While the cat's away ...

... the mice will play.

Roy and Amy have been hard at work since I've been on the river, finishing up the Blacktail. With Jim Hall and others they came up with a really sweet 30% proportional blue stain stripe, with a diminishing pin-strip to set it off. Stunning. They have some wild plans for a fancy transom. A little more interior box work and it's out the door. Launch planned for next week.

Marieke came by to leather her oars the last couple nights. As we were nearing the end of the project, trying to hold parts steady while we worked, Will came up with a plan for an oar roller made from old skateboard wheels, which soon morphed into a more bush-league reality. A couple of old casters from the cabinet of things-too-useful-to-throw-away... a hinge from the old apartment house Coop and I bought back in the '70s... some scrap lumber... a few handy clamps... And damn, not enough casters... but beers will work fine:

Those oars spin so smooth now!  Here is Marieke applying the smoking hot wax to the leathers. Drink it up, wraps, so you can sweat it out on the river.

And since we have momentum, let's resuscitate a couple 40-year old Willie oarlocks to go with the Willie boat we recovered last month. The great thing about those old brass oarlocks is how ductile they are. Pound and pry long enough and they go right back into shape. Some of the new ones are so hard they'll break an oar before releasing it--might as well use full-ring oarlocks at that point. These ones are old enough they still have the peace sign in the casting.

Julius jubilant

Julius survived his fourth Grand Canyon trip unscathed, through little fault of my own. I missed a few runs, slopped through a few others, but came out right-side-up and smiling. I was a training boat and blabbermouth on Arizona Raft Adventures's annual "Dories and Stories" trip. Last year I took down the Edith--my replica of the 1911 Kolb boat, for its 100th anniversary. This year I took Julius to celebrate the 75th anniversary of Holmstrom's solo run of 1937. (Next year it'll be a Nevills replica, to celebrate the 75th anniversary of that historic style.)

I shot a lot of video footage, although most of it was unremarkable. I'll post a few amusing ones. Here is Hance, where Alan and I violated each others' personal space for the entire run:
High res YouTube link

Sockdolager, where I tore an oarlock out and bent it:
High res YouTube link

Here we are hauling the potty to lunch, in lieu of the poo boat who had headed downriver early to exchange hikers. Buzz would be proud.

Horn Creek, where I actually made the run:
High res YouTube link

And a pause for beauty at Trinity Canyon:

Granite Falls: push hard left, get swept right anyhow--my standard run, but it seems to work:

High-res YouTube link

Down the left wall at Crystal:

High-res YouTube link

Another wander up Specter Chasm:

And one of the worst runs I've made at Bedrock since I was a greenhorn in the mid-70s. Angle, Brad. Angle! For the love of god, angle!

High-res YouTube link

An ouzel posing at Deer Creek:

And what was most likely the most spectacular run, down the right at Lava Falls, hot on the heels of an upside-down dory--a huge ride, complete with a high-speed chase through Lower Lava, nearly flipping in pursuit of a runaway dory oar... and the danged video cam ran out of gas before we even got to the rapid. Ah well... have to do it again.

A consolation shot at Pumpkin Spring and a few closeups Julius's suntanned Port Orford Cedar glowing in the late afternoon light. 'T'was a fine expedition.

Tidbits

I'll be heading downriver in the Julius in a few days. A few loose ends before I go. We finished up the Julius's fittings the other night, including the fancy non-original highly-inauthentic side boxes. But they sure will make life easier on a commercial trip, giving me simple, handy stowage and preventing full swamping of the cockpit.

And a floorboard with a highly inauthentic emergency feature:

After extensive testing of the new floor's features, I felt pressed to show Will, who is planning to do a bit of boating in the Julius, just how it is done:

Liam called from Prescott, wanting to bring his dory up for a little consulting. When I got home the craziest thing was in my driveway--the boat, not Liam. 

It is a very cool Pritchett classic Rogue River boat, built a while back from Roger Fletcher's plans. Man, does it look wildly different than the Colorado River style boats I have been working on for the last long while. Low sides, radical flare, and the truncated motor-mount stern. Liam was wondering about decking her over for Grand Canyon but we soon figured out that the oarlocks are four inches lower than the Briggs boats, which are almost too close to the water already. We imagined what would happen if you drove it up the face of a big Grand Canyon wave with that crazy stern. Quick and ugly, that's what it would be.

The wood fairy stopped by while I was out of town last week. This is a load of Modesto Ash from Southern California. My friend Jim McKenzie brought it by from his friend Don Seawater, who has a mill in San Luis Obispo. Last time Jim brought Monterey Cypress. Before that, sycamore. All of these woods are fascinating, but fail to show up in the books about structural properties of wood. Makes it more interesting. This Modesto Ash, which is the same species as our local Velvet Ash, looks great. We'll see how she works after a summer in the drying loft.

I went out on a training trip for AzRA a couple weeks ago, blathering to the new young boaters about all the stories I think I remember. Here is a shot of the mysterious "boat" near Nankoweap. It appears to have been the skeleton of some sort of fabric boat--canvas? animal hide? Hard saying. It has some round manufactured nails in it so it isn't ancient. Most likely some prospector wandered into the area in the 1900s, failed to strike it rich, and left this under a ledge in case he came back.

And lastly, here is a shot Lora took of us shopping for our Glen Canyon float. I seem to be dressed as the entire cast of Gilligan's Island.

Mining for the Moqui

A couple years ago I donated eight hours of boatshop labor to a local charity auction. Marieke Taney won the bid and showed up in my driveway with the most horrendous unidentified floating object I have ever seen--it was once a whitewater dory in Martin Litton's fleet, but had since been so bastardized with bolted and glued on detritus that the original boat was barely visible.

It was built in 1973 by the notorious One-Armed Willie Illingworth of Medford, Oregon, inventor two years earlier of the aluminum drift boat. One of two Grand Canyon boats, it was called the Moqui Steps--its sister the Ootsa Lake. Originally delivered without decks, the Moqui ran several years with a wretched decking system made of a resin-impregnated gunkboard called finform, which had been screwed to the hull with sharp screws that were too long of the job, resulting in hatch interiors that were lethal to both duffel bags and flesh. It was a modified McKenzie hull, up-sized for Grand Canyon use and with the flat midsection usually associated with Rogue boats. Although the Moqui and Ootsa were both serviceable boats, they were outclassed by the growing fleet of Briggs boats and eventually sold off.

Here is a wonderful Rudi Petschek shot of her in her heyday, amid her peers at Phantom Ranch in Grand Canyon. She's right in the middle.

The Moqui Steps fortunately got aluminum decks to replace her old finform horrors, and eventually ended up in Williams, Arizona, where her owner modified her nearly to death for trips on smaller rivers with scouts or some such thing. Massive amounts of iron and plastic plumbing and wiring were bored through the decks; foam and rotting plywood were glued in every available spot, rotting floorboards were screwed inside all the hatches, paint and Bondo were exploding from the exterior, gallons of silicone seal were smeared in every conceivable place (and a few inconceivable ones) and, to be quite honest, the boat Marieke parked in my driveway did not look like there was much worth saving. Marieke and her brother Harlan had gone in on the purchase, primarily because the trailer it was on was worth the purchase price; the boat was essentially free.

I could have said junk it, and perhaps I should have. But being the eternal optimist, I launched into a restoration attempt. I burned my entire eight charity hours removing debris from the boat, filled a giant trash bin, and although it looked a lot better, it still failed to inspire anyone.

Marieke subsequently fell in love with another boat, the Betty Boop, and has since begun a new life together with Betty. But somehow a fire kindled in Harlan this month and he brought the Moqui back for round two. On Monday we began a three-day assault on four decades worth of paint and gradoo. Terrifying work, but it paid off:

The Moqui was white. Then red. Then white. Then red. Then white. Then green. Then white.

Then shiny aluminum once again. Will Viktora, Harlan, and Marieke pause for refreshments amid the grind.

And go back at it. What a dreadful din:

More refreshments.

Getting there:

The hour grows late.

After midnight Will daintily massages some dents with a ten-pound sledge. The neighbors fail to alert the police.

This afternoon Will and Harlan delicately rework the side profiles:

Amazingly she actually looks like a boat again. Now she is off to the welder to get a hundred drill-holes patched and a few modifications to the hatch lids. That and some paint and I think she'll be a fine family boat for Harlan's growing brood. Another unique chapter in Grand Canyon boating history lives on.

Building the Blacktail

Here is a silly video of us assembling a drift boat at Fretwater Boatworks on Friday evening. This is a Woody Hindman 16' double-ender with transom, from plans in Roger Fletcher's Drift Boats and River Dories. With frames, sides, bow post and transom prepared, we build the hull in 80 minutes. Roy and Amy Lippman, whose boat this is, are calling it "Blacktail." Had the GoPro not run out of gas, it would have captured the insertion of the inner chines and application and finishing of the floor a couple hours later.

It is just as well that the camera did not record the mayhem that ensued after that. There was a bad reaction between wild women and a celebratory bottle of tequila that resulted in torn clothing, bite marks, and inexplicable bruises. I guess we should stick to whiskey.

Powell's Whitehall boats

One of my long-term projects at Fretwater Boatworks is to build and run every significant hard-hull rowboat in the Canyon's history. Which is impossible because several are unknown and undocumented. But it is a worthy goal.

The toughest boat by far to build will be the first: Major John Wesley Powell's Whitehall harbor boats. They were the fastest boat on the water in their day; a sophisticated curved hull designed to travel at high speed by oar or sail in the choppy water of America's busy shipping harbors. I hope to have one or more built for the 150th anniversary of Powell's 1869 journey, so I have seven years to finish my homework and get the boats done. I'll need it.

Powell's boats were built by Thomas Bagley of Chicago. I tracked down Ralph Frese, local canoe legend and boat historian in the windy city. He said, "They were built by a sailor that jumped ship in the port of Chicago, which in the 1880s, was the busiest port in our country. More boats arriving and departing each day than Boston, New York, New Orleans and San Francisco combined. He set up shop at one time under our Randolph Street bridge downtown to build small craft. There is not much more info available." That's a start, but I do hope to dig up a bit more on Bagley's background and training.

There are no photographs or accurate descriptions of the boats of the first expedition. Two were wrecked or abandoned along the way, and the other two drifted into obscurity somewhere on the lower Colorado. But Frederick Dellenbaugh of the second expedition of 1871–2 tells us this:

The boats for this trip were modelled on those used on the former descent, with such changes and improvements as experience had suggested. They were honestly and thoroughly constructed by a builder named Bagley, who had a yard where he turned out a small craft, the the north end of the old Clark Street bridge, and we often felt a sense of gratitude to him for doing his work so well. They were three in number, of well-seaasoned, clear-grained, half-inch oak, smooth-built, double-ribbed fore and aft, square-sterned, and all practically the same...


When I went the first time to look at the boats lying on Bagley's wharf, their ominous porpoise-like appearance gave me a peculiar sensation. I had experienced rough-water but this was the first understanding I had that the journey was to be more or less amphibian. On a day when the waves on Lake Michigan were running high we took them out for a trial. The crews were filled out by Bagley's men, our party not all being present, and with some reporters and a cargo of champagne and cigars our course was laid for the open sea. The action of the boats was all that could be desired, and, in the great billows it was so constant that our reportorial friends found some difficulty in obtaining their share of the refreshments. We were satisfied that the boats could ride any sea...


These three boats are well documented in the photographs of the second expedition:

and etchings from 1871-2 pictures were used in the Powell report of his earlier voyage:

 Two of the 1871-2 boats were abandoned at Kanab Creek in the heart of Grand Canyon, and thought to be used by later prospectors before they vanished. But the third one, the Nellie Powell, was left at Lee's Ferry. In 1938 Leo Weaver, who then ran the ranch at Lee's Ferry wrote to Grand Canyon National Park Superintendent Minor Tillotson:

Several years ago I noticed a boat down in the willows of one of my fields near the Paria. Dimly, I could see just the word NELLIE in black on the prow. At the time it made no impression on me, in fact I forgot all about it except at such times as I rode through through those willows looking for the cows perhaps.


I had a man clear the brush down there and burn it. Next time I saw the old boat, half of it was burned. Still I thought nothing of it, but now I DO.


I have all that is left of the NELLIE POWELL right in my basement.... some large segments of it....spruce, and some of the nails are square and of copper. Mr. Stone and that bunch who spent a little time with us lately almost had a fit over it. There is no question in MY mind but what it is the NELLIE POWELL all right, but I cannot prove it in the least. 

Tillotson sent Chief Naturalist Eddie McKee to Lee's Ferry to retrieve a large fragment of the Nellie Powell that Weaver offered. Here they are on the very spot Weaver found the boat.:

My friend Lora and I spent the day at the South Rim on Tuesday and paid a visit to the Nellie fragment that remains up there--about five feet by twenty inches. The planking appears to be softwood as Weaver suggests--spruce, fir, or pine; the ribs oak; the clench-nails square, round-headed copper.

At any rate, I'm on the trail, off to traditional boatbuilding school in May, Chicago for a bit of snooping in June... 

Obsession is a delightful thing.