With yesterday’s surprise planer repair complete, I’m starting work on a kayak that I don’t build very often: my Long Pointy Boat design. A surprisingly successful marriage of the performance principles of my F1 stern with the general shaping concept of a racing kayak bow, the LPB offers increased top speed and stroke ergonomics at the expense of cruising speed efficiency. (More wetted surface = more drag.)
It’s no secret that I greatly prefer shorter kayaks for reasons of portability, weight reduction, material availability, wind/wave/surfing performance, and less drag at cruising speeds; but I realized last week that if I’m gonna do any more development on my sail system I need to see how it will perform on both of my modern kayak designs.
I’ve also got a couple of students who are thinking of building this model, one for a grueling multi-day race and the other for an extended trip down the Yukon River, so I felt like it was time to put one together so I could re-familiarize myself with how it feels in different situations.
I’m trying a somewhat weird experiment this week of working on my hands and knees on the floor. I wish I could say that this had something to do with my interest in traditional Japanese carpentry but the truth is that the fairly serious medical condition I live with is making it harder and harder to stay on my feet. I may or may not talk more about that in a future post. For now I’ve dusted off my half-scale LPB model and hung it up for inspiration while I build.
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