De Pan

I started the morning by reading a few articles in Minnesota Conservation Volunteer, a magazine put out by that state's Department of Natural Resources.  How lucky I was to grow up in a state that valued its environment.  In retrospect, what I do is not something that I came across by luck, but instead, a result of many seeds planted by many different people, people who hoped that something would grow, but knew, in most cases, that they would never get to measure the result.  True to my nature, I don't seem to have been involved in making the plans....I go where I end up.

I put in down in front of the house on a cloudless day if one excludes the ones that are way over on the east horizon...where I am not going.  A half moon still hangs overhead and a fine cool autumn breeze blows off shore.  The tide has just passed low and I can start from the minimal shell beach that shows at that water level.  I stay reasonably close to land, mostly for shelter from the wind but also because the water is beginning to cool off and in the event of a capsize I'd rather not be drifting farther from shore.  Rather than cut across the bays from point to point, I swing in, paddling extra distance knowing that this will delay my arrival at the mouth of the river, which just might make it possible for me, as the tide comes up, to squeeze through a gap in the breakwater instead of paddling the mile out and around it.

I portage the bar that leads to Charles Island.  It is awash, but only by an inch.  The portage is not much more than 15 feet and hardly counts as such.



It takes something short of two hours to get to Milford Point, at the mouth of the Housatonic.  I do, in fact, find a gap in the breakwater that lets me sneak a shortcut into the river.  There, I spot 7 swans with 5 brants and a bit farther off are 5 loons.  The loon calls are limited to a brief "hoop".  One surfaces 20 feet away, very close for a loon.  I wonder if they might be yearlings here for the first time.  They aren't particularly large and seem a bit too curious for loons.  They are common loons stuck somewhere between youth, adult, summer and winter colors.

Milford Point and the Wheeler Marsh

I stop inside the point to stretch my legs and eat some lunch.  There is barely enough water to pass through the deepest of the channels in the Wheeler Marsh, but it will get deeper on the flood tide if I run out of water.  The mud banks at the base of the tall spartina grass are exposed and as a result there are quite a few birds out feeding.  I pass 20 some swans, see many egrets, several of the night herons, a great blue heron, some lesser yellow legs, and something small, dark and very fast hunting other birds (I hear a lot of warning calls when that bird comes by) but I can't identify it.

a juvenile night heron

I've never been in here when the water is this low...the yellowing grass being well over my head, it seems like... paddling through prairie.


Link to Minnesota Conservation Volunteer Magazine

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I've been using up the many scrap cutoffs from paddle making for a variety of projects.

Came across a neat idea for a sanding tool which seemed useful for handling the contours of a paddle, especially the shaft and throat area. It is my version of a "MacFarlane Bow Sander". I ended up purchasing a set of three 1" by 30" strips meant for a belt sander and used some walnut scraps along with a flexible strip of sassafras for the crosspiece. Also shaped some sassafras pieces into squarish dowel square to wedge and hold the sanding strip in place. Here are the pieces laid out for a visual.


The springy sassafras cross bar provides enough flex to bend and hold the sander under tension. While cutting out the slots in one of the walnut handles for the cross bar, a chunk chipped off so the slot became slightly too large. A thin wedge of sassafras must be jammed in to prevent any wiggling but the whole tool is pretty solid. It'll get some usage in the spring when I can start sanding outside again.



Also decided to use additional scraps to make some camping tools for my boys. Rather than learning proper technique with sharp tools, thought it would be proper to make some wooden toys so they could play and practice safely first. A piece of sassafras looked like an axe head to me and a cutoff of cherry had the contours of a handle. So they were put together but I couldn't find the camera to take pics at the time.

Then I read about a way to artificially accelerate the oxidizing process to turn the wood into a dark grey colour. It involves a mixture of rusty nails, vinegar and black tea.  Found the camera for this step and took pics of the natural sassafras turning into a dark black stain using this natural method. Might be a neat trick to artificially age some future paddles as well.





Also used some more sassafras bits to make a toy bucksaw and decided to stain "the blade" in a similar manner to look like metal. A canvas and leather case was also stitched up with some scraps.



Also still had various handle blanks cut back in '08 when making some custom carving tools. Just couldn't bring myself to burning these bits of hardwood. So these were used to make some toy tools similar to my own set for making the birchbark canoe. There's a basic belt knife with walnut handle and sassafras blade as well as a crooked knife with the same blade / handle combination





Used up more bits to make a chisel, a triangular awl and even a little firesteel rod replica.



Here are all the goodies spread out on the table. Planning on making a kid's sized pack basket to put them all in so we can have some camping / bushcraft fun next season.

It has been the longest stretch out of my canoe since I started my journal some six years ago.  February came in cold, very cold for this region, and it stayed cold with only a couple scattered days of thaw and a majority of days in single digits or teens (Farenheit).  Even the salt water of Long Island Sound had significant ice and it was frozen out as far as I could see on many days.

I put in at the feral cat park on the big river during a flood tide, all of that planned so that I coud paddle against the tide up to the narrowest parts of the river where ice might pile up.  I have managed to paddle in ice conditions most every winter, but that ice was mostly the 1/16 to 1/4 inch of night ice, the stuff a canoe canoe slice through.  The ice in this stretch of the river has broken up so that the surface is mostly water, but the first kiss of my canoe on the side of a flow comes more as a threat than an amusement.  After of month of freeze, the ice has substance.  Many of the flows are 4 inches or more in thickness.  That first kiss pushes my canoe aside and the flow hardly moves.  From now on I will treat anything bigger than a dinner plate as if it was a rock.


I head down river past Pope's Flat (an island) noting two hawks sitting on the downriver point.  They become four, and then they become immature blad eagles.  Ice moves birds around quite a bit.  Fresh water ducks and Canada geese, even some swans have been in the shallows of the salt water.  Eagles aren't so often seen although they are around.  The conditions may have forced them into a smaller area.

common mergansers (males)

I hope to reach the big marsh at the mouth, but at the last bridge I find a ice dam spanning the river.  I watch a fishing boat work its way through, but it takes two tries and some effort on his part.  This is as far as I'll go.

The first of my western red cedar paddles on its first trip

On the return while edging Carsten's and Peacock Islands, I spot some common mergansers, a flock of buffleheads, some ringneck ducks, and a few red breasted mergansers, and three of the eagles.  I pass my put-in at the feral cat park and continue until I reach ice jam up about a 1/2 mile upriver.

the upstream ice jam

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With the building bed all prepared and the bark cleaned, the next step was to prepare the canoe's hull. I mentioned earlier the the bark panels provided with the kit were of insufficient length to form a 1-piece hull. This meant that the hull would have to be lapped - a technique described in Jim Millers's fantastic DVD.

The dilemma I had was that the two pieces of usable hull bark had large knotholes in perfectly akward places. Which ever way I oriented the panels, there would be a gaping hole right at the delicate bow/stern or right under the centre thwart..not acceptable. To get around this dilemma, I was forced to to cut one of the bark panels into pieces so as to remove the centered knothole and build a three piece hull.


Central Panel; Cutting out knothole; placement of panels below form
The bark was placed white-side-up under the form and starting from the stern, the panels placed on top of each other moving towards the bow, like laying shingles. The pieces are supposed to overlap 2" in a full scale model, so for my ¼-scale model that meant ½" lap. Effectively this means some overlap ridges on the bottom of the canoe, but these will be sewn and sealed with pitched to make a watertight seal. In also means that this canoe model will in fact have a distinct bow & stern, unlike may 1-piece hulls that are symmetrical at either end.


Overlap at bow; Overlap at stern
The bed was moved out to the balcony and boiling water was liberally poured onto the bark & the weighted down frame (weighed down with some heavy block planes). At intervals of 3", gores were cut into the bark ensuring that they were cut perpendicular to the frame edge - that's why they look like they are on an angle. The cutting was done with a utility blade angled towards the stern to get a thinned edge.


Softening the bark with boiling water; Cutting a gore
With the gores cut, the bark was carefully folded up and held into position with the ¼" dowels serving as stakes. To ensure even pressure along the sides, scrap pieces of cedar, serving as battens, were sandwiched between the bark and dowels. Once I finished these outer stakes, I placed square ¼" dowels (not included in the kit, purchased at Canadian Tire) with their bottoms shaved to a point on the inside of the hull. These were placed carefully to fit in the small space between the bark and edge of the plywood frame. Then the inner stave and outer stake were tied with scraps of leather lace to effectively shape the hull.


Folding up the bark; Tying the first inner stave & outer stake combination
After all the inner staves were tied off and done, the outer stakes were tensioned to vertical by tying additional lacing across each pair of dowels. Now the soaking bark needs to dryout for a few days to permanently form the hull shape. Starting to look like a canoe!


Inner staves positioned; Tensioned hull with cross lacing
Items up next include the most difficult part in my opinion...carving the gunwales - the real backbone of the canoe. Scaling them down to quarter scale means that these structures will be quite delicate. We'll see how it goes in another post.