: Big brother,
: an experianced man in a kayak tells me a retractable skeg is essential for
: Irish waters.

Pretty much all British commercial kayaks are fitted with skegs to make it
easy to compensate for imperfect trim and/or varying wind and wave conditions.
You'll certainly find plenty of the latter off the west of Ireland, though
perhaps less on the east. But the Guillemot isn't the classic "British" kayak
hull shape, so you may find that a skeg is less necessary - or perhaps more -
some people certainly seem to find that the Guillemot is more manoeuverable
than it is strong tracking, so it perhaps comes down to your kayaking
background. If you are a white water kayaker turning to sea kayaking, then
you may well be quite happy without a skeg. But if the Guillemot is going to
be your first experience with a kayak of any sort, a skeg is probably a
good idea.

: I saw a web page with details of how to make and install a
: rectractable skeg but the web page is no longer available. Anybody got any
: info?

I've seen a few pages on skegs - search the building board's archives. You'll
probably come across a couple of photos of mine, but no links to any
description. Well, you've nudged me into writing one more web page - I've
got 500 Mb of construction photos and progress on getting them into web
pages is a lot slower than building the boat, but people asking questions
on this forum seem to provide the necessary motivation - thanks to you
and to Nick :-)

Andy