The Pen Makers Boat: #538 Now Sold

Spalted Sassafras and Gun Metal Rollerball Pen

SPALTED SASSAFRAS - Atherosperma moschatum

Of all Tasmanian timbers, Sassafras has the most variable and dynamic colouring. It is a beautiful and pale creamy grey to white normally but can be streaked with rich browns and black heart. It is attainable in two major groupings: Golden Sassafras and Blackheart Sassafras.

Finishing to a grey and golden tone, Golden Sassafras is particularly attractive as a veneer or as a solid timber with knots providing figure. If the tree is infected with a staining fungus it produces Blackheart Sassafras. Blackheart is a timber with distinctive dark brown, black, and even green streaks running through the wood. Blackheart is highly prized for decorative work and bowl turning as no two pieces are ever the same.

Sassafras is versatile. While the wood is light and strong, it is rather soft and easily worked. Renowned in furniture use as a solid, a veneer or a laminated board, Sassafras is used for panelling, mouldings, joinery, veneers, cabinet-making and turnery.

Sassafras grows as an understorey species in lower altitude wet forests throughout Tasmania. It is not related to the timbers known as Sassafras that grow on mainland Australia. It is an aromatic evergreen tree with some quite distinctive qualities; the bark, sap, and associated oils are highly aromatic and smell like cinnamon, while its leaves have a strong sarsaparilla scent. The leaves are dark green, turning yellow as the tree ages. The best trees are found in gullies where Sassafras may reach 45m in height and almost 1 metre in diameter.

Sassafras is a component of wet eucalypt forest and young rain forest where it may live for up to 150–200 years. It is a heavy seed producer although germination can be erratic. Seedlings are subject to heavy browsing by native animals and many young trees become established where they are inaccessible, on mounds or on man fern trunks.

Pen #538 was turned on 20th May 2016 at Mercia Marina in Willington

After Fradley Junction and the drop down through busy locks came a run across glorious countryside to Alrewas and down onto the main Trent River for a short run past fast flowing weirs and our stop at Burton-on-Trent. It was a short half day trip through a few more downhill locks and into Mercia Marina at Willington which would be our next port of call and a floating market with the added benefits of the marina facilities including our much anticipated 240v electrical hook-up.

This was our first time trading from pontoons and it certainly did bring a new set of challenges. The first of which was just getting into position on our pontoon. The wide open spaces created by all the flat water in these new super-marinas can really accelerate any breeze into a ferocious wind that will blow a 60 foot 18 ton flat bottomed narrowboat off course in the blink of an eye. Luckily our fellow traders were there to lend a helping hand.

It wasn’t until the first trading day that many of us appreciated that the very narrow (and shorter than advertised) finger pontoons were going to be a tight squeeze for sharing with another boat. They were only about two foot wide and had no barrier at the far end which at 40 feet long was about two thirds the way along the average boat. We shared our pontoon with a day trip boat which was fine until it started leaving every hour for fifty minutes to convey its passengers around the local canals leaving our customers standing back to look at the pen displays and teetering on the edge of the pontoon!

Like I say a challenging weekend but enjoyable none the less, however it may be something that we don't revisit in the future as our insurance is valid for trading from a towpath only.