Monday, 24 April 2017
Book Review Building Outrigger Sailing Canoes
Building Outrigger Sailing Canoes By Gary Dierking
International Marine, 2007
ISBN 9780071487917
$22.95
Review by Bob Holtzman
Gary Dierking is an American who has lived in New Zealand for many years. A skilled boat designer and builder, he has been fascinated by multihulls since his youth, and he has devoted much of his professional energies to catamarans, proas, outrigger canoes, and their ilk. While much of his work is, full custom, he also series-manufactures at least one outrigger canoe of his own design in composites (i.e., fiberglass).
In Building Outrigger Sailing Canoes, Dierking presents three of this own designs in full detail for amateur construction. These boats are:
- Ulua: A 17'9" Hawaiian-inspired design with a tacking rig for strip-plank construction
- T2: Also 17'9" and strip-planked, based on Micronesian canoes, with a variety of shunting sailing rigs
- Wa'apa: inspired by Hawaiian "three-board" canoes, and designed for stitch-and-glue plywood construction, she can be built as a 16-footer, a 24-footer, and/or in modular sections that allow the owner to switch back and forth between these two lengths with the inclusion or exclusion of a central 8' section between two 8' fore and aft sections.
These are beautiful boats, even the square-sided Wa'apa, but if your dream of the south Pacific includes floating idylls in calm lagoons with fruity alcohol drinks in a coconut shell, these boats won't do it for you. Looking at their lines, one can only conclude they are screamers: exciting craft that should keep any sailor on his toes and run rings around most sailboats twice their length.
Dierking includes complete building plans for all three boats in the book and, with its 8.5" x 11" format, reproduction is large enough (just) to build any of the designs right out of the book. (If your eyesight can't handle the size, or you want the greater precision that larger plans might allow, they are also available in larger formats from the author: http://homepages.paradise.net.nz/garyd/) The step-by-step explanation of the building procedures is concise and clear: so much so that one wonders why authors of other books on strip planking and stitch and glue construction need twice as much space to cover the same ground. Perhaps it's partly a function of Dierking's 3D how-to illustrations, generated in a drawing program and extraordinarily concise and clear in their own right: they reveal how the things go together more clearly than any number of 2D drawings and verbiage. This is one multi-skilled individual: he can design a boat; do the research on the cultural background; draw; write; and his workmanship as a boatbuilder is of a very high order.
The only thing that keeps me from being too envious is that I was his editor at International Marine (yes, this is the disclosure), and in that role, I do believe I considerably improved the book's organization. Indeed, I'm immensely proud of having helped bring this book into publication, for I feel it's one of the best boatbuilding books published within the past five years or so (I've read a few!). But the credit is the author's.
Of real importance is Dierking's presentation of numerous sailing rigs: several versions each of tacking rigs and shunting rigs, including an original, windsurfer-like shunting rig of Dierking's own design. (He calls it the Gibbons/Dierking rig, named for naturalist Euell Gibbons, but I feel he's being too modest. The rather crude rig that Gibbons designed provided only a bit of general direction to Dierking, and it suffered from tremendous weather helm. Dierking's version is really unique, perfectly balanced, and very sophisticated.) He gives the pros and cons of each rig type and provides useful guidance in how to sail a shunting rig -- something with which few Western sailors are familiar.
The boats are not simple -- they have a lot more bits and pieces than your average design for amateur construction of comparable displacement -- but none of the procedures are difficult. To build any of them, you will need a certain amount of dedication. They're also rather limited in their applications. For their length, they won't carry much, and they provide essentially no protection from the elements, so neither cold-weather sailing nor camp-cruising are really practical. But the benefits are numerous: they're beautiful; they're attention-getting (I think it would be impossible to take one off your roof rack and start assembling the components on the beach and not draw a crowd); and they're really, really fast.
Saturday, 25 March 2017
Book Review Birchbark Canoe
Birchbark Canoe
By David Gidmark
Review by Bob Holtzman
Subject matter and methodology aren't the only similarities between David Gidmark's Birchbark Canoe and John McPhee's much better-known The Survival of the Bark Canoe. Both are indeed about the same kind of craft; both are extended profiles of an individual builder of same; and both were written quite a few years ago -- Gidmark's in 1989, McPhee's in 1982. The most striking similarity, however, is how unpleasant said builder was.
McPhee's book focuses on Indian canoe builder Henri Vaillancourt, who comes across as a dedicated egomaniac, a pretty good craftsman who feels that everything he touches is fine art. Gidmark's William Maranda, a Quebecois Algonquin, in contrast, is an unforgiving racist who blames the white race for just about anything that crosses his mind while, at the same time, enjoying American soap operas and 4WD pickup trucks.
Gidmark became interested in bark canoes as a youth when he first observed a building demonstration -- apparently a not very skillful or authentic one, but one that impressed him nonetheless. His interest became so intense and so sincere that he moved to the Quebec town of Manawaki to learn canoe building from Maranda, one of the few remaining Algonquin builders. Maranda promptly turned down Gidmark's request based, it seems, on his disdain for the white race, but Gidmark had become so enamored of Algonquin culture that he settled into the town and began studying the language, the process of moose-hide curing, and other traditional skills and traditions. After observing him for more than a year, Maranda consented to teach him the craft, but he remained distant, never offering praise or encouragement.
Eventually, Gidmark learned to build a bark canoe under Maranda's teaching, using pretty authentic methods. He then hooked up with a couple other native builders, Jocko Carle and Patrick Maranda, the latter a relative of William's. Jocko and Patrick proved to be much more pleasant, sympathetic teachers, and Gidmark's experience in Manawaki was ultimately a positive one, largely because of them.
I read the original 1989 General Store edition of Gidmark's book which was an interesting read, but was not professionally edited or produced and suffered in its readability on those accounts, being somewhat halting in its diction and disjointed in the flow of the narrative. The book was republished in 1997 by Firefly, shown below (it appears to be still in print), but I haven't seen this and don't know if further editing was done to improve its readability. Gidmark has published several other related books, including a how-to book on building bark canoes based on the experience that he relates in Birchbark Canoe.
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Many thanks to Panera in Augusta, Maine, where most of these posts have been written. Good salads, bread, and wireless access!