While we grind through video work for the next couple weeks I’m sharing some of my favorite skin boat images.
Of my many insane wood salvage schemes over the years, collecting rib and coaming stock for a Baffin Bay replica made entirely from driftwood was neither the most arduous nor the most hazardous, but it definitely ranks up there in creativity.
The terms of the commission specified the frame to be built with hand tools from wild gathered wood, which became something of a problem for sourcing rib stock. I remembered that years back I had seen a long-submerged black locust tree peeking out of the mud on a very low tide, but unfortunately there were no low tides at this time of year. To get the wood I had to dive down with a handsaw and saw furiously over and over until I ran out of breath.
Eventually I returned from the depths with a sizable limb and Tom went to work making ribs. With its tough interlocking grain, locust splits very poorly, so each rib had to be adzed out of an oversized blank. After chopping out the ribs we boiled them to death and then I over-bent them until they partially broke to match the details on the original kayak.
With just one shot on the coaming we said a few prayers and wrestled it into a horseshoe shape which I fastened with a little ivory plate from an old scrap of walrus tusk I’d been given, also matching an original detail.
Overall the build was way harder than I had anticipated but the result was gorgeous. I’ll post more text and pictures about this project tomorrow.
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This post was originally featured on our Instagram feed.
See the original post and discussion here.
