AND FUNCTION FORM

For Alex Comb of Stewart River Boatworks, building wood and canvas canoes did not begin with canoeing or fishing or wilderness. It began with his eighthgrade woodworking class. He just really liked working with his hands. “For Christmas, I would make presents from wood and that’s just what I did in high school.”

In college, Alex took a tech-ed course at the local high school to keep making Christmas gifts and some furniture. “The instructor had two students making cedar strip canoes,” he said. “I had never heard of it. That’s really cool. You strip down cedar and glue it. This was 1970.”

He bought a design from the Minnesota Canoe Association along with some fiberglass and resin. He found cedar from a Sear’s supplier and built a cedar strip canoe in the garage of a friend.

Comb graduated with a degree in psychology and social work and moved to Boston, where he worked for a magazine for seven years. While in Boston, a friend said to him, “All you want to do is go back to Minnesota and build canoes.”

Comb remembers thinking, “That’s the strangest thing I ever heard.” But once his friend said it, he knew it was true. He moved back and started a short-lived business making tofu, worked as a carpenter, and then he was a building contractor. He started to build a woodcanvas canoe as a winter project.

Comb knew wood-canvas from the Old Town canoes he paddled as a kid. He also made wood strip and lapstrake canoes because he was a woodworker first. But the wood strip and the lapstrake canoes take more time, need more exactitude, are less tolerant of mistakes.

“Wood canvas is a genius of an idea,” he said. “A light weight canoe that’s pretty tough. It’s amazing what these canoes can take. And they’re repairable. And easy to replace parts.”

He based his design on the Canadian Chestnut canoe known for its stability and performance. Wood and canvas canoes are built on a form—picture an upsidedown canoe. The builder steams, then bends strips of cedar using the “form” to create the shape, nails on planks, wraps the canoe in canvas, and seals it with a special paint.

Comb divides his time between repairs and new canoes, with three to four canoes (and rowboats, too) in various stages of progress. It takes him about two months to complete a canoe. A wilderness paddler himself, he says he prefers to sell to canoeists and fishermen. He doesn’t want his boats hanging in someone’s living room.

“Boat design is important to me. I have chosen models or designed boats for how they perform on t he water, not so much for their looks,” he said. “I think they can be beautiful, too, but that is form following the function, not some fanciful design.”

Julie Buckles and her husband built and continue to paddle a wood and canvas canoe based on an E. M. White design. Author of Paddling to Winter: A Couple’s Wilderness Journey from Lake Superior to the Canadian North, Julie was also part of the communications team that conceived and birthed Intangible . Currently, she owns and operates Honest Dog Books, a new and used bookstore in Bayfield, Wisconsin.