CHAPTER IV.
CANOE FITTINGS
THE DAY
of sail canoeing seems to have gone out of vogue of late, giving place
to the light, open Indian type of canoe. Time was when one could go to
the far ends of the earth in the canvas-covered cruising canoe or its
heavier wooden counterpart, though I always preferred the former. I see
no good reason for this change, and hope that these chapters on the
canvas cruiser will do something to revive a most interesting type of
long-distance canoeing. As a matter of fact you can build a very
serviceable canvas canoe with spruce and ash framing and ten-ounce duck
skin which will not weigh over thirty-five pounds.
Nessmuk, who navigated in the lightest wooden canoes in
the world, weighing but 11 lbs., seemed to think that canvas canoes
gained in weight with age and were limp, logy, and non-floating when
awash. As a matter of fact he spoke from hearsay on this matter and
never gave the canvas canoe a chance. Far from being logy it is as taut
and spruce a craft as floats, lively and safe in seaways that would
have held Nessmuk's ten-foot open canoe helplessly wind-bound, and, if
you upset, which may happen if some accident like a jamming rudder
befalls you, she will fill to the brim and yet carry your weight
nicely, while you kick her ashore, or, if the seas are not too choppy,
you can bail her out from the water alongside, crawl in over the stern
and go your ways rejoicing. I have done both and I know. And she is the
only solution of the mosquito problem in a cruise along the great
Atlantic bays, such as the one to Currituck Sound and back via inside
route from New York. For the canvas cruising canoe is the one
impervious sleeping resort where marsh mosquitoes abound. Its tent is
virtually a little rectangular house over the cockpit, and is provided
with a mosquito blind inside the flap. When you retire for the night,
not only is the tent buttoned firmly to the cockpit all around, but the
bottom edge of the mosquito bar is also. You gather a few armfuls of
sage for bedding, strew them in the bottom of the canoe, pile sand
around her as she lies up the beach, step in the two masts and guy the
tent between them, leading out to pegs on the beach, and the ravenous
horde of stingarees outside can sample the tent or the canvas deck, or
the canoe bottom, to their heart's content for all you care.
In making a canoe tent, ordinary sober whites and drabs
seem out of keeping with such a gay bird as the canoe has been proving
herself to be all day long. I always prefer something loud in awning
effects, broad, noisy stripes that are blatantly aggressive on the
color scheme of the surrounding scenery. These stripes should go
vertically, and four feet high is plenty. The tent should be just the
length and width of your cockpit, which will be about 2 feet wide by 6
feet long. To make it, sew two strips of yard-wide awning duck
together, hemming across the ends. This piece will give you both sides
and the top. Get out two more strips a little over two feet wide and
five inches longer than the height of the tent. Hem at the bottom and
sew to the other piece of canvas, making the ends of the tent. Each of
these ends will now have two five-inch flaps sticking up above the tent
top.
Get two spreaders (stout sticks, like broom handles) and
sew these flaps around them, sewing the leftover edge inside the top of
the tent at the ends with a double seam. Run in two bolt ropes of
1/8-inch white cotton rope inside the tent from one stick to the other,
and sew it to the canvas every foot, or overstitch it to it all along
its length. Bend on a bridle to each of the sticks and put in grommets
every foot along the bottom of the tent.
To set up :--Run the canoe up on the beach, pile sand
around her, step the main and mizzen masts furled, lead out guy ropes
for bridles of the fore and aft spreader sticks of the tent and guy to
pegs in the sand. Use the main and mizzen sheets for side guys. Along
the outside of your cockpit should be a row of brass awning buttons or
hooks, which you can get from any ship chandlery, and you now snap the
grommets over these hooks and the tent is up. For doors you simply
leave about three feet of the middle seam on each side unsewed, and sew
to the edges of the flap thus formed a loose fold of green mosquito
netting of the strong linen kind, that they use for salt water mosquito
bars.
This arrangement allows you to pin back one flap and get
the air, the opening being covered by the mosquito bar. As the rest of
the canoe is mosquito proof this bar will ensure you a good night's
sleep, no matter how mosquitoey the country, and in the day time along
its Atlantic marshes the mosquitoes are generally at peace with the
world. The canoe tent is good and comfortable for midsummer camping,
and is insect and snake-proof, besides giving the maximum of comfort
with the least browse, since its circular shape goes in very well with
the contours of one's body. I have slept in them for weeks, and have
even tried it off shore at anchor, but this is apt to end rather
moistly as you never know, when you drift off to sleep, what the
weather is going to do during the night.
Nessmuk's "pudding stick" or auxiliary paddle I have tried
and found good. Get a piece of 7/8-inch by 4-inch clear spruce about
two feet long, and whittle from it a miniature paddle with a seven-inch
blade 4 inches wide. Tie it to a rib of the canoe with a bit of twine
so you can drop it any time. It is very useful when working up salt
creeks after rail, snipe or reed birds. Hold the shotgun in one hand
and maneuver her along with the pudding-stick in the other. If a shot
offers, drop the stick alongside while you attend to fresh fowl for the
larder.
A 3-1/2- or 4-pound folding galvanized anchor, costing
about $1.50, is a necessity; also a small bow chock on each side of the
stem, as there will come times when you will simply have to lie to,
when paddling is impossible against head seas. You can't do anything
with her without the bow chocks unless you perform the delicate
maneuver of crawling out and tying your anchor line to the stem ring.
The anchor is also handy for fishing or resting for lunch in the middle
of a long traverse.
I do not advise a folding centerboard for a canvas canoe.
They are a necessity on the larger wooden cruising canoes, but the
little fellow is easy to keep on a level keel and is in fact a boy's
paradise in all kinds of blows, so that a good 2-1/2 inch or 3-inch
yellow pine keel the entire length of the canoe will keep her from
making leeway quite as well as anything of a folding nature. Besides,
the smallest of these made is 24 inches long and requires about three
inches of flat keel to screw to. A good brass drop rudder is, however,
a luxury not to be despised. You can buy these at more or less fancy
prices, compared to the cost of building the canoe (about the same
money), but you can make one for less than a dollar.
Get a piece of half-inch brass pipe 16 inches long and
slot its lower end with a hacksaw. Spread the slot to pass a 1/16-inch
brass rudder plate. Cut this out in the conventional round-end rudder
shape, 8 inches long by approximately six inches broad.
Pin near bottom with 1/4-inch brass bolt. Drill two
3/16-inch holes in the back of the pipe to receive the rudder hangers,
which are stout brass awning hooks screwed into the stern-post and left
upside down. They have just the right slope to allow the rudder to be
easily shipped. Finish the rudder by filing a flat at the top to
receive the yoke, which should have an eye in the bottom to pass the
twine for lowering and raising the rudder.
The only other hardware you will need is a jam cleat for
the rudder line, two for the main sheet inside the cockpit, and one on
the bow deck for the anchor. Halyard cleats are best on deck screwed to
the main deck carline. So equipped you will find a canvas canoe trip
one of the most enjoyable cruises you ever undertook.
I propose to add here a footnote on centerboards which has
been several years in the making. Leeboards are objectionable as being
clumsy and landlubberly; I have always preferred a fixed keel. This
latter will, however, not do much towards minimizing your leeward drift
when sailing closehauled, so I have schemed much for some sort of canoe
centerboard for canvas sail canoes. Of course the first thing to be
investigated was the folding metal fan centerboard, used on wooden
sailing canoes. These run from 24 to 40 inches long and, even in
galvanized iron cost $8, or more than the cost of the canoe; but that
is not its worst defect. The width of three or more inches required by
the base of the folding centerboard trunk puts it out of the question
for attaching to a 7/8-inch keelson.
If I were building a larger Waterat of, say, 17
feet LWL, intended mainly for sailing purposes, I would make the keel
of 5 inch stock, fining down to 1 inch at stem and stern and riveting
my ribs across it inside. With this keel there would be plenty of room
to screw down the trunk of the folding board, and I am sure that such a
cruiser for two men in salt water or lake country would be nearly
ideal, for she could carry a lot of sail, would be much lighter than
the wooden cruising canoe, and therefore paddle more easily, and it was
the bugbear of this tedious and laborious paddling that eventually led
to the downfall of the popularity of the wooden sailing canoe.
My cogitations on centerboards for the Waterats, as built,
led to the design of a thin wooden trunk of shape to take a 12 x 36 x
1/8-inch brass dagger centerboard. This was to be lined inside with
canvas, the lips of which were to be brought out and tacked over the
canvas on the keel, thus making a watertight canvas surface inside the
trunk, for it is obvious that a plain wooden trunk would surely leak
because of the joint between keelson and keel which cannot be got at to
caulk. By lining the trunk with canvas this difficulty is obviated.
To construct such a board, cut a slot through keel,
keelson and ridge timber of upper forward deck 3/8 x 12 inches. Let in
two uprights of 1/2 x 1-inch oak, necked down to 3/8 inch where they
pass through keel and upper ridge timber, and screw these into place at
each end of the slots, setting the joint in white lead paste. Now screw
to each side of these uprights the sideboards of the trunk, with their
canvas inside facings already stuck fast on them by painting down with
several coats of paint. These facings should have about three inches of
free canvas along their lower edges, which canvas is pulled down
through the slot in keel and keelson and brought around outside the
canoe, where they are pulled smooth and flat and tacked outside the
main canvas skin of the canoe with copper tacks set close together and
liberally doped with white lead paste.
This construction will give you a watertight, canvas-lined
centerboard trunk suitable for a narrow dagger-type centerboard of
1/8-inch brass with a wooden stop or top, which board is to be shoved
down through the slot in the upper forward deck, which is the upper end
of your trunk.
The above design is easily put in while building the
canoe, and, even for a built one, simply involves taking off the
forward upper deck so as to get at the work.
As Waterat IV was wanted up at the June encampment
of the Camp Fire Club and I was too busy to attempt any extensive work
on the canoe that year, I built on her a detachable keel board, put on
and taken off with wing nuts like a set of leeboards, as we used to do
with keel rowboats. All you needed was a piece of 8 x 7/8 inch yellow
pine about three feet long, and two 1/4-inch carriage bolts 2-1/2
inches long with wing nuts. It did not take half an hour to put this
scheme into execution. I sawed a slant fore and aft on the keel board,
so that in running aground or striking anything submerged I would not
be brought up all standing and have something ripped loose.
Two carriage bolts were driven through, about eight inches
from either end of the keel board; the holes for them were marked on
the 2-1/2-inch keel (which, you will remember, is permanently secured
to the bottom of the Waterat models), and, before putting her
overboard, the carriage bolts of the keel board were shoved through
these holes in my keel and secured fast with the two wing nuts. Other
sailors had leeboards; I had a keel board! and, for a long time, they
were mystified as to what kept the Waterat so well up into the
eye of the wind with no visible leeboard gear.
More ...
..
© 2002 Craig O'Donnell, editor & general factotum.
May not be reproduced without my permission.
Go scan your own damn
stuff.
