On Tue, 21 Aug 2007 21:15:35 +1000, Herodotus
wrote:



But millionaire's yachts don't really tell the story. Where are all
the people that used to build Sharpys, Friendship Sloops,Chesapeake
Skipjack, Dorys, Skiffs and all the other wooden working boats - all
gone.


Bruce in Bangkok
(brucepaigeATgmailDOTcom)

They have moved to Indonesia in places such as Sulawesi, the Molluccas
and Kalimantan and a host of other places where they still built huge
wooden trading ships in the same old manner on the beach. You must
have seen some of these on your way through Bruce. The ancjors are
still hauled up by man power on a horizontal windlass.

A couple of years ago on Pankor Island near Lumut, an old boat
builder, Eng Hok, was building a 65 footer traditional craft for a
wealthy private client. It was built in the traditional junk manner,
being planked around solid bulkheads set on the keel.

When I was a young kid in Wellington, New Zealand I used to help a
friend's fisherman father caulk his 40 foot double ender with cotton
waste, red lead and hemp. Came in handy a few years ago when I was
able to show a friend who had bought a genuine 100 year old Colin
Archer pilot boat from a defunct US museum how to caulk his leaking
boat. he had kept it afloat with sikaflex but the water eventually
leaked past this. Couldn't find a genuine caulking iron anywhere in
Sydney (Aus.) so made one out of a brick cutting bolster.

cheers
Peter

Sorry to disillusion you but they "didn't move to Indonesia -- those
guys had been there since the Portuguese, or before.

True that they are still built on the beach and the lines laid out by
eye but the sails disappeared at least twenty years ago. All the
pinisiq have engines these days. Progress!

I could tell a long story about taking some foreign engineers down to
the harbor at Cirebon only to find that all the romantic Schooners
were now motor vessels. The only way I saved any face was a smaller
lanteen rigged vessel loaded to the waterline with bamboo came
creeping into the harbor under sail, sailed directly across the harbor
headed for a creek where a number of these vessels were moored and as
they approached the mouth of the creek the (obviously) youngest crew
member dove over the side, swam ashore and belayed a line around a
tree. The boat came to the end of the line, turned into the wind and
coasted into the creek -- do it every day, right?

If you want to see old time boat building come to Thailand. At
afternoon tide they bring a fishing boat up the marine railway at the
shipyard in Phuket. The sanders and the power saws go all night. At
day break the caulking crews move in. These all seem to be extended
families, Father, mother, sons in law, etc. They use the same sort of
caulking irons that I saw in an 80 year old boat builder's shop in
Maine years ago but they don't use the hammer. They use a hatchet with
a welded pipe handle that is used to drive the iron and the sharp edge
is used as an opening iron to spread the seam a bit. The women folk
sit in the shade and rub some sort of orange paste into the cotton --
I assume sort of red lead kind of stuff. Send the safety people right
round the bend with that act. Lead? Ahaaaaaa.

Come afternoon tide and the boat is fresh painted, caulked and ready
to go back in the water.

Eng Hok was a Chinese anyway. And if it was traditional teak it
certainly was a millionaire he was building it for. I've seen some of
that stuff 24 X 24 inches by, say, 30 feet in the fishing boat yards.
Of course, it is smuggled Burmese wood but can you imagine what legal
duty paid teak timbers that size would cost. For a fishing boat?

Enough. Where are you now. Back in N.Z. as, "Honey can you take out
the garbage?" Or swanking around Central America as Captain Peter?


Bruce in Bangkok
(brucepaigeATgmailDOTcom)