Boats

I built my first boat when I was at Camp Lincoln on Lake Hubert during one of my summer trips there.   I must have been about 10 at the time.  The boat was a kit that I purchased at the crafts store at Camp Lincoln, about 8 or 10 inches long, powered by an electric motor and two flashlight batteries.    I had heard a story of another boy who put one out on the lake and lost it because it sailed straight out and away and so I tied my fishing line onto my boat and sailed it successfully out to the end of the line and reeled it back in.

The next boat I built was larger, perhaps 30 inches long, a cabin cruiser type that was powered by a larger electric motor and a lead-acid wet cell battery.   I installed a single-channel radio in the boat which operated several different controls via an escapement especially designed for the purpose.   It would turn the rudder one way or the next, alternating automatically, with a long pulse of the transmitter button and thus the direction could be controlled by simply using long pulses surrounding a shorter one whenever I wished to turn the same direction twice.   The off-on control of the motor was done with short pulses, which would activate those two switches alternately.   It actually worked quite well, after I practiced often to acquire some skill with the pulse length and my friend and I took it out onto the Mississippi River on one occasion, sailing the boat with much fun.   But there were not many opportunities to use it since there are no bodies of water close to my home town, other than the river.

One other occasion occurred when I attended Winona State College in 1961.   My brother-in-law and I took the boat out to Lake Winona (which is simply a backwater of the Mississippi).   Unfortunately, the lake was quite polluted and consequently full of grass and algae.   The propeller and rudder promptly fouled and I lost control of the boat and had to ask somebody with a rowboat to go out and retrieve it.   I subsequently sold the boat through an ad in the Minneapolis Star and Tribune shortly after I got married.

Several years later I purchased another boat kit, a much larger one, from a hobby shop (in Minneapolis?).   This was a Dumas scale model of a Chris Craft Express cruiser, almost exactly 4 feet long.    Interestingly enough, Dumas still makes a kit model of this boat but it is only about 36 inches long today.

I began building this kit almost immediately but since I was unhappy with the balsa wood hull, I purchased a fiberglass kit and covered the finished hull with it.   But the boat remained unfinished and unused for many years afterward.    Boats page 2