Bohol’s bigiw amakan sailing off the horizon

Bigiw nga amakan. This is something that would certainly cause a smile among the generations eating the nutribun.

For today’s millennials, however, its building technology would most probably stir some bashing fun. Nigiw nga amakan or simply bigiw amakan is a boat that relies on a carved-out solid wood hull: thin, streamlined-hull carved from decades-old tipoo, tipolo, atipol, antipolo (Artocarpus blancoi).

With the lightweight tipolo and the minimum streamlined draft , the boat simply glides as effortlessly in calm waters as it breaks the surf on its way out to a tempestuous seas. Its secret: with its 01-15 feet long hull, the thin hull belly touches the water with least displacement and friction. 

So designed to be light to eliminate drag, bigiws slice through the issue of displacement, and cuts through the water with ease. One wonders how people before designed the boat in the context of deeply understanding naval engineering and simple physics concepts.

Belonging to the bugsayan categories (paddle boats) that ply the seas of Bohol, bigiws are as common in the waters as the XRMs are in today’s streets. A boat so crisply clear in the memories of the nutribun and hot mongo generation, bigiws are so iconic that its most prominent feature is the woven-bamboo (amakan) walls.

Yes, woven-bamboo strips. At a time when everything else is a perfection of the technologies past, the question of how could a woven bamboo be an integral part of the boat rises. Two things, says boat builder and craftsman Alejandro Hubac, 68, married, and a resident of Salvador Cortes. One is the challenge to make a boat as light, and in the absence of the other light materials, builders found the amakan. Two is how do you waterproof the amakan? With tar, mixing coal, wood and petroleum or harvesting natural resins from trees, to caulk the bamboo walls.

Hubac, who grew up from a family of carpenters and fishermen, shared what he learned of the skill in building boats, including bigiws, after experimenting with the repair of a family boat. “My father told me to gather plywood that can be salvaged from our rotting wooden hulled pumpboat. When I inspected the rot, I found that I could still salvage about 10 feet of hull and some plywood, so I experimented on the repair and I succeeded after many trial fits,” he narrated.

When the neighbors saw him do the boat, request for repairs started to stream. "Every piece that comes out of the shop is proof that I belong to the big leagues," Hubac said.

With his skill improving, he was hired to join a commissioned mass boat-building shop. Here, he painstakingly learned the bamboo weave technology which would get him into his own boat-building shop in the family’s copra sheds. First, one would need a solid tipoo log, let it air dry, and then the planning stage begins by drawing the hull form.

Tipolo, when dried, is a lightweight equivalent for the balsa wood. When it is not so soft and not too porous, putting a coating of tar on the hull extends its water saturation levels.

Using a hand axe, an assortment of curved chisels, some long handled and some needing mallets, the boat maker would have days of pounding and scraping wood, sometimes aided by burning out portions that need to go away.

“The trick is to go slowly and surely," he shared. "This patience would have to be doubled when the tricky routing of the hulls starts, as this determines the float, and the draft as well as the position of the hull extensions,” he added.

Sleekly carved to maintain a streamlined hull, the bigiw’s waterline is barely below the wooden hull. But with the boat redesigned to be one that can ride choppy waters, a boat hull extension would provide an additional space, additional loading capacity, and protection from the water into filling the boat.

A bigiw’s hull extension is a woven bamboo, caulked in alquitran (tar) made from coal, wood and petroleum, or bought commercially. As alquitrans are black, this too, lends the bigiw its deep black color but its coating is thin enough to show the weave, which casts interesting designs when reflected in the water.

Designed as a wave breaker, bigiws have long pointed bow (dung).

From the wooden hull, a prow called pamaong rises and is held on by wooden strips to act as gunwale concealed in 4 to 6 feet of amakan covered deck. In some boats, the end piece of the pamaong sits a rounded cleat which an anchoring rope courses through for better berthing.The bigiw’s opening, relatively smaller, starts after the splashboard outrigger boom crossing (called platik) until about four feet where open hull allows for one or two seats (called langkapan) to the ulin (stern) when it is again a covered deck of amakan.

Now, with marine plywood, bigiws then were commonly crafted from woven bamboo slatted strips (amakan), and fastened to the canoe hull by bamboo ribs topped by wooden gunwales. 

“It is always tricky putting in bamboo sticks from the hull and the shaped gunwale. You would need patience, a set of tricks, and creativity,” Hubac, who is fondly called Andot, said. “These bamboo sticks that are so used to make the boat even much lighter, this reinforces the gunwale which would be critically holding the amakan walls held only by ‘lipak sinagushan’ as clips,” he said.

With the wooden hull and framework done, the next job is making the woven bamboo strips into amakan walls. From a freshly harvested and well selected bamboo considering long nodes, the builder cuts 8-10 inches of tubes between nodes. These he stores in cool, dry places away from direct sunlight to air-dry. After a day or two, be begins to cut half-inch sticks.

From these, he makes between 6-8 thin slices for the amakan weave. Weaving the bamboo slatted strips can take between a day to three days, while making sure it is kept off the rain or sun or these will warp and grow fungi which ruins the weave.

Affixing the woven walls to the hull and gunwales is another tricky job, but with the right measurements, it should get right, he said. For stable balance, bigiws sport outriggers for a better platform for fishermen in their sorties out into the sea.

The bigiw’s double outriggers are made of 4 to 6 feet of bamboo tubes (katig) which have natural ballast properties. These connect to the boat hull by a bamboo pole boom (platik). The platik is tied firmly to the boat hull with hull anchors, to allow it to balance on its outriggers. But considering that bigiws afford much smaller storage spaces for a night fishing sortie, bigiws have been the fisher’s day fishing boat when one needs no thick jackets, a meal pack, and an assortment of deep sea fishing implements.

In Bohol, where the Amihan (easterly winds) and the Habagats (Monsoons) are notoriously fearsome, for people who go out to sea, a properly designed sleek boat that can ride the waves and cut through the surf spells the difference between getting easily capsized and losing the fish catch or the fisher's life and paddling home safely.

The bigiws, owing to their relatively smaller open hulls and closed decks, reduce the chances of getting in water. That, added by the recent skirting which fishermen use in foul weather, it makes the bigiws virtually an unsinkable empty ballast tank.

The strong winds which make boats veer off steering is a little match to the covered decks of the bigiw, as its sleek design catches very manageable wind making steering the boat easy, even in gale force winds. The sleek wooden hulled boat also makes it easy to break off the surf and glide with the waves, making it a true wave surfer of sorts.

Bigiws own up a generous slice of memories among fishers in the 1950s onwards. It has been the favored paddle boats for the elite fishers who go beyond the boiling surf into the deep blue to catch the legends they can own up bragging rites for.

In calmest of seas to the most turbulent storms, the bigiw and fisher have welded a partnership similar to the bond an extreme motorcycling builds to his racing machine.

While bigiw amakan technology may have been widespread in Bohol until the late 1970s, the dawning of the marine plywood and steel epoxy has changed the rules in boat building. Add to that the ban on cutting protected endemic tree species and this last nail seals the box that marks the dusk of these iconic paddle boats.

Now, due to easily available and more durable materials, bigiw amakan could drift off to the horizon, its prime now overtaken by the onslaught of modern plywood and fiberglass in tricky boat-building here.

Building a bigiw amakan now may be impractical, but to honor the skill, craftmanship and forefathers' deep understanding of maritime science, Andot may be the last hope. (rahc/PIA-7/Bohol)

SLEEK STEALTHY BIGIW. A wooden hulled boat with woven bamboo walls, bigiws, which used to ply Bohol seas, are the testament of Boholano craftmanship and profound knowledge of naval engineering and marine science. Now considered extinct in Bohol, resurrecting the bigiw-making tradition may be this generation's last hope of seeing these unique boats again. (PIA Bohol/Digital image by Bo Johannsen Chiu)

HYBRID BIGIW. A bigiw which uses plywood hull extenders is the new bigiw, says Hubac who thinks weaving bamboo strips for hull extenders is impractical with marin plywood now easily available. (rahchiu/PIA7/Bohol)

LIGHTWEIGHT BOAT WITH HEAVY TASKS. The framework of the bigiw is a flimsy bamboo sticks attached to a shaped gunwale. But whne the amakan walls are attached to it, the walls bind the bamboo ribs to the hull and gunwale, creating a tight bond. HWen caulked with resin or tar, the lightweight issue is solved. (PIABohol/digital image by Bo Johannsen Chiu)

AMAKAN-COVERED DECKS. With amakan forming a watertight wrap on the boat, the chances of getting in water becomes considerably less, and sinking is virtually impossible. (PIA Bohol/Digital image by Bo Johannsen Chiu)

With marine plywood, there would be no need for bamboo ribs. The new material has somehow contributed to the redesign which also helped people forget the fine tradition of craftmanship in local boat-building. (rahc/PIA-7/Bohol)