Coming up -we are off to Charlotte, Las Vegas, Phoenix, and Denver.
Northern Indiana Lakes magazine recently featured a story about people who built their own wooden boats. Here’s an excerpt:
“Joe Hilliard, a commercial photographer in Elkhart, also caught the serial kayak bug. An accomplished paddler, Hilliard already owned a number of kayaks -fiberglass, folding, and conventional plastic-but had often considered building a wooden boat. He certainly knew his way around wood, having built houses, decks, and even banjos before.”
Above: Testing my boat before heading to the Boundary Waters.
“Then in 2005, Hilliard read about a wooden kit kayak, the Pygmy Coho, in Sea Kayaker magazine; several reviewers cited its exceptional handling. Further, the Coho weighed in at about half that of Hilliard’s other kayaks, a big advantage when transporting boats.
That was all it took. Hilliard liked the idea of going the kit route, because evrything was provided and all the wooden pieces were precut for precision. So he ordered the kit and started carefully working his way through the instruction, thinking that he might eventually build a boat for each member of his family -all four of them.
No sooner was it done than Hilliard’s new kayak was put to the test. “I finished it around noon on a Friday,” he says, “paddled it on the river for about ten minutes to make sure it didn’t leak, and then we left for a week-long camping trip to the Boundary Waters wilderness area.” The Coho lived up to its reviews, he says, even when loaded with more than one hundred pounds of camping gear.”
Above: Paddling my feathercraft folding kayak in Canada in the North Channel of Lake Huron.
“Like many builders of wooden boats, Hilliard initially worried about scratching his new project’s sleek hull on rocky shorelines. “I had to have a talk with myself,” he explains. “I asked, ‘Did you build a piece of furniture or did you build a boat?’” Even though he was prepared for the worst, Hilliard says that no scratches have yet penetrated the tough epoxy coating.
In early 2008, Hilliard started a new Pygmy Osprey kayak, which will feature a dark cherry stain on its deck. Because he can only squeeze in work on the boat between photography assignments, he doesn’t expect to complete the new kayak until this winter.”
Above: We used my wooden kayak for a photo shoot that ended up as this billboard for Elkhart General Hospital.
