I made this canoe in 2002 for Tony Johnson of the Chinook Tribe. He did the finish carving of the nose & tail and surface texture carving of the gunwale. He also painted the canoe. Ul Imits is a very accurate 7/8 scale representation of the Scarboro Canoe at the Oregon Historical Society. Tony and I spent a day taking the lines of the Scarboro canoe which was carved by a Chinook carver near Scarboro Hill at the mouth of the Columbia River around 1900. The canoe was built with the taped-seam plywood method. Tony gave me a block of cedar from a centuries old cedar tree from Chinook land for the nose and tail carvings. He named the canoe "Ul Imits" which means "Old Nose" in the Chinook language. We learned a lot from the old canoe, especially about how the early carvers blended the flat sections of middle of the hull into the sharp fin-like hull ends.
There was an informal race between Ul Imits and Aludaq at Coos Bay. Both canoes have a normal crew of 4 pullers. Ul Imits won but the average age of the Chinook pullers was significantly less that those in Aludaq (my old self included). The question of which is faster is still a matter of cheerful contention. That day Tony loaded this canoe with a total crew of six. It stormed along at high speed, low in the water, pushing a big bow wave like a black battleship. I don't think this would be practical in open water, but it looked impressive. Tony has had Ul Imits in the surf at the mouth of the Salmon River here in Oregon. They were able to cross the bar through the surf and back into a beach down the coast. At one point, as they were practicing surfing, a following breaker kicked the stern sideways and spun the hull crosswise to the wave. Normally this would result in pitchpoling. This is where the bow is pushed under, the hull pivots around the bow and the canoe flips over sideways in the surf like a rolling log. However Ul Imits stayed upright, thanks to some quick corrective action by the crew, and surfed sideways across the wave face. This shows the fantastic performance that comes from the centuries of research and development by the people on this coast.
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