Ten minutes of fame


Don Cash was a videographer for the Texas Department of Wildlife and wanted to do a segment on wood strip canoe building. I was introduced to him at a Houston Canoe Rendezvous and so began an interesting journey. I was about to design/build a new boat to participate in Junior Water Safari. After talking to Don we struck a deal wherein I'd build a boat slightly more photogenic than I'd originally intended and he would film the process and produce a video for a segment of Texas Parks and Wildlife show that ran on NPR.

From my viewpoint it was a large undertaking for Don. It was a three hour round trip from his home base in Austin to our house in Cypress. There were a lot of trips, first for the design, then several segments during different stages of the build. Followed by some of the original launching and then the actual race. I suspect his interest started to flag when I started the inlaid chevron deck. It was a little tedious and looked pretty rough unfinished but I sanded down a short segment of the deck and wet it out to show what it would look like finished and we soldiered on.

In any event those untold hours were condensed into ten minutes of video as shown on NPR here

After YouTube gained ascendency Texas Parks and Wildlife re edited the video to a 9 minute video here.



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