Outfitting the tandem kayak, Part 3: The boat and the guy who's working on it

Here's another look at the boat that I'm about to work on.  It's a Seafarer K-2, built by Doug Bushnell at his West Side Boat Shop in Lockport, New York.  This photo, in which I'm paddling in Wolf River Harbor with our friend Kendra, shows the boat without any hatches.  I'm going to install hatches, along with bulkheads, and modify the seats to make them more comfortable.






As I prepare to work with these fiber-reinforced plastics, the question comes up: how does somebody become an FRP expert?

I can't really tell you, because I am not that guy.

But over the years, I have learned a thing or two.  My education began in earnest when I started to enter whitewater slalom races, and got my first FRP race boat.  If you race on whitewater, you WILL break your boat sooner or later, so learning to patch it is a must.  The first time I had to patch a boat, I bought some resin and fiberglass mat down at the auto parts store.  The resulting patch was acceptable, but as time went on and I got to see how other racers were patching their boats, I picked up a few tricks of the trade, learning how to make patches neater, smoother, and more permanent, and also learning about better resin to use.  (Newcomers to this blog can read a post here about a patching job I did earlier this month.)

In late 1994 I got a bee in my bonnet to convert a playboat kayak into a C-1.  For some reason I chose the Lazer kayak, manufactured by the Wave Sport company of Steamboat Springs, Colorado, for this project (it turned out to be a terrible choice, but that's another story).  I spoke on the phone with Chan Zwanzig, the owner of Wave Sport at the time, and he told me that because the kayak seat assembly in the Lazer is an important part of the boat's structural integrity, I would have to replace it with a Kevlar and fiberglass layup in the cockpit area.  I was a little intimidated, but he kindly coached me through the process, and he pointed me toward Sweet Composites, my most important source of materials ever since.

Here's a picture of the Kevlar-and-fiberglass layup I made inside that boat.  It's not the prettiest thing, but it held up fine and served as a solid anchor surface for the pedestal, thigh straps, and everything else a C-1 needs.  (I took this photo while I was in the process of converting the boat back into a kayak recently.  I have removed the pedestal and thigh straps.)





Over the next decade I started up a woodworking business, and found frequent uses for epoxy resin in my wood projects.  Epoxy works not only as a glue, but also as a filler, so it's a good choice for securing a loose joint.  And many of the tools and skills I use for woodworking cross over into FRP work.

I received another great learning experience several years ago when I built a Coho kayak, offered in kit form by the Pygmy company of Port Townsend, Washington.  A lady here in town had bought a Coho kit, realized she was in over her head, and was seeking a builder.  Somebody gave her my name, and there I was.  Though I had never built a boat before, the kit came with easy-to-follow instructions, and I combined that with my FRP experience to get the job done.  Pygmy boats are "stitch and glue" construction: the parts are all pre-cut to fit together precisely, and the builder simply "sews" them together with steel wire, injects resin into the seams with a syringe, removes the wires, and laminates the whole thing with a layer of fiberglass cloth saturated in resin.  The project included bulkheads and hatches, so I will be drawing directly on that experience to outfit our Seafarer tandem kayak.

And this Seafarer project will be my latest independent study in the college of fiber-reinforced plastics.  Whether I ever accumulate enough credits to earn the degree of master boatbuilder remains to be seen; but anytime I come away from an experience with new skills, that experience has been well worth the effort.  This project includes a couple of things I've never tried before, but I figure I'm a smart enough guy to figure it out, and I hope I might inspire similar confidence in somebody who reads this.