: How to measure the boat. They are already made but I want to be
: able to give specific measurements because it will most likely
: be shipped to someone as I am in rural Newfoundland. I am not
: using plans to build my boats, just kind of creating them so I
: would also like to start logging what I am doing.

For length and width: Assume you are building a rectangular box around the boat. make this imaginary box so it has straight sides, and just touches your boat. measure the inside dimensions of the box to get length and width, or beam.

Put the boat in the water with enough ballast in it to simulate the weight of a paddler. If you have a boat built for a small paddler that might be 100 pounds. If it is for a larger paddler it might be 150 pounds--or 250 pounds! Your design displacement is the weight of the boat plus the weight of the paddler, or the weight of the sand bag which represents the paddler. So, a 40 pound boat for a 150 pound paddler would have a design displacement of 190 pounds.

Make a mark one inch above your waterline. Add enough sand to sink your boat that extra inch. Probably it will take 35 to 60 pounds of extra sand. That gives you information on what a typical load might be for a paddler with some additional gear. If you want you can keep doing this until you have only 3 or 4 inches of freeboard. That will give you some idea of the maximum payload of the boat. If you fill the boat with water instead of sand, you can pump out the water and measure the volume in liters. This is a pretty good estimate of how much the boat displaces.

With a marker, mark several spots along the length of the boat where the boat rests in the water. That is the water line at the design displacement. Free board is the height of the sides above this waterline. Depth is how much of the boat is below the water line. Find the deepest spot. If you made another imaginary box to fit around the waterline you drew, the inside measurements of that box would give you the waterline length and width.

If you can get a couple of friends to help, two can hold real boards along the sides of the boat, and along the sides of the waterline, while the third person measures the distance between those boards. Just keep a picture of the imaginary box in your head, and you'll do this just fine.

The computer software used for boat designs makes calculating these numbers a problem for the computer, not you.

good luck with your measuring.

PGJ