I recently made a trip to the Seattle area and had some time to tour around the Center for Wooden Boats on Lake Union. I found a kayak there that initially attracted my interest due to its size. This plywood boat is very long and has 4 cockpits! That was enough to get me to take a closer look in itself, but then the construction caught my eye. This is a plywood boat, but it is evidently molded somehow such that the deck smoothly transitions up into the coaming lips all in one piece. This molding process continues on the inside of the cockpit. Very cool. Like plastic wood :-) Inside the cockpits was another neat feature. Each had a tractor style seat, also molded from ply. At least I could imagine those being formed in some kind of press or mold, but the coamings have me stumped. So in the tradition of the old "what is this?" posts we used to get here, I'll pose a "How'd they done do that??" How do you get ply/veneers to smoothly flow into the cockpit shapes like that? As I remember, the deck appeared to be built from two pieces which ran the length of the boat and joined in the middle.

The kayak is apparently a custom/commercial job from northern Europe (Sorry, I don't recall from where). Does anyone from that region know of other examples like this?

Many, Many thanks to Ben Staley for going back to get these photos, as I was dumb enough to leave my camera at home!

Bill