A couple of years ago, I designed this kayak for someone in China. He never got around to building it, or at least he never let me know if he built it. It’s been sitting on my harddrive since then. Recently, I pulled it up and refined it a bit to add extra stability. This [...]
The Siskiwit Bay SOF is a multi-chined version of the original Siskiwit Bay cedar strip boat. It’s a great modern British-style sea kayak that a builder can scale down to suit his size. These free kayak plans are for builders desiring a skin-on-frame version of the boat built in Yost-style. For stitch and glue plywood [...]
PaddlingLight offers a significant number of historic canoe and kayak plans and several original designs. In the past, those free kayak plans and free canoe plans came as a drawing on one sheet of paper. The plans showed the stations at 1-foot intervals with the stems drawn over the station. Only my commercial plans and [...]
Only a few of the kayak plans on PaddlingLight include specific cockpit designs, which leaves it open to you to decide which cockpit to use. I like a cockpit that runs around 32 inches by 17 inches. The plans for this cockpit run just slightly over 32 and just under 17. I find this length [...]
In September 2010, I decided to draw and release a free canoe plan or a free kayak plan each week for the entire winter. I planned the project to end on April 1st, 2011. My goal was to produce between 24 and 26 total plans based on historic designs found in Bark Canoes and Skin [...]
The Beothuk Canoe appears as Figure 87 in the Bark Canoes and Skin Boats of North America. It differs from every other canoe in that book, and no actual physical model existed when Adney surveyed the canoes. He based the drawing on historic and sometime conflicting descriptions, and a birch-bark canoe toy found in the [...]
The Coast Salish Style Canoe appears on page eight of Leslie Lincoln’s Coast Salish Canoes. Lincoln writes that it’s the classic style and is housed at the Vancouver Centennial Museum, Vancouver, B.C. The boat measures over 27 feet making it as long as most voyager canoes. Lincoln also notes that the Coast Salish style canoes [...]
The old model Algonkin canoe from the Ottawa River area represents a canoe built before contact with other tribes and the fur trade changed the types of canoes built by the Algonkin. It features high ends, a flat sheerline and resembles canoes used during the fur trade. In the Bark Canoes and Skin Boats of [...]
The 1888 King Island Kayak appears as figure 181 in The Bark Canoes and Skin Boats of North America. Howard I. Chapelle writes that the King Islanders were known as skilled kayakers. Their kayaks followed a pattern similar to the Nunivak Island kayaks with a narrower and more V-shaped hull and different stems. The King [...]
The Nunivak Island kayak isn’t something that you’d see everyday in modern recreational kayaks. For one thing, it has a big hole in the bow. In the Bark Canoes and Skin Boats of North America, Howard I. Chapelle notes that the hole is one of the main features that distinguished the Nunivak Island boats from [...]
The Unalaska baidarka appears as Figure 178 in the Bark Canoes and Skin Boats of North America. Howard I. Chapelle, the author, writes that it represents the standard design used throughout the Aleutian Islands and on the mainland as far east as Prince William Sound. The Aleuts also used this style in the Pribilof Islands [...]
The St. Francis Canoe of About 1910 appears as Figure 81 in the Bark Canoes and Skin Boats of North America. Howard I. Chapelle notes that the canoe features a narrow, rockered bottom, and he notes that the model was popular with guides and sportsmen for forest travel. The almost vertical to slightly flared sides [...]
In the Bark Canoes and Skin Boats of North America, Howard Chapelle tells us that the most common type of Ojibway canoe northwest and west of Lake Superior was the “long-nose” form. The form shows a straight sheer, only slight rocker near the stems and a steeply upturned sheer near the stems. The stems were [...]
In 1888, Jim Paul and Peter Polchies built the Malecite Racing Canoe of 1888 for Lt. Col. Herbert Dibble of Woodstock notes Howard I. Chapelle in the Bark Canoes and Skin Boats of North America. This 19-foot, 30-inch canoes, which appears as figure 66 in his book, shows flare in the center and tumblehome towards [...]
Belcher Island Kayak Plans
The Belcher Island Kayak was collected in 1958 from Great Whale River where it was built by “Adlaykok” or Allaiquq. It appears as figure 46 in E.Y. Arima’s Inuit Kayaks in Canada: A Review of Historical Records and Construction, Based Mainly on the Canadian Museum of Civilization’s Collection. Arima notes that it was likely built for demonstration, [...]