The Siskiwit LV combines the quick maneuverability of a 16-foot day boat with the speed and tracking of a 18-foot touring kayak. This all-around, mid-sized British-style sea kayak suits a kayaker looking for a boat with good initial stability that is easy to edge and quick to turn. When the water gets rough, the Siskiwit [...]
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Paddlinglight.com began as a place to distribute my wilderness philosophy, show off my kayak and canoe building logs, provide boat information, and get my free canoe and kayak plans online. Since it’s inception, Paddlinglight.com grew far bigger than I expected, and the most popular articles on the site have consistently been about boat building. For [...]
Description: The Siskiwit Bay MC is all-around fast mid-sized British-style touring kayak designed for plywood building. This kayak suits a medium to heavy paddler looking for good initial stability and with increased flare above the waterline lots of secondary stability. As the water gets rougher, this kayak feels more stable. It’s a fast design slightly [...]
I stood looking up at the kayak, a plastic Dagger Magellan, inside of our newest yet unopened store in the middle of Iowa. With the sunlight beaming through the sunroof and hitting the plastic of the kayak, which was standing on its end, I could see a small clear flaw. When the rep showed up, [...]
In the last installment of Building a Perfect Kayak, I laid out the design criteria for my new kayak and ran into some software problems. Mainly, with the software that I’m using, I couldn’t export rounded stations to build the forms for the kayak. Because Hulls, the boat design program I used, is made to [...]
If you remember from the previous article, I had just figured out a way to output forms from Hulls by using an extra chine above the design of the kayak. This extra chine gave me a common point in all the forms, and with the click of two buttons provided me with perfectly aligned offsets [...]
With the design steps over, I moved on to figuring out what wood to build this craft with, but, first, I fired off an email to Gregg Carlson suggesting a few improvements for his excellent program, Hulls. I suggested that he should have the program calculate the Block and Mid-ship Coefficients, which would help simplify [...]
Background Way back in episode two, I explained about station forms and what they are used for, and I mentioned the strong back. If you don’t remember all that dribble then you may want to head back there for review, because in this episode they are the main character. Attempt One So, after I had [...]
Those Little Set Backs in Boat Building My old strong back was beautiful. Built from some of the best 16′ 2x8s I’ve ever seen, and topped with a lovely almost clear 16′ 1×6, the strong back was straight true, and had proven it on several canoes. But as all great things come to an end, [...]
Having finished the bottom of the kayak, I flipped it over and for the first time got to see – I mean really see – my kayak. It was a stunning moment. Not only did the stems look true to each other and not twisted (I guess all the work I did beating the heck [...]
A perfect kayak not only is one that performs perfectly in all the aspects that you desire, but one that you are building and have designed can only be perfect if everything goes correctly, the shape ends up as you wanted it, and then when finished it performs better than anything else that you’ve paddle. [...]
With the fiberglassing finished on the bottom of the kayak, I flipped the kayak over and started in at the Layback Lounge. If you recall from the now many previous chapters of this building log, I needed to do a cockpit recess to get the back coaming height down to a level that would allow [...]
Last episode, I wrote about Free!Ship, and now with version 2 out, I’ve been able to recalculate by hydrostatics using the Free!Ship program to provide me with numbers that I had to calculate and figure by hand in the third episode of this builder’s log. With the new numbers, I’ve come up with some more [...]
Woe is I; I made a mistake. I forgot that for displacement, a ton is a long ton and not just 2000 pounds, which is what I’ve been using to convert the numbers in FREE!ship to pounds. With this realization, I’ve had to readjust part 10 for KAPER and the like. It also means that [...]
Siskiwit Bay Skin-on-Frame Sea Kayak Plans
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 [...]