Making A Boat (Part 1)

Notice: The next two chapters focus on how exactly the boat was constructed, so if you don't really care about that info, feel free to skip the next two chapters.

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Finally, having been cured of the disease, I decided to stop teaching people how to fish as I didn't want to overhunt the river. And although this made some people disappointed was a necessary precaution to make sure we could still hunt fish in the future.

It was still only 5 pm though, so I decided to begin working on the ship. Thankfully since we were in an area of the rainforest with tiny trees (At least compared to the giant ones that one could find elsewhere), It was not that hard to find a tree that was 12ft tall and at least 4 ft wide.

Once I got my hands on one, I spent 20 minutes rolling it back to the settlement using snakeskin. And once there, I just split the log in half, putting one half aside while splitting the one left in half, leaving me with two pieces of curved wood that basically took up an area of 2ft by 2ft.

I put one aside and grabbed the other one to make a 12ft long, 1ft high, and 6in wide wooden plank. Once I did that, I just repeated what I did before with the half a log I had put aside, only managing to finish that by 6:23 pm.

At first, I planned to go and get my hand on enough wooden planks to build the base. Still, it was already pretty late, and everyone had already chopped all of the wood into small chunks that everyone could use to fuel the fireplaces, so instead, I opted to carve out the two curves I needed.

It wasn't too difficult as the wood logs' natural shape was already a circle, so I could skip having to carve the curve into a piece of wood since wood wasn't hollow though I did still have to carve out the wood inside, leaving only a curved plank that was 6in thick. From there, I just called it a day and clocked out for the night, as it was already 7:42 pm.

March 30th, 0001:

As soon as I got everything sorted for the day and planted the two new orange seeds that had begun to sprout, I get everyone except for the children to continue clearing out the stones in the river and then proceeded to take the children back to what had now just become an open classroom of sorts.

Unlike the last time though, instead of killing their throats making them constantly repeat words, I decided just to make them say all of the words once and then proceed to get them to watch as I just made an expression that matched the word while saying the word out loud in the hopes to get them to make the connection between the word and the expression eventually.

Knowing that it would take them at least a couple of days to do so, I just kind of 'turned on' my 'autopilot mode' and just went into my head thinking of ways I could connect the two pieces that made up the side of the boat, or more specifically what wood joinery techniques would be best.

Eventually, lunch arrived once again, and we ate some fish that Gabriel caught since it honestly took less time than going hunting for Suri. Then we all sort of separated, and I just got back to work on the boat.

As for what wood joinery technique I chose to connect the two wooden planks that would make up the sides of the boat, it was the Yose-Ari-Hozo-Shikuchi technique, basically just carving a small piece of wood at the bottom of a wooden beam and making the base wither than the top.

As for how it worked, you were just supposed to carve a hole on the bottom wooden beam the size of the base of the piece of wood on the wooden beam that was on top. From that hole, you would then have a triangular-ish hole that extended from there with an opening at the top wide though for the top part of the wooden carving that would be inserted, and a base large enough for the base of the piece of wood that would be inserted.

Since this was a rather long wooden plank thick enough to be a beam, I decided to make 12 of these; that way; there would be one for every foot of wood. Since I could only use an ax to carve it though, although doable required me to be careful, making it so that by the time I was done with them for both pairs, it was already 4 pm.

It was all worth it though, when I could finally connect all of them, and everything thankfully didn't break. Plus, after hitting it only slightly holding back, it could hold out without a problem. As for why I even did that, it's because realistically, something like this would happen eventually, and if the wooden plank failed the test, it would be best just to start over than to keep a faulty product.

All that was left for the boat's outer shell, at least, was just the base and the 'faces' of the boat with that done. Regarding the base, I just had to go even further into the jungle to find a tree that was 5ft wide.

Which surprisingly took more time to take down than to actually move back to the settlement with the help of Fransisco and Omar (Who I had to bother because I was too week to bring it back myself) On the bright side though, although it took longer than I had expected, I didn't have to go through the trouble of using wood joinery to connect many planks to make the base.