Raft Building update No. 1

This is the first in what will be an occasional picture report from the headquarters of the Suwannee Cooter, our working title for the raft that my friend Anthony Ackrill and I are building in my garage. We plan to build the raft during the coming year and take it down the Suwannee next summer on a photo adventure.
i've been shooting pictures on the Suwannee for a long time, and I've got a pretty good archive of photos to work with when I publish the book on the Suwannee I've been planning for the past quarter-century. There's much the river has to teach us, about going with the flow and watching our wake and working around obstacles.
Like the rivers of Florida, our lives have a source and a destination and stories to be told along the way. the metaphors and analogies are many and potent. And we're so fortunate to have the Suwannee - Florida's contribution to the great rivers of the world - in our back yard.
And so, after many years of dreaming and scheming, and lots of consultation between me and Anthony and David Beede and Jim Trebilcock and lots of other friends, sawdust flew in july as griffis sawmill cut the cypress logs for our raft.
The 20-foot boards, which are square cut on three sides, weigh a couple of hundred pounds each. we loaded them on my jonboat, which i used as a trailer to transport them back home. but then we decided to kiln-dry the big lumber for a month, so it would take glue. it just wouldn't do to have sections of the raft delaminate in the river, so it was off to Lumber by Lance in fort white, for a month in the sauna.

We also got lots of plywood and 2-by-lumber, from central builders supply. i'd like to tell you i have a full set of plans, on paper. it would make a nice addition to my picture report. but we have no such plans (odd, perhaps, for an architecture school dropout), other than what's in my head. the raft will be 8x20-feet, with an 8x10-foot open cabin with a ladder leading to the roof. our friend david beede built a very cool little shanty dock that measure 8x16 feet at his lake place in melrose, and that has inspired us a lot. what i envision will feature lots of cypress and bamboo and manila rope and palm fronds. i don't want it to be too precisely built--a raft is supposed to be a funky, thrown-together water craft, right? the sort of boat that will inspire people who see it to want to quit their day jobs and come run away with us on the river. like a lot of people, i've wanted to build a raft since i was a kid...

The first step of construction was to glue the 20-foot boards together with PL Premium construction glue and borrowed pipe clamps. (as an aside, i set up a fixed camera in my workshop, wired with an electronic trigger set to fire a picture every 30 seconds during the construction. there will be thousands of pictures made with this camera that will be composited into a time-lapse video showing the construction). even peg is pleased that we've finally started building what euphemistically has come to be referred to in our family as "the damn raft." every summer for the past god-knows-how-many years, our family plans were contingent on whether or not they would conflict with my finally getting around to building "the damn raft." peg has been very patient, and i'm determined to make a believer out of her. mostly i'm just relieved to finally get this damn raft project going. daughter caitlin and thomas are having their wedding party next august, and i wanna be off the river by then...

I tend to misplace things so i like putting my name on my stuff.

I'm confident anthony will be pretty much the ideal companion for his adventure. he's smart and funny and talented (check out http://www.anthonyackrill.net/) and has a most agreeable temperament. he even laughs at my lame jokes. and he has shown laudable patience with me. we've talked about building this raft for at least a decade and i've had good excuses for not building it before now. if the economy wasn't in the toilet these days, i might very well have excuses not to build the raft this summer too. this is the gift of the recession to me, and i am hugely grateful for it. i'm looking forward to this project with anthony and i hope our friendship doesn't suffer on account of it (i mean, i've built this thing up in my mind so much, there's a real possibility of a letdown when we finally get to the river). i'm lucky to have the support that i have on this project (thanks, david, jim and robert and all the others, named and unnamed...).

After gluing up the 20-foot long cypress boards, we cut the curved shape of the hull.


we almost made it through the first week of construction before i slipped with the drill and drove a driver bit through my fingernail.


Real artists bleed for their work.

And of course, we had to reset the "accident-free" counter...
that's all for now. OSHA shut us down and we'll resume construction soon, we hope; after the investigation is complete and we pay whatever fine they levy.
just teasing. i'm busy photographing swallow-tailed kites on the st. johns river this week. gotta go...

Testing John's blog

All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds, wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act on their dreams with open eyes, to make them possible.
Thomas E. Lawrence