A young man and his kayak: a journey of growth
To 15-year-old Cassidy Ramsay of Viroqua, Wisconsin, completing eight grade was not only a mile stone, but a special learning experience.
Cassidy recently graduated from Pleasant Ridge Waldorf, a K-8 alternative school located in Cassidy’s home town, which has a focus different from traditional schools. According to the school’s website, acknowledging the school has grown, the school remains true to the founders’ vision of providing a balanced educational experience that instills in children a love of learning, a respect for nature, a strong sense of community, and an abiding appreciation for the value of service. Additionally, it states the founders also wanted to make Waldorf education available to families from a wider socio-economic background than at a typical private school.
A requirement of eighth grade is completing a special project that students chose, research, complete, and present to their classmates. The school opens up the presentations to the public, nurturing community involvement. “Each eighth grader does something that they work on the entire year,” said Cassidy. His project would be on skin boats, specifically the kayak. He focused on the Inupiat people and how they made their boats. Accompanying him for his presentation was the frame of a kayak Cassidy had started building late last fall. His included a history of the Inupiat people and their long history of skin boat building, and the process that he followed to make his kayak frame.
Cassidy, already had a head start on what he chose for his project. By seventh grade, he already had kayaked off and on in a small plastic kayak his mother Vicki had bought. “I decided that it would be pretty cool if could build my own kayak.”
Cassidy met with Matt Shortridge and Jerry McIntyre, two men with experience in building small boats to discuss the feasibility of building a kayak. Originally, Cassidy was thinking of building a wood strip kayak, but after further research, learned it can take years to complete. With a deadline to meet, Jerry suggested Cassidy build a skin on frame kayak that would take less time to build, and Cassidy agreed.
A requirement of the project was to have a mentor and with Matt’s experience, Cassidy asked him to play that role.
Cassidy and Jerry looked for and found different plans online. They found a guy in Oregon named Ryan that had videos on how to build an F1 kayak. “Pretty much through the course, you watch videos on what you need to do, and then you do that. I also had to work with paper plans and cut all the wood that I needed. Cutting the wood pieces probably took the longest,” Cassidy said.
Cassidy shared that the kayak is nearly complete, with the final step being applying three coats of a polyurethane system, making the hull made of a nylon fabric, hard and durable.
While he started the project last August, finding and choosing the plans and purchasing the materials took through September.
Oh, the work and ingenuity that went into this project. Cassidy said they had to select woods based on strength and flexibility and chose Pine, Fir, and White Oak. Most pieces needed to be bent or formed to make the kayak frame, and as the saying goes, necessity is the mother of invention. “We had to make a steam box. We used a wallpaper steamer and put it in box. Then we would put a piece of wood in it for like 10 minutes. When you take it out, it’s bendy and can be formed into the shape you need, like the wood we had to bend to make the cockpit of the kayak.”
Although Cassidy explaining parts of his kayak’s construction was Greek to me, he seemed excited while sharing bits and pieces of the construction process. “The Oak we used for strength and because it's drought resistant. There's something called the ribs which go across the bottom of the boat. We had to steam bend every one of those, and there's 20 of them. We had to bend each one manually and stick them into mortices which are like these holes and you can stick tenon into them, which are pieces that fit into the holes perfectly so it creates a really tight joint. So, we had to bend each one of those too.”
Cassidy said some mistakes were made during the process and were corrected. He recalled when they were making the gunwales (pronounced gunnels) they had cut one of them wrong and had to recut another piece of wood. That he admitted, was a time-consuming mistake, seeing as the gunwales are the longest pieces in a kayak giving it strength and its shape. Not to mention all the other pieces are reliant on them.
When his mentor Matt was not available, Cassidy’s mother’s boyfriend Erik, who has known Cassidy the past 6 years, stepped in to give him a hand and encourage Cassidy’s work. Erik said the amount that Cassidy has learned throughout the whole building of his kayak was impressive. “Obviously, learning the history of boat making is one thing, but also the terminology and the terminology of the parts of the boat which are very detailed. I think learning how wood works, how it would fit together, using sinew and so forth to bind two pieces together, that's really a neat part of this boat too. Aside from glue, it's pretty much all lashed together, it's not pegged. But to figure out how things bend and fit together and tighten, that's a skill,” said Erik.
Cassidy said his older brother Kele who attends college, was another that helped with the kayak. “He went to the same school as I did, and for his 8th grade project built a surf board. He used epoxy instead of polyurethane, so he knows about mixing stuff up.”
Certainly, there were things that Cassidy had learned throughout the building of his kayak. Persistence was the first thing that came to his mind. “I guess I learned that. It shouldn't have taken me this long. I guess I feel like I should have stuck to it. I guess I took a lot of breaks. Just kind of disappointing, but I guess I also did have a lot of travel and stuff like that going on. My mom was always wanting me to be more persistent about working on it. She was like, ‘you gotta get this done’, and I'm like, ‘I will, I will’. She's been really supportive about it and pushed me to keep working on it.”
Vicki seems beyond proud of her son. A Science & Math Teacher and Department Coordinator at the Youth Initiative High School in Viroqua, the school that Cassidy will attend this fall, said her son really started think a lot about the project last summer. “I think we had done a lot of kayaking. I had gotten one of those little plastic kayaks several years ago, and he really had wanted his own kayak. So that was kind of like the starter kayak, and he really loved it.”
Vicki pointed out that independence in the water was really appealing to Cassidy. “I think he was looking for his own project that spoke to him and what he loved, and the more he thought about it, the more he decided he wanted to make a kayak.”
She also noted that he’s very self-directed, very motivated. Although, she said, she kind of had to keep encouraging him to get going on the kayak in the fall and in the winter. “I think everybody just needs to have that impetus come from themselves. You know, they don't need to be nagged and screamed at. That's not going to really help motivate them. Ultimately, he found his own timing with it.”
A majority of Cassidy’s school year was spent working with Matt on the kayak. Cassidy would watch videos and then do what he could. Matt would come and work with him about once a week. As his presentation date drew near, the two worked more frequently together to complete the frame, so Cassidy could have that to share during his presentation. The two worked on the kayak at Matt’s shop and Cassidy’s home. “So really, looking at the whole scheme of things, the project happened in its own divine timing. There wasn't any rushing it, and they found their rhythm,” said Vicki.
There were challenges and mistakes that had to be fixed, but Vicki said the two worked very well together. She stressed that the growth she saw with her son, was the process of having an idea and then connecting with his mentor, talking to Matt about the next steps that needed to be taken. She was encouraged by how Matt was good at letting Cassidy lead the project. “I saw Cassidy going from looking to his mentor for guidance on what to do and how to do it, to realizing that even mentors make mistakes and that he has his own capacity to do all of this. Eric was also really good at letting Matt be the mentor. If Cassidy ever needed help, he knew he could go and talk to Erik about certain things that he knew. So, a lot of this was just like Cassidy recognizing how to find the help he needed with the right people.”
Vicki said she appreciated that Cassidy’s teacher Mandy Palen, was so history focused. “She really gave him a lot of time to get the history down properly.”
In researching the kayak and other Inuit water vessels, Cassidy said he learned an appreciation for the cultures’ skills and tenacity. “It is definitely really fascinating, because they had to do everything manually. They couldn't just go to the store and buy the wood they needed, they had to use driftwood and bones and stuff. They also had to hunt for their hides they would use to make their boats. They didn’t have power tools to make sure that everything fit together. They also had to coat everything, otherwise it wouldn't work, and if they missed a spot it would leak. Then they still had to care for the boat, taking the skin off every few weeks to let it dry, recoat it and sew it back on. There was a lot of work involved, it wasn’t easy.”
Editor’s note: Cassidy will start his Freshman year at the Youth Initiative High School in Viroqua this school year.
