Kayak building tricks and problems

Kayak #4 has two shapes that makes building a challenge. The sharp bow and stern bottom in combination with the flattish middle section requires a twist of the strips along the keelsection. At the same time sidestrips need to be bent sideways to carry down a the curvature of the shear down towards the keel.

The first mentioned shape causes the middle section of the keel to be pushed up and away from the form. Perhaps the problem would not have been there with stapled strips? Alternatively the strips could have been layed out differently? I do have a plan however - the keel section is still not fixed to the bow, so I can extend it forwards and push it back down and out. What may be interesting is to see the technique to keep strips aligned without staples, and to have them pressed together. All the complex forces cannot be fixed at this stage by stapling. The forces would only lift the staples up and out as they did in my attempt to fix the hoovering keelsection.

Stripbuilt kayaks

Are you thinking of, or decided, to build a kayak? I decided to build or aquire a stripbuilt kayak after seeing photos of our own mid-winter paddle excursion in the local newspaper. Compared to my plastic kayak the stripbuilt kayak was much more admirable in the photo. Secondly I got a link to Kayak Foundry software. Ross Leidy in Canada has developed it. The software gave me the options to experiment with extreme kayak shapes. Extreme measures are not for mass market and I wanted to break out of the existing kayak design limits.

At this time I've designed and built two kayaks for prototyping. The designs received much scepticism. Now two more traditional models are in the process. The value of designing is that I learn to understand chines, rockers, width, length, w-hulls and rounded hulls. As you may know the kayak shape affects how the kayak behaves and how manouverable it is. Trying out kayaks of different makes is another possibility, but would you understand why?

SeaStrip (6,20 x 0,38 meter) might be the narrowest kayak you have seen. Perhaps a more appropriate name is the "Needle". This comes to peoples mind when they see it.

Alma's kayak is a kids kayak. Designed as a scaled down traditional kayak. Scaled down in order to facilitate comfortable paddling for small people, without common knowledge on how capable toddlers of 3 years are to maintain blance and or bracing with the paddle. With practical experience we would discourage parents to put pontoons on the sides of the kayak. Try rolling a kayak with side floats and when you're upside down you will know what I mean.

Imitating established designs is another challenge. How can photos of profiles and measures be used to build a similar kayak? You may recognise this halfbuilt kayak having some extra design strips of oak in the hull. Wood selection can be used to make harder chines than used in the printed forms that would strips are built on.

Once you have one design and know how it behaves next temptation will be to make adjustments. The two prictures below are of the fourth design originating from the previous imitation. Stern and bow have been narrowed down among other things. I would expect this kayak to be faster, dive and cut waves and to be less sensitive to sidewinds. It should be less bumpy in choppy waters.

Especially the curvy shapes are admirable I've noticed. Dimensions of kayak building and custom designs is unlimited, so are also the possibilities to design and build something out of your scope of abilities.

At the moment the third kayak is getting epoxied and fiberglassed while the fourth has the hull ready for sanding. When you have and excellent finnish of the basics in the hull it becomes tempting to do some inlay work, preferably something that falls in naturally with the wood grains. There is of course a limit on how much the strips allow bending.

Valley Nordkapp in windy conditions - trimming

Yesterday was the day after the gale of 16 m/s wind from the south against the Ekenäs archipelago on the Finnish south coast. Some wind was still present and kept boaters on sheltered waters with sails down. For me it was an excellent opportunity to get familiar with the waters outside the Paddlingsfabriken renting cottage. Significant wave hight on the Baltic sea was on 5 meters yesterday. I might have had a maximum of 2 meters today and they were quickly dying out. At noon time they might have been 1.5 meters. My plan was to take some admirable photos with my Olympus waterproof pocket camera, while still not knowing what kind of wave formation I would have out there between the reefs.

Since I was going alone I chose to take the less challenging boat - the PE Valley Nordkapp. Someone else would have been happy with the boat, but to me there was not much of fun. I had none of watersplasches in the face. The ride was as dry as it can be. There was a slight tendency of the boat to turn down from the wind while paddling, and a more or less immediate fall down of the bow when I stopped paddling to take pictures. Of course the waves did their job in turning the kayak on top of the effects of the wind. Another reason could have been my spare clothes in the stern hatch. No other load was present except my own weight. It had been much wiser to load them in the front to balance the kayak for headwinds and using the skeg to make it fall down. Travelling light in the boat and especially the bow made the ride extreamly dry. I think it also made the going back home on surf less of a joy. Catching waves and surfing them was a struggle. Mostly I could sea the waves going much faster and giving almost no push. Skeg up or down did not even matter much for tracking on the surf.

Despite the unfavourable weight trimming I did get as good pictures as possible while on a paddle alone. With good paddler company and a helmet on, getting ontop of one of the slippery rocks had given even better waterspray shots. Another kayaker had also put some perspective and scale to the swelling seas.

Capsized before the age of four

Today was another milestone in my young childs life. She capsized her kayak on the paddle to the beach. Some drama appeared but not the kind I or you might have pictured.

We had prepared for a capsize to happen by visiting the public swimmingpool along the winter. I urged her to do jumps and dives on deep water while I stood by to pick her up. I urged her to blow bubbles in the water. She never really wanted to do a dive other than as a jump from the pool edge. Her favourite was to imitate watergymnastics from the neighboring pool, or dance to music. She does swim with some boyancy aid. That's it!

This tipping happended fairly much because she reached for the water with her right hand and went over. Holding tight with her left hand to the paddle she managed to momentarily go under the water. By holding on to the paddle and working herself up with her left hand, and with the PFD she kept herself with nose and mouth above the water. She screamed! She was clearly in distress. "MY COCKPIT IS TAKING IN WATER!!" I was expecting her to cough at least a little, but no. Her main concern was the water in the cockpit. I used the sponge and had it dried up soon enough, and we paddled ashore. She made the last meters on her own. No trauma.

Time for a swim/play in shallow water and then we paddled back home. She did the first 100 meters by her own, and the remaining 500 meters she wished for a tow.

For anyone reading this and considering similar exercizes with their toddler, I would strongly urge them to first develop their own control of their boat. When your toddler has capsized it is not adviceable to use many seconds to position yourself for an assist. My guess is she was less than 6 seconds in a capsized position, maybe 4. Experience with older paddlers tells me when someone is going to capsize, and I am quite often on the move already when they go. For a toddler a first traumatic capsize is likely to affect her relationship with boating for the rest of her life.

Perhaps she decided to do a capsize. All previous tours were done without the spraydeck. This was the first time using it. Or maybe it made her moves too stiff and connected to the boat deck. Have to look into that, and perhaps design a pfd that goes better together with the spraydeck.

I think we will have fun and play with some edging tomorrow.

Turning a kayak

Every almost pro (sea)kayaker knows how to efficiently turn their kayak using paddlestrokes. But what if they were put into a tandem kayak, or if they were less than 4 years old? Would they still be able to turn?

My "toddler" daughter found a new and fun skill in her. Since a couple of weeks back I felt frustration. She just would not turn the kayak or go backwards. Now - all of a sudden she went as fast backwards as she did forwards. That felt like a milestone and made me glad. On top of that she did turn the kayak. Perhaps not in a very controlled manner, and so far in one direction. But still it is a beginning that I am proud of. She also enjoyed wigging the kayak, a beginning to edgeing. What really gives her pelasure is to paddle over to the sandbeach and play with other kids in the water. Kayak handling becomes part of a childs summer play on the beach.

Ever seen a tandem kayak really turn? Another beginner couple came for a trial paddle. They were looking for an activity were leg handicap would not be in the way. The preferred choice was to use a very stable tandem. Safely on water the typical problems of coordination of two paddlers in place of one appeared. Using some sets of excersises the kayak started to move in a fairly straight line. Because of the handicap of the paddler in the cockpit in the back, operating the rudder pedals his feet was not an option. I decided to teach them the Stern-Rudder and the Bow-Rudder, and then to do them in sync so that when Bow-Rudder is used in the front right side, the Stern-Rudder is used in the back on the same side. Once the paddlers found the first feeling of that syncronised stroke the kayak turned more sharply than I've seen no tandem kayak turn before. It looked like a dram and it must have felt like a dream in comparison to the first 30 minutes. This couple got hooked on doing the turns. And when leaving for home that one teaching was on the top of their mind.

I was glad to be able to help and teach them an impressive tandem turning stroke.

Hull sections in K1 kayaks?

As sea kayakers we would demand our kayaks to have hull sections that prevents the kayak from beeing flooded. Typically the hatches do this work for us. They are also excellent places to store our camping gear and food. In the worst case senario a fully flooded kayak would dive forward an unknown distance from the location where it was seen for the last time above surface.

The Annual Gullö Runt was paddled for the 27th time today. The distance is 20 km, starting from Ekenäs and going around the Gullö island. More than 60 paddlers appeared to sunny Ekenäs. 18 of them were in the so-called competition class, and some of them are officially competition kayakers that train hard almost every day. The fastest paddler did the round in 1 hour and 24 minutes. They paddle K1 kayaks and the like. Myself decided to use the SeaStrip, a strip build kayak of my own design. It is fast, but I might not be the man to paddle and maintain the speed of the top paddlers. Starting to consider myself a recreational paddler in comparison...
Considering I did a K1 paddler rescue while "competing" my total speed of 10 km per hour was not too bad.

When bracing on the K1 for the rescue from my 38 cm wide SeaStrip I noticed that the K1 kayak had a hull section wall behind the seat. Would I have known I might have emptied the water before the rescue, but I did not. It bugs me I did not emty the water! I also started to wonder why hull sections or bulkheads have not been introduced to the K1's for common safety. A Swedish competition kayaker diseased in the winter of 2008 as his kayak was flooded. His fellow kayaker had no means of getting him out of the cold water, but the kayaker died of hypothermia while being towed to the shore. Had there been bulkheads - the flooding would have been minor and even without emptying the kayak he would have been able to paddle or be towed ashore, and in a fairly good shape for final recovery. So why don't K1 builders start adding bulkheads?

Stripbuilt Nordkapp alike kayak

With two stripbuilt kayaks on the journey towards the bright future it is time to add a third, fairly ordinary kayak model to the set of Paddlingsfabriken stripbuilt kayaks. It was the 620 cm long and 38 cm wide fast kayak with a rudder, then the 350 cm long toddlers kayak, and now a model following the lines of the Valley Nordkapp. We might offer either of them with client specific modifications - sharper chines, flatter hull, wider, more narrow... lower deck.... you name it. We are curious ourselves to see the hull beeing built and to try and compare its' perfomance against the factory built counterparts.

The hatchcover solution will get some special focus. We are targeting on excellent dryness of anything that has been stored underneeth.

Finetuning selfrescues

We had a warm and beatiful day today. T-shirt and factor 25+ weather. Two couples went kayaking, and myself went doing some rolling and remounting excercise in the Finnish midsummer dawn.

One couple went for a slightly longer daytour. The husband of the woman had previous kayaking experience and desired to share the experience with his partner. They both joined my kayaking class the previous day and quickly became comfortable in paddling and manouvering their kayaks. Today they picked the faster single kayaks from yesterdays class. It was another success of enjoying nature and getting even more comfortable with kayaking.

Another couple went on a first time paddle for a couple of hours. They were equipped with a stable tandem kayak. Should not say it is impossible to capsize it - but almost. This couple was inspired by a paddler passing by under the Snäcksund bridge to Ramsholmen. Again happy faces. We will do it again.

I used the evening to finetune my selfrescues. Rolling right and left. Sculling up and sweeping. With force and speed, and with slow smooth motion. I did find a couple of positions where the lift of the paddle and something in the "hip" movement did not match perfectly and I failed to do an unforced roll. After a failed roll, sculling up did not seem to work as an immediate backup. Had to go back down and start from the beginning. This will be my homework for the next training session: To fail a roll and then on halfway up, with a sinking paddle, switching to a sculling brace, from where rising up should be safe and easy.

Re-entry and roll with a closed spraydeck succeeded first time for me. There was a little bit of nervousness when being underneeth. An anxiety was closing in on me while I let the paddle go to fix the spraydeck using both hands. I had to "trackback" in my head and convince myself that a) I do still have oxygen in my blood and lungs for many more heartbeats, b) It is also possible to go and sip for air without rolling if I fail. c) calm down - close the spraydeck as you normally do above water - grap the paddle - roll up. Easy! And yes!! I was up with spraydeck closed!

Some improvement is still needed on the re-entry-spraydeck-roll. One disappointment with my performance was that the cockpit flooded with as much water as when doing the re-entry-roll with spraydeck open. Some more confidence and finetuning should improve those scores too.

Mounting the Valley Nordkapp by "jumping" up from the water to initially lie across the cockpit seems to be quickest. I also have less water to pump out. At the moment cross-mounting is much better than re-entry and roll measured by liters of water.

All while doing the training manouvers I could hear cheering and applaudes. "He tipped again!!" And after awhile - applaudes! A group of boys had much fun around their illegal campfire on the shore.