Back in the late 1990s I was invited on a agro-forestry tour of parts of China for a few weeks with folks from the Chinese Academy of Forestry. The tour was sponsered by the International Tree Crops Association. Our main guide was a forest geneticist whose main emphasis was Paulonia. The Chinese plant it all over the place, often along roads. It grows very fast, you can feed the leaves to livestock, and they have been making furniture out of it for quite awhile.

I have never seen or heard of large-scale plantings in the western US. You would be hard pressed to get long logs (>10 m) from the trees I saw, but you should be able to get kayak length pieces if you wanted.

We visited one Paulowina furniture factory that was a fully integrated manufacturing facility. It started with piles of 3 meter long logs which were hand loaded onto a cart, pushed over to a small bandsaw, milled into boards which were put back on the cart the log came on, pushed over the the woodshop where they were put through planers and joiners and then made into dressers and chests of drawers with pictures of Snoopy and Woodstock on them. There was a frightening lack of shop safety equipment, but the whole operation was pretty amazing. Didn't see any boats being built...

You might try contacting:

International Tree Crops Institute
Box 1272
Winters, California 95694

I'll poke around and see if I can find any western US sources...