Finally! On Labor Day, we launched two Sea Pup kid kayaks designed by Tom Yost. As you may recall, we've been building four of them with father/son teams. The boys are all 9 and 10 years old. We started construction on August 18th. The frames came together very quickly, ready for skinning after three days. Skinning the hulls was fairly time-consuming- a day and a half or so. The decks can easily be done in a half a day, and then the coamings, the trim, the footbraces, the deck rigging, the gunwale rub strips... that all probably adds another three days or so. I suppose eight full days is pretty realistic. I'm sure I could do another one faster, now. We spent a fair amount of time scratching our heads over the little details. The boys did a terrific job, although to be realistic, the vast majority of the work was done by the dads. It's pretty difficult (especially for perfectionistic control-freaks like yours truly) to let the boys 'mess it up', but of course it's more important to keep them meaningfully involved. The little imperfections don't bother the kids much at all, and as long as it looks okay and floats and goes- that's all that really matters. Of course frequently the boys would rather just go play than work on the boats. A lot of the carpentry can be done by the boys, and when putting on the skin, the dads can do the tensioning, and the boys can do the stapling. (speaking of staples, we used 1/4"long Monel (like stainless) available at our local Home Depot, and we bought an electric stapler...there are about 1,000 staples in each boat!) It's been a great project, and the results are truly excellent.

The launching went great. These boats handle beautifully, and at 23 pounds, they're a pleasure to move around. They seem very fast, and track and maneuver extremely well. Although I would prefer a slightly larger boat for myself, I'm actually quite comfortable in the boat, and felt surprisingly stable. A pleasure to paddle. I think the upper end for this boat would be about 5'9", as my legs (I'm 5'7") didn't have much more room in front of them. The other launching dad, Dave, at 6'2", was able to get in by putting his feet through the next station frame, but he's just too big, and was extremely unstable.

Oh yeah, the kids! My son Calder loves it. We went on quite a long paddle, and he did very well. I have to work on the padding and the seat a bit, but otherwise, it's great. Poor Captain Joel, Dave's son. A few days ago he hurt his arm jumping off Calder's bunk bed, so his arm's been in a makeshift sling since then. He wasn't going to be stopped by that, though, and the result can be seen in the picture. The seven-year-old siblings both had a great time in the boats, too.

Including building the strongbacks and buying the stapler, the boats ended up costing about $151 each in materials. A bargain! I like the PVC skin a lot, but I'm eager to build one using either nylon or polyester. It was nice to skip all the coating, though.

I can't possibly give enough credit to Tom Yost. The design is excellent, and his support all through the project made the whole thing possible. He's a tremendous asset to the kayak building community!

If anyone wants to see a bunch of other pics of this project, I'm going to put up another posting with a link to our family webpage. It has a photo album with lots of pics of the whole project. I've been sort of dumping all my pics into the site, so they're not very organized or edited. Too busy! Speaking of pictures, the unskinned frame in the pic does not yet have its' deck stringers. We put a couple of light stringers in the aft deck to support any deck loads, and of course the foredeck ridge. If anyone has any questions about the project, don't hesitate to ask. Steve