrees, it takes twice that long. Fortunately, I have a refrigerator in my garage which produces enough ambient heat to keep my garage at about 70 degrees. I thought I was going to have to use a space heater, but my frig does the trick. It’s cold in Half Moon Bay. While places like Modesto, CA enjoy 90 degree summer days, we “enjoy” misty, cool days (55-ish) most of the summer. Think Scotland, not Bermuda.

The wooden board “clamps” came off tonight after nearly 4 days of curing – busy with work – and my basic hull sections are now done. I will need to clean-up where the epoxy soaked into the wood around the “scarf” joints where they were glued. The amount of bleeding of the epoxy will influence what sides I face outward on the kayak because I want to varnish the natural wood, not paint a solid color. I should have put clear packing tape along these joints to prevent that – live and learn.

A solid start

About 2 months ago, after two or three years of considering buying and building a do-it-yourself boat building kit from Chesapeake Light Craft (www.clcboats.com), I purchased one of their Chesapeake 18′ sea kayak kits. It shipped to me a few weeks later in a surprisingly small amount of boxes with “everything” I’d need to construct a world-class mahogany kayak.

Look, this isn’t like buying a treadmill. A treadmill you can fold-up and kid yourself that you’ll use it “tomorrow”. No, these kits are a commitment. They don’t do anything without major work and patience. When built, they are essentially large pointy shoe boxes held together with epoxy and 5 or 6 coats of varnish. And they have to carry you about in a violent, corrosive and unforgiving ocean, so you’re motivated to build them well.

(Fear of death is like a good high school swimming coach, I always say.)

Or, you screw-up and hold a mini-viking funeral with whatever you lamely put together. There’s no in-between on something like this. It’s a commitment. So don’t screw-up.

The first thing you need to do when you construct an 18′ sea kayak from a kit is to build a work table. This one is built from a ripped 4′x8′ 1/2″ ACX sheet of plywood and a couple 20′ 1″x4″ fur planks. I nailed the sucker together with nailgun and 1-1/4″ nails. That made a 2 ft by 16 ft work top. It sits on a couple of saw horses. For its size, it’s pretty dang portable, yet very stable.

Well, to be honest, the first thing you do is shove everyone’s crap to one side of the garage. In fact, if you’ve been longing to clean-out the garage, a kit like this may be the most effective and insidious way to achieve that goal. Jeannie, my lovely wife, helped me reorganize the contents of our garage, including the treadmill, to make room a couple Sundays ago. It was weird. No complaints. It was as if the rest of the family were smurfs and I was driving a monster truck – no resistance. I felt like Moses parting the Red Sea. The garage is now mine, all mine.

Prologue

Out on the perilous deep,
where danger silently creeps,
and storm’s so violently sweeping,
You’re drifting too far from shore.

Excerpt from Emmylou Harris’, Drifting Too Far From This Shore