catsittingstill: (Default)
[personal profile] catsittingstill
I finished Patience about 1:30pm yesterday. I put her in the water for the first time at 7:00pm yesterday night. I only waited so long because I'd promised to let people know when I was launching. Unfortunately, nobody could make it on six hours notice, so it was just me and Kip anyway. But that was okay because I didn't need to worry about keeping people entertained after I put the boat in the water and paddled away.

Lessee--she floats. She seems to be more or less watertight. She goes pretty straight, as far as I can tell, though she doesn't track quite as well as I'd hoped. She's more stable than I feared she might be, given that she's narrower than any canoe I've ever used. She's faster than my old canoes, but maybe not as fast as I hoped.

I tested her stability by tipping her on purpose three times that first evening. There are canoes that stay stable when leaned, to the point that you can dip the bottom edge of the outwale in the water without tipping. Patience is not one of those canoes, probably because of the knuckle. She's stable up to a point, but then she flips right over. To the point that I actually flipped her *by accident* this afternoon, when I took her out the second time. A mis-stroke of the paddle (I was trying to do a kind of J stroke that I can more or less manage on the right side, but I was trying to do it on the left side, where I'm not as proficient) that would normally just have jerked Gussie's gunwale down, and the next thing I knew Patience had bucked me off. I had to swim her to the bank, mop her out and get back in. I was so weirded out I had to turn around a couple of minutes later and go back for my hat, which at least was still floating; let's hear it for Tilley hats. Fortunately my camera was in its dry bag and tied into the hull using the handy tiedowns, and I didn't lose anything (I don't think).

I started to canoe when I was five or six (I was cargo back then, but still). I've been handling the canoe myself since I was ten or so. This is the first time I can remember that I've ever flipped a canoe by accident.

Patience is a friendly canoe--reasonably fast (I think--with the regular paddle I kind of lag behind a tandem (longer boat, two people paddling; tandems are faster) but with the double paddle working only moderately hard I can keep up with the same tandem going flat out), reasonably stable, kitted out for tripping, with tiedowns and thwart bungees and through-holes fore and aft. She's no holds barred the prettiest thing on the water. She's a friendly boat.

But she isn't tame.

Date: 2006-07-09 02:54 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] tnatj.livejournal.com
Ooh, a spunky thing, eh?

Speed in a boat is not 100% reduction in cross-section. A proportionally longer boat generally does better at higher speeds due to quirks in hydrodynamical flow, as William Froude would have you know.

Pictures?

Date: 2006-07-09 03:17 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] catsittingstill.livejournal.com
True. Longer boats are faster, thinner boats are faster, an asymetric hull shape (thinner in the front, thicker in the back) is faster. Treowesith is 16 feet long, 36 inches across, symmetric (I think). Gussie is 12 feet long, 33 inches across, symmetric (I think). Patience is 15 feet long, 29 inches across, asymetric. Racing solos are 17 feet long (sometimes longer), and 27 inches across (sometimes less). Sea kayaks are also quite long (and kayaks are generally faster than canoes, but some of that may be the double paddle).

But I chose the design partly as a tradeoff for weight--I wanted to be able to put Patience on the roof of my car by myself, and I did that successfully this afternoon. Treowesith is about 50 pounds (light for a tandem). Gussie is 35 pounds. Patience is, (remembering that weighing a canoe invoves moving the bathroom scales out to the garage, stepping on the scales, noting the number, picking up the canoe and stepping on the scales, noting the number, and subtracting the non-canoe-bearing number from the canoe-bearing number) 45 or 46 pounds.

Date: 2006-07-09 03:03 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] peteralway.livejournal.com
I bet you could edit this post down to a song.

Date: 2006-07-09 03:18 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] catsittingstill.livejournal.com

Patience isn't tame my lads
Thank you all the same, my lads
Patience is a friendly boat, but Patience isn't tame.

Date: 2006-07-09 03:25 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] peteralway.livejournal.com
Aye, that be a fine chorus!

Date: 2006-07-09 04:51 am (UTC)
From: (Anonymous)
T'was a hand-crafted craft
She was rigged 'fore and aft
And it drew awestruck exclamations
It could seat up to two
Like a friendly canoe
And she called it the Good Ship Patience!

(ttto: "The Irish Rover")

Date: 2006-07-09 05:23 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] admnaismith.livejournal.com
That was me, btw.

Wow, you actually built a boat! Good job!

Date: 2006-07-09 06:20 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] catsittingstill.livejournal.com
Thanks!

Actually, Patience is a solo canoe, so she can seat only one, when the counting is done. :-)

Date: 2006-07-09 03:04 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] randwolf.livejournal.com
Whoo-hoo!

Date: 2006-07-09 03:18 am (UTC)

Date: 2006-07-09 03:42 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] barbara-the-w.livejournal.com
congrats.

Shall you picspam us? Please?

Date: 2006-07-09 06:21 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] catsittingstill.livejournal.com
Err. I take it you want a picture or pictures. I intend to--I just need to figure out how to do it. :-)

Date: 2006-07-09 09:27 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] barbara-the-w.livejournal.com
yeessssssss, precious pictures, yesssssssss.

:)

Date: 2006-07-09 04:14 am (UTC)
mdlbear: blue fractal bear with text "since 2002" (Default)
From: [personal profile] mdlbear
W00t!

I'll second (or probably third by this time) the request for pictures.

Date: 2006-07-09 06:22 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] catsittingstill.livejournal.com
First I have to figure out how to put some up...

Date: 2006-07-09 09:50 pm (UTC)
mdlbear: blue fractal bear with text "since 2002" (Default)
From: [personal profile] mdlbear
Quick solution is to sign up for a free account at flkir or some similar photo-sharing site; the free account has only a limited monthly upload allowance, but that's not a problem for a small number of pictures.

Date: 2006-07-09 09:59 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] gfish.livejournal.com
Looks like I'll be the third: I'd love to see some pictures. :)

Date: 2006-07-09 06:22 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] catsittingstill.livejournal.com
See above :-).

Date: 2006-07-09 01:25 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] filkergem.livejournal.com
Congratulations on finishing her! I'm impressed.

Date: 2006-07-09 06:22 pm (UTC)

Date: 2006-07-09 01:51 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] msminlr.livejournal.com
This post was remarkably evocative.
I first read it last night, a few minutes before going to bed.
I dreamed about helping haul a boat (for some reason it had a traier but we didn't have a vehicle) from a storage facility to the lake and get it launched.
It looked nothing like your canoe.
The town looked like noplace I've ever lived.
(This is S.O.P. for my "you don't REALLY want to wake up: see how much more entertaining it is to stay in this dream" dreams.)

Congratulations on getting Patience finished and launched.
I don't know anyone else who has actually built any kind of boat from scratch, at least as far as I know.

Date: 2006-07-09 01:51 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] msminlr.livejournal.com
that should have been "trailer", not "traier".

Not enough blood in the caffeine stream yet, apparently.

Date: 2006-07-09 06:23 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] catsittingstill.livejournal.com
Thanks :-) I had figured you meant "trailer." It sounds like an interesting dream

Date: 2006-07-09 01:54 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] braider.livejournal.com
But she isn't tame.

Maybe she's rebelling against her name.

Date: 2006-07-09 06:24 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] catsittingstill.livejournal.com
I hope not. That would be inconvenient. I'm hoping that as we get used to each other she'll stop bucking me off.

Date: 2006-07-09 03:14 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] andpuff.livejournal.com
I've been telling people I know someone who's building a canoe -- now I shall tell them it's launched and floating and YAY!

Really, this is too cool!

And lj has made posting pictures REALLY easy. Really easy. Even I can do it. *g*

Date: 2006-07-09 06:26 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] catsittingstill.livejournal.com
Um. The problem is that the picture has to go on some other web-attached server, right? Then you put a little html statment in the journal entry to tell the browser to go to that different server to fetch the picture? The problem is, while I have some web-space elsewhere, I don't remember how to access it because it has been so long since I've done it.

Date: 2006-07-09 06:33 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] andpuff.livejournal.com
Nope. You can go right from a file on your computer. Lj added a gallery feature so that after posting, the pictures get stored as part of your live journal.

And, now I've said that, I wonder if it's a only paid account thing...

Date: 2006-07-09 09:28 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] barbara-the-w.livejournal.com
photobucket has a free service, so does webshots and tiny.url

Date: 2006-07-09 09:54 pm (UTC)
mdlbear: blue fractal bear with text "since 2002" (Default)
From: [personal profile] mdlbear
The image tag you need is <img src="url">

Profile

catsittingstill: (Default)
catsittingstill

February 2024

S M T W T F S
    1 23
45678910
11121314151617
18192021222324
2526272829  

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Feb. 5th, 2026 06:35 pm
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios