Both my mother and father were craft-oriented with their hands, my mother with her sewing, my dad with his model railroad. I built model airplanes as a kid in Minnesota, and started going to YMCA canoe-camp in the Boundary Waters when I was 14. I learned to portage and shoot rapids in a Grumman aluminum canoe. I loved it. When I started college, I went back for a summer job as a guide.
I built my first boat (at right) while I was in college, a canvas-covered kayak from Popular Mechanics, and then discovered it was too small for me. I gave it away to a cousin. The next summer, inspired by a museum collection of Arctic artifacts that included the frame of an eskimo kayak and the book "The Bark Canoes and Skin Boats of North America," I designed and built my own version of an eskimo baidarka, a two-cockpit kayak. I used spruce for the frame and rubber-coated nylon for the skin. It was 20 feet long and 24 inches wide, a real needle in the water. It was roomy and fun to paddle. I took that kayak on a solo paddle from Lake of the Woods to Lake Superior along the old voyageur routes, and collected some great memories of contact with nature.
It wasn't until I was out of grad school and in my first job that I built my next boat, my first wood-strip canoe. I was teaching "Industrial Arts" at The Dalles High School, in Oregon in 1968. I had seen the marathon racing canoes of the Minnesota Canoe Association, and obtained a set of drawings with a short paper on how to do it, written by the son of Karl Ketter. Later on, I named this canoe design "Abenaki" due to its similarity to the hull shape typical of that tribe.
I thought my students could relate to the building process, so we built it together in our shop at the school. It was crude and lumpy, but it won a race or two against factory boats. I have recently heard that boatbuilding is being used as a focus for motivating at-risk teens, and I believe there is good reason for it.
A couple of years later, I was done with teaching and casting around for a new direction, so I chose boatbuilding because it was "unique." I advertised to build a wood-strip canoe for less money than it cost to buy the cheapest aluminum canoe available, and I got my first paying customer. The design for this guide model canoe, which I called the "Micmac," (again, because of its similarity with the canoes of that tribe) also came from the Minnesota Canoe Association, and could be the work of A.C. Momsen.
I worked about 200 hours on that boat and earned about 50 cents an hour, but while I was building it, I landed two more customers. I was off and running. I named my business "Wilderness Boats," and began decorating my boats with Northwest Coast Indian designs. I became more efficient with each boat, and after some 30 boats or so I reduced my man-hours per boat down to about 40 hours. I built three solid plug molds so that I wouldn't have to set up station forms every time, and the shape of the boat was less variable. I also designed two lengths of tandem touring kayaks, a wider-beam Micmac, and a 20-foot Micmac.
To sell boats, I went to alot of boat shows and craft fairs. Many people who couldn't afford a finished canoe asked me about kits, plans, and directions. I decided to publish drawings of the canoes and kayaks I had been building, along with instructions that I wrote in 1972. The first edition was printed on newsprint in tabloid format and was no more than photocopies of typewritten pages that contained a few drawings and photographs. The first edition of The Stripper's Guide to Canoe-building sold for only $3.50. The next edition was upgraded to staple-bound like a magazine with a cover, but it was still newsprint inside. I made road trips around the west coast to book stores, selling my book, and advertised in canoeing magazines. Finally, in 1976, I was able to turn over the publishing and distribution to Tamal Vista, and the book has been revised several times since.
After 4 years and 60 boats, it became very apparent to me that selling wood-strip canoes was much more difficult than building them, and that it was time to do something else. I was living in a farmhouse 2 hours east from Portland, Oregon, and building boats in the barn. I was having fun, but my family was getting fed up with the isolated lifestyle, and I was definitely not climbing any socioeconomic ladders. I sold out. The people who bought my business operated for a few more years until they bankrupted.
We moved to Portland, got divorced, and I went through a period of personal searching and turmoil until I settled in Eugene. When I remarried, I built our honeymoon canoe and decorated it in the 4 weeks prior to the wedding. Then Valerie and I paddled it 100 miles around the San Juan Islands on our honeymoon, beginning at Anacortes, Washington (above). On the first day, we crossed Rosario Straits in a heavy, multi-directional chop. Valerie had never even been in a canoe before--- talk about trust!
I built a couple of dinghies in wood-strip, worked in photography and treatment centers for a few years, and then I built parts for wood drift-boat kits. I have built another canoe for our family, a 20-foot sailing canoe. We love to canoe-camp in the San Juan Islands, and our 18-footer has just gotten to be too small.
I hope you've enjoyed my story.
David
The Stripper's Guide to Canoe-building by David Hazen is available from:
Copyright 1998, David Hazen. You may download, store, or print a single copy of this page for your personal information. No part of this material may be reproduced, stored or transmitted for personal gain.
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