With twenty consecutive work days finished, I took a much needed rest and spent a couple days just staring across the harbor from Tim’s deck… Being an organic farmer myself, I really enjoyed Tim’s backyard garden. Well cared for and not too big, it rewards him and Deirdre with plenty of fresh fruit and...
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Teaching in Tassie: A Kayak Building Adventure on the Wrong Side of the Planet
Before we speak of Tasmania and my misadventures even further down under, first I must confess the shameful tragedy of Sydney. Let me spell it out plainly. On the last day of my class in Sydney, I did a roll and my camera fell out of my sprayskirt tunnel and sank. This being the...
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Kayak Log Race 2009
Myself and Mark have been risking life and limb clearing log jams on the North Fork of the Nehalem River, and salvaging the logs. After cutting four fat spruce logs and four smaller cedars, our attention turned to getting the logs down to where we could haul them out. I hatched the idea to host...
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Kayak Logging
What do you get when you mix gasoline, steel, water, wood, kayaks, and some seriously uncertain footing? The extreme sport of kayak logging. Over the years I’ve collected some good logs, lost some great logs, and had a lot of fun with some wild stories to tell. The pursuit of logs by kayak allows me...
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1931 Disko Bay West Greenland Replica Kayak Delivered the Old fashioned Way
1931 Disko Bay Greenland replica kayak20 inches wide, 6 1/2 inches deep, 16’4″ long Oh how I love the 1931! As a designer I like the lightly aft trim, flat tail rocker, progressive bow rocker. As an artist the perfect proportions and subtle recurving gunwales pull my eyes into the shape. As a paddler I appreciate...
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Kayak building in North Carolina
It’s no big secret that I am travel averse. Exporting my class across the country is hard work, and invariably there is some sort of shipping catastrophe. So for the most part I stay at home and try to lure people to the rainforest paradise of the north Oregon Coast. Every year, however, in...
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Tyak: Custom Multisport Racing Kayak
I should start by saying that I hate racing kayaks. Fragile, expensive, tippy, and enough wetted surface to insure that each stroke feels like it’s planted in molasses. For many years I have synonymized racing with toil and drudgery, the truth behind those long sexy kayaks. It seems like every year the idea resurfaces,...
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Thanksgiving by Kayak
Three years ago my roommate and best friend Ginger came up with the idea that we should have a community thanksgiving gathering where all of the food would come from within a hundred miles. By embracing local food we would reconnect with the land and save a few barrels of oil too. Our food,...
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Using your Greenland Kayak
This is not a sea kayaking instructional text, it is only an explanation of some of the issues specific to paddling a Greenland kayak. Your safety is your own responsibility, get educated, get instruction, and practice! Modern kayaks are designed for the maximum comfort and utility in a recreational context, traditional hunting kayaks were...
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Building Kayaks at the 20th Annual Delmarva Paddlers Retreat
This year I was invited to teach a kayak building workshop to correspond with the 20th anniversary of the Delmarva paddlers retreat at camp arrowhead in Lewes, Delaware. Owing to the stunning incompetence of UPS who lost a crucial box, and then lost the overnight box I shipped to replace it, we had a...
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Exploring the Coastline of Southern Oregon
At dawn Mike and I crossed the bar in Bandon, picking our way through breaking waves into a wet morning fog. Peripherally I tracked his line past thundering surf and the boiling surge that slid up and down the faces of the rocks. His path was less conservative than mine, but not in the...
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Experimental Boats
With such an easy and painless means of prototyping at hand why not build outlandish and improbable boats! I call this one-off creation, Small Craft Advisory. It is essentially the bottom profile and rocker of a windsurfboard built up to a canoe. Bamboo and ABS pipe make a poor mans’ outrigger. It is unique in blending...
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Surfing the F1
Visit F1 design page here …But how does it surf? Ahhh yes, the perennial question, and perhaps the most misguided one because sea kayaks, by design, are not good at surfing. Not real surfing, not the kind that surfers do. This of course never stopped me from trying to make one that is! I invited my buddy...
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The F1 Kayak: Adventures in Kayak Design
“Brian, I finally got a chance to paddle one of your kayaks. It was my birthday and Judy let me paddle her boat. It was a peak experience, it was like wearing silk underwear.”– Lorraine “Thank you so much for the loan of the F1. I had a blast! Today I took your boat out on...
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A week of paddling with Alec
When my friend Alec said he wanted to come out and build boats for a week I said “sure!”, when he said he wanted to do some paddling I said, “yeah right.” Manzanita in February? A god-forsaken-dreary-forlorn-place. It rains like a faucet and the surf is always twenty-feet. Alec must be good luck though. The surf...
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