Why Would Anybody Want a Wood Kayak?

February-March 2001

This is an article from WaveLength Magazine, available in print in North America and globally on the web.
To download a pdf copy of the magazine click here: > DOWNLOAD

by Shawn W. Baker

Shawn’s beautiful creation

Busting the myths

They’re fragile, they’re expensive, they require a great deal of maintenance, and don’t have the high performance features offered by their composite counterparts. Wrong!

Many people have the mistaken notion that owning and paddling a wooden kayak is a big compromise of features and versatility in favor of having a beautiful vessel. Yet every choice of kayak, fiberglass or wooden, fabric or plastic, is somewhat of a compromise, and while there are tradeoffs, paddling a beautiful wooden boat does not require sacrifices.

Myth #1: Wood Kayaks are fragile

Wood is not nearly as fragile as one would suppose. Used correctly, wood is one of the greatest building materials known. Wood is, in itself, a composite of tubular voids surrounded by harder lignin cellulose. Harder, stronger summer wood is bonded in layers to softer, less dense spring wood. It is strong in tension (pulling); strong in compression (pushing); strong in torsion (twisting); strong in shear (tearing) across the grain; and less affected by severe fatigue cycles than more stiff and brittle materials like carbon or fiberglass.

When the wood shell of a kayak is completed and sheathed with a protective layer of stiffer, shiny fiberglass, a rigid monococque structure is produced. The wood and fiberglass composite offers a unique ‘symbiotic’ relationship. The fiberglass protects the wood from water saturation and everyday scrapes and dings. The wood (aside from being beautiful) provides a very stiff core material that is less likely than a foam core to shear away from the face composite, and is much lighter for its given stiffness than a hull constructed from solid fiberglass.

Some wooden kayak paddlers are highly reluctant to drag their laden kayak onto a rocky beach. The wood kayak deserves no less (and requires no more) care than a similarly constructed composite boat. A scratch in the varnish of a wooden kayak is no more life-threatening than a similar scratch in the gelcoat of a composite boat. Big holes are few and far between—generally avoided due to wood’s toughness and springiness—and are easily repaired if they do occur. You learned how to fix it in the process of building it—the skills are the same.

Plastic kayaks are much more durable than fiberglass, kevlar, carbon or wooden hulls, but most plastic kayaks suffer from designs that are optimized for rotomolding rather than optimized for paddling. Composite and wooden boats are less subject to hull deforming than rotomolded kayaks.

I often get the comment, “Gosh, I’d sure hate to put that in the water!” from people who think this beautiful wood boat is mysteriously going to disintegrate when I put it in the water. I just grin and launch anyway!

Myth #2: Wood kayaks are expensive

A simple hatch cover becomes a thing of beauty.

Are wooden kayaks expensive? The answer is no. And yes. If you take the time to build your own kayak, they are the most inexpensive kayaks available. If you have a skilled artisan build your boat, it could tend to the pricey side of things, but you’re not buying a humdrum run-of-the-mill kayak either.

By sourcing your own materials, you can build a stitch and glue kayak for as little as $300 US ($450 Cdn); woodstrip kayaks can cost as little as $350 US ($525 Cdn). Kits run from $700-1000 US. A skin-on-frame kayak with a wooden frame could be yours for little more than $100 in materials.

The trade-off here is time. A stitch and glue kayak can take 80-120 hours to complete. A woodstrip kayak can take 200 hours for a simple design to 3-400 hours for an intricately stripped deck pattern with many contrasting species of wood. While time may be money to some, when I’m not at work, the cost of my time is $0. Kayak building is a collection of many small steps—strip-building especially—so it’s not hard to find a half-hour here or a half-hour there to work on the boat. For many, it’s also a relaxing stress-reliever, and that kind of time is priceless!

Custom-built kayaks can cost $3,000 to $5,000, but as Nick Schade of Guillemot Kayaks says, “It’s an art, not a craft”. Professionally crafted kayaks draw the kinds of stares and ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ that completely escape commercial kayaks.

Myth #3: Wood kayaks require a lot of maintenance

People familiar with larger wooden vessels probably perpetuate this myth. While wooden sailboats, runabouts and tall ships require a great deal of elbow grease, the wooden kayak’s fiberglass sheathing protects the boat from weathering, and its owner from all that work!

Most wooden kayaks are sheathed with fiberglass saturated by epoxy resin. Epoxy is very tough, waterproof, and durable. Its only drawback is low UV resistance. An annual or biannual varnishing with a quality marine-grade spar varnish is all that is needed to protect the boat from UV damage.

Most scratches and dings are in the varnish layer only, and disappear during the varnishing ritual. Deeper scratches are gone, too, when they are filled with epoxy, sanded smooth, and varnished over. Serious penetrations (if they actually occur) require about as much fiberglass work as a similarly damaged composite boat. Gaping holes in plastic boats can’t be reliably fixed.

Myth #4: Wood Kayaks can’t be High Performance

If you’ve only ever seen a cheap plywood boat designed on the back of a napkin by a hobbyist who threw the whole thing together one cloudy Sunday afternoon, you’ll be pleasantly surprised. Many commercial kayaks are pulled from molds which were originally formed around a woodstripped prototype. Lots of commercial designers use woodstrip kayaks in the prototyping process to avoid the hassles of building a plug and mold that may never be used again. If the kayak prototype paddles well, it gets faired out completely, smoothed, and becomes the mold plug and the predecessor to hundreds of commercial composite boats.

The fact that design possibilities of woodstrip kayaks are flexible enough for composite designers to use them as a plug should serve as evidence enough that a woodstrip boat can be built to accommodate absolutely any design feature desired.

Even stitch and glue kayaks can be built to high performance hull shapes. Stitch and glued hulls are the easiest way to make a hardshell kayak with hard chines. The Current Designs ‘Caribou’ was originally a stitch and glue design that performed so well it was added to the composite maker’s lineup.

Wood kayaks are as stiff as kevlar and fiberglass boats, and much stiffer than plastic. This stiffness means less paddling energy is lost in flexing the hull—a stiffer boat is a faster boat.

By and large, though, the best reason to paddle a wood boat is that they’re just so beautiful! While I have seen a couple of wooden kayaks that were victim to less-than-adequate handiwork, they still looked better than an average economy-model plastic boat. And a well-constructed wooden boat is a sight to behold.

A word to the wise, however—if you want to be able to gas your car, launch your kayak, or travel anywhere in populated areas undisturbed, don’t get a wooden kayak. Wooden kayaks have the knack of attracting slack-jawed stares and the praise and compliments of complete strangers. Sometimes it’s really nice to be able to go unnoticed and enjoy your fine handmade boat in solitude, but other times it’s nice to know that the vessel you doggedly worked on for all those hours looks pretty good to others!

Shawn Baker is a 25 year-old “old married guy”, father of 2 Labradors, who’s been paddling for 4 years, building wooden kayaks for 2.5. His greatest thrill so far has been paddling his newest strip-built boat in Deception Pass, WA this past summer. ©