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It was freezing outside, but I wanted to get some exercise, so I took my bicycle out for a spin along the Ilse of Que. My buddy, the unofficial "mayor", was not around. You can see his title posted on his porch. Some college students stole his first sign, so his grandkids made him another and they locked this one to the railing. The old man sits on the stoop of his porch in the summer, waving to passersby until evening. He has yelled at me to ring my bicycle bell when I go by, even if he's not outside, so today I rang it as I passed. I rode down to the end of the isle, which is 3 miles long.

I briefly visited the gravesite of my cat, Tina, who died in October. She's nearly under water from the recent precipitation, and may morph into a catfish before too long...Finally, I saw this design in the ice and thought you all might think it was interesting or artful...I though it looked neat, the layers and swirls but perhaps you have more interesting lives and just see it as plain ice.

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This is the tale of the 3 boats....You see, I have been not-so-secretly building another boat in my apartment. This boat, the "Maestro", is in honor of our grandfather, "The Maestro", and is a Shearwater 16 foot kayak and is being made for my brother John. John races with me on the Susquehanna River and really seemed to dig paddling, so I decided he needed a boat!

Boat 1

I started this project by placing tracing paper on top of my Shearwater 17 kayak and making a pattern. This was probably a big mistake because the wood in the kayak is already curved and it is 17 feet long...I knew I wasn't going to build another 17 foot long boat in my kitchen....
I bought Okuome plywood from a lumber yard in Harrisburg and cut the pattern out.

After facing some problems gluing the pieces together, I came to the realization that it looked more like a canoe than a kayak. I told my friends that I had made a Canyak! Because of this, I took a power saw and cut that boat in half down the chine, breaking the pieces apart and sanding them down so they looked like new....

Boat 2

I reconstructed the parts of Boat 1 so that the vessel had a flat bottom where the paddler sat. It definitely looked more like a kayak than the previous boat! But there was something wrong with this boat...It was twisted. The sides were not symmetrical and it curved along the keel. Had I continued making this boat, John would literally paddle in circles like the Maestro used to paddle around in our pool...Look carefully at the picture to the left and you can see the dog leg curve along the bow.

Trust me, I thought of all sorts of ways that I could repair the boat, but nothing seemed to make sense or work...

So, I decided to throw it out the window. I was giving up on the boat! On Christmas morning, I asked the girls at the Sunoco station to watch traffic for me and out the window it went. The one girl taking pictures with my camera got this shot....It hit the telephone pole and then hit the road and sidewalk and split nicely into 4 large pieces. At some point I put the video up on the web so you can see it....

Boat 3

I was determined to make John a boat, so I drove down to Annapolis, Md and bought a Shearwater 16 kayak kit and 2 more sheets of plywood. I figured John would think I spent too much money on the kit and might be upset with me, so I took the pieces of wood from the kit and used them as patterns to draw on the plywood for building yet another boat.

The kit will wait for another day to be born a boat! So, John's boat is in the process of being produced.

I'll keep you all updated on where I am with this process...Right now, I am still cutting out the pieces from the plywood and shaping them with a plane. I expect that I will have the boat generally constructed by the start of the next semester (January 12th) but probably won't have it completely ready for him until the end of the semester, when I have more time and when the weather is nicer...

This is what John's boat will look like when it is completed....

We will have more designs illuminating the "Maestro"....