New Life for an Old Town Canoe

A recent project that I've spent way too much time on is the restoration of a badly-damaged and well-worn Old Town Canadienne canoe. Here is the finished result:

This canoe belongs to my long-time canoeing partner, Ernest Herndon, who has paddled it many hundreds of miles on rivers and lakes of the region, frequently using it on his research trips in the course of writing such books as Canoeing Louisiana and Canoeing Mississippi. When we paddled the Pascagoula River System from the headwaters to the Gulf in order to co-author the book, Paddling the Pascagoula, Ernest chose his trusty Old Town, while I paddled a hand-built wooden sea kayak.

The Old Town Canadienne is a classic north woods canoe with recurved stems, tumblehome sides, and a large load-carrying capacity. It's ideal for long trips on big rivers and lakes, and can easily carry two men and all their gear and supplies for trips of two weeks or more.

Below, Ernest Herndon getting ready to shove off in the morning after breaking camp on a river sandbar. Here, you can see that the canoe is well-loaded with dry bags, duffel bags and all the other assorted gear needed for a river trip.

Ernest bought this canoe at a local Mississippi salvage store. The Old Town, along with many others in a shipment, came into the salvage store's inventory after suffering some significant damage in transit somewhere. When he first brought it to me back in about 1993, to see if I could fix it up, it looked like it had fallen off a truck at highway speeds. There were several major cracks in the hull, broken all the way through in places, and the aluminum gunwales were bent and even broken in one place.

At that time my boat repair skills were minimal. I patched the fiberglass, reinforced the broken gunwale with a strip of aluminum riveted in place, touched up the red paint with a spray can, and called it good enough. He used it like that for all these years, finally bringing it to me for a complete refit earlier this year. The canoe had lost much of its shape due to the bent and broken aluminum gunwales. The fiberglass patches were finally peeling off, and the floatation bulkheads in each end had broken loose from the hull. Below is a photo of it right before I began the work. It's hard to see all the problems in the photo. It looked much worse in person.

The only cure for the gunwale problem was to get rid of the aluminum rails and rebuild the boat with inwales and outwales made of ash. I started with the inwales, scarfing them to length, then gluing on spacer blocks to the inner sides so they would have, in effect, scuppers all along their mid-length to allow easy dumping of water by turning the canoe on its side.

I first cut away the aluminum rails at the ends and glued in triangular blocks of solid mahogany to serve as a termination point for the inwales, as the extreme ends of the fiberglass hull were too irregular and rounded to carry the inwales all the way. I then removed one aluminum gunwale first, leaving the other one in place to maintain the shape, while the first wood inwale was clamped and glued in place.

After both inwales were fitted and glued in, the outwales came next, in two separate steps. You can see the scuppered inwales in the photo below.

The new ash gunwales imparted much rigidity to the tired old hull, bringing out its true shape and fairing the wobbly sheer that had been so distorted by the fatigued aluminum. I have no doubt that the boat will have an entirely different and better feel to it once it's in the water again.

Below you can see the detail at the stern, which is identical to the bow. The hull sides are sandwiched between the inwales and outwales of ash, and the mahogany end blocks finish out the bow and stern. Note that Ernest wanted me to replace the Canadienne graphic with the more appropriate for him, Mississippian.

A big part of the job I did not photograph step-by-step was the repair of the fiberglass damage and the filling and fairing of the hull. It was, as you would expect, a time-consuming and labor-intensive process, but in the end proved worth it. The hull exterior was then painted with four coats of Interlux Brightside in "Fire Red".

Four coats of spar varnish on all the ash and then the application of new vinyl graphics for the Mississippian name and the Old Town logo completed the job. Tomorrow, I'm meeting Ernest at the nearby Pearl River, where we'll break-in the new refit by paddling the canoe from Hopewell to Georgetown, a river trip of about 10 miles.

Making a Rope Bow Fender

My friend David and the crew at Boatsmith recently completed construction of a lapstrake pulling boat to Iain Oughtred's Guillemot design. This vessel will be the new tender to the 1929 Alden schooner, Summerwind. David's construction photos and more can be seen at his blog on the project.

Below is one photo of the mostly-completed tender:

Knowing that my girlfriend, Michelle, is quite accomplished at decorative ropework, David called me last week to see if she could produce a bow fender or "bow pudding", as it is correctly termed, on short notice - like over the weekend. The fender was in the contract for the finished dinghy, but David couldn't find anyone who could make one without a lead time of more than a month or two. Michelle has done lots of ocean plait doormats, turks head bowls and monkey's fist key chains and the like, but making a fender was new territory until this project came along.

Michelle was first introduced to nautical ropework by the late Captain Charley Strickland, who we met at Point Cadet Marina in Biloxi when I still had Intensity docked there. Although we only had the privilege of knowing him for a few short months before he passed away in 2005, he gladly shared everything he learned in a lifetime as a professional seaman and was delighted to find Michelle an eager student of the art of knots. Below is a photo I took of Captain Charley with some of his work on the dock at Point Cadet. More about him can be found in an article I wrote for The Sun Herald that was also posted here.

Knowing Captain Charley would be proud of her continued efforts and not lacking in confidence in her ability to learn new tricks, Michelle told David she could deliver the fender on time. She pulled out her reference books, including the classic, Ashley Book of Knots to get some ideas. None of them showed a fender like David described, but by studying the various drawings, we came up with a plan and I helped her make the seized eyes and build up the core so she could do her thing on the decorative covering.

Below is close-up of one of the eyes, made by seizing a loop of 1/2" manila.

The eye with additional strands of rope doubled back from the other end to form the bulk of the core.

David's specifications for the bow fender required a length of 36 inches for the protective part, with 3-inch eyes at each end, for a total length of 42 inches. The piece of rope used to make the eyes was doubled back several times so that the core would consist of single piece of line in the center. He wanted the finished thickness to be 3 inches at the ends and 5 inches in the mid-section.

The taper from the thicker mid-section to the narrower ends was created by adding more varying lengths of 1/2" manila and binding them in position with smaller cord. The bent shape was also created at this stage by the binding, with longer pieces on the outside of the curve and shorter pieces on the inside radius.

The covering method Michelle decided to use consists of a series of continuous half-hitches, using 1/4" manila. This half-hitching method works well for covering a tapering surface, and provides plenty of cushioning bulk for the fender. Since it also is flexible and fits loosely over the core, the fender can easily be bent further to fit to the bow of the boat.

That's a lot of half-hitches and over 200 feet of 1/4-inch manila.

It takes a lot of patience to tie all those knots when you have to pull 50 or more feet through each time and fight the rope's tendency to unravel and twist.

Here's a closer view of one end of the fender, showing how the knots conform over the taper and form the rounded end at the eye.

The finished fender came out to just the right size. It will be smoothed out and bent to just the right shape when installed on the boat. David has installed a rope rub-rail made from 1 1/2-inch thick manila all around the perimeter of the boat. The bow fender will be lashed at the eyes and pulled up right to the rope rubrail.

I plan to travel to Florida next week to help David with some interior work on the Summerwind. The new tender with its bow fender will be delivered to the schooner while I'm there, so I should be able to get some additonal photos of it installed as well as photos of the schooner to post when I return.