: My 7 yr old son asks me weekly
: "when are you going to build me a kayak?". So, I've decided to
: build him one and am having some difficulty deciding which boat would be
: suitable for a 7 yr old.

As if you didn't have enough choice already (a luxury for boat builders
which off-the-shelf composite kayak buyers don't get:), you can always
scale an adult design - especially strippers.

I built a 5/6 scale Guillemot Great Auk, which is a nice boat. There are
some things I'd change if I was doing it again.

1) I skipped the cockpit recess - this was a bad idea as the knees are under
the pitched deck and it is really difficult to brace the knees for a roll.
Whatever you do here, as the child grows, the knee and foot position will
change, so you need some sort of adjustable knee brace as well as movable
footrests.

2) I scaled the cockpit as drawn in Nick's book. This results in a cockpit
that needs a custom spraydeck. If I were doing it again, I'd use an ocean
cockpit of the same size as the Valley Anas Acuta, so I could use an off-
the-shelf deck (we have two other boats with this sized cockpit, so it
means you can have one spare which fits several boats).

3) I didn't add a retractable skeg, which means that trim is a bit critical -
especially given that the cargo weight for a camping trip is bigger in
proportion to paddler weight than it would be for an adult. Having built a
skeg for my own boat (a hybrid Cormorant), I would definitely have one in a
kids' boat (indeed, I may have to retro fit one at the same time I hack the
boat to add a cockpit recess...)

The Great Auk is a good design to scale, since it is a fast hull shape
with a long waterline length for its LOA. I'm far too big for it, so it has
non-existant primary stability for me, but it gets more stable at speed,
and I can cruise at 5 miles per hour (circumnavigated Lake bala in under an
hour, for a distance of over five miles), which is a lot faster than I can
drive any other boat I own. The secondary stability is not bad (especially
for a lighter paddler), and the boat turns well to a strong lean...

A small boat is important, as windage is critical for a light paddler - a boat
that is a shade too big can be ballasted (or used for overnight trips) when
the paddler is young, and retired to day tripping as they get bigger. A big
boat tends to be very hard work for a small paddler in a wind, even if the
trim is perfect and there is no weathercocking - just paddling into a
headwind is epic if the boat is sitting high in the water and the paddler
has less than half the muscle mass to drive it of an adult...

The composite boat that seems to get most approval from young paddlers in the
UK is the Qaarsut - which is basically an Igdlorssuit kayak in fibreglass, like
an Anas Acuta but not scaled up for a European paddler the way that boat was.
The commercial ones of these come with a retractable skeg fitted off-centre,
which helps to avoid clogging with sand/gravel, and they are quite long boats,
but with low windage and enough rocker that they turn really well. You could
do a lot worse than using Bryan Hansel's Free!Ship files to build an Iggy.

Andy