System 13

I’m a memberof a group that focuses on studying Viking vessels and the Viking way of life. (Viking Age Vessels, if you’re interested, or just want to see some pictures.) We’ve built one boat thus far, Blackbird. She’s modelled after the Gokstad faering, which you can see a bit of here. We’ve taken Blackbird out quite a few times on some of the local lakes, doing mini-voyages during the day. However, we’ve not made any overnight voyages – yet. That’ll be changing this October.

This October, me and two other members of our group will be taking Blackbird, our faering, up the Ohio river. We’ll be heading out early Friday morning, and rowing / sailing (depending on whether there’s any decent wind) until around nightfall. We’ll then land the boat and set up camp for the night. The next morning we’ll put Blackbird back in the water and continue on to our destination, where either 1) someone will meet us or 2) we’ll have parked one of our vehicles there ahead of time.

While the overnight voyage is for enjoyment, it’s also a bit of a learning experience. Basically, we’re trying to get a feel for what it was like for, say, a small-time Viking trader to drop his boat in the water and head to the next town to sell or trade his goods. Or perhaps a Viking group heads down (or up) the river with the intent on acquiring some goods to trade. Whether they’re acquired in a ‘legal’ way such as hunting, or in a not so legal way (such as plundering a monastery) doesn’t really matter. The fact is, beginning voyage would be similar.

Seeing as Blackbird is a small boat, this exercise brings up some interesting questions. One of the big ones is, what do you pack? After you get 3 crewmembers into Blackbird, there isn’t a great deal of storage space. Currently, we’re looking at having a tarp to sleep under, a hatchet to cut firewood, some sunscreen and insect repellant, clothes (not much of this, just enough so that none of us have to go naked!), and food. The food is probably going to be fairly boring – most likely something along the lines of iron rations. We’re trying to see if we can get anyone in our group to serve as the ‘farm’ that we stop at during our voyage. As noted by one of the guys who’s going, it would make the overall experience a bit more enjoyable.

As can be seen in the preliminary list of stuff to bring, there aren’t any weapons. I’m sad to say that we won’t be pulling Blackbird up onto the shore and jumping out with swords in hand. While doing so would be an enjoyable piece of reliving part of the Viking lifestyle, it would also be highly illegal. I enjoy learning about history, but I don’t enjoy it enough to go to prison.

This won’t be the first time we’ve had Blackbird out on the Ohio. I personally have been out on the Ohio once before with Blackbird, with two other VAV members. It was definitely a different experience than being on a lake. Obviously, there’s a whole lot more current. There’s also really, really big boats, such as barges. We had one or two go by when we were out before, and wow. Talk about some waves. Blackbird sits extremely low in the water – there’s probably around 6 inches of freeboard. Having rolling waves come at you from a barge when you’ve only got about 6 inches of freeboard is a bit unnerving, to say the least. Luckily the boat rolled well with the waves, and nothing major happened. I think we had a little bit of water come over the side once, but besides that, all was well.

All in all, I’m really looking forward to the experience. Once I get some details about our course, I’ll post some more. And, of course, there’ll be at least one post about it after the voyage. I’m sure there’ll be at least a few nuggets of interesting-ness to share.

Oh, and one will history tidbit while I’m on the topic of Vikings. I mentioned in my post about Vikings in Stargate, but to repeat:

Vikings did not have horns on their helms! Ever!

That is all.