Kilted at the Wooden Boat Festival

[Alan H]

Well, I’m back from Washington, with the following report. Pics to follow shortly as soon as my friend Greg sends along the CD with the pictures from the weekend on them. Honest...I promise. I got my picture taken, kilted, at the Shrine of West Coast Singlehanding....read on and you'll understand.

This past weekend I attended the Port Townsend Wooden Boat Festival. I spent all day at the Festival, Friday and Saturday, kilted. Here’s how it went.

First of all, one of the primary reasons I went to the Festival was to see “Dolly”. “Dolly” is a 23 foot long, cold molded (wood veneers laminated together with epoxy) boat built by John Guzzwell. Why this boat? Well, in the mid 1960’s the sport of sailing alone across oceans really started with a number of truly amazing voyages. Sir Francis Chichester started it all off with a solo crossing of the Atlantic in Gipsy Moth. Shortly thereafter the first Singlehanded TranAtlantic race happened, with personalities like David Lewis and Valentin Howells. In the Pacific, two notable voyages took place. One was by the Japanese teenager Kenichi Horie, who managed to scrape enough money together to buy a screwed-together piece of *junk* plywood boat which he named “Mermaid” The young Kenichi left Japanin secret and sailed from Japan to San Francisco, where he received an uproarious welcome, and was given the keys to the City. Kenichi’s visit did much to heal post-wartime animosity towards the Japanese in San Francisco. Up in Victoria, British Columbia a young fellow by the name of John Guzzwell was building a little Laurent Giles design he named “Trekka”.

John finished off Trekka and spent four years sailing the little 21 foot ketch, singlehanded around the world. John’s voyage was the first major singlehanded ocean crossing ever attempted by a North American, and he followed it up by writing a fabulous book called “Trekka ‘Round the World”. If you like a good sea-story, I heartily recommend it.

Well, in 1991 John, who was now in his early 60’s, redesigned Trekka with more modern construction techniques and an updated rig and so on, and he built her, again. Only this time, he named the little boat “Dolly” and gave the boat to his wife. “Dolly” was the subject of an absolutely wonderful Wooden Boat Magazine article in 1993, and I loved what he had built and always wanted to see her. I was very excited to see that she’d be at the show, because she is truly a beauty…just a little gem of a boat.

“Dolly” is now owned by a Japanese couple that lives in Seattle, and Hiroko was on board. We had a lovely chat and she let me poke around every corner for a good hour and a half. It was great. Imagine my shock when I heard on the dock…”Oh, yeah, Chris sailed Trekka down from Victoria. She’ll be coming in the breakwater at any minute.” I just about died. So as it turned out I had the unique opportunity to view, at GREAT length, both Trekka AND Dolly, there at the Port Townsend Wooden Boat Show. This truly is the “shrine” of West Coast singlehanded sailing.

…..all the while attired in my MacNaughton Bear Kilt. Trust me, climbing down Trekka’s hatch without giving the whole harbor a good look and dispelling all mystery forevermore was a bit of a challenge!

Anyway, seeing Dolly and Trekka was the highlight of the show, but I attended a bunch of great seminars for boatbulding nuts like “Vacuum Bagging Techniques for Wood Veneers with Epoxy”…”Stitch and Glue Magic”… were the more up-to-date seminars. “Rudiments of Cruising Sail Construction” and “making a wire rope splice” were more traditional skills. I especially loved “Thumbnail Boat Design” where a well-known naval architect showed us how to rough-out a basic boat design on graph paper and work out the basics of displacement, prismatic coefficient, wetted surface and so on, just to see if your ideas will work. I attended all of these activities, kilted.

I got oodles of comments thoughout the weekend, from the **highly alternative** Port Townsend kids on the street giving me the Hawaiian thumbs-up to a long discussion with a couple who both played in a pipe band, locally. A piper played for the launch of a truly superb carvel-planked pulling boat that a local native had built, and I got about a hundred questions during the weekend…”were you the piper?”. I got the usual sideways glances, outright stares at the sporran, a couple of appreciative grins and comments from some of the bolder ladies that I usually get. I only once heard anyone say, to his kid no less…”See the weirdo in a skirt?”. I just turned around and smiled at this guy and then I said to his kid….. not to him, but to his 9 year-old-son….

“See, one of the things that happens when you grow up is that you get to a point where you don’t worry so much about what other people think about you, and you just do what seems right to you”…and went on my way.

That incident was balanced by the woman who stopped her SUV on the main street to wolf whistle at me and shout “Nice Legs!!” as we exited from dinner. I replied to this, just as loudly as she had shouted, by hollering….. “They look even better in high heels”, which sent about half of the street into gales of laughter.

I spotted a couple of other guys in kilts during the show, from one of the fellows who works on one of the classic schooners who was wearing a denim kilt, to 3-4 UK’s. No other tartan kilts made an appearance, though.

I found a really nice Celtic Store on Water Street downtown, so I had to go in. It’s called “Wandering Angus” and lo and behold, Alan who posts over on the Bravehearts forum, was working the counter. We had a nice chat about kilts and I bought a lovely pewter knotwork buckle.

Saturday night our friends who are active in the Wooden Boat Foundation in Port Townsend had us over and I went, kilted with socks and flashes, the whole kit. It was a lot of fun, and Matt Newsome, I met a lady….I am completely spacing out on her name right now, though I expect her last name is Becker….who does costuming for some of the period farms that y’all have locally. We had along chat about the history of tartan and the migration of the Scots and Scotch-Irish to the New World and along the Great Wagon Road.

All in all a GREAT weekend in Port Townsend. For anyone who’s a serious boat nut, I highly recommend the show.

[Alan H]

I should qualify the above by mentioned Captain Joshua Slocum's voyage in the late 1800's aboard "Spray" as the first singlehanded circumnavigation by a North Anmerican. However Slocum was truly a throwback to an earlier time and he sailed a very old boat outfitted with early 1800's sailing gear. His achievement is monumental. John was the first North American in the "modern" era of sailing technology ....though that technology has rather changed, now, to achieve a singlehanded circumnavigation.