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Adirondack Guide Boat, mini

4/28/2015

Of all the things I build, Adirondack Guide Boat is by far the most beautiful. Constructed in skin-on-frame that natural lines are even more mesmerizing. Far from the simple construction of a kayak, I like to joke that guide boats are "dangerously close to real boat building." The work is precise and time consuming, and even though there isn't really a way to make them in a way that pays me what I need, I still build a few every year. Sometimes it's not about money, sometimes it's just about love. There is the pride of just lusting over the finished product, and then there is the superb experience of using something that has long since been refined to perfection. Every time I drag a guideboat over the edge of a dock on it's flat armored bottom I think: Why isn't every small boat built like this? Anyone who has ever rowed a guide boat will tell you there is just something sweet, something more than the sum of it's parts.

This year I received a commission from a smaller gentleman out of San Francisco who is a little older and is starting to have some back problems. We hatched a plan to see just how light we could go, paring everything down to the absolute minimum. I love pushing the limits, so we decided to go 11'8" long. The decks were shortened, the oars shortened, the sheer dropped, the end seats omitted, even two of the floor slats left absent. When I was finally done the little boat weighed 30lbs. I worried about getting the trim and freeboard right in such a short version, but no so much that it stopped me from loading the boat without a test paddle and heading down for a hand delivery in San Francisco.

Unlike the Oregon coast, San Francisco has this mysterious phenomenon called Traffic. I'm not sure how people endure this daily torment, but aside from a very scary wind gust on the bay bridge, I made it to my destination unscathed and we headed out for a test row at sunset. Fu-Ping settled the guideboat perfectly on it's lines, and with a lot of pride I watched the little guideboat dance like a water-strider, swift, graceful, elegant.

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Designing for injury

5/1/2014

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Two important things happened today: 1) I started seeing a new physical therapist, and 2) I decided that if I want to get back on the water this year I'm going to have to start thinking outside the box. Owing to the lightweight and infinite modifiability of skin-on-frame, individuals with injuries are a big part of my business, so I suppose it's a little ironic that I'm now one of those people who needs help.

After sustaining a fairly serious sacro-illiac injury in the winter of 2013, I've been off the water for a little over 16 months now. Despite physical therapy, rest, and careful exercise, things aren't getting any better yet, and I don't need to tell you how much of a problem that is for a guy who's life and passion revolves around kayaking. I need to paddle.

Unlike a lot of people, I can sit for extend periods of time on my knees, and I also have excellent balance, so I thought it might be time to consider a C1 conversion for my kayaks.

A C1 is basically a decked kayak that you kneel in, a little wider and a little deeper than a kayak, they are primarily a whitewater phenomenon with the common thinking that a sea kayak would simply be too tippy for a raised center of gravity. I decided to test this theory by outfitting a standard F1 with a pillar seat.

A trip to the hardware and paddling store, and about $50 of foam and straps and other misc. bits later I arrived at my friend Harvs' house. Harv is my buddy. He also happens to be my only buddy with a band saw AND a sewing machine in the same place!

I think most people would approach a $50 block of foam a bit more tentatively, but if there is one thing I've learned from prototype projects in the past it's that you are just as likely to screw something up after staring at it for two hours. So, like in most things, I tend to take a "go for it" attitude and after a few minutes this foam pillar is what I came up with.

The paddler sits on top, the legs are folded to the sides underneath. The trick here is keeping your center of gravity low while keeping your legs from falling asleep. I can tolerate 4.5 vertical inches, but I think most people would be more comfortable with 6. The seat is 8 inches wide up top, 6 at the bottom, and 12 inches long end to end, about 8 inches of which protrudes in front of the backband.

Because C1's don't have thigh braces it's common for them to be outfitted with thigh straps or a seat belt to hold the paddler in place.

Once convenient thing about a skin-on-frame kayak is the abundance of attachment points all over the frame.

A simple loop of parachute cord does the job nicely.

Next it was time for me to try my hand at the sewing machine. Don't let the photo fool you, I'm totally an expert at this! :)

With the buckles sewn in place and clipped into the attachment loops I decided it was time to give the whole setup a test drive and headed down to the pond in the middle of a local city park for a voyage of dubious legality.

So how does it work? Surprisingly well actually. The minimalist outfitting is comfortable and the boat is much more stable than I'd anticipated. I could easily paddle this 22.5 inch wide kayak in rough water. The buckle straps do add a layer of complexity to a wet exit, but they pop pretty easily and I'm not worried about entrapment. What will be really interesting is to see how it rolls!

One thing I wasn't prepared for is the giant cavern of cargo space where my legs used to be, a space large enough to fit a backpack full of gear without disturbing the float bags in either end. This could be huge advantage!

The cockpit of a stock boat is a little small for this sort of setup, so if this works I'll probably build a dedicated boat with just a bit more room in the paddler area, maybe an inch wider and an inch deeper.

The physical comfort is a heck of a lot better than sitting normally in a kayak right now, but more testing is required to see if it actually stresses the injury any less.

For now, I'm hopeful. I'd give anything to be back on the water, and if this works it might offer enough freedom on the water to keep me from going crazy while I wait another year for the injury to stabilize.

I'll take it on a trip, and report back. Maybe this modification could help someone besides just me?

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Everything old is new again

3/11/2014

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As much as we like to think design is progressive, it's often cyclical. As every sport is fractioned and specialized, so much is focused on what is being gained, until one day, someone stops to notice what we have lost. You get back on that old Centurion ten speed with 27 inch wheels, and realize that the flexy steel, the rolling inertia, the relaxed geometry, make for a damn fine afternoon ride. In paddling we're seeing a lot of similar trends lately, shorter sea kayaks and longer whitewater boats. In an attempt to make more playful sea kayaks designers are making boats that are just generally more useful, but what really excites me is progress in the river cruiser and whitewater creek racing kayaks. Focused so much on the river, these guys may not realize they are making the crossover kayaks of the future.

It brings me back to my own humble beginnings in the sport, when I purchased a Dagger Crossfire and a Perception Dancer for 200 apiece. Designed to run whitewater, my 18 year old self and my long suffering girlfriend loaded those things down for sea kayaking trips, extended river tours, surfing, fishing. No, they weren't the optimal craft for steep class V creeking, but they did everything else good enough for our broke college student asses to have a lot of fun together.

I'm fortunate in my job to meet a lot of different people, and recently I was chatting with a old school whitewater pioneer and an ex-olympic C1 slalom racer. Conversation ranged to the oldest fiberglass whitewater kayaks, and their polyethylene offspring, and I found myself missing the ol' Crossfire, and starting re-think my notions of skin-on-frame not being suitable for whitewater paddling. I mean, these first boats were far more fragile than a skin boat, and they charged some pretty serious water. No, you're not going to go rock bashing on a low-volume creek in a skin-on-frame, but medium volume class III with a heavyweight cloth? Why not?

Lets think past whitewater though. Lets say for instance you wanted to do a weeklong ultralight self support tour on a river that was mostly flat but with a few significant drops (which describes most river trips out there). Or explore a coastline more playfully than you can in a sea kayak. Or wind your way through tight marshy passages and portage between them. Maybe you want to punch out through the surf and drop some crab traps and then snap in a surf fin and pick off a few sweet waves while you wait. Maybe you just want to go do some rolling practice and a few laps around the pond and would rather just toss your 30lb yak in the back of the pickup rather than strap a 16 foot sea kayak to the top of the car. Suddenly the compromises of a mid-length all-rounder don't feel so much like compromises at all. So me being me, 6 hours after finishing teaching for nine days, I was walking out of a kayak shop with an old friend on my shoulder, The Dagger Crossfire. I wasn't planning to copy it so much, as I just wanted the company while I started down this new, old road.

Anyone who makes art knows that inspiration can't be pushed and I've been in something of a rut for the past few years, so to feel that compulsion to design swelling inside of me again, to want to be at the shop at 7am and leave an 10pm, was such a good feeling. Creating this frame I threw out ten years of swedeform obsession and replaced it with a symmetrical balanced hull. Crazier things have worked! I also knew I wanted a lot more volume than a crossfire, so I bumped the length, width and depth up a bit, resulting in a more comfortable cockpit as well.

In two days I had a prototype finished, and in 3 I had it saran wrapped and taped up for a float test.

I instantly remembered the freedom of a boat that tracks only from your paddling motions, paddling straight at a pretty good clip, then spinning on a dime whenever I chose. It was playful, but not doggy like in a modern short whitewater boat. It was fun! I put my girlfriend in the cockpit and she instantly agreed, grinning the whole time.

Cutting off the wrap I already knew this was going to be a fun-as-heck river touring boat, and I was dying to see how it would do in surf so I could start the process of knocking out prototypes to get it right. But alas, paying work beckoned, so I left the frame as a sculpture and left the boat in my shop while I drove away to teach yet another class. There is a whitewater saying that says "we are all in between swims" Me? I'm just always in between classes.

This whole time though, up here three hundred miles from my shop, the new boat just dominates my imagination. All I can think about is building the next frame, sewing a heavy duty skin on it, and throwing down on a month long tour of everything I can possibly find to paddle in the state.

No honest designer really knows where anything will lead. I scrap four design themes for every one that ends up in production, but even when things fizzle out the process is still a thrill. Heck, I got the best wave of my life in a skin-on-frame ten-foot surf boat that ultimately went nowhere. Sticking the rail on a wicked air-drop into a lurching 14 footer I was cheered on by a flotilla of shortboarders, something I'm sure has never happened to any surf kayaker before or since. Who knows, maybe in two months some river runners swirling in an eddy somewhere will be saying, "Did you see THAT?"

The lovely Georgiana endures what it means to be my girlfriend. "Do I need a life jacket?" "Nope." "Are you sure?" "Yes."

8 Comments

Adirondack Guide Boat, mini

Designing for injury

Everything old is new again

Brian Schulz

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