boat book « Chine bLog

Fantastic read: Tim Severin’s “The Brendan Voyage”

Posted on December 18th, 2009

Last Winter we finally read one of Tim Severin’s books, The China Voyage: Across The Pacific By Bamboo Raft and posted some reactions, all positive. One of our friends said, at the time, that if we liked that book, Severin’s The Brendan Voyage: Across the Atlantic in a Leather Boat was better still. [...]

Phil Bolger, 1927-2009 - A sad, sad loss for boat design

Posted on June 2nd, 2009

This is certainly the best design I ever made… When I come up for judgment and they stop me at the gate and ask, ‘What’s your excuse?’ I’ll tell them I designed the Gloucester Light Dory and they’ll have to let me in.

- Phil Bolger (taken from his obituary in the Boston Globe)

For [...]

Thinking about a ocean voyage on a bamboo raft? Read “The China Voyage”

Posted on February 24th, 2009

I actually had the crazed idea to read a book recently. Doesn’t happen much – I am lucky if I can clear my magazine rack in a given month. Long on my to do list, though, had been reading some of Tim Severin’s works. Severin is an Irishman (at least he lives there) with an fascinating joint interest in history, archeology, and epic voyages, mostly maritime ones. Sound intriguing? It gets better. Severin’s shtick has been to identify an unproven or poorly understood historical journey, build a traditional boat, if a maritime one, that represents the type of that era, and then recreate the journey to see if it could have happened as theorized. Oh yeah, I am IN! I have known about him for a while and only just got around to checking him out.

I began with The China Voyage: Across The Pacific By Bamboo Raft. Apparently there are a group of archeologists who believe (or believed, as of the early 1990s) that there was contact between East Asian cultures and Central American cultures within the last couple [...]

“Shadow Divers” – a fantastic read

Posted on October 13th, 2008

I recently read “Shadow Divers: The True Adventure of Two Americans Who Risked Everything to Solve One of the Last Mysteries of World War II”, by Robert Kurson. It is a well-known book at this point and you may have read it. If not, you really ought to – it is fantastic. [...]

Great children's reading:

Posted on May 4th, 2008

I recently picked up a great book for my kids: The Island-below-the-Star. It a wonderful story / “myth” about Polynesian discovery of Hawaii in a double-hull canoe and the navigation skills that help the voyage. Worth grabbing for fellow traditional boat lovers with size-small crew floating about.

A great read: the Dye's

Posted on January 4th, 2008

As I mentioned recently, my dad gave me Frank and Margaret Dye’s Ocean Crossing Wayfarer: To Iceland and Norway in a 16ft Open Boat for Christmas and I tore through it in several days. Great book for those liking adventure or those liking nice wooden boats.

For those not in the know, Frank Dye began [...]

Roger Fletcher and the river boats of the American West

Posted on December 28th, 2007

There is logic to this, but I won’t get into it. Suffice it to say that I had recently been thinking about the wooden dories and river boats indigenous to the American West. I don’t know much about these boats and have never been in one, so I don’t think about them much [...]

“Canoe Rig” – an amazing way to expand the possibilities of what a canoe adventure could be

Posted on November 25th, 2006

Canoe Rig: The Essence and the Art : Sailpower for Antique and Traditional Canoes, by Todd Bradshaw, is one of those books that stakes out a new piece of turf in your mind. In this case, that turf is the possibilities of adding spars and canvas to the traditional canoe. Bradshaw presents, in [...]

Top designer: Iain Oughtred

Posted on June 29th, 2006

I bit ago I realized I was overdue doing a post about Iain Oughtred, a man whose drawing table has produced some gorgeous small craft. I first got introduced to him vis his book on glued lapstake building: Clinker Plywood Boatbuilding Manual. Yeah, he’s a Brit, so he used “clinker,” which, [...]

A second shout-out to Messing-About.com

Posted on April 5th, 2006

Many thanks to my new friends at Messing-About.com, which I profiled a little while back. They immediately linked to my blog here upon request and sent a good number of visitors my way. Folks, I hope you enjoyed it and return again!

I do internet strategy stuff for a living and we often tell [...]

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