Bamboo Kayak Attack

It's a slow news week here in Red Hook, a perfect moment to delve into the history, personal and global, of the bamboo kayak. Arcane, you say? Perhaps. But once again the converging lines of conspiratorial coincidence lead us inexorably to our topic.

Years ago, before any thought of visiting Antarctica had ever entered my mind, I went through a phase during which I exhaustively researched home-made kayak and canoe construction online. It was rather like that moment 10, 11, or 12 year-old girls go through, when they can't get enough of horses. At the time I was living in my main man Alex's vacation hideaway, a simple frame cottage built atop a ridge in the highland forests of Puerto Rico. I was working on my book in the mornings, and luxuriating in free afternoons, and I had the thought that I might spend some of them paddling along the shores of the Caribbean, a twenty minute drive downhill from my writer's retreat.

There were many recipes for boats to be found on the web, even back in 2000, but most called for exotic ingredients like one-quarter inch marine-grade luan plywood, dozens of knot-free board feet of British Columbian cedar stripping, or expensive epoxies manufactured in northeastern sailing havens. None of these things were easy to find in Adjuntas, Puerto Rico at any price. In any case, my budget for the project was slim, and ideally, zero.

It was then that I stumbled upon Craig O'Donnell's The Cheap Pages, a blog about one man's personal passions compiled before the word blog had even been invented. Obsessed with home-made guitars, his dead cat, and, first and foremost, the construction and navigation of extraordinarily low-budget water-craft, this was clearly the production of someone after my own heart. Years before the emergence of the e-book and Google's scans of the entire contents of the world's libraries, O'Donnell sought out and digitally reproduced countless obscure public domain texts on small boating adventures. (Sadly no link, as at the moment the Cheap Pages are down; one can only hope that soon they will be restored.... UPDATE: Thankfully back online.)

I had never heard of Fridtjof Nansen, the great Norwegian polar explorer, but there he was, visiting the Greenlandic Inuit in the 1880s and appreciating their magnificent kayaks, built entirely from driftwood in a land without trees. (It was probably by looking at kayak frames that Nansen developed his theory that the polar icecap actually has a directional flow, rather than being frozen in place. He identified the wood he saw in Greenland, most likely in the form of kayak parts, as having come from Siberian tree species, and hypothesized that they had drifted up and over the north pole to get there. He soon put this hypothesis to the test.)


Fridtjof Nansen and Hjalmar Johansen left their ship, the Fram, frozen in the arctic ice, and set out for the north pole on foot, dragging their bamboo kayaks behind them on sledges.
Photo of photo taken at The Fram Museum, Oslo

We will perhaps never know exactly where Nansen got the idea to build his own kayaks out of bamboo. Almost as intriguing is to wonder where he sourced it from, for he would have had to bring it to Norway from more tropical climes. He must have had something in mind for the bamboo he stowed in the hold of the Fram. I've already theorized that his bringing bamboo along with him might suggest he knew all along that he would eventually abandon the ship and continue on foot. He not only survived the experience but went on to win the Nobel peace prize for his work with Armenian refugees, making him one of the indisputable world's coolest humans.

Nansen, paddling a kayak he brought back to Norway from Greenland.
Image shamelessly stolen from The Nansen Photo Archive.

Bamboo, O'Donnell suggested, is an ideal material from which to build a kayak. It is strong, flexible, lightweight and easy to work; what's more, it is fabulously "green" and "sustainable." Timber bamboo reaches maturity in three years. On the property in Puerto Rico it grew in abundance, to heights of thirty feet and more, great culms as big around as my thigh. It was late spring, when bamboo sprouts, putting on all its annual growth in a short month. New canes were poking up outside the kitchen window, and they grew so fast that when I left my hillside retreat to go food shopping I would return to find the shoots a foot taller. I harvested some older, mature canes and set to work.

Adjuntas, Puerto Rico, early in 2001, the framing almost complete. Note duct-tape holding the glorious craft together, where the gunwhales meet at the stern end.


Aft cockpit view of one of Nansen's bamboo kayaks, which are on display at the Fram Museum in Oslo, but barely; this boat was under a diorama, beneath the guardrail, and difficult to get a good look at, let alone photograph.

Patch on the Nansen Kayak. Eighteen months of dragging these boats across icy pressure-ridges made for lots of frozen-fingered sewing to effect repairs in the field


Interior of Nansen kayak, including ancient polar dust, photographed by surreptitiously thrusting my camera down into the cockpit. The view towards the bow, where the paddler's feet would be.

Stern view

The author, demonstrating the whisper-light character of the SS Adjuntas. The skin is a tan polytarp, purchased at Wal-Mart and sealed with more duct tape.

The "swimyak," in action.

Maiden, and only, voyage, on a local mountain pond. Design flaws were immediately apparent; this kayak had literally half an inch of freeboard and required immaculate balance. From the way the bow protrudes from the water like a torpedo I also appear to have positioned the cockpit a good eight or twelve inches too far aft. I hadn't intended to build a bamboo "sit on top" kayak, and decided my lovely was not quite fit to brave the savage waters of the Caribbean.

Final three photos: Cynthia Kirkwood

Fridtjof Nansen laughs at bad luck

Sick in bed today I nonetheless enjoyed the inauspicious date of this Nansen diary entry:

"Friday, October 13th. Now we are in the very midst of what the prophets would have had us dread so much. The ice is pressing and packing round us with a noise like thunder. It is piling itself up into long walls, and heaps high enough to reach a good way up the Fram's rigging; in fact, it is trying its very utmost to grind the Fram into powder. But here we sit quite tranquil, not even going up to look at all the hurly-burly, but just chatting and laughing as usual." page 116

Nonetheless, at this point the Fram, although successfully frozen solid in the ice, was drifting north-east, then south, then west, and the mood of the crew followed. They were making little if any progress towards the pole and Nansen began to be filled with doubt:

"Wednesday, November 8...Far off I see the threads of life twisting themselves into the intricate web which stretches unbroken from life's sweet morning dawn to the eternal death-stillness of the ice. Thought follows thought--you pick the whole to pieces, and it seems so small--but high above all towers one form.... Why did you take this voyage?...Could I do otherwise? Can the river arrest its course and run up hill? My plan has come to nothing. That palace of theory which I reared, in pride and self-confidence, high above all silly objections has fallen like a house of cards at the first breath of wind.... But no, there is no getting over the evidence of that Siberian drift-wood."

Reading: Farthest North by Fridtjof Nansen

This is not an original observation, but I am able to confirm that even amongst those with a strong sense of geography any differentiation between the two polar regions can be elusive. Before I came to Antarctica I was asked if I was likely to see polar bears. They live only in the Arctic. "Will you see any penguins, or do they only have those at the north pole?" (I told Anne our friendship will be over if I fail to see some penguins on this trip--there are colonies some distance away on Ross Island, where the McMurdo station is, but seeing them right here is apparently unlikely. There are no penguins at the north pole, although one species, the Galapagos Penguin, lives as far north as the equator, on the Galapagos Islands. Antarctica proper has two species, the Emperor and the Adelie; many others live on various Islands in the deep southern oceans but don't quite reach as far south as the continent). Why then complicate the issue with a mention of Farthest North, a memoir of north polar exploration?

Despite the confusion there are obvious similarities between the north Arctic and the southern Antarctic. They are both, as my pappy used to say, and his pappy before him, colder than a witches tit. (Although today was our first day with any "weather" to speak of. We were filming backhoes and strange airportesque all terrain transport vehicles beeping along the snow-swept boulevards of McMurdo, which looks, as the guy sitting next to me on the airplane down put it, "pretty much like any grubby Alaskan mining town." It is supposed to be about -17 F outside and wind chill down to -44F. The combination of snot and moist exhaled vapor turned the nasal zone of my balaclava into icy chain mail in a matter of moments. The scary part is in that chill of a wind the clump of ice clinging around your beard acts as a reassuring insulating barrier). The first man to reach the south pole, R Amundsen, and Robert Scott, who made it a month later and then died trying to get back to McMurdo, both learned a tremendous amount from Fridtjof Nansen, a lunatic Norwegian who, with Colin Archer, built a special and unique ship, the Fram, designing it to be capable of sustaining a complete freeze into pack ice without being crushed to splinters. Amundsen sailed the same almost flat bottomed Fram on his successful southward journey; Nansen apocryphally or actually watched their departure and waved a wistful goodbye from some fjord overlook outside of Christiania.

Farthest North is the travelogue of a journey which must stand in the annals of world adventure as one of the most extreme of all time. Based on some shards of driftwood brought back from Greenland, Nansen hypothesized that the north polar ice cap flows like an immense ice river, arcing over the pole from Siberian Asia towards Greenland and the north Atlantic. He and Archer designed the Fram to withstand the pressures of being frozen into the ice in order that he might then sail and steam his way north-east from northernmost Norway along the virtually uncharted northern coast of Siberia before becoming intentionally frozen into the ice. He then planned to wait it out, a frozen Noah with three dozen Huskies in an ark, resting on the gigantic ice-floe, drifting steadily towards the as-yet undiscovered Pole. Steadily and very slowly; the plans for the trip included provisions for a three-year journey. Nansen expected the Fram to eventually melt free somewhere in the north Atlantic. What makes Farthest North so compelling is that Nansen actually planned on being ice-bound. His very goal was to lodge himself in the sort of predicament that any sensible sailors would at all costs avoid.