Vietnamese boats

[Mattie64]

Leaving the river above Ha Noi:



the album finishes with couple of photos of a launch trip across Liet Son Lake inland from Duc Pho, Quang Ngai Province on a pilgrimage to the mountain site of Dr. Thuy Tram's war-time clinic:



And then some of various places traveling from Ha Noi to Quang Ngai and return.









Any questions about where and when are welcome.

Regards...Rob

[RFNK]

Rob, could you put some of those old photos you have on this thread please? It would be nice to see the older boats juxtaposed with the contemporary ones. Rick

[Mattie64]

Rob, could you put some of those old photos you have on this thread please? It would be nice to see the older boats juxtaposed with the contemporary ones. Rick

Certainly, certainly:













And I'll post six more in the next entry. The link to the album is:
http://s195.photobucket.com/albums/z...20Blue%20Book/

Regards...Rob

[RFNK]

Thanks Rob! Fantastic!

In a previous post, Luc noted that many of the contemporary boats still have the long groove at the bow for a `lee board' to be placed there, from the sailing days. In this old picture from your album it looks as though the board at the bow is set up so that it sits high above the water and can be slid down into place when needed. I'm guessing that's how it works!



Rick

[Mattie64]

Rob, could you put some of those old photos you have on this thread please? It would be nice to see the older boats juxtaposed with the contemporary ones. Rick

Of course...







The "Junk Blue Book" has a lot of information about such things as fishing patterns and practices, boat measurements and construction, etc. For instance this is a photo of a measurement being taken, with a bonus of having the slotted stem and stern pieces fairly evident:



Then more details...



And some commercial aspects of the cargo and fishing business...



I'm hoping to get all the pages of the book processed through cleaning them up and putting the entire thing into a PDF file, plus being able to print-on-demand with my printer. I don't think that there will be any commercial interest in it but for special people it would be a wonderful resource. I have seen that it is available through one of the government printing offices, but John Doney told me that the copy he got from them was not really good, so he didn't plan to reproduce it from that. The digital copy I got from Ben Fruedenreich was taken from the original copy that he has.

Regards...Rob

[RFNK]

Well I'd love to get a copy so please let me know!
Rick

[Mattie64]

Rick, I know that you didn't mean to imply that I am OLD, but I will also post some here from my Facebook album "Vietnamese Days", taken in '70-'72 during the two years I spent in VN running Army boats out of Saigon.

A boat yard on Cu Lao Tay, an island on the Tien Giang branch of the Mekong;





Then the crossing from the market of the Kinh Cho Gao, Rice Market Canal, near My Tho:



The following is one of my favorites, probably the longest tiller-arm that I've ever seen, with great mechanical advantage, and allowing for plenty of exercise going from side-to-side:



And last a couple of the large old river junks which have transported rice from the Mekong Delta to Saigon for over a century:





The large river junks weren't motorized when I was in VN in the 70s; they had smaller push boats which ranged alongside, most of them with diesel engines. I would think that the arrangement then made the living quarters aft much more comfortable, without the engine noise and fumes.

All the photos in the Facebook album are copyrighted but I would be pleased to allow use if asked and credited. The public link to the album is: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?ai...9&l=386c3a50bb

Regards...Rob

[Mattie64]

Thanks Rob! Fantastic!

In a previous post, Luc noted that many of the contemporary boats still have the long groove at the bow for a `lee board' to be placed there, from the sailing days. In this old picture from your album it looks as though the board at the bow is set up so that it sits high above the water and can be slid down into place when needed. I'm guessing that's how it works!



Rick

I'm going to post some pages from the '62 "Junk Blue Book" with text which deals with the slotted stems and stern-posts. Not positive if these are all of the pages but these might do for now. Note in a couple of the photos the scale boards being used to take measurements by members of the team doing research for the book.









"DABC-1" refers to a numerical classification assigned to different types of boats from different locations. Hope these complete pages add some insight to these features.

Regards...Rob

[RFNK]

Great Rob!!
Rick

[Lucky Luke]

I'm hoping to get all the pages of the book processed through cleaning them up and putting the entire thing into a PDF file, plus being able to print-on-demand with my printer. I don't think that there will be any commercial interest in it but for special people it would be a wonderful resource.

It would be extremely kind of you if I could obtain a pdf copy of that book! I have a copy of the French "Voiliers d'Indochine" and (quite rare) "bois et bateaux du Vietnam", but never heard of this "Junk blue book", which seems very well documented.
Additionally: your "old" personal pictures would be most welcome

I am sorry that, although "dealing with boats" and living in Vietnam for over 15 years, I do not go around with a camera and my collection of pictures is close to nonexistent! Just like New-Yorker - or a Parisian - can live all his life in his city and seen less than a 15 days tourist!

[RFNK]

These boats are all from Vinh Long and Ben Tre, Me Kong Delta provinces just to the southeast of Ho Chi Minh City.

[RFNK]

This one shows the traditional Vietnamese standing rowing system as well as the newer longtail engine shaft which is common throughout SE Asia:




The boats of the delta aren't as appealing to me as the seagoing craft of the Central provinces but they certainly have their charm:




And they're functional:





Even bamboo boats are being replaced by fibreglass in some areas though:



Rick

[Mattie64]

It would be extremely kind of you if I could obtain a pdf copy of that book! I have a copy of the French "Voiliers d'Indochine" and (quite rare) "bois et bateaux du Vietnam", but never heard of this "Junk blue book", which seems very well documented.
Additionally: your "old" personal pictures would be most welcome

I am sorry that, although "dealing with boats" and living in Vietnam for over 15 years, I do not go around with a camera and my collection of pictures is close to nonexistent! Just like New-Yorker - or a Parisian - can live all his life in his city and seen less than a 15 days tourist!

Luke, I will continue to finish cleaning up and filing the Junk Blue Book and when done will certainly send you a copy. The second edition which came out in 1967 is a larger book and I think a reprinted edition is available from the Vietnam Woodenboat Foundation. By '67 the few fleets of working sail were not that much of a challenge to the US Navy's Market Time operation, so there are really no sail vessels in the book. Occasionally I see copies for sale on ABEbooks at around US $ 300. The second edition was a more formally produced book with hard cover, but it doesn't contain the same information as the '62 edition. My copy was given to me by a Navy bos'ns mate back in '70 when damp and water-stained it was replaced with a new copy. There may be copies of the second edition somewhere in VN today as a lot of that sort of thing was abandoned in April '75. I have an early or first edition of Voiliers d'Indochine but haven't heard of the Bois et Bateaux du Vietnam ...is that a book which might be worthwhile to obtain ?? Let me know if the link to the Facebook album "Vietnam Days" doesn't work for you...that is the album which has about 200 of the "old" photos I took working in Saigon and the Mekong Delta.

Regards...Rob

[Mattie64]

It would be extremely kind of you if I could obtain a pdf copy of that book! I have a copy of the French "Voiliers d'Indochine" and (quite rare) "bois et bateaux du Vietnam", but never heard of this "Junk blue book", which seems very well documented.
Additionally: your "old" personal pictures would be most welcome

I am sorry that, although "dealing with boats" and living in Vietnam for over 15 years, I do not go around with a camera and my collection of pictures is close to nonexistent! Just like New-Yorker - or a Parisian - can live all his life in his city and seen less than a 15 days tourist!

Well, I must apologize slightly: I took down my copy of the '67 edition of the Blue Book of Coastal Vessels South Vietnam and took another look through it: 570 pages, and it does have a certain amount of sail power covered. In ABEbooks.com there are listed 3 copies for sale, all around $300, but I found that I could download a PDF copy from NTIS for $45, which I did. The photo quality is very poor, but the text and line drawings are quite clear. I'm not sure how we can exchange email addresses on this forum, but I can send you more information on PDF file if you want that way.

Regards...Rob

[RFNK]

Rob
Of course I'd be grateful for any literature, photos etc. as well! To send a message to a WBF member, just click on their user name and one of the options that will come up is to send them a private message. Then of course you can exchange email addresses etc.
Rick

[Mattie64]

Cleaning up some more pages from the '62 edition of the Junk Blue Book and thought that I would post some more photos and one page with text. Hiking boards, all the thrill of being way out on the things to weather, wishing that when I was young and doing that crazy thing I'd had a digital camera: they didn't even have digital cameras then of course, and I was a kid sailing in Norfolk.



This is the page the photo is on:



Then a couple more of the slotted stern with-rudder, raised in these photos:





And another basket bottom boat careened on the beach with her slotted stern showing. I always feel looking at these photos like I'm peering underneath to see whether the thing is male or female, like with a new kitten:



And last this day somewhere on the coast with just enough air to ghost along, drifting to the lee making no headway but keeping the nets working to weather:



Regards...Rob

[donald branscom]

This little school doesn't really qualify as a wooden boat I guess but I thought some of you might be interested in it anyway. It's often too rough and usually too expensive for these raft village children to travel into the town of Cat Ba to attend school so this little `satellite' school was set up to ensure that these children attend school at least 4 times per week. Rick

Beautiful place for a class. Lets the kids breath a little.

[floatingkiwi]

Another good example of how wasteful these Vietnamese folk are. There is clearly room for a lot more fruit here. This boat isn't even sunk down to the deck. Man.

[Mattie64]

Wood Boats, wood anchors:







And wooden "Horns", one or two, as boom crutches on the bow:

[riverat]

Isn't it amazing how these simple people have for generations managed to build water craft without the benefit of computers, magic tables of mysterious numbers, plotting half entry angles, waterlines and so much other gobbledegook and queer speak. All they used was handspan, length of fore arm, primitive handtools and an inherited ability handed down through the ages. If a vessel turned out not too good then they just didn't copy it in the future. And very early in the thread the boats with the curved thing at the stern, well that is the water pump, prop wash blows the water up thru the engine, no more, no less, just as early hydro plane racers used a tubular rudder stock for the water pick-up. regards ray. good thread guys.

[Mattie64]

Another good source for old boat images from Viet Nam is colonial era postcards. I "mined" the Internet during evenings for a couple of months last year and out of more than 5000 images I copied into files over 600 were of boats. Most of the images are small, faded, and often times damaged, but Photoshop can restore the majority of them to usefulness. A few to make the point:











France is the place to find the colonial era photos for Indochina, as England is a source for early images out of China and India.

Regards...Rob

[floatingkiwi]

Isn't it amazing how these simple people have for generations managed to build water craft without the benefit of computers, magic tables of mysterious numbers, plotting half entry angles, waterlines and so much other gobbledegook and queer speak. All they used was handspan, length of fore arm, primitive handtools and an inherited ability handed down through the ages. If a vessel turned out not too good then they just didn't copy it in the future. And very early in the thread the boats with the curved thing at the stern, well that is the water pump, prop wash blows the water up thru the engine, no more, no less, just as early hydro plane racers used a tubular rudder stock for the water pick-up. regards ray. good thread guys.

Looking at the country from a ways out can make all you say make a little more sense.
These guys got some serious water around their country.

[BarnacleGrim]

Beautiful place for a class. Lets the kids breath a little.

Something tells me that of all the challenges these children face, ADD is not one of them.

[RFNK]

Ha Noi celebrated its 1000th birthday last month. One of many additions to the city to mark this occasion was the completion of a ceramic mural along the main dyke road. The dyke is Ha Noi's primary defence against inundation from the Red River. The mural runs for about 2km and features many different aspects of Vietnamese life and art. I particularly like the traditional representations of boats (of course) so here are a few, along with a couple of shots of the mural near Long Bien Bridge:













Rick

[Gerarddm]

Nice pics, Rob. When are you going to be in Seattle again?

Also, loved those old shots, too. I especially like that kid in the wooden tub, he sure looked happy with his own little vessel.

[Mattie64]

Nice pics, Rob. When are you going to be in Seattle again?

Also, loved those old shots, too. I especially like that kid in the wooden tub, he sure looked happy with his own little vessel.

Gerard, the tub that the kid is in is actually a small basket-boat. I have a series of photos of one being built that I will ask permission to publish here, and will if allowed.

Rob

[JimD]

Thanks for all these pics and commentary. Its a part of the world I haven't seen and still hope one day I can.

[RFNK]

Gerard, the tub that the kid is in is actually a small basket-boat. I have a series of photos of one being built that I will ask permission to publish here, and will if allowed.

Rob

No permission issues here Rob! Great to have this collection of pictures - old and new - in one place! All contributions very welcome! Post #85 has some basket boat building shots from Da Nang. It would be great to add some more shots of the various techniques and styles so I look forward to seeing what you have.
Rick

[Columbus]

Hi,
I am in search of a sawmill/boatyard in Vientnam to purchase timber for a boat (30m) to be built abroad.
Ideally the hull could be somewhat prefabricated in Vietnam and exported.
Any source?
Any idea about prices compared to other countries such as Indonesia, Malaysia?
Thanks in advance

[RFNK]

I suggest you post this on the Building Schooner in Vietnam thread in Building/Repair - I'm sure Luke will be able to advise you.
Rick

[Mattie64]

Regarding the bamboo basket boats, John Doney put me in touch with Isaac Bingham who had spent part of 2006 in Viet Nam as part of a project he did with a fellowship. Isaac posted a number of photos of the building process for one of the bamboo basket boats and actually got very involved in the entire process from stripping out the bamboo through waterproofing the finished hull. He didn't provide captions on the photos but they are pretty descriptive. I will do my best to add my own thoughts on what is going on, but will defer to any of you more knowledgeable people who have anything to add.

First of course will be the gatheriing of tools and materials:









I can't tell you what kind of bamboo was/is used, or if it is soaked for preservation. From the photos it looks green, but the woven panel has obviously lost that color. Next in the process is the weaving of the large circular panel, flat on the ground:



[To be continued in the next entry]

[Mattie64]

Returning to Basket Boat construction you will see that Isaac got right into the middle of this going even so far as to use his bare feet like his instructors. We will continue with the initial flat circular panel construction:







What will become the bottom of the boat has a different weave than what will be the sides: I'd be interested to understand the reasons for choosing the different patterns but will have to ask Isaac:





Next posting will continue with panel construction.

[Mattie64]

Finishing the round flat woven panel of bamboo:



Then bamboo strips are bound into the circular shape which will become gunwales and define this type of Basket Boat...and raised off the ground with stakes which will give the depth of the hull:



The woven bamboo "disc" is placed unsecured on the shaping and gunwale frame:



Then the shaping of the hull begins by the builder climbing onto the disc and beginning the process of pushing the flat woven bamboo down into the frame:





He's using stones or bricks to keep ahead of the tendency of the bamboo panel to spring back up and cancel progress.

[Continued in next posting]

[Mattie64]

Continuing the shaping of the flat bamboo disc into a three dimensional hull, the builder pushes the bamboo into position and the weavings assume different angles to accomodate going from flat to full curves:





When the shape of the hull is finally assumed satisfactorily, then the now- deep-woven hull is bound/stitched to the bamboo gunwales [after, I imagine, the excess weaving is cut off]:



The hull is coated inside and out with some kind of waterproofing. I'm not sure what is used today but in earlier times a kind of pitch was used...





[continued in the next posting]

[Mattie64]

The waterproofing inside and out continues:



And then stringers of bamboo are run inside the basket hull, for wear and reenforcing I imagine:









That pretty much covers the basic steps in constructing these boats. A longer more oval hull shape as used in Ha Long Bay would mean a longer oval gunwale frame, and the traditional wood-sided-basket-bottomed craft from other places on the coast would have had the longer more narrow woven bamboo mats forced down into the shape that the already layed up wood plank sides had.

I want to thank Isaac Bingham for permission to post these photos. Any errors in interpretation of the processes shown are mine and I apologize. Constructive criticism is encouraged and welcome.

Regards...Rob

[RFNK]

Thanks Rob, great to have this series here! By the materials and the look of that boat I'd guess it's somewhere around Da Nang?
Rick

[Mattie64]

I guess that I need to stir the post again, little more wood on the fire. In the Handbook of Junks of South Vietnam, 1962, I've gotten about 90% through boosting the images and re-ordering the text. I still face the challenge of getting better scans of about 40 ink-drawn elevations of the different boats, but text and photography are coming along. I have gotten as far as this discussion of the eyes of the different Vietnamese boats and am posting a couple of pages of text from the Book, plus a diagram and a couple of photos. There is not much about the eyes typical of the Mekong Delta, with which I am most familiar. The authors admitted that their knowledge of the origin and meanings of the eyes was not definitive, but published what they knew and speculated about.








Then a couple of the many photos in which eyes are prominent:






I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas and that this coming year's accomplishments stay firmly anchored to their dreams.

Regards...Rob

[Fredy Champagne]

Truly beautiful site, Rick. The photos are striking and bring back the memories from my many trips up and down Viet Nam in the late 80s and early 90s. I worked in Viet Nam early on trying to help influence our government to lift the Trade Embargo against Viet Nam. We were the first group of vets to return to Viet Nam and construct the Friendship Clinic in Vung Tau in 1989.

I particularly liked sailing on the tourist junks in Ha Long Bay, North of Haiphong. I thought riding the ferry boats across the rivers in My Tho and Can Tho was very scarry, talk about unsafe and overloaded ferry boats.

I was looking thur your site for one boat in particular, have you seen the junk, the "Song Saigon"? I had the privilege of meeting Rinaldo Max and his wife Rosemary during the construction of this magnificant wooden boat. Spent a coupld days on the Saigon rIver with this boat and crew. Wondering if you have seen her lately. My last trip to Viet Nam was adding a wing to a hospital in My Lai in Quang Ngai province in 2001.

[RFNK]

Thanks Fredy! Song Saigon actually means Saigon River in Vietnamese. I haven't seen that boat but Luc (Lucky Luke) might be familiar with it. Perhaps he'll let us know as he checks this thread from time to time. Although I've been lucky to travel a lot throughout Vietnam, I haven't really spent much time in Saigon. My base was Hanoi.

Rob, thanks again for uploading all this historical information and the old pictures. They're really wonderful!
Rick

[Lucky Luke]

"Song Saigon" (the junk) is gone...

She was built by Max Rinaldo with part of the finance coming from Denis Colonna (former Chairman of "Exotissimo" travel agency), and who now has a new "Song Saigon", but which is an aluminum catamaran motoryacht, built by Saigon Shipyard on a design by the Joubert-Nivelt tandem. After cruising from Saigon to Marseille with his wife, where they are now, he has put the boat for sale (at a ridiculous price!).

But let's go back to the junk.

As you know, Freddy, she was (...) a three masted junk built from a design preserved at the "Musee de la Marine" in Paris of an ancient trading junk from the South of China. She was entirely built in "sao" wood - an exceptional timber which is now preserved - and fastened with trunnels in the best building tradition. She was, in all respects, meant to be an ocean going boat, but as I have experienced, actually much better on the river than at sea....as her sad ending finally showed!

However, one must bear in mind that these boats were designed to sail with the monsoon, from North East to South West China coast from May to October, and back the other half of the year, not at all for beating to windward, which "Song Saigon" was incapable of, and not built for either. We did a short passage with her from one of the Western mouths of the Mekong delta to Vung Tau city, with her V12 Baudouin engine (which came from Alain Colas 70m. three masted "racing" boat "Club Med") giving all what it could....just to be stopped dead by every one and a half meters wave we would regularly face. The boat was suffering as much as behaving miserably in this medium seaway. Nevertheless, she was a wonder of comfort, not only in her cabins and large aft saloon, but moreover on her huge aft deck gently sweeping forward like on the after castle of an ancient ship - which she actually was!

So, she was mostly taking passengers for up and down river cruises, sometimes at sea, very seldom hoisting her two tons mainsail with all the complex junk rig, bamboo battens and heavy cotton cloth. She even went up to Cambodia where she was used for an unsuccessful treasure hunt on the "Condor" reef, but mostly had an easy life up to when she was finally sold to film makers who took her to Micronesia for some mysterious researches... (???). They changed her rig to a certainly lighter kind on "junk looking" marconi rig, just as ugly as non-propulsive, but she had some more good time in this gentle part of the Pacific ocean. During that time, she was alas not maintained using the well proven traditional ways that the Vietnamese had preserved but Micronesian ignore. Then she sailed across the Indian Ocean, up the Red Sea, and entered the Mediterranean. That is where her world changed!!!

In this often very windy and extremely choppy sea, and after years of improper maintenance, she suffered so much that her seams opened, her old trunnels not holding her together, her pumps unable to cope with that water....and she sank! Definitely the one and only Chinese junk that ever sunk in the "Med"!!!!

Her crew was all rescued, but she who once was the beautiful junk "Song Saigon" now rests in the bottom of the Eastern Mediterranean sea...

[RFNK]

Quite a story! Thanks Luc!! Wish I'd seen this one!
Rick

[Mattie64]

Thought that a page of equivalent's might be suitable here, enabling some basic translation. This from the '62 Junk Blue Book :



And to fill out the posting three pages of illustrations from the same:






It's not Harold Underhills Masting and Rigging, but it's a start.

Regards...Rob

[BarnacleGrim]

Fascinating stuff! I'd build one, but bamboo here is $6 a stick in the garden section

[Mattie64]

For those of you who have been following my postings from the "Junk Blue Book" you can now download the entire book from the Indigenousboats Blog [ http://indigenousboats.blogspot.com/ ] free of charge, no threads attached. In the Wednesday, February 23, 2011 entry blogger Bob Holtzman introduces the book and gives a link to the site. From there you can click on the book cover and the download will begin. It takes awhile even if you have broadband, because 89Mb was as small as I could get it and still maintain the resolution needed to print a clear copy. The pdf [file] is set up for printing, with mirrored gutter margins. I've printed 4 copies on 8.5x11" paper, three of them I had spiral bound and one I had hardbound. I printed the copy for hardbinding in black and white except for the 7 pages with color, and am more than pleased with the result. If you chose to print the entire book in color the photos will be sepia toned. I have located an original copy in a library close enough to drive to and have been getting some better resolution copies of the 30 some pages of boat elevations, which I will eventually update to the pdf [file], but for now the elevations are readable but a little shy of the best resolution. Finding an original copy for sale would be almost impossible and I don't want to think about what the cost would be. Printing and having it hard bound is a lot easier "nut to crack" though it's still an expense. Those of you in Asia who might want to can probably have a couple of dozen of them printed and hardbound from the file, at about what it cost me to have the one copy done in New Orleans. Of course a one-off printing and binding is always expensive. Anyway, the book is in the public domain so the file is free to share, something I encourage. Maybe that way other copies will surface and be preserved [and it might be that some day I will get an original copy of my own]. The book is definitely a classic if I say so myself and deserves to be on a lot more bookshelves.

Warm regards...Rob Whitehurst

[Thad]

That address didn't work for me. Good stuff!!!

[Mattie64]

Thad, apologies from me and the blogger Bob Holtzman. I'm sure that the site will be working properly shortly. If you didn't get the pdf let me know and I will forward a separate link.

[Mattie64]

Regarding the blog http://indigenousboats.blogspot.com/ the link to the Junk BLue Book is up and running fine so "He'p yoseff", as they say in eastern North Carolina, you can download the Book with a little time and patience.

Regards...Rob

[Gerarddm]

Nicely done, Rob. You should post a notice about it to the Alumni section of the RISD newsletter.

Best regards-

[The Bigfella]

I've just processed some more photos from my trip last year... and found some more boats

Here's the bow of the boat we travelled down the Mekong on.... a cargo boat

Inside



Outside



One of the boats used to transport the sand from dredging operations... loaded, with decks awash, and a less heavily loaded identical boat behind



Timber boat being constructed



A couple of women lacquering the inside of a bamboo boat. Smelly stuff...



Same location as the above (Da Nang), looking seaward. I shot this with a telephoto.... a couple of seconds before, there were two of these large nets in the air. I blinked... and there was one

[RFNK]

Those nets in the air are fish traps. They're lowered into the water for a while and then hauled upwards with a cable and winch. Some of the winches are powered by electric motors, others have a petrol or diesel engine. The little building on stilts that you can see in your photo above, behind the net, probably houses a small petrol engine that raises the net.
Rick