admin's blog

Blaine Skillings photo

For the past few years, my friends Greg Paquin and Paula Reigel (Owners of Kayak Waveology) have organized the Autumn Gales rough water sea kayaking symposium in my home waters of Fishers Island Sound. Greg is a BCU coach and he brings in other coaches from locally and abroad. This year he had Nigel Dennis, Peter Jones, and Harry Whalen from the UK as well as Carl Ladd from Rhode Island as well as local guides such as my friend Carl Tjerandsen. I was invited in the local guide capacity.

I just got back from the WoodenBoat School in Brooklin, Maine after teach a five and a half day class on building "Fine Strip-Planked Boats".

 I have recently been going through the process of upgrading the software for the KayakForum. For those who are not familiar with it, the forum is an open discussion board devoted to the design, building and use of kayaks and other small boats.

For those of you who just can't have too many sources of hand made boat stuff coming into your smart phones and have a softspot in your heart for lo fidelity images that look like they were taken with a Polaroid and stuck to the fridge for 35 years; I've started posting the occasional photo on Instagram. The subject matter will tend to be related to boat building, woodworking, using wooden boats etc. We'll see what develops.

The puzzle joints make assembling the plywood panels very straight forward. There is almost no way to mess up which parts go together because the puzzles will only fit together in one way. The CNC cut cut makes for very precise joints which usually fit together quite easily.