The Great Auk

As far south as new england, there used to be a penguin sort of animal called the Great Auk. Some people say there might have been a sighting in 1852, but as far as we know, the last of these birds was strangled 3 July 1844 by some jerks named Jon and Sigorour or some such. Their good buddy Ketill stomped out the eggs they'd laid. I'm not sure why someone would have done that since apparently the eggs were insanely valuable; the wikipedia page claims that they would go for 11 times a years' wage for a skilled worker. In today's money we're probably talking about million dollar items.

I'd never heard of this animal until last year. For some reason (unknown even to myself), I decided I wanted to build a boat- a kayak specifically. Some research online led me to realize that such a project was within my reach, and I ordered plans for a 14 foot boat called the Great Auk, after the bird that used it's wings for swimming instead of flying. This is a strip built kayak, with a 24.5 inch beam (that's width), and a 4 inch draft. Even though it's only 14 feet, I should be able to make 5 knots without much effort. The shape of the hull will allow for 45 degrees of heel before it wants to capsize, which is great for a boat like this. The only thing it won't do really well is racing, for that I'd want a 19 foot boat. The longer a boat is, the faster you can go because you can make a longer wave in the water and go faster before you make more than one wave per boat-length.

Here's a guy on flickr who built his own great auk.

Here's step one: buying the lumber. Since I found a mill with 14' planks of spanish cedar, I built a stand for my truck so I could support the strips through the window of my truck. I got a call yesterday that they'd milled my strips, so I'm off to pick it up tomorrow. Here's a picture of the build so far.

We also made good progress on step 2 today, in which I get an area of the basement to work on this project. I started to do this in the garage when I got it cleaned out last summer, but after the accumulation of tools and such from the deck project, there's just not enough room in there. We'll see if Claire tolerates this takeover of the basement!