A broken man's homemade, seaworthy ship rests in the Canadian prairie (2015) | Hacker News Reader

A broken man's homemade, seaworthy ship rests in the Canadian prairie (2015)

atlasobscura.com

150 pointscwillu60 comments

On a smaller scale, when I lived there a few years ago there was a man in Southampton (UK) who had a large catamaran in his garden. It took up the entire garden and was easily visible from the road as they had a corner plot.

According to local hearsay he had rebuilt and restored it (perhaps even designed and built it from scratch) in place, but having done so it could never be moved due to power lines and other obstructions. There was a dispute of some sort with the local authorities on the grounds it was an eyesore or some such, but as it actually couldn't be moved without being destroyed...

Sometimes when I drove past I would see him out polishing the handrails and other metal adornments.

(Doing some searching, it appears to have fallen into disrepair in the last few years of the owner's life, and may have finally been demolished after he passed last year. It's possible it had been there since he started building it in the mid 1960s! "Bitterne Park Catamaran" for the mildly interested... if you see the aerial shots, the boat has a bigger footprint than the house.)

It's still preserved on GMaps:

https://maps.app.goo.gl/1g5pid6qEfYg3RrGA?g_st=ic

Another article with more details on the life of the builder:

https://www.canadashistory.ca/explore/settlement-immigration...

Wow its wild to see this posted here my great grandfather knew this man . He was famous for building that ship in a small part of Saskatchewan.

My grandfather still has a farm in the region and had this to say

> Tom knew that building a boiler to power a steam engine was beyond his scope so he wanted Alex to fashion one for him.

My dad said he was definitely a different kind. Tom was determined, no doubt. However he made a set of false teeth - they didn’t fit very well and yet he would persist - showing up in town with his mouth bleeding.

Our local region, say, within a radius of 25 miles which would have been served by the villages of Lucky Lake, Birsay, Beechy, Dinsmore and Macrorie contained a relatively large number of Finnish settlers.

”Sontiainen” means dung beetle. Knowing this added very little to the story though..

It's think it's very fitting. The dung beetle is the worldly embodiment of Sisyphus. Doomed to forever push a boulder uphill only for it to roll down again when he was near the top.

although probably unintentional, there's a bit of synchronism too, since the dung beetle (aka scarab) is the ancient Egyptian (Coptic) symbol of resurrection (among other things).

The way it's been described to me, the ancient Egyptians viewed dung beetles sort of like a phoenix (phoenices?) or an ouroborous, because they believed the beetles to have the power of self-creation (from the mistaken assumption that a dung beetle could survive entirely on dung it produced itself). So I wouldn't be so sure it's an unintentional reference.

A (disputed) story goes that a community wanted a church house and tasked a likely local to get it built. He protested that the only thing he knew how to build was sailing ships. So in 1868 they built an upside down ship and called it a church. The Pine Valley chapel is still in operation today in the mountains of southern Utah.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pine_Valley_Chapel_and_Tithing...

https://www.intermountainhistories.org/items/show/485

My understanding is that roofs of church naves in the style of a ship's keel are fairly common: https://www.google.com/search?q=keel+nave+roof+church&tbm=is... The metaphor is that the Church is a ship that protects and carries its congregation.

The same story was told about a chapel that was part of the Little Norway museum in Wisconsin. I think these stories might be completely made up in response to the ship-like style of the roof.

This wasn't explained: "the two made for the Canadian border only for the boy to be rejected and sent back to his foster home."

"Rejected" by whom, and on what grounds?

I would assume rejected by the Canadians because his son wasn't legally his son anymore.

> Sukanen may indeed have been mentally ill. He apparently attempted to patent wife-beating implements.

This wasn’t explained either…

Likely forgot to fill in his ArriveCan application.

His cell phone ran out of batteries on the way and he couldn't download the app.

Back to your country you go!

They should sail it, with his remains, to Finland.

Sounds like the making of a YouTube channel. If only it existed back then.

He won't rest until he's home

I had the exact same thought.

I don't see much proof for it being seaworthy other than the claim in the title. Definitely wouldn't chance my life on that thing.

Can someone explain what it means by:

> The keel was sealed with horse blood in keeping with Finnish tradition

I tried googling “keel horse blood” but didn’t find anything useful.

Blood and other binding agents are combined with fibrous material that gets pushed into the cracks between wood planks. Much more commonly done with types of tars and heavy oil.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oakum

https://www.google.com/search?q=caulking%20ship%20wood%20rop...

Sounds made up. Finnish boat-sealing tradition is all about pine tar.

Yeah, and I'm not all that sanguine about calling that boat "seaworthy" either.

Sealing with something that's soluble in water does sound like a silly idea.

What I don't really understand is why he went back to Canada after he managed to get back to his homeland the first time.

Not uncommon for sailors to stay aboard ship even when they reach land. It's possible he wouldn't have been allowed to disembark.

> Of course, Sukanen may indeed have been mentally ill. He apparently attempted to patent wife-beating implements.

It would be really interesting to see these applications. I just can't imagine what something like that would actually look like.

Also, my wife says Sontiainen is the name for some bug that likes to live around shit.

wiktionary agrees with your wife.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sontiainen dung+insect

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-iainen#Finnish

I went to this museum as a child. It was a great museum, it had a lot more than just the ship. I never knew this man's full story. It's very sad.

> (Of course, Sukanen may indeed have been mentally ill. He apparently attempted to patent wife-beating implements.)

That took a nasty turn

More like a nasty gas station on the road made out of nothing but nasty turns that was his entire life.

I’m not sure if that would have made a difference considering he didn’t have a wife any more?

Maybe he was still angry with her for dying while he was away?

“Built a rowboat and headed for the Hudson”. As in Hudson Bay? That looks like a very challenging journey on its own.

It seems that it was Hudson Bay: https://www.newspapers.com/clip/105820900/tom-sukanen-1878-1...

When I saw "the Hudson" I thought of the Hudson River. It seemed plausible he might be able to row to Lake Winnipeg and then follow rivers and portages to Lake Superior, and from there paddle his way down to Lake Erie and the down the Erie Canal to the Hudson.

Not exactly an easy trip, but NYC seemed to me like a better place to find a steamship to Finland than Hudson Bay!

I think that would involve a lot of upstream rowing (though I don't know for sure).

Guy walked 600 miles to Canada, I think that sounds about right tbh.

It's called sisu in Finnish.

I’m just amazed by all the comments here about visiting the museum! I grew up near there and… it’s definitely pretty far off the beaten path for almost anyone!

I wouldn't really call Minnesota landlocked

Usually rivers don't count against 'landlocked'. It does seem a bit silly though, there's a ton of ship traffic on the Great Lakes and through the St. Lawrence River to the Atlantic.

Minnesota also borders on Lake Superior, but it does raise the question of how big the body of water needs to be to disqualify a geographical entity as landlocked.

Isn’t the concept of „landlocked“ usually referring to your ability to do trade at scale with the rest of the world without being dependent on the goodwill of some other actor? Seems Minnesota would still depend on the goodwill of whoever controls the waterways between the Great Lakes and the Atlantic. So they are still landlocked.

By the same logic, all the Black Sea nations depend on the goodwill of Turkey to let them pass to the Aegean. Are they landlocked? No. Are Azerbaidjan and Turkmenistan landlocked, even tough they have access to the Caspian Sea? Maybe if it's a water body that somehow connects to an ocean, then it's not landlocked.

That would be the case without any international treaties. Turkey has the physical ability to block the Bosporus and the Dardanneles, but modern Turkey has never had the right to do so.

The Treaty of Lausanne (1923) demilitarized the straits and and opened them to any traffic under the supervision of the League of Nations. After the political situation in Europe changed, the Montreux Convention (1936) granted Turkey limited sovereignty over them.

Modern Turkey has the limited right to block passage of warships through the Bosphorus, a right which it is most notably exercising right now, during the war in Ukraine.

The Montreux Convention does not allow Turkey absolute discretion here [0], but international law is really about practicalities rather than theory.

[0] https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/03/01/turkey-black-sea-strait...

The black sea is a sea.

Minnesota has no seas.

Minnesota has lakes, which are also landlocked, and rivers which lead to the sea, but it abuts no sea.

Minnesota's lakes are not landlocked. It borders Lake Superior, and shipping from the great lakes into the ocean is very very much a thing.

They are landlocked by the definition of being a lake and not a sea. Landlocked doesn't mean "does not connect to the sea", because so many lakes and rivers connect to the sea. A lake is a lake by virtue of not being a sea. And a land mass is landlocked by virtue of not having a border that is a seafront.

As stated by others, you can get to the Atlantic from Lake Superior. But also, I think of Superior as a freshwater sea so I doubly think Minnesota isn't landlocked

Landlocked means "does not have a border that is a seafront". There's some opinions about it, but that's the definition.

And for the curious a sea is a part of the ocean, by some geologic definitions including seabed and salt water, even if it becomes closed off, and a lake never was part of the sea.

So, the same as the Caspian (actually better because they connect to the ocean through rivers), only freshwater. By the same logic the Caspian Sea is a saltwater lake.

The legal status of the Caspian Sea is a bit weird. It's something between a lake and a sea. It's not a sea, because Russia wants to maintain control over the system of rivers and canals that connect it to the Black Sea, the Baltic Sea, and the White Sea. And it's not a lake, because it's not fully divided between the bordering countries.

I think there is a canal the Soviets built to allow shipping in the Caspian to reach the Black Sea.

Note that international trade is possible using just the Great Lakes, without needing the St Lawrence River, since the lakes are next to Canada.

Canada != Rest of the world.

https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/landlocked-states-of-the...

Reading between the lines of the "aww shucks, how endearing", this guy destroyed many lives, including his own, by doing something totally unnecessary only for his own self-serving ends. Might be an allegory for the current shenanigans at Twitter.

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