The early days

Just thinking of my first kayak.My dad would build a frame of oak strips and stretch canvas over it then tack it on with copper racks .The finishing touch wash 3 coats of oil paint.I can’t imagine what it weighed.He would then carve out paddles.Anyone out there go back before plastic?

In high school my friend Dan and I fixed up an old wood boat he bought, and I had a wooden sailboat, but our Dad’s had fiberglass motor boats. You could find wooden boats cheap so that is what we could afford.

As a kid growing up in England I used to sail my uncle’s old wooden Lightning.

The boat was a bit of a mess, but for a teenager it was a lot of fun.

My brother and I built a raft when we were pre teens. Had a blast on it. Looked like a pile of driftwood.

Bought my first canoe in 1958 a 1939 Old Town wood canvas. I was 11 years old and paid $15.00 and I still have it.

I actually owned a old town power boat a 20 foot ski boat.Old Town went to the dark side for a few years,what’s funny is you will never see a reference to it on there web site.Dose not fit in with there green image.Don’t get me wrong I love old town I own 3 of their kayaks

My dad had a mold for fiberglas kayaks back before plastic and before fiberglas whitewater boats were widely available. He instructed whitewater paddling at a YMCA camp, and our basement would reek in the spring as he patched up old boats and cranked out new ones. Not sure what it did to our brain cells.

@amf said:
My dad had a mold for fiberglas kayaks back before plastic and before fiberglas whitewater boats were widely available. He instructed whitewater paddling at a YMCA camp, and our basement would reek in the spring as he patched up old boats and cranked out new ones. Not sure what it did to our brain cells.

Obviously damaged them because you’re here. :slight_smile:

Only by association, as was the case for you. My dad built a couple of wood boats from plans he must have ordered out of a magazine or something not long after I was born. One was a 12-foot, square-backed rowboat/motorboat, and the other was a ten-foot, double-ended, partially-decked duck boat. That duck boat was particularly cool, and was light and pretty easy to carry. I temporarily inherited it while I was in graduate school and fished out of it quite a few times in those days. The other boat was not so easy to carry. I remember how he used to slide it off a trailer and wheel it across the parking lot to launch in the lake, with a wheel attached to a steel framework which clamped to the bow and would then be removed, once in the water (he’d run the wheel right down into the water). Only in the last few years did I hear my dad tell me about his first trip to the particular backwaters location on the Mississippi that he first introduced my brother and me to as young kids (I’m the outdoorsy one of the two kids and I still go there to this day!). There, he launched the 12-foot boat down a causeway embankment, and later, couldn’t pull the boat back up the slope, and since he would have been about 30 or 31 at the time, that tells me that that boat wasn’t at all light in weight (a couple of bank fishermen helped him get the boat back up to the side of the road). In those days, wooden boats of simple design were still commonly seen. Now, I haven’t seen one in decades.

My Dad built a couple of boats and houses before I showed up but they were replaced by glass soon after.

I built one of those canvas on frame canoes. It had negative rocker. Darn near couldn’t turn the thing. So I sold it and went to building wood Y-Flyers.

I built a skin on frame kayak in the mid seventies. 11.5’ long - it would be called a rec yak today. Had a lot of fun in it, and then someone stole it. Never did learn what became of it.

My Dad had 5 brothers when ever they would do something it turned into a compation they all built skin on frame kayaks and rigged them to sail they would race on the tital river where they grew up.However the younger brother decided to skin his with bed sheets and then paint,If my memory is correct he made it about 50 feet from shore before the sinking

When my brother was an early teen, he built a Folbot from a kit. The factory was in Charleston and the owner helped him.
We had been raised in motor boats so giant brain borrowed a small outboard for the maiden voyage. I wasn’t there do I don’t know how he attached it.
He launched it and cranked the motor which immediately flipped the boat
He never did that again .

I had a summer job in the mid '70s and rented a room from a guy who made, and raced, his own 8 foot fiberglass kayaks. That was my introduction to the sport and have been at it since.