On Saturday at GLTAG, Bob Berg decided to lead an atlatl fishing expedition. The basic plan was to construct two homemade catamarans from canoes. Me and my dad eagerly jumped in on the idea, we figured that it would be a once-in-a-lifetime event. So we presented our willingness to help to Bob, who happily sent us to cut down several spruce poles three to four inches in diameter. We used a machete and saw to bring them down, then a large knife to trim the branches. These each were cut into two, giving us a total of four poles. We then lashed then canoes together, a task handled mostly by my Dad, whose memory of lashing techniques was fresher than mine.
The next step was putting the shooting platforms (two on each catamaran) for the atlatlists to stand on. Safety harnesses were added to ease the amount of balancing the thrower would have to do. These were essential as I would later find out.
On the catamaran pictured, we added a torch holder with twenty rolls of birch bark to burn. Along with the torch, a shield was erected to protect the eyes of the thrower directly behind torch. After that, we worked on building harpoons for the fishing expedition until the evening.
I am the thrower on the left. As you can see, the torch was quite effective, we could see to the bottom of the bay.
Alas, no fish were seen. The carp will live to see another day. We had a great experience and I will remember this all my life.
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