George Dyson: The Floating World

[Music] there's a group of people who think the british are the best sea kayakers and there's a group that believe the americans are the real sea kayakers and the europeans are are way behind and the people who are sort of rolling connoisseurs [Music] prefer a ringless style boat for rolling [Music] there really were two places that kayaking achieved its sort of greatest advance and that was greenland and the aleutian islands through genetic evidence we're getting a much better picture of what really happened and it does seem pretty clear that kayaking culture became established in the aleutians roughly 10 000 years ago and in greenland much more recently greenland people came to it later what appealed to me about the alu designs i've used a very strong technical argument why they why they are the best designs it's because of the environment in greenland you only kayak part of the year the rest of the year it's frozen solid but the illusions were on the pacific with the warm you know relatively warm motion so the allutes not only kayak year round but they kayak long distances if you were doing what i wanted to do travel long distances in the ocean and carry lots of gear there was no question the ally design was the design of choice where the biarca was so off the charts was just efficiency you know you have a quarter horsepower maximum power and what you can get out of it it's just amazing you know it's like a piece of music where everything fits and uh i no longer have any sort of illusions of of changing that or improving on it other than to execute it in detail better but not not differently [Music] this is wonderful we've known you for years and known about you for years and you have become ultra famous for history of technology you've had this amazing best seller it's it's extraordinary tell us a little bit about what it was like toward the end of your run in princeton when you were in high school talk a little bit about high school i was terribly unhappy in high school as many students are and i think it's a a tremendous loss to humanity that we sort of treat high school students so poorly if you look at most of the great geniuses the real mozart's and people like that they they started at that high school age if not less and that's the time at which we extinguish talent rather than then nurture it what irritated me was that our high school which i think was typical of the time tried to differentiate people into two classes there were students who were going to go on and do things with their hands and there were students who were gonna go on and do things with their minds and they they tried to separate those two you either you went into vocational ed and learned you know how to run machine tools or you were going to go to university and and i sort of refused that distinction and left i didn't try to drop out i tried to finish early and then we had a very unpleasant assistant principal who said no i fulfilled what i was told were all the requirements to leave in three years and then he said no you didn't have four years of pe you can't graduate and that made me so mad i just i just left so that gave me a sort of disrespect for authority i didn't want anything to do with it i ended up going to vancouver british columbia to i had an older sister who got married there and i saw a classified ad in the newspaper for a job on a boat answered the ad so overnight my life changed i had i had romanticized about boats built model boats bill had built a kayak when i was 12. but knew nothing about real working boats the captain was a lager he grew up in a world completely different from mine where he had read two books in his life grew up with chainsaws and blogging camps and i mean what was it like when this 17 year old kid shows up who has never seen a chainsaw we just started immediately working our way up and down the coast delivering things taking charter doing whatever we could to make money with this boat boy he taught me a lot nothing was explained he would just you know hand you a chainsaw and say do this in a way that seems completely crazy and dangerous today but but that's how you learned you learned by just by doing things we went around cape scott on halloween night and no instruments i mean now you know no radio uh a compass but no no gps no you know nothing we picked up some other kid came along who was so scared he was praying so how long did you hang out with jim most of two years and then it just [Music] it just came to an end without any further ado let's give the floor to george [Applause] i came away from meeting him after having some beer and pizza you know and i thought i'd met the keeper of the grail you know they had this exquisite uh armatures that this you know kayaks in progress there and some musty old pictures of those excursions up north and he has a watercolors of fleets of kayaks and his his library and this of all this collected lore and legends the lucian kayak was really really fun to meet this guy so i went home and devoted myself to try to clean up my life so i could make a boat it wasn't uh it was a there was a lot of things to clear up [Music] literally we were coming down georgia straight i used to say that we hit this log but it's not true we didn't hit it there's a near miss big cedar log and then we towed that log into vancouver harbor to balcara where we knew these people who lived in this lodge and so we dropped the log off here and then i decided to stay with the log it turned out that it was a restaurant in deep cove that wanted shakes to they would call themselves the log cabin restaurant and so i ended up staying at belcara to split up this log and got off the boat and then never went back so half the log got sold to the log cabin restaurant the other half [Music] became my treehouse so that's how that's how the treehouse happened that's what allowed me to build all those kayaks because i sort of had a place to live and this former lodge had like everything in those times it had a bunch of outbuildings and it had a blacksmith shop and a carpenters shop and so there was lots of facilities there that i could use for boat building how high up were you it was 95 feet up a tree in the forest would be impossible to climb but this was on the beach so it had branches that grew out over the water you know all the way up so it was like a ladder going up as long as you move one hand or foot at a time you're you know you're safer than walking down the street i don't think it was dangerous it just definitely you could separate people who had fear of heights and not you know if you had fear heights you wouldn't climb up there i was very lucky to end up in canada where there was uh really not the class distinctions we have in america this is what how america was originally was and was supposed to be but we sort of lost it i think it would have been very hard to do anywhere else this was six miles from downtown vancouver you know it's incomprehensible but all of vancouver harbor had squatters living everywhere every little corner people lived in beautiful little cottages but they didn't own the land they just you just didn't mess with them if you squatters rice was a real thing it's the last of a whole era when it was really a socially acceptable thing to do to go up the inlet and find a place and build a cottage so the treehouse in that context it wasn't that strange [Music] i had already built one kayak in vancouver what kind of kayak was it it was a nunavak island design that i got a copy of howard chappelle's bark canoes and skin boats in north america that time you could still buy for 2.75 and in there i saw this plan of a nunavak island kayak that i i thought looked really cool had a hole in the front it actually was a very poor design it was about the worst design i could picked very unstable but i built a copy of that with aluminum tubing why aluminum i couldn't find any good wood and i had a kelty pack frame made out of aluminum tubing it just it seemed like such incredibly light strong stuff and i found out you know where you get it it didn't cost less than 50 dollars to buy the tubing to build this but it wasn't big enough it was too unstable and not big enough to travel so then i then i heard about these russian baidarkas which were 25 or 30 feet long where where did you hear about this they're mentioned in chappelle's book he includes a hatch by darker but no three hatch so i just took his drawing of the two hatch by darker and made my own interpretation of what a three hatch by darker would be i built that boat and it was just fancy it was great it was everything i imagined it would be which is why the russians like them because they would they would go around collecting hundreds and hundreds of sea otter skins and they could bring them back in these big huge kayaks you know those boats are amazingly stable empty and then when if you've got 200 pounds of gear in them there you can you can get out and walk along the deck i had little sales on it it sailed like crazy did you have charts or did you i had a few paper charts but no you know i mean nothing that would qualify as a coast guard approved life jacket or anything like that just you know just a lot of wool clothes you know headed north and went went back up to that area around alert bay you know george let me know there was one of those big three holders down in uh down in tomales bay in there in california where i lived and he uh he built six of these boats with one of them and it ended up down in there and he uh said i could go find it and take it for a ride it was it was under you know the custody of some other fellow who'd joined him on that expedition of the six kayaks up north but i wasn't able to contact him i had a date a gal we took off for that boat and um we went off on our scenic cruise i'm paddling along and you know along the shoreline there tomales bay it's a long skinny body of water there was there were sirens and red lights going and i thought some poor soul's been busted you know and they were after me they were after me i didn't know it you know we got back after dark and all of the marin's finest where they're waiting for me to round up this uh thief and i just explained the situation to him the owner of this boat is up in a tree house up in north of vancouver canada and if you just let the phone ring long enough you'll be able to you'll hear it and so it took about 15 minutes for them to answer the phone but i told them i was cool they let me off the hook it was fun [Music] if you produce a good book or a great film or a great album then then everybody expects your next thing to be twice better twice as good yeah so i built this 16 foot kayak and then i built this 31 foot double and and i wanted to build i was trying to build a 62 foot kayak real mount fairly was going to be 62 feet long had no sense of scale i mean i was very very naive i tried to get money from the canadian government at that time was funding projects i wrote this grant proposal and they said no i worked on a fishing boat that year and i bought enough aluminum tubing to build this 48 foot kayak six six hole and it was just way too big it made no sense it was no longer a kayak but anyway it was what it was it was it was a very interesting experiment and it sort of showed what was barely pot it was it was like the there's always sort of the largest animal and then and then things scale back it had too many sort of crippling [Music] disadvantages just a plinkett or nutca canoe that size you know would have a dozen strong paddlers who who'd been paddling all their life it was sort of crazy to build a six-person kayak without six people so there you were in canada and you would have kind of set yourself up what was it about canada that you liked well canada was first of all very welcoming in america if there was real wilderness it was in national parks where it might be wilderness but it was a very controlled wilderness whereas in canada it was truly open wilderness there were these entire stretches of coastline some still uncharted that were not parked they weren't they were just crowned land it belonged to the queen of england who didn't didn't care and it was a very different kind of wilderness you could you could happily pick a bay build a house live there your entire life if you wanted to and nobody would stop you and if something happened you broke your leg and had to go to the hospital if you went to the nearest hospital you would be treated well i mean it was it was a very different kind of society which was actually you know now we call it socialism in a way that that actually works [Music] i used to dream of still doing some ways of going back up the coast and building another treehouse someday but i'm not sure if i ever will [Music] well i lived there three years and it's yeah it's very memorable every day was you know was magic in a way just waking up right over the water but not total wilderness in the distance you'd see the city of vancouver i could paddle a mile across the inlet and go to the dollarton shopping plaza that had a royal bank and a you know liquor store you were treated always sort of like a wild animal i mean oh there's a you know this guy in a kayak i remember coming into some cove and there was a guy with his beautiful yacht so he invited me on board and you know gave me a gin and tonic and i remember him telling me you know son you don't appreciate this now but someday you know you're gonna have everything you're gonna look back and you're gonna see these are the best days yeah and you you better appreciate it you know you know you don't and do you you don't have this big uh you don't have a law firm to go back to whatever and yeah now i do but i didn't realize it at the time but now you've bought a boat [Music] now i've finally got the boat i always wanted a little 30 foot small it's sort of the smallest boat that has everything you need and a diesel where are you going to head do you think back to uh you know the beer powder alert bay or just places i used to go now i'm i'm going to be that guy you know the old guy with the nice boat anchored out in the cove but and a guy is going to paddle in in a badarka with an aluminum frame maybe he'll have no idea who you are but that's that's really what that's that's the plan [Music] [Music] [Music] hmm [Music] you

Channel: Andrew Elizaga

Views: 10,324

Keywords: george dyson, sea kayak, sea kayaking, skin on frame kayak, aluminum frame kayak, fort ross, fort ross california, alaska native day, aleut kayak, baidarka, inside passage, british columbia, kayaking british columbia, kayaking inside passage, documentary

Id: 9DD_6EHoIs8

Length: 20min 49sec (1249 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 26 2021