In the spring of 2000, my oldest son and I went on a canoe trip down the Charles River with my son's Boy Scout troop. One of the other boys had a plastic injection molded kayak. In the evening, after we had set up camp, my son borrowed the kayak and I was impressed with how easy it was for him to control and how well he took to it. This was when we started discussing building our own.

Years earlier, when I was finishing highschool, I had built a canvas covered kayak for my own use. Shortly after I got married and we were living in an apartment, some 7 years after I built it, I sold it for $50 (mostly because there was noplace to store it). I decided that it would be a good father-son project to build a set of these.

I looked around on the web for plans, and found Clarkcraft, where I had bought my original plans, and ordered some plans for the same kayak. Time was getting short because about 10 months had passed since the last canoe trip, and we wanted to have these done in time for the 2001 trip.

I cut out the frames in April 2001, and then things sat for a couple weeks. May 1, 2001, I started assembly.

As of today (5/8/2001) we have one frame complete and the other almost complete. Once the frames are built, I will coat them with epoxy to seal the wood and then cover them with cloth.

The original plan was to use the cloth covering and epoxy for the cloth from Cory Freedman at The Skin Boat School in Anacortes, WA. He was very helpful over the phone, but these kayaks are much less traditional than his are. The cloth is an 8.9 oz. ballistic nylon and the epoxy will make it somewhat translucent. With any luck, the materials will arrive in time. The problem was that it became obvious that the materials would not arrive in time, so I covered the kayaks with Naugahide.

We expect to have them in the water for this weekend's camping trip down the Charles. I will to be posting pictures of the rest of the construction and of the boats in the water.

We got the boats in the water for 5/12/2001. Unfortunatly, I also got my camera in the water (by flipping my kayak), so I don't have any pictures of it. I will post pictures, soon, of the mostly finished boats.