an infrequent repository of mostly new stuff
Chapelle and Barto Plans
(to start of project)
I’ll be working from a combination of printed plans along with measurements taken from boats of other builders, in addition to a few modifications of my own. Besides the one page Chapelle plans, I have the more complete set of plans from Wooden Boat Magazine by Marc Barto. I’ve also talked to Roger Crawford and taken measurements from his boats, as well as several other amateur and professional builders, all of whom you’ll hear more about later.
Wireframe Boat
In the complicated calculus of my conscience, there are many things I have to do to earn the right to do something I really want. I know, I know. But that’s just the way it works.
Therefore, before spending a year or more of time and money building two boats for me (okay, and the family), there were certain things I was going to have to do first. One was wait until my daughters were in college, because high school is not the best time for a father to disappear on his two teenage girls. The other was to make a viable studio workspace for the lovely T, my artist wife, who has been forced to use the dining room table and various closets as a work space for years. Patient, she is. That meant finishing the basement, referred to hereafter as “The Cave.” On the plus side, I would get to use The Cave first for the boat project, before turning it over as art studio.
Funny how things circle back.
It was the mid-1930’s, at the business end of the last Great Depression, that a young, not quite gainfully employed naval architect named Howard Chapelle signed up for a job with the WPA. Everyone needed work, and the government was creating jobs and funding them as fast as anybody could think of them. Someone in FDR’s administration came up with an idea to put the nations destitute naval architects to work. It was to be called the “Historic American Merchant Marine Survey/” Along with a lot of other projects that came out of the WPA, it would turn out to be an incredibly valuable storehouse of historic documents; though, with humble beginnings and a short life, it’s eventual cultural value would not be evident for quite some time. Of the two largest work programs created by FDR – the CCC and the WPA – it was this one, the WPA, that received harsh criticism as wasteful and unnecessary, particularly from the conservative opposition.
8th Lake, Adirondacks
|emˈbärk| begin (a course of action, esp. one that is important or demanding)
ORIGIN mid 16th cent.: from French embarquer, from em- ‘in’ + barque ‘bark, ship.’
I’ve been planning this project for quite some time. Years, in fact. Life intervenes between many a fine notion and it’s fruition. Sometimes that’s a good thing. Big projects begin innocently enough, with an idea or impulse, and before you know it it’s taken root. If you don’t pull some weeds up quickly they drop seed and it’s all over but the mowing, or in this case, rowing.
Carl and his Melonseed, St. Michaels
Started a new boat building project, finally. This time a pair of Melonseeds. They should take a year or more to complete, and there will be a lot of posts detailing the process, so to keep all the entries together I created a separate blog category devoted just to that project.
The link appears in the navigation menu at the top. At some point later, all the related photos will be gathered together in a single gallery, but for now they’ll appear in posts as they’re taken.
North of Monticello
I have a handful of friends and family who I hear from around this time every year. It usually begins with emails, arriving in mid-October, with subject lines like “Has it started yet?” and “Almost Time!” They’re people who, for one reason or another, now live in places where they have no autumn to speak of, no explosion of fall color like we have in Virginia.
Last Fall I began playing with Final Cut Pro. I started out with a bunch of rough footage shot with a cell phone on a trip to NYC, along with some snaps from the same trip.
While playing around with the program, I was listening to some new music from Vector Trio, an improv piece from their Basement Tapes called Dream Dogs. The piece seemed to fit the footage, so I kept replaying it. Before long, I was subconsciously making edits and cuts to fit the music.
Eventually, the two just sort of merged into one thing.