: Hi, Steve. You may want ot look at these plans from Clark Craft. They are
: similar to yours, and about the same difficulty to build, but there are
: boats of various dimensions, and I don't believe any of them are wider
: than 28".

: As a fellow scouter, I wish you success and lots of good trips. I have
: tripped with a couple of these boats in the fleet (16' doubles, paddled as
: singles), and they were just fine.
Steve,

I agree that Clark Craft is a good place to get plans from (my wife bought me the plans for the BK22 for my birthday). See the URL below, I created a Yahoo group for sharing kayak/canoe plans (note: public domain plans only). Two may be of interest to you, the Canvasback and the King Canvasback, check in the Files section along the right hand portion of the screen. My dad and I built two kayaks, back in '86, based on the Canvasback plans that we were able to find and modified them to 14' with a proportional widening of all the plywood frames (despite my dad having, at the time, almost every issue of MI from the '70's and '60's we missed finding the KC plans or that was one of the few issues he did not have). Then we messed up and skinned them with fiberglass cloth/matting/cloth and turned them from nice light frames into heavy kayaks requiring two people to lift each one. Excellent project, though we did not get much use out of those kayaks because of the weight. The BK22 that I will be working on during the winter/spring will be my first boatbuilding experience since those two kayaks.

One point you brought up about the beam width being in the 30" range, I would not let that be a concern except when it comes to ease of paddling. Depending on the height of these scouts, 30" wide beam may interfere with paddling. For safety's sake (I take it most of these scouts have never kayaked before?), however, I would want the beam to be as wide as practical without being wide enough to interfere with paddling. Also, the initial stability helps those who may be a bit afraid of getting into a kayak feel more comfortable. My wife and I rented a sit-on-top kayak when we were on our first honeymoon and the lack of initial stability scared her enough that she would not get on it, after trying to (I ended up not liking the sit-on-top because of lack of back support caused me to get a backache very quickly).

Good luck with your project,
Paul