CVG

If you have a sail for your boat you will not get very far if you do not also have a mast from which to fly your sail.
Back in the day I rowed out to Valino Island in South Slough by where we lived and I chopped down a little Port Orford Cedar. Bad girl, yes, but fuck you it was a long time ago. And actually I did not chop it down, I used a hand saw. The thing was maybe ten or twelve feet tall and three inches in diameter. After I got all the bark off, and let me say the Port Orford Cedar smells like the better neighborhoods in heaven, and sanded it down a couple coats of boiled linseed oil made a wonderful soft smooth stick of wood for my  spritsail I made fron Kmart nylon.
Unfortunately Hayden Island does not have any Cedar Trees, only stupid mcrooked-ass cottonwoods. Which also smell wonderful when they are in leaf, but the wood is lousy for making shit.
And as defiant as I might think myself, I'm really pretty tame and I wasn't, in the end, attracted to the pirate logger solution. even though there is a Red Cedar grove alongside Hwy 30 between St Helens and Rainier.
Last Sunday my pal Maggi and I ran around North Portland to look at salvaged lumber at a couple of places and Lo and Behold there was, at the Salvage Center where Harvey Hardcock used to work, a pair of clear vertical grain old-growth Douglas Fir 3x4 sixteen feet, or as close as makes no difference, perfectly knot-free straight grain perfectly cured and dry for perhaps a hundred years.

There's 20 grains to the inch.Those are nail marks near the layout lines, after all , this beam held up somebody's beaverboard front porch ceiling for many years. You can fill them with  a splinter and some glue and call it a dowel and feel quite properly bloated with your skills.

This is an amazing thing to find. This shit takes a thousand years to grow, and there just isn't any more of it being cut.
And nobody in their right mind made 3x4, even though that is exactly what you need to make a proper pair of oars unless you want a glue joint down the middle. And there is a mast in the other piece as well.
These mugs at the Salvage Center, cleaning and warehousing building material donated for recycling by all kinds of cool leftwing Portlanders, aren't in this for the money, because they only asked for a dollar a lineal foot. I would have paid five, and you would pay 7 or 8 if you could find it new in a specialty yard like Crosscuts or Woodcrafters.

In my infinite vanity I imagine myself capable of makeing a mast and pair of oars using only hand tools!
The mast, 11 feet long, round in cross-section, 2 3/4 inches in diameter at the partners tapering to 1 3/4 at the tip and butt, will require approximately 48 feet of ripsawing with an ordinary carpenter's handsaw/
Last night I laid out the first two full-lengh side cuts, and later on I got out my new old handsaw and I went to work. Unfortunately my rate of cut is about one foot an hour.

I will be looking for a saw-sharpening service quite soon. There used to be an old retired logger or two in every town in Oregon with a little sign on his garage who amused himself with an excuse to put on his hickory shirt and stagged-off tin pants and dip snoose and spit in the garage all day. There don't seem to be many of those guys left.

And that's not even counting the work with the jack plane to make it round, and, please, shut up about the oars.
 It's going to be a long winter.

PS EDIT: Nov 9th--Today I cut off a two inch wide strip of the walnut dyed canvas, got it quite wet but not dripping, put it in a baggie on the windowsill above the baseboard heater to see if it will mildew. I did the same to a piece of undyed plain canvas for a control. Check back later. (Actually this was on the 29th Oct)

EDIT2: Nov 15th There's little black spots of mildew on the untreated piece of canvas on the windowsill. I can't tell if the other one, the treated sample, the walnut dye-job, has any or not because of the color. I willl give it a few more days and then break the seal and really try to make a determination.

EDIT 3: Nov 24th I took the dyed brown strip out of its bag today and it looks like it is finally getting a bit of mildew started. I dont think it was there on the 22 when last I looked.
The undyed strip has a lot more mildew spots now but it used up all the moisture. I think my point is proven, that the dye inhibits frungal growth, but it doesn't stop it completely...more later...