I've got mixed feelings about deck lines. All those pieces of string running around the deck mess up the beauty of the wood, but if you should end up swimming next to the boat for some reason, having something to grab onto may save your life. I am even more ambivalent about hatch hold-down systems. Again, most systems mess up the lines of the boat, yet hatches are really useful for carrying gear.

I put together a couple small photo books showing an overview of the building process for my Nymph canoe and Petrel kayak. I orginally made these to bring to shows to help explain to people how I make my boats. I got a fair number of requests from people who wanted a copy of the books, so I've put the books up on Lulu.

In this class we will build two of Nick's popular boat designs. Each boat is quite different cedar strip boats. Nymph is a sweet little double paddle canoe. It is lightweight and fun to paddle. The Night Heron is an elegant sea kayak. These two boats will give people a well rounded experience in using the woodstrip method of constructing small boats.

Preparation

The hole pretty much defines the shape so cutting the hole accurately is step one. Since that step the boat has been fiberglassed and the rough edges left over from that need to be cleaned up.

You don't need to see more sanding, but that is what needs to happen before glassing the inside so I kept the sanding footage to a minimum in this video. Next I added a fillet in the chine. The Petrel has a hard chine aft of the cockpit, while it doesn't need a fillet adding one will strengthen the corner and make it easier to lay in the fabric.

Like the feature line on the deck, I wanted to have a bright maple accent along the sheer line between the deck and hull. Since the feature on the deck was in the middle of a stained area I had to stain the accent strip and then scrape the stain off.

If you like to have a little reading material hanging around the house I've put together a print version of my plans catalog. You can either get it for free by going to the Scribd site to download a PDF or you can get have MagCloud print out a nice bound and glossy copy and send it to you:

Strip planked boats are beautiful lightweight and rugged. The building process involves bending long, narrow, thin flexible strips of wood around a building form and fitting these strips together with other strips. It is a versatile boatbuilding technique that can be used for small, lightweight solo boats and scaled up to full sized yachts.

I'm applying two different sort of fill coats in this video. One is quite light and the other is heavier. The hull will eventually get another layer of fiberglass, after I have joined the deck in place.