O'Reiley's Island by William Wardlaw

Author:William Wardlaw [Wardlaw, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780595606825
Publisher: iUniverse
Published: 2008-02-19T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 10

Construction had started on the boat. After carefully stepping off the length, O’Reiley selected the first of the many hundreds of bamboo poles and laid them out to form the basic keel structure. Carefully selecting the poles, he formed them into bundles of three, alternating the narrow tips with the wider bottoms. Overlapping the bundles to provide strength, the keel grew from the stern until he reached the curve of the prow, which he formed by bending and tying the bamboo into the desired curve. Then he repeated the process, carefully securing each layer of bamboo with twine until he had constructed a strong keel made of five layers of bamboo, four poles in each layer, with bamboo connectors every two feet to which the ships ribs would eventually be attached. Each layer and each pole was strongly secured and tied in place and the entire keel wrapped and re-wrapped with twine. The curve of the prow was held in place with several layers of twine until the bamboo would dry in the hot sun and harden in this shape. The completed keel was twenty-five feet in length, and had required over a hundred and twenty bamboo poles, hundreds of yards of hand made twine, and nearly two weeks to complete. With the keel completed, he constructed bamboo supports onto which he lifted the keel, with the prow resting in the sand. Starting again at the stern, he constructed the curved rib structures from young, flexible bamboo, carefully bending and securing four layers of poles into the curves he had envisioned. With a temporary pole tied in place to retain the overall shape of each rib, he carefully attached the ribs to the keel with twine, knotting and trying each one for a secure, sea-worthy connection. As ribs were added, he tied temporary poles along the outer edges to check and retain the curvature of the hull, making adjustments as he went to assure that the boat would be symmetrical in shape. At last he stood back, satisfied. The structure before him suggested a skeletal but finely shaped boat frame, upside down, twenty-five feet in length, a little under six feet in beam, and nearly five feet at its deepest point.

He harvested armfuls of the seaweed that provided the black adhesive, and setting his pots on small fires built right at the building site, proceeded to cook up the noxious smelling glue. First he carefully coated every exposed section of twine and knotted connections and then covered the entire skeletal structure with the black, tar-like paste. Building and fastening the ribs to the keel had taken him seven weeks, working from sunrise to sunset. Evening hours were spent making twine from the vines, making tools, constructing water and food baskets and going over his plans in his mind, changing, clarifying and improving. Frisco seemed to acknowledge his masters new ambitions, and stayed close by, peering with his bright eyes at O’Reiley’s progress while strutting the length of the keel.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.