: Paul, btw, the person you are preaching to, note the CSFW after his
: name, Clear Stream Fine Woodworking. Dan is an often contributor
: to this forum and also designs and sells kayaks and canoes in
: his side business, professionally.

So let me rephrase that: As an experienced owner of a canoe with a nice hull design, I want to suggest that when he wants to do his own design he might want to examine (or outright steal--that's between him and the price of Gilpatrick's book) the bottom curvature of the Puddle Duck.

In his book "One, Two, Three, Infinity", George Gamow proposes that there are infinities and there are larger infinities. For example, the list of numbers is infinite, and you can assign a number to any point on a line, and have an infinite number of olines passing through each point. Then you can have each line assume an infinite number of shapes, and all those curves would no longer have a one-to-one relationship with all the numbers available. Thus you'd have a bigger infinity of curved shapes. Rather than let Dan struggle through the trial and error approach of sifting through an infinite number of hull shapes, I thought I'd suggest one as an alternate starting point to the Rob Roy and Wee Lassie forms which are so often cited.

This is of course a kayak forum, not a math class, so I thought that this bit from Wikipedia might bring things back into topical range: "Gamow then worked at a number of Soviet establishments before deciding to flee Russia because of increased oppression. His first two attempts to defect with his wife, Lyubov Vokhminzeva, were in 1932 and involved attempting to kayak: first a 250-kilometer paddle over the Black Sea to Turkey and then from Murmansk to Norway. Poor weather foiled both attempts." Doesn't say if he built the kayak.

PGJ