Back in the ’60s, Roger Miller sang, “I’m a man of means by no means, king of the road.” My son Koen and I are men of means by no means, but we had an ambition to make the coast of British Columbia our road.I had read and heard about the wondrous waters of British Columbia and long ago had my heart set on sailing them, so I proposed to Koen that we take a cruise. He studies math at the university in Vancouver and was doing quite well in his courses, so he could afford to take a semester off to join me. We looked into renting a boat or buying something cheap, but couldn’t find anything that would fit the bill. We shifted gears and decided we could build a simple boat in a month and still have enough of the summer left to head north along the mainland coast.We let the idea ripen for a few weeks. It still felt good, so during lunch one day I grabbed a pencil and in a burst of inspiration sketched the simplest form I could think of. Most boats are designed to last for decades, but there was a time when people just hollowed out a log if they wanted to cross the swamps. On Lake Titicaca, people would bundle reeds and have a boat in short order. In other parts of the world people made birchbark canoes, coracles, or balsa rafts using the materials available to them. We’d do the same; in our case we had access to cheap plywood and construction lumber. And to outfit the boat for our voyage, the Vancouver area has no shortage of boatyards and chandlers, supermarkets, and secondhand stores.

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