The Cormorant's Captain

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Christian Beamish for a short piece in the current issue of The Surfer's Path (issue 92 Sep/Oct 2012).  Christian is the former associate editor of The Surfer's Journal, a writer, wooden boat builder and wilderness surf adventurer who lives in California.  I had a hundred questions that I wanted to ask him, but had to parr it back to fit on a single page.  Below is the full transcript of our interview, with some of the images that he sent through and a recent video vignette produced to promote his brilliant book, "The Voyage of the Cormorant"; absorb and enjoy.

How did your ocean attraction begin?

From an early age I spent a lot of time at the beach with my Dad bodysurfing, boogie boarding, and then, naturally, board surfing at around 10-years-old. An L.A. County lifeguard in California’s “golden era” of the 1950s, my father raised me with what I now recognize as an overall waterman sensibility: Free diving the reefs of Laguna, sailing and fishing were all background activities to the main pursuit of wave riding. In my grown up surfing life I have pursued wilderness surfing experiences as much as possible, having nevertheless surfed a lot of “parking lot” beaches in Southern California. What I find most interesting about surfing is the way that it puts us into the natural world with such immediacy. It was in this spirit that I set out to explore wilderness shores in my small, open boat.

Can you please tell us about your boat, Cormorant.

A Shetland Isle beach boat, designed by Iain Oughtred on the Isle of Skye, Cormorant is 18-feet long by 5’4” in the beam. Although modeled on traditional craft, the boat is built in marine grade plywood, secured with epoxy resin. The boat carries about two weeks of food and water. With a mainsail (a balanced lug) and a smaller mizzen, Cormorant makes about 5 knots. There are three reef points in the mainsail and the “double ended” design handles a following sea very well, so it is truly a “sea boat.” Historically, the Shetland Islanders fished banks 40 miles offshore in these boats, and then landed in small coves.

What inspired and drove you to build your own boat for solo surf searches?

A feeling has nagged me that our headlong embrace of electric gadgetry threatens to sever us from an essential, physical, aspect of ourselves developed over the 50,000 years (or however long it has been) of our modern human physiology. I suppose it’s a longing for a forest home and the adventure of open water that informs the notion that florescent lighting, emails and automobiles make machines out of us. I was living on the grounds of a lighthouse, on the North Coast above Santa Cruz, California, and the maritime history seemed to haunt the place. There were historic photos of  fishermen plying those waters in traditional craft and a vision hit me so hard that I knew right then that I needed to experience that kind of essential human endeavor.

Where have you sailed her to date?  

I’ve got about one thousand miles “under the hull” (as Iain Oughtred has said). Two long Baja sails, a couple of 30 mile crossings to the Santa Barbara Channel Islands (with circum navigations of Santa Rosa and Santa Cruz Islands), countless “local” trips from Dana Point and San Clemente down to Trestles and up to Laguna, and a great month-long journey in Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada.

Can you give us some high and a low points from your adventures in Cormorant?

The high points are nice sailing conditions and the quite glide of it all. Low points are abject terror, far offshore when conditions threaten to overwhelm – but in those situations one is too involved in the moment to really judge “high” or “low”. The low is running out of supplies, far from help and feeling the inherent limitations of such a small vessel. 

Did you ever miss a surf to work on the boat in the two years that you spent building her?

I wouldn’t have missed “epic” days, but sitting in a line-up with a bunch of people in tiny waves will always be less appealing than the mediation of building a boat (or shaping a surfboard for that matter!).

How did your experiences with Cormorant lead into you surfing Mavericks?

I can’t say that building and sailing Cormorant led directly somehow to surfing Mavs. But once on that program I recognized a real similarity to the feeling of being in “big water” with just yourself and your equipment (self-built) to rely on. But neither pursuit – solo expeditions or big wave riding – has ever had an element of being something I wanted to “challenge,” “overcome,” or “conquer.” The inherent danger is not to be dismissed, as much as accounted for. Then I make an assessment of my abilities and the conditions for any particular day. Luck plays a huge role for anyone involved in ocean work.

Is/was Cormorant just the start of a much deeper relationship with the ocean?

Yes. I sometimes shudder when I think of some of the situations I’ve put myself in. Oddly, I think I’ll be more cautious now in my ocean forays… they’re not done, but I want to make a few adjustments.

What lessons did you learn from reducing your immediate world to an 18’ x 5’ space?

Hard to say, but Cormorant was my transport and shelter, and traveling this way is much like traveling by bicycle with a tent to sleep in at night. So it wasn’t quite like a monk in his cell… I sometimes rowed ashore and set up a beach camp, or, if staying aboard, I’m off surfing or fishing most of the day, leaving the boat at anchor. One of the great feelings is having a snug cove you’re anchored in, a good meal you’ve cooked (and caught) on the camp stove, and a good book to read by lantern light. It’s sort of the small boy and his “fort” made in the woods feeling.

What’s next for Cormorant and your boat building exploits?  Do you have plans to extend your fleet at all?

Solo expeditions have their place, but I’ve also greatly enjoyed traveling with friends. The vision I have is to build two new boats (need to speak with Mr. Oughtred!) scaled-up to 22- or 24-feet. I want to sail with 2-surfers per boat in wilderness areas. The boats will stick together and share camp duties and of course the fun and challenges of these adventures.

Were your trips simply surf trips, or were they by their very nature more multi-dimensional?

Multi-dimensional, but guiding by a foundation in surfing. A lot of the old timers say that “it’s all surfing,” and with beach boats that really is true.

And finally, on a purely inquisitive level based on my own boat building experiences (and not part of the main interview), how many clamps did you have to use??!

Always about twice the number I had was what was needed it seemed!

Christian recorded some of his adventures as a podcast for The Dirtbag Diaries a while back.  I listened to his piece and immediately reigned in the plans that I harboured for adventures in the boat that I was building at the time.  Click here to listen to 3/8th of an inch to eternity.

Here's how it looked in print...

You can purchase Christian's book, The Voyage of the Cormorant, here.

All images are copyright Christian Beamish which means that if you want them then you have to ask nicely, please don't just take them - it ain't cool.

Whatever Floats Your Boat

Well, she floats.


And in this case, whatever floats my boat is about a year and a half of hard work and head-scratching (on spare weekends), three sheets of fsc certified plywood, a couple of old school science desks, some kitchen worktop offcuts, mis-blown foam from a lifeguard paddleboard, various workshop scraps, an old windsurf mast, the spare sail and a few bits from a knackered old mirror dinghy, 26 old seatbelts, a load of used plastic drinks bottles, a roll of fibreglass, some epoxy resin and finally patience and advice from a whole heap of people.
  
And what a relief it was when I pushed her into the sea!  After a year and a half in the making, An Reun Govynnus had sort of become the elephant in the corner; the project that I'd taken on that was arguably waaaaay to big.  So to push my little wooden boat off the beach at Port Isaac where my Great Great Uncle was the last wooden boat-builder and for it not to keep on going along the seabed until water came over the gunnels, or instantly capsize, was a pretty nice feeling.  To be honest, just getting it finished took a weight off my mind, let alone whether or not it was seaworthy.

An Reun Govynnus (Cornish for 'The Curious Seal') has featured on here a few times in the past (here and here), but I didn't want An Tor Orth An Mor to become a build diary for a project that I wasn't completely confident of finishing.  Building a boat is quite a big job as it turns out, particularly when you're working from a book (not full scale plans), adapting all of the measurements to suit the reclaimed and recycled materials that you're intent on using, don't really understand any boat jargon and only have 5 clamps to your name.  All that, and I'd just started a new and pretty full-on job which was overly-demanding on my time.  

It must be getting on for ten years ago that the desire for an outrigger canoe first crept into my mind; it seemed like the ultimate vessel for accessing some of the little nooks and crannies under the high cliffs around where I live to go spear fishing.  The outrigger would give it the stability to climb back aboard easily after diving that a normal small boat wouldn't provide.  So I called around a load of outdoor centres trying to get my mitts on a knackered old Canadian canoe with the aim of lashing a bit of drain pipe onto the side of it.  Well that dream morphed a bit over the next decade.  Surfboards get in the way in small boats, so for small surf trips up and down the coast an outrigger canoe provides space to lash a stack of boards....and why paddle everywhere when there's free energy in the wind?  One guy that I e-mailed for advice told me to build one in a day with friends and a crate of beers then smash it up paddling around in the surf to see whether I liked outrigger canoes enough to build one properly.  But by the time I'd shelled out for three sheets of plywood I figured that I'd made an investment and might as well do it properly.  Cue admiralty charts laser etched onto the fore and aft decks (so that I don't get lost), a trampoline of recycled car seatbelts and a whole heap of other little touches that might only be known to me.  If a job's worth doing...

I splashed her back in April during a horrible storm, my girlfriend Kate patiently watching from the beach in the driving rain whilst I bobbed around making a mental list of all of the things that I needed to do and improve before I could hoist a sail.  She also had to endure a conversation that I had with Tom Kay of Finisterre at the opening event of an exhibition where we gibbered excitedly and almost exclusively for a good ten minutes about various sail set-ups, making models with paper napkins and cocktail sticks to the bewilderment of everybody around us.  I owe her a public thank you for being so wonderfully patient and understanding.  Thank you!


And so to the maiden voyage:  Launching from Port Isaac seemed like the right thing to do; kind of completing the circle of wooden boat building and heritage.  Captain Christian Beamish calls it "blood memory" and I'd be inclined to agree.  It was a dropping spring tide so, having put all of the various bits of boat down on the pebbles at the waters edge the tide had dropped a fair bit by the time I'd lashed all of it together.  A few Port Isaac locals helped me to carry it down to the waters edge and, just as I shoved off my housemate Matt pulled his boat Sea Explorer into the harbour with a full compliment of clients on a sea safari.  Nice to have an escort for moral support and mainly in case my boat building skills weren't actually all that.  It's an interesting way to test yourself isn't it?  Putting your faith in your own craftsmanship to the extent that if it fails you'll probably have to swim a long way home or get scooped up by the lifeboat.

I paddled out of the harbour walls and looked back to enjoy the view of the picturesque little fishing village that I'm so used to seeing from within (some of you would recognise Port Isaac from Doc Marten, the TV show that's filmed there).  A mile east under the cliffs to Port Gaverne and then after beaching to adjust my rigging and eat some lunch I pointed north up a rugged, beautiful and largely inaccessible stretch of coast.  I had my eyes and heart set on a semi-secret beach a good few miles away but was paddling against a light head wind and didn't want to be overly ambitious on my first outing.  The last time I was in charge of a boat was a good few years ago after all, and I kind of wanted to soak it all up; this stretch of coast is utterly stunning with verdant green clifftops speckled with purple heather and yellow gorse flowers, incredible cliffs, waterfalls, coves and sea caves.  An Reun Govynnus only draws about 15-20 cm of water with me onboard so can come in remarkably shallow and skim over some of the reefs protecting the rocky shoreline.  

I hoisted the main sail and jib (the smaller sail at the front) for the run south back towards Port Isaac, just as the sea mist descended over Tintagel Head and the breeze picked up.  After such a beautiful hot and sunny day with barely a breath of wind the sea mist came down the coast amazingly fast.  Almost as fast as An Reun Govynnus which, at 16 foot long and less than 2 feet wide doesn't need a lot of sail up to get a move on.  This was the bit that I was a bit more apprehensive about because I'm a surfer and by no stretch of the imagination a sailor, and essentially an outrigger sailing canoe is an offset catamaran with the mast over to one side unbalancing it enormously.  When the sail is out over the outrigger it is pushing down on that buoyancy, however when it swings out to the other side it is more likely to capsize the boat than power it forwards and you need to be able to scramble out to the outrigger float to counterbalance it.  Everything that I read stated that these things are fast, easy to capsize and difficult to right, particularly singlehanded.  Luckily the breeze was manageable and I made it back to Port Isaac just as the sea mist caught up with me and almost exactly on dead low tide which revealed a few choice rocks and boils just outside the harbour walls that aren't often uncovered.
My original plans had been to follow the coast south and west the 7 miles or so back to Polzeath so that I could run my boat back up on my home beach and wheel it up the sand back to the garage where I'd built her.  But that voyage is probably an overnighter that can wait for another day and the next patch of high pressure that moves over us.  One paddle stroke at a time hey, now that I know that it floats.

I built myself a bloody boat, but it absolutely wouldn't have been possible without the following people:
My parents for the boat building heritage and "blood memory"; Richard Scott of thirdshade surfcraft for telling me that building a pram dinghy "just wouldn't be cool" and for advice and materials; John Burford of Upper Deck Marine for providing me with chandlery despite my enormous lack of knowledge about what boat bits I was actually after; Kate for taking photos, her unending patience and for making allowances for my near-obsessiveness, lateness and gluey/sawdusty clothing; Gary Dierking for designing such a rad boat and writing the book that I worked from; Matt from Cornish Sea Tours for the workspace and escorting me from Port Isaac to Port Gaverne; Dave Cook of Marine Academy Plymouth for advice; Byron the Port Isaac Harbour Master for allowing me to launch from "home", and finally to everyone who got so enthusiastic about my stupid project and encouraged me to do a proper job.  Thanks very much, sorry I didn't build on a gin-deck for us all to sit back and enjoy it on.


Images 1, 4, 5 and 8 taken by Kate Fewster, images 2, 3 and 6 taken by me and image 7 taken by Cornish Sea Tours.

Keeping The Boat Afloat

My friends Hardy and Layla live on a boat.  It's not only their home but also a full-on historical restoration project somewhat akin to an upside-down barn conversion, their "homeymoon" destination/accommodation and their floating wedding list.  It's an inspiring project and one that I've been dying to photograph for a while.  


The Northern Sky is a 58 foot larch on oak Scottish fishing boat built sometime around 1937, and she's designed to carry up to 22 tonnes of fish which, with no fish in the holds means that there's ample space  for some very unique living quarters.  Make no mistake, when they bought the boat it was in an absolute state, even being sold complete with a flea-ridden ships cat, and Hardy has spent much of the last two and a bit years working day and night and every hour in between trying to restore the boat so that she won't sink with all of their possessions aboard, and then once that's done, turn it into a home.  No mean feat.  

Captain Hardy in the port door of the wheelhouse, which actually serves primarily as Layla's country style kitchen where tea-towels hang to dry off the ship's wheel.

Ahoy!  Layla looking out of our bedroom porthole with a nautical scaffold platform below, showing past work below the waterline and one of the jobs "to do" painting topside.

Hardy has slowly but surely been replacing the majority of the oak frames that make up the skeleton of the Northern Sky;  after buying curved sections of sawn oak (from where the branch meets the trunk) he has to cut them down into beams and then take complicated multi-angle measurements of the section to be replaced, cut the replacement to fit and then swap them out.  

The aft cabin will eventually be the main bedroom.  You can see all of the work that has been done replacing the frame of the boat, and work yet to do above the waterline where there are holes in the planking big enough to stick your fingers through.  Last winter, during all of the snow and cold weather that we had in Cornwall, Hardy was sleeping in here and was woken up by rain being blown through the gaps.  Luckily there are no such holes below the waterline.

This illustrates perfectly how much hard(y) work has gone into restoring the good ship hardship:

That square nail is called a galvanised dump; each one is 150mm long and Hardy reckons that each whack of a 25lb (11kg) sledgehammer sends it 1mm further into it's hole.  So it takes roughly 150 whacks to hammer it in.

There are 60 frames running the length of the boat (2 sides) with 40 planks on each side.  Each plank is secured onto the frame by 2 nails (dumps).

60 frames 

x

 40 planks 

x

 2 nails

 x

 2 sides of the hull

 x

 150 whacks of the hammer

 /

 2 because Hardy has only re-planked the Northern Sky up to the waterline and still has the topsides yet to do

 =

 720,000 swings of a sledgehammer out of a total of 1,440,000.

To complete the re-planking of the Northern Sky Hardy will have swung his big sledgehammer almost one and a half million times, and there is no easier or faster way of doing this job.

The multi-purpose ships wheel.

Living on the water means getting friendly with all of the wildfowl.  Layla has been adopted by their local swan. 

Hardy rowing their tender back towards home on sunny evening, April 2012.  Refurbishing the little rowing boat will be nothing compared to the work done on the mothership.

The Northern Sky dockside on a Spring low tide.  

Hardy and Layla are forgoing a traditional wedding list for their upcoming marriage at the end of August and are instead asking friends and family who might wish to celebrate their marriage with a gift to donate towards the "restore and refit" coffers.  They have started a blog to allow friends and family to keep up to date with their progress and hope to arrive at their wedding reception on the Helford River in their homeymoon vessel, blasting the foghorn and trailing a couple of tin cans in their wake.

Check out the past stories, see how far she's come and see what's being done on their blog "Keep Our Boat Afloat", it's wonderful, inspiring and makes me want to live with funny shaped walls and round windows too.

Howls From The Pit: An Reun Govynnus

"Ships are the nearest things to dreams that hands have ever made."

Robert N. Rose

I've heard it said that whenever you start a project, plan for it to take three times longer than you expect. I'll put my name to that.

An Reun Govynnus was a pretty ambitious project that I cautiously took the lid off back in March last year in the first "Howls From The Pit" post, and considering all of the other things that I had going on last year I really shouldn't have publicised the fact that I aimed to launch her in the summer. Needless to say I missed my planned launch date and the boat's still sat down in The Pit, 95% complete but still confined to dry land while I work on the finishing touches and take the winter to go back over her and make sure everything's all ship-shape and Bristol fashion. I don't want this fancy floating box falling apart on me when I'm around the back of the headland after all.

Since March last year a lot has happened, but often it sometimes doesn't look that way. The eight foot outrigger arms (iakos) were laminated up with 5 strips of ash sandwiched between layers of iroko top and bottom and formed to a curve to meet the outrigger float (ama).

Following a self imposed "tread lightly" sustainability challenge I researched all of the different options available for sheathing the hull and ended up opting to use standard fibreglass cloth and epoxy resin from a local surfboard materials supplier. Not all that sustainable I hear you say, but I had to balance out sustainability, safety and cost; hemp cloth absorbs a lot more resin and only really works with epoxy so would add weight and expense, after a few tests and enquiries I decided against bioresin and fibreglass (questionable bond strength with wood), and in the end after checking every cloth/resin combination the best option was the least environmentally friendly one. But it works and now the hull sections are laminated and painted white.

I glued up the biofoam offcuts using old tyre inner-tubes to strap it all together then glued on balsa and western red cedar nose and tail blocks made from workshop offcuts. I had to stand the ama on it's end in the yurt in our back yard to use it's own weight as pressure on the glue joint with the tail block which made for quite a neat image.

The deck panels had the admiralty nautical charts for the coastline where I live etched onto them using a laser cutter in case I lose my charts overboard and I realised then that all of the clamps in the world still wouldn't be enough to hold them to the tight curves as the glue set. I begged and borrowed as many clamps as I could and cut up sections of drainpipe to apply pressure in between clamps, and the decks are on.

This winter I've had even less time than last year to sneak down and whittle the boat but I've ripped down leftover lengths of iroko and capped all of the gunnels so they're looking all classic in dark hardwood. I've spent a lot of time trimming glue overspills and working on small important things that I can't even see when I step back, knowing that it's the small things that count.

I also saw an advert in my local Newsagents window, advertising an old mirror dinghy in need of some TLC. I called up and on December 27th I headed along to the next village of Rock, just inside the Camel Estuary, to take a look. The dinghy has a hole in the hull and some bits of rot that need cutting out and patching, but it came with spare everything, even a complete set of spare sails. The price on the advert had said £60 and as the elderly gentleman talked me through all of the bits laid out in his garage I was sure that he'd made a typo and that I was £540 short.

Luckily for me it wasn't a mistake so I'm now the proud owner of TWO un-seaworthy vessels. I think that makes me a Commodore? Or a straight up idiot. Probably the second.

I assembled all of the bits a couple of weekends ago on a windy but sunny(ish) January morning with my great friend Alex of Initiative Surf filming my fumbling and confusion (see below, thankfully sped up and crammed into 30 seconds), and the plan is to cannibalise all of the spare bits of the Mirror for An Reun Govynnus and get her under sail. Then I can patch the holes and have two boats...but one step at a time. Three times as long right??!

"A lot of people ask me if I were shipwrecked, and could only have one book, what would it be? I always say "How to Build a Boat."

Stephen Wright

Top two images shot by Dave Williams.

Bottom two images by Mat Arney.

Mirror Dinghy footage shot and edited by Alex Espir.