vagrant

Click To Play While staying at Ulrich’s house on Isla San Cristobal we hiked into the jungle to help extract a new dugout canoe which Ricardito was having built. Around the Bocas Archipelago it still makes economic sense for people to build these canoes which are carved from a single piece of wood. For most people living in the islands they are the primary form of transportation, whole families will pile into a tiny sinking cayucu the the kids bailing while the father paddles to church. The larger ones are made to move materials around or goods to market. The biggest ones that we’ve seen approach fifty feet with about a six foot beam, all carved from one tree. The trees that are big enough to produce one of these are getting rarer and farther away from the water. People must spend weeks in the bush roughing out the boat with hand tools and chainsaws before it is pushed to the neares river or ocean. After that it’s reworked with power tools and usually painted. The one which we helped push out was about twenty feet and only took an hour and a half with about ten people. I can hardly imagine what it must be like to get one of the huge ones out of the jungle. Ulrich has one which is 43 feet and he posted a video and a write up about it.Ashe and I take equal credit for shooting and editing this one…