I'm back home a week now from the excursion my family and I took from Minneapolis to Seattle (Gig Harbor, to be exact) where we picked up the Old Town OTCA 16 footer I purchased via Ebay (sort of). The trip was good nutty fun and probably completely uncalled for if all I needed to do was get an old canoe to work on. But I suppose cutting out on a wild ramble just felt like the thing to do, and the canoe almost became an accessory to the nonsense, rather than the purpose for the trip at some point.
But now we're back and the canoe has become the focus of my attention again. I ran it over to my buddy, Bob Hengelfeldt's, shop. Bob rebuilt an Old Town Guide model canoe when he was in high school and now rebuilds old houses. He is my trusted resource for how to go about fixing up my canoe. His impressions matched my own, for the most part... good solid canoe with only the one major structural issue, a cracked rib with some cracked planking to go with it near the prow (or is it stern?).
Bob advised me to get some linseed oil on the canoe to stabilize the wood. I decided to get off the lst bits of canvas that were hanging on, remove the gunwales and keel and follow his advice.
As I started unscrewing the gunwales I started to become concerned because of the way the wood was reacting on one of the gunwales. It didn't seem to be hold the screws in the way I might have expected. And sure enough, when I got it all off, I discovered that the gunwale was rotten at the center, probably where it had rested on the ground. There seemed to be a bit of rot up near one of the stems too. It wasn't bad, but likely to be a hassle. My dreams of simply giving the canoe a quick once over and recanvassing it are quickly disappearing.
Now that I have both gunwales off as well as the keel, it looks like the rot is pretty much confined to the gunwale, the bow stem and a bit on the bow deck. I don't think that this is going to be more than I can handle. Fingers crossed and touch wood!
More when I take next steps...
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