BOAT BUILDING

Building a dugout canoe requires a good trunk of an aspen ( Populus tremula), which grows throughout the forests of Estonia. ‘Good’ means big enough and old enough – usually with a count of 80 rings – and straight as a pencil. Trunks must be healthy and checked for Phellinus tremulae, a parasitic fungus that causes heartrot, resulting in a hollow core that makes them unsuitable for building but an excellent home for the large-eyed Siberian flying squirrel. Once felled, the trees are peeled and shaped like a cigar using an axe or a chainsaw. ‘Even my teachers used a chainsaw 30 years ago,’ says Ruukel. ‘I don’t want to copy everything as it was done hundreds of years ago. Our boats are still handmade, we just use some modern tools.’ From here, the interior of the boat is carved out to give it shape. Ruukel works with an adze, an ancient tool like an axe but with a curved cutting blade set at a right angle to the handle, whittling the hull down to a few centimetres in thickness. A long log fire is then built alongside the canoe, which is filled with several bucketfuls of water and left to warm up. After a few hours, and once the water has evaporated, sticks are wedged into the hull lengthways to open it up. Aspen is a soft wood and a trunk half a metre across can be expanded into a metre-wide boat. It takes around six hours to spread the hull with longer sticks, watching out for emerging cracks in the wood and knowing when to stop or risk splitting the hull in two. The boat is then left to cool in the shade and is traditionally finished the following spring, once the wood has fully dried, when it’s given its final design and sealed with tar.