Last spring/early summer I built a kayak for my 8-year-old. It's a scaled reproduction of the MacMillan kayak at the Pilgrim Monument and Provincetown museum in MA. I took the full size lines drawing and reduced it 15%. This yielded a kayak just over 14' long with a beam just over 16". I have some friends from Greenland who have built kayaks for kids, and according to the way they'd size it this kayak is both too long and too wide for her. I'm assuming that the kayak will grow with her.

As for ribs, deck beams, and the like- there are 16 deck beams plus masik, and 16 ribs. That's a lot of mortises to cut by hand. I wouldn't do that again, at least for a kid's kayak. H.C. Petersen shows 8 deck beams and ribs. The point was to practice building a replica, and the original was an actual hunting kayak, so I'm sure it needed the strength. In adapting the design I did alter the size of the cockpit. The original had a round 16" mast hoop-type coaming, and shrunk proportionally that would be an 11 1/2" round cockpit. It's a kid kayak, so for safety's sake I made it bigger- I think it's like 15" x 12".

Foot braces. She will grow, and even now she will need to slide all the way back in the cockpit to paddle with any sort of trim, and slide way forward so she can contact the masik/seeqqortarfik for rolling. I used off-the-shelf Harmony slidelock foot braces. I had measured carefully before I skinned the frame and those were the ones which fit. I also mounted them before I skinned the kayak. I should be able to get inside to remove them when she grows that big.

You can see in the photos that even though the dimensions sound small on paper, she is definitely not too big for them. It's a fairly stable design and very surprisingly quick. It's skinned with 14-oz. polyester from George Dyson and coated with Rustoleum marine topsides paint. The colors are her choice, and she requested lightning bolts, which are on the back deck. She named it blue lightning bug.

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