Mosshead

./makekayak.sh prequel

July 16th, 2006

“A” worked on a shell script for automating new wiki creation in her wiki farm at work all last week. So by the time the morning arrived to go pick up our kayak kits, her dreams had merged into automating her kayak building shell script (hence the title for those of you who have no idea what I’m gabbling on about).

We usually rent Eddylines from Boston Harbor Marina for tooling around the Eld Inlet in southern Puget Sound, but there’s only so much exploring one can do from the same launch point. We’ve both always wanted to do more touring and as we grow older, wilderness camping via boat is more enticing than hurking our gear through the wilderness on foot like we’ve always done.

For months I’ve watched Craigs List, eBay and other local listings for good used touring sea kayaks. Something with good initial stability and really good secondary stability. Our eventual intent as we improve our skills and gain experience is to explore the San Juans, the Queen Charlottes and the coastal Olympic National Park.

But … sea kayaks are an expensive little toy! The secondary market for touring ranges between $1.7k -$5k per boat. I’ve always thought wooden boats had more style than composites but strip kayaks take far too long to build. Most people seem to spend at leat 2 years on them and I don’t like having unfinished projects that long, especially because I don’t know how long we’ll have access to our current workshop. I was reminded of  pygmy boats which I always see at the wooden boat fairs, but had completely forgotten about. They make stitch ‘n’ glue sea kayak kits and the boats are both attractive and very sea worthy, designed specifically for sea kayaking in the Pacific Northwest. Best of all, they can (supposedly) be built in about 80 hours.
After much internet searching and reading, we decided we wanted to build pygmy boats - the coho model. Although we’re fairly confident that we’ll be happy with it, you don’t really know until after you use a boat for a season. So, one of our deciding points was worst case scenario, if we decide we don’t like them, we should be able to at least sell them for what we’ve got invested. So it’s a relatively low risk investment. I highly doubt that’ll happen though. The boats are well designed by enthusiasts and the kits are complete and reportedly have good instructions - always a good combination.

Oh, and the price - less than $1k each for a boat that I think is more attractive as well as more functional than a lot of manufactured alternatives.

The boats are supposed to be buildable in about 80 hours time. Our vacation begins in 4 weeks and we plan to camp at Lake Ozette, which will be our maiden kayak camping trip.

Saturday morning:

It was hard to keep this schedule: the brakes went out on the car earlier in the week and had to be fixed, my computer completely melted down Friday morning and my day was spent trying to coax data off a damaged hard drive instead of setting up our workspace. Without our looming vacation date, I think we would have procrastinated another week. But it was a beautiful day, the Lavendar Festival was in full swing in Sequim (just up the road from Port Townsend) and we needed to get started.

We chose the coho model for it’s multi-chine design and maneuverability. The trips we take will likely be no longer than 2 weeks and there should be plenty of stowage for our gear. The stability also appealed to us as we’re beginner/intermediate paddlers.

In any case, so today we drove up to Port Townsend and examined all the models in the show room and the Coho was definitely the model we wanted. It was well worth the drive to fully examine a built boat before buying the kit.

When we got home, we cleared out the garage and made work benches - our landlord’s father had built 2 canvas baidarkas on a strongback, so we just had to make another surface with plywood and sawhorses and then level them. Of course, cleaning out a garage is always somewhat time consuming so that was all we had time for today.

We both fell asleep reading through our build manuals.

Entry Filed under: pygmy sea kayaks