Guillemot

Since I'm waiting on some supplies I thought I'd take a moment to talk the design.  I'm going with the Guillemot as designed by a boat builder named Nick Schade.  He's put a lot of thought into his kayaks and is a prominent designer/builder in the stripper* world.  In fact he wrote the book on strip building kayaks.  Well two of them anyway.  

After reading up on a few different boats I settled on the Guillemot because it should fit how I expect to use it.  I'm looking for something big enough to cruise across local lakes and paddle around in inter-coastal waters.  From time to time I may want to carry camping gear for overnight trips.  While there are a number of large kayaks that fit the bill this one seems to have a good balance between stability, payload and speed.  Not to mention it's quite beautiful.  As an added bonus Schade's book The Strip-Built Sea Kayak focuses on building this and two other models and since I was planning on reading it anyway, well, the Guillemot just made sense.

A close second for me was the Petrel.  Another model by Schade.  I actually think it's a better looking craft and it's faster but he sacrificed a little stability in it's design.  Since I haven't kayaked in many years and will be retraining from scratch stability was the main factor in deciding in favor of the Guillemot.  So basically it was a coin toss.  Schade has a series of online videos on YouTube I really enjoyed that demonstrate the steps of building a Petrel and if you're interested at all in the process I heartily recommend these videos.

Another boat I really like is his Night Heron.  Again stability was a factor but this time so was size.  The cockpit is small and the total length is a foot longer for rougher waters.  Of the three I'd say this is my favorite based on looks alone.  I'm not trying to say the Guillemot is an ugly duckling (no pun intended) but the Night Heron has a permanent place in the Modern Museum of Art.

Once I had the boat picked out I thought it was important to come up with a basic deck and hull color pattern.  I looked at a number of other kayaks and boats for inspiration and came up with the design below.  I hope it's not overly complicated for my first build but I wanted to mimic the coloration of the Common Guillemot; the namesake for the boat.  The white underbelly along with black decking reminiscent of feathers really appealed to me.

But I'm also considering this one in cherry:

We'll see how it goes.  No need to worry about the finish this early in the game.

The observant reader will notice an abundance of links embedded in this posting.  For the rest of you look again and see if you can spot them.  Enjoy!

* It's probably a good idea to mention that the term "stripper" referrers to any boat built using the strip built method as opposed to skin-on-frame, stitch & glue, etc...  Not what whatever it was you were thinking.