Day 1, Skin on Frame River Touring Kayak: Miscellaneous prep work

Skin on Frame River Touring Kayak. Day 1, misc. prep work.

A white water capable skin-on-frame touring kayak is something I’ve been working on intermittently for a long time. Basically, I’m looking for something to fill the niche on multi day river trips with a lot of flat water and a few significant rapids interspersed. Neither a support raft with a squadron of river kayaks or sea kayaks are really ideal for the job. I’ve done both and they’re equally annoying for different reasons.

I’ve built seven prototypes so far (two of which are shown at the beginning of this post) one of which was really close to meeting my standards (the one shown here) but it just didn’t have the “wow” that I need for something to become an official Cape Falcon design.

With a challenging work year coming up I thought I’d take a week and bang out another river boat prototype just for fun. I’m shaking up my creativity this time by doing something weird: juxtaposing the deck of my F1 with the hull shape of the North Alaskan boats we built last year. It probably won’t work out but I feel like it’s worth trying because if it does paddle well that means that anyone who currently owns a set of F1 plans and has built the forms and jigs could just build this boat without having to purchase any additional course materials. This probably makes me a poor capitalist but whatever.

My biggest design goal for this is the one I’m least likely to achieve which is a boat that will track straight when you’re paddling it forward but will spin on a dime when you’re not. This is something that’s never been achieved by any kayak of similar shaping — probably because it’s not possible — but I have an idea I want to experiment with.

I think the maneuverability of something like this could also be useful as an instructional boat where you’re constantly moving between students in close quarters. I’m also hoping to shave a couple pounds off for a finished weight of 28lbs.