This is a plywood-epoxy replica of the 12th-century “Gislinge Boat,” built by Chesapeake Light Craft. The boat is 25’4″ (7.7m) long and 5’7″ (1.7m) wide. Fully rigged, with ballast, the boat weighs about 975lbs (442kg). In the future we will be offering this boat in the form of a CNC-cut kit.
In 1993, archeologists excavated a boat near the village of Gislinge (GISS-ling-ah), in Denmark. Dendrochronology established that the boat was built around the year 1130. The Gislinge Boat was reconstructed and documented by the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde, Denmark. In 2015, the Museum released the working drawings to the public, launching the Gislinge Boat Open Source Project.
In 2019, Chesapeake Light Craft began developing a computer-cut wood-epoxy replica of the Gislinge Boat. CLC’s pre-cut marine plywood kit, assembled using ordinary “stitch and glue” techniques, makes the construction of this ancient design accessible to serious amateur builders and organizations. Read more here:
https://www.clcboats.com/gislinge.html
Video was captured in October 2023 at the Mid-Atlantic Small Craft Festival, hosted by the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum in St. Michaels, Maryland, USA. At the helm is John C. Harris, with CLC boatbuilder Steve Youngkin and serial adventurer John Guider.
Comment: Some lighter content for a change. Practical? Maybe not. But I can see my two sons and I making our way up the Potomac to lay waste to the Alexandria waterfront. Maybe even hit a church or two. Hardy Curonians we!
BTW, I’m posting something light today because tomorrow’s post will be on the heavy side. Stay tuned.
TTG
https://www.delfi.lt/en/culture/curonians-the-fearsome-pirates-of-the-baltic-71509824
If you really want to have an impact on the Alexandria waterfront, something like this might work better… 🙂
https://youtu.be/XORSpUUy0lQ?si=J1gWTH6-b5I8w2fZ
Peter Hug,
I visited the Draken Harald Hårfagre a few years ago when it sailed past the Alexandria waterfront and docked at the DC waterfront. Hate to try to put her on a trailer.
I miss my days canoeing all around the canals of upper ny state between Buffalo & Syracuse. Usually alone but a few times with beautiful blonde ….. who I met in 1968. She tested at 184 IQ on a mensa test and yes, she was indeed very smart. But she was a complete lunatic? No. More than complete. Off the charts loony, just like her test scores. Regretfully she encountered a very tragic fate because she simply wouldn’t or couldn’t listen to anyone about something medical. She was one of so so many people who you meet on Twitter (now heX) who defend any position however incorrect simply because they started out saying it, so they defend it to the death. The story of the human race? Almost, not quite.
A few yrs later, with an even more beautiful blonde, slightly strawberry, who was far more intelligent than the mensa mental case – she wrote poetry in French, Spanish, German, Russian and English and could translate between them all at the age of 15, and possibly even more lunatic but not really, I was taken at her behest to the St Lawrence Seaway and the Thousand Islands actually, for a camping trip, just the two of us. There, I was insanely foolish enough myself to get into an ordinary rowboat with her, powered by nothing more than two oars and my pathetic 5 ft 8 in self. No motor. What a blunder of blunder of blunders. We got taken out farther than we ever expected or desired into the actual Seaway itself, which is really vast for a rowboat.
And then, praise whatever is still holy and zap me with lightning if I lie, an actual gigantic ocean liner appeared and was moving right toward us. I’d traveled on several as a younger idiot child, even on the North Sea during a violent storm which killed a few passengers lost overboard, but I never appreciated how large they really were until then. We were dead. Finished. Over with and kaput.
By the grace of god a powerfully motorized boat appeared out of nowhere and managed to throw us a line and tow us to safety. Complete strangers risked their lives to get near to that leviathan and it’s wake to rescue two college sweetheart fools. It didn’t seem to be any official rescue service, just some motorboaters out for a bit of whatever motorboaters do. The Vikings couldn’t have rescued us, the kontiki heroes couldn’t have rescued us, but those unknown people in their powerful motorized boat evidently could, and more importantly did. Then again, they didn’t have colossal ocean liners to contend with. Sailors are the strongest men by profession, old time sailors. Everybody wants to argue with me. Retired Lt Colonel of the United States Army TTG will argue with me, and did,,even though by his own numerous admissions he’s a damn sailor himself. So be it. Believe what you want to believe, it matters not to me. I wish I had met commenter babelthuap 7 decades ago. How much grief I would have been spared, I don’t know, but possibly a fair quantity.
My favorite prayer is Hail Mary, full of grace .. etc blessed art thou among women, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death .. Did I say it? I don’t think so, but I didn’t learn that prayer by going to Church, regrettably, or Sunday school. I learned it by listening to my small transistor radio late late at night and on until sunrise lying in my bed in far upstate NY on lake Ontario. The Catholic Church had a radio station that broadcast 24 hours of every day all through the year. The area was hugely Italian-American. You could at anytime turn it on and listen to a sequence of Our Fathers, Hail Mary and the remaining canon intoned and repeated over and over again seemingly to infinity. I found it very comforting, even though it was a forbidden fruit for me since my parents were abysmally stupid atheists, their atheism due to having overly rigid and bigoted parents, so they rebelled, they never understood that they were simply trying to hurt their cruel and backward parents, they thought they were very smart and progressive, scientific people.
I think it was the same station though it may have been another, but the voice seemed identical to the priest’s voice, where very somber accounts were also intoned of the execution of our American prisoners of war by the Japanese. Most of them were airmen like my dad. Beheadings of captured American airmen. Of course the effect on me was chilling.
And then the prayers would continue.
Today an eclipse of the sun is going to create a circular blot, as seen from space, which will travel across the United States of America from Seattle and head south over central America and then swerve out to sea westward and on to places where the rotten chauvinistic warmongering ruling class rag the New York times was too lazy to inform me about. This will happen more or less simultaneously with the mass murder of civilians in Gaza, where half the 2.2 million people are less than 18 years of age AND the United States will keep guard over the massacre with an aircraft carrier battle group and at least one USMC expeditionary force, not to mention its numerous other assets in the vicinity and skies. The murders will travel around the entire world immediately as a million people are destroyed and massacred. 500,000 were rendered homeless as of a few days ago. Israel will cheer. America will applaud. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will gloat that it will ensure their reelection. Donald Trump will pour more gasoline on the fire, so will Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley. This has never happened before in the history of mankind. Yes genocides and massacres have, but never so many people killed in such a short amount of time and broadcast worldwide as onlookers are encouraged to celebrate, and will celebrate.
Power is energy divided by time. If the energy is small but the time is very small, then the quotient can be astronomically huge. What is the quantity MD/T .. Mass Death divided by Time equal to? I don’t know but if it’s anything it has to be related in some way to the quantity POH – Presence of Humanity, inversely it certainly seems to me.
Now as it happens this blot will travel across the United States of America. A blot. Caused by the motions of immensely powerful heavenly bodies. Think. Think about it. What does it say to you? The lunatic fundamentalist Jews will say it is a sign from their old testament genocidal god, just like when Joshua destroyed Jericho and the sun was made to stand still. And they will say it’s a divine sign of blessing and proof of their righteousness. But I most definitely don’t think so. I think that if the powers of the infinite universe conspire to make a large circular blot traverse your entire country as your government guards over a mass murder and expulsion of vast quantities of people (who in ethnicity are increasingly coming to live in your country, btw) – I think it says something else entirely. I think the nation that does this is cursed.
@F&L
Re. Mensa and lunatics.
I have been at Mensa quite a while ago but I quickly dropped off because it is indeed a mad house.
I suspect it’s not just about IQ but the motivation to belong selects for outlandish characters.
jld
I had a friend and old student who became a very noted author of novels and essays. He was a student of mine in a high school geometry class in a school for gifted children. He was probably the smartest person I ever taught by a fairly wide margin but it’s hard to tell, the experts in that testing said that if a person scores over two standard deviations above the mean, then there’s little benefit in teasing out the difference between 138 or 154 etc, because it’s meaningless. This kid was so exceptional or so he thought that he was enrolled in a special intelligence test designed for only the very highly intellectually gifted. He scored the highest ever recorded and they were testing the top diplomats, Nobel laureates in science, math prize winners, judges lawyers executives etc. At first I believed him but as his career developed and I read his books and kept in contact with him over the years I had my doubts. He was told over and over again from childhood how prodigiously special he was. And rewarded with Macarthur genius prizes and book.awards. But he had zero life experience, and I mean zero. His work was not very good at all in my opinion and it became obvious to discerning people overtime that he was kind of like the promising two year old who got ruined by being pushed to win the triple crown. He was totally uneducated, dropped out of college and that only verified to him that he was indeed the smartest who ever lived. I regret not having had the presence of mind to ask him when he told me, brashly, about his super duper IQ in tenth grade. Since he was such a fan of fiction I should haves asked him / hey kid, regarding that test you took at NYU with all the giants of the world of brainpower – did you ever watch Mission Impossible? I wonder if he would have understood that the reference was to when the fake scenery would drop off and the masks were removed and it turned out they were all actors of the Impossible missions outfit.
He’s not a complete nut, but very close to it. In favor of tearing down the monuments because they were all “war criminals” and totally 900% woke. An entire civilization can go down the drain that’s fine, but if a single transgender even so much as gets his feelings hurt it’s time for the Nuremberg trials v 2.0. Smartest person in human history. He actually believes it still. His parents were insane hippies, I have nothing against hippies but they were very f’d up people – do I think it destroyed him? Only a bit. Nurture is important but so is nature. But his childhood was unmentionably awful and really really stupid. His mom was hugely influential and probably got him inserted into the test. She fucked everything that wore pants even in front of her kids and husband and he did too. She probably serviced the people doing the test. Poor kid. If he’s the smartest person ever, has he figured it out? I doubt it.
My complements to the sail maker, whoever it was. I’ve never seen that good a shape achieved with a square sail. Look at how that small sail has them ripping along on a close reach at the beginning. Yeah, they had a nice breeze, but that sail is imparting a lot of thrust and not much heel. I had thought it impossible but it seems likely whoever it was stumbled on to a lost art. No sailmakers today has any experience with square sails and everything I’ve seen looks like a slab. It seems likely the sailmakers of antiquity did sails like this one by long experimentation, and that boat is configured the way it was back in the day.