Customer Reviews

How to Build a Tin Canoe: Confessions of an Old Salt

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Robb White's descriptions of growing up along the Florida Panhandle sets the stage for one of the funniest, most entertaining books I have read in years. Beginning with a gang of kids, toddlers in diapers to gawky teenagers, who wandered shallow bays and sandy beaches from dawn to dark, White moves on to his Navy years in Puerto Rico, where he spent his off hours (and there were a lot of off them) watching local boat builders, and finally beginning his own boat building business. Stateside, he followed the boat-building trade as best he could, struggling to earn a bare living, with long periods of cash-money work such as crewing aboard tugboats which pushed oil-laden barges around the Gulf Coast and up tiny tidal waterways. I practically rolled on the floor laughing at his accounts of life aboard the tugs, which included ritual trading of tattered "porn" magazines and a crewmate who literally "gutted" an annoying tug captain. Interspersed through lively, often hysterical, accounts of his travels and travails, are delightful chapters about small boats and boating: jury rigging ancient outboard motors, building classic fishing skiffs and featherweight sailing canoes, capturing and cooking the sealife of the Gulf. I couldn't put the "Tin Canoe" down, read it through without stopping and loved every page!

Robb White writes of his wild childhood and wild boating life. And he gets away with it because he's so good! This is candid, uproarious writing of the best sort. It's specific. And you know he knows what he's talking about because he's been there. What a tonic! His work reminds me of Jack Saunders. : ) --A fellow folk writer who hasn't gotten his break yet. Robb's is rough'n'tumble family storytelling, yet it's gentle. It's personal...and it's general. Just the right stuff. More! ...OK, I have to let the cat out of the bag: if you want more, subscribe to the thrifty, friendly little magazine "Messing About In Boats" right now. Robb has been writing biweekly columns for it for years now. What great good times! And fiesty, helpful boating (and living) info, too. (Did you know that Robb is the world's best bass fisherman? He'll tell you why sometime...)

I got this from the library as I am a canoe nut. Turned out more of a continuing "autobiography"(?) in the McManus tradition (THEY SHOOT CANOES. DON'T THEY?)only this is all in the deep south. It is funny, informative and best of all highly irreverant. This guy was corrupted by some of the same forces that did me six decades ago. I am ordering it now for a keeper.

In this slim but tugid volume, Robb White, heretofor known only to a narrow audience of small-boat nuts, introduces the wide world to his native waters, the Florida Gulf Coast, just like Mark Twain did for his, the Mississippi. This is no idle comparison: Like Twain, he has played with and piloted all kinds of boats upon his waters, met all life's characters there, and kept his eyes wide open all the time. If you think his language can't be as pungent, his characers as rich, his stories as deceptively simple -- well, don't judge till you read him. Then you might agree, Huck Finn ain't got nuthin' on ol' Robb White.

If you're a fan of nature or outdoors writing, especially the sort that provides a good deal of local color, you'll probably enjoy this book. It reminded me of William W. Warner's wonderful little book, Beautiful Swimmers, which was about the blue crab and other fisherman of the Chesapeake Bay. (By the way, I can highly recommend Warner's book as it is not as well known as it should be, but it is a much loved classic among those who do. Try reading the reviews here on it and you'll see what I mean. They're practically all rave reviews).

But getting back to White's book, White recounts the life of a Georgia small boat builder and waterman from his earliest childhood to his more mature years. White was practically born building small boats, and it shows, as his knowledge of small boat building and craftsmanship is as broad and deep as the waters he has plied for decades in his homemade canoes.

But the book isn't all about boat building, as White is a first-rate raconteur and tells many funny stories and anecdotes along the way, in addition to giving you his down-home philosophy about people, boats, and life in general. Overall an enjoyable read and if you follow other authors in the genre, like Randy Wayne White, you'll probably want to try Robb White (no relation as far as I know) too.

You will not want to put it down, and Mr. white will leave you wanting much more! A brillient storyteller with a touch of Mark Twain and Will Rogers, but contempory and better!!!
Share the laughter and joy, give this book to someone, be careful, you may not get it back.
You can not, not like it!

There's something wonderfully satisfying about listening to a good storyteller's yarns. And when that storyteller has decades of smart, hilarious material and the skills of a Scheherazade, you just hope it will never end. How to Build a Tin Canoe: Confessions of an Old Salt is that kind of experience: one of my finds of the year. After laughing my way through this memoir by author and lifelong boat-builder Robb White, I've improved my knowledge about (or at least plumbed my ignorance of) much more than building boats.

White grew up in the 1940s in the Florida Panhandle, the ringleader of a rowdy group of children who messed about in boats from first light until they came home and fell into bed at night. They paddled or dragged boats in the shallow waterways, fed themselves from the same waterways, learned the ways of the local marine life, and took care of each other--"Lord of the Flies" without the power struggles. The parents? They were drinking martinis on the porch with their friends; not that there was anything wrong with that, judging by the way Robb White turned out. He built his first boat, the eponymous canoe, from the tin roof of a shed.

White writes that if you want to make children do what you want them to do, keep a close eye on them until they happen to do it -- and then MARVEL. Works every time, he says.

The tales go on; White married his sister's friend who was part of the raggedy pack. ("I raised her from a child" he says.) He entertains the reader with stories of military service in Puerto Rico, his early years of working odd jobs to support his boat building, and some of the hair-raising boats and people he's known in his rich life on the waterways.

I learned a lot about carpentry (chines, lapstrakes, when not to experiment with newfangled things like polyurethane varnish), motors (chokes, two-strokes, how to suck oil out of a broken outboard with a radio aerial, how to start an army surplus storm boat motor). My appetite for fish stew has never been greater. I know that catfish LOVE biscuits and suck them down from the surface in a little vortex. I have at least an idea of what tugboat crews like for breakfast, what happens when you lose your clothes swimming ashore and can only find a clear plastic shower curtain to wrap yourself in, how to carry a passenger and sheets of plywood on a motor scooter... but the most important thing I learned from this wonderful book is the imperative to do what you love, know it inside out and be good at it, enjoy life, and let somebody else worry about the rest.

If your life is a little too hectic, maybe a little too structured, read this book and feel the pressures of life fall away. Listening to Robb White's stories is the little vacation we all need. If you don't think you like audio books, this is DEFINITELY the time to take a chance. The audio presentation, read by the author the year before his death in 2006, is sheer enjoyment. His voice is as Southern as tupelo honey and his story has all the richness and diversity of the waterways he loved so well. Highly recommended.

Linda Bulger, 2009

GET THIS GLORIOUS BOOK! EVERYONE WILL LOVE IT. FUNNY, BUT ALSO SOME REMARKABLE STORYTELLING, THE LIKES OF WHICH WILL HOLD YOU, AND STAY WITH YOU. YOU WILL LEARN NEW THINGS, AND IT WON'T HURT. EXCEPT FOR SOME YANKEE ENVY, IT IS FLAWLESS.
THIS IS THE MOST ENJOYABLE BOOK I HAVE EVER READ IN A VERY, VERY LONG TIME.
WAKE THE KIDS, CALL THE NEIGHBORS, AND GIVE EM EACH A COPY, THEN WAITE FOR THE HUGS AND KISSES.

I believe every story here in "Tin Canoe" appears again in "Flotsam and Jetsam". I didn't care, my quest was to track down Mr. White's boat building methods. I really wanted to find out where to get plans for his sport boat ($75.00), instead, Mr. White took me all over Southern Georgia, Northern Florida, west to New Orleans, east to Puerto Rico and the Bahamas. It took from the end of the civil war to present day to get back here and I still don't have the plans. I'm left trying to figure out why you would sheath tulip poplar with fiberglass and epoxy before assembly? But, instead of heating the shop to 120 degrees to facilitate epoxy outgassing, now I will use heat lamps. Cost of book recovered. I don't know how much else I can take away from this book and put to practical use, the telling here is what's important, but for those that want to go messing around in boats, you might want to bone up on boat ramp launch/recovery techniques and etiquette, what constitutes an adequate mooring rig and how to determine if the other boats close to you are anchored properly. Oh, get a good set of binoculars to take out there so you don't miss anything on the Yahoo channel. And please, don't litter.

Robb White has an in-your-face writing style that is refreshing and extremely readable. With all the hijinks, odd characters and tall tales, he actually tells you something about boat building.