Not much of my time has been spent boat-wise over the past while. I have been away from Tsunamichaser for most of the month. This feels wierd after a year of in-depth living the build. I spent the last few days in an interesting little community on the Pacific coast called Bay Center. It is an oysterman's town and the local high spots are the mounds of white shells that pepper the landscape. I went to vist artist friends who have their studio there. Partly to hang out and partly to work on packing up and transporting paintings to Seattle. This was an willy endevor as we did this in the midst of hurricane winds first accompanied by a snowstorm and then monsoon rainfall. When we left, winds were a steady 40 to 50 mph with gusts of 80 plus. We left in a lull in the storm which was good as the next day the wind was gusting to one twenty. The studio is an old church built of mainly hand hewn timber and boards. On Sunday morning as the winds howled, the numerous chandeliers that have been added over the years swayed and jingled in a most frightening way. We strengthened our resolve with strong spirits later followed by oyster stew.

Of boat building interest was a lengthy conversation with one of the locals who oysters but who also builds the scows that the locals use to collect their bounty. These are similar to Wharram cats- built of plywood and fiberglass though the similarity ends there. They are truly scows - 30 plus foot long boxes built of construction grade fir plywood encapsulated in fiberglass - the polyester kind. Framing is local softwood framing lumber. Amazingly they get thirty or so years out of these craft. Fishermen have plenty of worries (often lessened by strongly altered coffee drinks) but one of them is not "does it look pretty alongside the dock?" We builders of Wharram's double canoes can learn something from these seafolk, much more so than we can from the shiny stern tied too crowd on the Med.