Epoxy

Eyak Lake

Cordova, Alaska, USA

Also known as Cordova, Orca Inlet, Copper River Delta, Prince William Sound

When the shaking finally stopped in Cordova, the harbor was too shallow to float a boat.

The Good Friday earthquake of 27 March 1964 was magnitude 9.2, the largest ever recorded in North America and the second largest anywhere. It ran for more than four minutes. Cordova sat in the belt that rose rather than the one that dropped, so the ground here came up and the waterline went down with it. People in town described the harbor falling about seven feet. What had actually happened was the land lifting underneath them.

The deformation covered more than 50,000 square miles in a belt over 500 miles long. Where the seafloor rose it pushed a wave ahead of it that reached Hawaii.

Eyak Lake sits just behind the town and drains to Orca Inlet by a short river. The whole of it, and everything on this board, sits higher above the sea now than it did that March.

Details

Feature: Lake
Build: Epoxy
Material: Solid Walnut
Colour: Caribbean Blue
Size: 10-1/2" x 16"
Completed: May 2025

Shop this Style $350.00 CAD

How this one was made

Walnut, inset, with the dam following the waterline about half an inch out.

Eyak Lake is all arms. Three main ones spreading from a centre, plus a scatter of smaller bays and inlets breaking off them, so what looks like a modest lake for the board size is actually a long run of shoreline. Each arm gets dammed on both sides, and the narrow necks where they meet are where the two lines come closest.

Two colours, the water and the black. The black is doing three jobs here: the lettering, the compass rose, and the customer's text down at the shoreline. The rose is a syringe fill, since those points and the outer ring have outlines too fine to dam at that size.

The house marker is the smallest element on the piece and gets its own white fill. This kind of marker is fiddly out of proportion to its size, because it is a shape with corners rather than a dot, and the corners have to hold.