AwooView 360
The whole boat is fourteen feet and three inches long — smaller than the photograph you are about to stand inside. Pick a station and look around for as long as you like. Nobody is watching. The eyebrows are, technically, but they’re discreet.
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Finding the stations…
One moment. The camera is being fetched from the shed.
Drag to look around · scroll to zoom · tap a red dot for the story behind it · ← → walk the route
While you’re aboard
Every one of these is somewhere in the panorama above, and every one of them took considerably longer to build than it takes to notice. Catalog numbers are real in the sense that they exist. They are not real in any other sense.
The smokestack does not make smoke. It makes bubbles, continuously, and it is the single most effective piece of equipment aboard for stopping strangers mid-sentence on a dock.
Servo-driven, above a pair of cartoon eyes, and fully capable of expressing disappointment at another vessel’s docking technique. Legitimate maritime technology by the only definition that matters here.
A real wheel, real controls and a genuinely honest amount of responsibility for a boat this size. The switch panel does what the labels say, which was not a given for most of the build.
The most-photographed square foot of the boat, and the seat from which the entire project was tolerated for three years. There is a page for leaving her a kind word about that.
Twenty horsepower on the transom, which sounds modest until you work out that a thirteen-foot waterline caps her at walking-pace-plus-a-bit no matter what you hang back there.
The thing she is named after, and the reason conversations near her end abruptly. A 1908-pattern klaxon on a fourteen-foot boat is not proportionate. That was never the goal.
Why a 360° tour of a very small boat
A photograph of AWOOGA gives you the joke and nothing else: a little tugboat, cartoon eyes, funny. What a photograph can’t give you is the part that took three years — the way the cabin actually fits a person, how close the helm is to the water, how much hardware is packed into a hull you could carry on a trailer behind a hatchback.
That’s what a panorama is for. Standing in the cabin, even virtually, is the moment most people stop finding her funny and start finding her impressive — usually in that order, usually within about four seconds.
She is not the biggest boat in the harbor. She is, however, the only one with eyebrows.
Still to come
“When ready” is the only delivery date on offer. The curator is also the captain, and the captain is usually sanding something.
Every fitting above gets its own marker in the panorama, so the story is where the thing is.
Narration for each station, lightly edited for public consumption. Very lightly.
Tap a surface and see the same spot mid-build, three years and several regrets earlier.
The same route shot on the water instead of on the trailer, once the weather cooperates.
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