more of the alternative lifestyle.....

when the family moved up coast they lived on an island... yes.. Grandma Hacket owned an island.. small but was functional... apparently they had goats and chickens but was before my time...apparently Grandma sold the island for $800.00 and the man who bought it eventually sold it for a million dollars... sometime during the late 50's or 60's i believe...
i only remember going there to pick plums and sometimes apples from the remaining fruit trees... the house was gone and little remained.. mother nature has a way of covering up abandoned farms...
anyways...

my parents were prolific builders... they built several boats, houses and my mother's favourite hobby, woodworking ...

these float houses are really doll houses that she made... i only remember one of them, the others had been given away to family friends children..

all the characters she made herself with a treadle lathe/jigsaw combination.. here is a link so you can see what it looked like... ...i had it for years until someone convinced me to throw it out because it had a couple of pieces missing ... sighhhhh DUH for me!!!
below are some pictures of the boats they built themselves...

the Ripalong...

the Coquette... the top picture is one with the fishing poles down... for trolling... the bottom photo is one without the fishing poles... they would take the poles off for the winter when they logged and trapped....

one of the unique things about the fishing poles or the mast was if one should happen to break, my father would look for 'the perfect' pole... we'd anchor, he'd go ashore, chop the tree down, debark it and replace the broken one...

in the lower picture of the group above, you can see the smoke stack, that would have been for the wood stove and the smaller stack by the mast would have been for the engine, which most like would have been an Easthope engine .. they were very common in the earlier part of the century... sometimes even today you can hear the putt putt of the engine in some of the old restored wooden boats....

the next boat is the Rae-Maid which was built in 1950... they not only built the Rae-Maid they also built a sistership for the Hadley's who owned the local Sawmill...  most of the boats were built with Red Cedar, but the stern was built with Yellow Cedar, which is even more rot resistant than Red Cedar......

the photo in the upper right hand corner is him in the pilot house...

in this boat, was an upgrade, instead of a woodstove they had an oilstove... and in the pilot house (upper cabin) they had a cold cupboard for a fridge.... the boat was high tech at the time, complete with a toilet (the head)and it had a large water tank for fresh water with a hand pump at the sink...

the next photo is the Yellow Cedar tree that they logged to make the stern out of...

they would have chopped it down and towed it to Hadley's mill to be sawn into boards for the stern of the boats...  

i'll bet that stump is still there... what a tree....

more to come....