Wood Stove

I am a jack of many trades. I used to weld for a living and I used to live on my commercial fishing boat. So it stands to reason that I would have a welder on the back deck of my wood fishing boat…Right?

Well about 35 years ago in the BS days (BS days are Before Sue days) I spent a month tied to an old trappers float about half way between Ketchikan and Wrangell. It was in the middle of winter and the fish weren’t biting and I had found a 4’X 10’ sheet of ¼ inch steel plate grown under a bush at a deserted logging camp. So I decided to build a wood stove to put in the fo’c’s’le of my boat. (What’s the fo’c’s’le you say??? That’s the pointy end of the boat below the deck. The old time sailors called it the fore castle and they shortened it to fo’c’s’le ‘cause they couldn’t speak so well)

I put my oxygen and acetylene bottles in my skiff to take to the beach so I could cut the steel plate into pieces I could handle. Then I got it all out to my boat so I could put it on the trappers float to work on it. When you are 50 miles from the nearest road with most of those miles salt water in the winter, you really don’t want to use the cutting torch on a wood boat. Better to light the float on fire than the boat. Fortunately neither happened.

An old fisherman told me that if you build a wood stove so that you can close a flap on the top of the stove that redirects most of the burning gasses back to the bottom of the fire in stead of it all going up the stack you get more heat out of the wood. Obviously this old fisherman had too much time to just think up stuff and I had too much time to think about his crazy idea. But anyway that is what I build. I had the materials and the time so why not try it?

I had a piece of 4’ pipe that I cut in half twice to make rounded corners. Anyway, to make a long story not so long, I made this stove with an air-tight door and double sides with a heavy flapper on the inside so that I could close that flapper when it was burning good to recirculate the air. The only part I bought for that stove was a small bi-metal coil, like an old choke coil. Blaze King used one for the air draft so that as the stove heated up the coil would close down the air going into the stove. That part worked perfectly. However I could never tell if my flapper ever did anything but make it smoke up the room if I forgot to open it before I opened the door. It finally rusted open and I couldn’t get inside with out a cutting torch so it was no longer a problem.

I spent about 3 weeks building the stove. It was only a two day job but I had books to read and it is so much fun watching the tide come up and eat the snow that had fallen since the tide went out. And did you ever watch the tide come up around the feet and legs of a seagull. It takes about 10 minutes from the time the water touches the bottom of their feet until it touches the underneath feathers. Then you can never tell whether they are going to fly off or swim off. These things take time you know.

In those days I was pretty strong, so I planned to just lift the stove up the 3 ½ feet to the deck of the boat and then carry or slide it across the pilot house floor, down the four steps into the fo’c’s’le and bolt it in place. (Yes, I bolted it in place. A boat sometimes moves around a bit out in the ocean and you don’t want a wood stove rolling around in your fo’c’s’le with a fire going in it now do you???)

That boat had about a 16 inch deck on the side with a sliding door on each side to enter the pilot house. You had to steep over a 6 inch threshold and down two stairs to the pilot house floor. I had the stove on the float right beside the open door and grabbed the stove. I got the side closest to me up where I wanted it so that I could just tip backwards and put the far legs on the deck. Well, no matter how hard I tried I could not get those back legs off the float. I figured that it only weighed about 250 pounds so I should have been able to lift it. It must have stuck out too far. It may have been then when I was deciding if the seagull would swim or fly.

I put my chain saw in the skiff and headed for the beach. I cut a tall tree with about a 6 inch butt and limbed it and towed it out to the boat. I put that on top of the pilot house roof with a big block of wood on the open door side so that end would be high enough above the door so that my come-along had room. Then I tied down the other end and picked up the stove with the come-along. This had the added benefit that then I could just lower the stove down onto the pilot house floor after swinging it through the door. I put the stove on a small piece of carpet so that I could slide it over the carpet on the floor. Going down the fo’c’s’le stairs was not too hard. I didn’t have to raise those stubborn back legs. They just followed down the stairs like they were suppose to. The platform I had beside the stairs for the stove was about a foot above the fo’c’s’le floor so I just made sure I didn’t go past the platform or I would have had to re-rig the come-along.

That stove had a fire in it continuously about 9 months out of the year for 8 years. It was great! With that thermostat controlled air inlet I could put wet wood on top of burning coals, (about 3 tines a day) open the air up and after a while the wood next to the coals would dry out enough to burn and in about half an hour it would be going good and the thermostat would shut down the air so it would not get too hot and burn up my boat. I burned beach wood, which was wood that had been in the salt water (sometimes for years) and drifted up on the beach. I liked mostly hemlock but hemlock soaks up water badly. I remember once when loading split hemlock from my skiff onto the deck a piece fell in the water and sank! I had to clean out the stove pipe 3 or 4 times a year because it would completely plug up but that stove made all that wood burn.