Knock Knock!

"Knock knock!"
"Who's there?"
"Wooden."
"Wooden who?"
"Wooden you love to have a boat like this?"

You can't buy these in stores. They are hand made. You start by building a table. Yes, you need a perfectly level very long table, so you build it out of plywood. Then you cut shapes out of plywood that are cross sections of the canoe type you want and you mount them upside down on the table.
Then you take tiny strips of cedar wood, 1/4" thick and 3/4" wide and very long. The first one is clamped onto the forms and the second one glued to that and the next one glued to that. Where they meet along the center, you have to cut very precise angles both across and along the wood so that they meet just right. When you have all the strips glued together, then you sand and sand and sand so that the series of flat strips forms a continuous smooth curve.
Then you put on a layer of fiber glass cloth with epoxy. The cloth is white and it seems like this is going to DESTROY the beautiful wood boat, but the epoxy makes it clear. You do this inside the boat and outside the boat.
This boat is like no other in the entire world, for then a gas grill was retrofitted as a steamer with PVC pipe so that it somewhat resembled a still, and wooden strips were steamed to soften them and then quickly bent into shape to fit the inside of the canoe. When all of the dozens of strips were bent one by one into shape, they were glued in place, and the whole thing was given more coats of finish. The top edges, called 'gunwales', oddly pronounced as 'gunnels', were cut and trimmed and sanded and glued into place and the triangles in front and back, called 'decks' were hand crafted by meticulously cutting and fitting various kinds of wood. The center support, called a 'yoke' was hand carved into a shape to make it comfortable to carry the canoe upside down on the shoulders and wooden frames were cut and glued and sanded then woven with rawhide strips to make seats.
The man in the yellow had did most of the work and the kid paddling in front helped, especially with the bending of the ribs inside the canoe.
It is a thing of wondrous beauty and it made its first water voyage recently on a cloudy day. But oh, it is amazing, when beautiful wood is finely hand formed into something so perfectly functional. A canoe itself is a thing of quiet beauty that takes you places where the splash of water, the breeze on your face, and the life in the water and on the shore make you remember that we live in a beautiful wonderful world indeed. I love my little one person boat, but a boat like this, built for two, means you have someone along to share it with, when you make a discovery and whisper 'Look!"