Here’s another build from 2019 that we were fortunate to be a part of. Max, the school headmaster in Tiilerilaaq, a small village in Tasiilaq East Greenland, reached out wanting to build F1 kayaks for the students at his school to use. Traditional kayaking has been extinct there for many years and they wanted a safe, predictable kayak for the children to begin reconnecting with those icy waters in a skin on frame kayak. Max built an F1 with the help of Kamilla, a visiting teacher at the school, who documented the build on the Student Builds blog on our website.
From Kamilla: “Our school has about a dozen pupils. Tiilerilaaq is a traditional fishing and hunting settlement on Sermilik fjord and has about 70 inhabitants. Kayaks are used here and grandfathers pass them on to the young generation, but there hasn’t been any kayak built in Tiilerilaaq for hunting since 1954. However there were kayaks built in Tasiilaq in the 90-ties, mostly for the museum.”
We were able to ship some supplies to East Greenland, along with the kayak building course on a thumb drive as the internet is very slow in Tiilerilaaq. With the F1 finished, Max has been beginning to build more traditional kayaks and we’re working on helping him get ahold of some better tools as supplies that are hard to come by in Tasilaaq. As always, all of our plans and courses are free to native arctic people.
Many thanks to Kamilla for documenting the build and sharing these photos. We’ll share some photos of the students with the boat in the next post.
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This post was originally featured on our Instagram feed.
See the original post and discussion here.
