... he'll never dream of picket fences.

The Wisner family is salty clear through, kinda like Ernie's favorite licorice.  Here are some boats he's been interested in lately:

Ernie's Hooper Bay-style kayak:

 

Ernie and student Liz, working on her Baidarka (Siberian-style kayak), a project from a TrackersNW workshop.

(Down the left side:)
Boat on workshop floor, being "faired up,"

Lashing scantlings and ribs together,

Ernie steaming the nylon skin,

and (above right)
Liz showing off her newly finished boat.

More pictures of skin-on-frame boatbuilding by our good friend Thaddeus: http://thaddeusss.blogspot.com/ (take a look at June 2007)

Sometimes Erica helps, too: 

 Here, she's lasooing the Waldorf School's TrackersNW project, a 33-foot whaling-boat style Umiak. 

See other umiak pictures at: www.Ancestralways.Net

 

And here, on our honeymoon, we are helping Karli Mueller dress up Anais for Port Townsend's 2008 annual Wooden Boat Festival.

 

This is an example of the type of fishing boats Ernie grew up with, off the Oregon coast and up through Alaska  (only with better varnish):  The Petrel at the 2008 Wooden Boat Festival. 

To practice sailing, we built a "sampan," or "3-plank" boat.  This design was drawn by William Blake, based on a typical small boat from China and SE Asia. 

It's a prototype to learn Asian boat construction. If you've ever  built traditional Asian boats, especially working-class craft like sampans or harbor boats, we'd love to hear from you. 'Tari' is our invitation to lovers of Asian boats to let us in on the 'right ways' to put these boats together.

What's the next boat project? 

Erica is drafting plans for this basic driftboat, as built several times now by Ernie's dad, Cap'n Ron Wisner. 

Economical on materials and transport, this 15-foot boat can hold 4 to 6 people, made from 4 sheets of plywood, some 1x4's, plus glue and hardware.  And it's light enough for one person to slide into the bed of a pickup truck, at least if that one person is a Wisner.  By birth.  The rest of us might prefer a buddy, or a trailer.  But it does fit on there, with a good knot or two, or straps.

Ron says the best test of the plans would be fore Erica to make one. 

Erica would be happy to nominate another willing victim to be the plan-testing-guinea-pig, or lucky sponsor of a boat at cost-of-materials. 

Meanwhile, Ernie and Ron are puttering away on Ron's 26-foot fishing sled, as well as an 8-foot pram, in the barn.

Ernie's 'big one' is still growing.  A 40 46 47 foot sailing catamaran. With head clearance for a 6'6" mariner on crutches, partial wheelchair accessibility, open deck space for projects, a tiny little solarium for Erica to grow fruit plants, staterooms for two families to live aboard, or a larger temporary crew for disaster-relief, research, or educational missions.  This is about as big as home-built boats come, and nobody makes plans for 6'8" head clearance throughout.  Ernie is reading up on other projects and trying to cajole various designers into letting him purchase/preview plans for a larger vessel to be sure he's got the load-bearing strains well covered.

http://www.sailingcatamarans.com

www.wharram.com/

Find Ernie talking like a sailor online:
http://www.Woodenboat.com/forum

Or drop us a line: Ernie@ernieanderica.info

Erica is taking some online sailing courses this winter at www.NauticEd.org.  With some highly amusing Kiwi charter humor.

If this sounds like a good winter hobby to you, too, you can use the promocode "wisner" to get $15 off your first NauticEd course.