Hollow Wood Surfboard

Here's a photo set of my latest project - a hollow Paulownia wood surfboard. Its 5.'9" by 20" wide and 2.25" thick. I took initial lines off of a Hayden Shapes Hypto Crypto but ultimately made some changes to the dimensions (some on purpose and some by mistake!) The board is unique in that I used light weight bent struts to support the deck rather than the typical plywood fishbone approach. I also slipped in a light layer of fiberglass under the deck for additional strength and fiberglass tape on the inside seems of the bottom skin. Both top and bottom skins are 1/4 inch so I would have enough material to shape bottom contours. Once glassed this board should still be relatively light. Check out a full photo set here

Fun in Catalina

The Otter is for sale!

After all of the restoration work and new paint job, I'm putting the Otter up for sale. My boat storage plan fell through and the boat is a little too hard to get on top of the car. So I'm looking for a good home for this sweet little boat. Here are some recent photos of the Otter.

Fairy Housing

Maybe someday I'll get back to boat building with kids, but for now its fairy houses! Six fairies will be sleeping in style tonight. I must say that the re-sawn almond firewood made for good roofing material.

Floorboards and Crabs

I made some floorboards out of the old Douglass Fir pola beams from the outrigger canoe that I replaced with the new hollow Sitka Spruce ones. I really just wanted to build something on which to test my old fashioned finishing recipe of pine tar, linseed oil, turpentine and japan drier. It turned out pretty well (and stinky). Last weekend my friend Wen and I took the Otter out for another successful crabbing mission. Our beach launch and landing was quite a bit smoother than last time! Here's a photo set of the floorboards and crabs.

New Decks for the Otter

The old rotten teak decks are gone and the new western red cedar decks are on. I used the off-cuts from the 10'8 cedar longboard I made two years ago. I bedded the decks in 3M 4200 and fastened it down with SS screws. Here are few more photos.

Otter update

My brother and I took out the almost-finished Otter a few weeks ago for opening day of crab season. Luckily there are no photos because our surf launch was far from smooth! Some valuable lessons were learned. All in all we landed our Dungeness limit and had a great feast. The real fun, however, was the midinight crabbing session in the canoe the night before. Four of us paddled from Crissy field under the bridge to Baker Beach and back between 10:00PM and 1:00AM. Very cool experience. Here's a gallery of recent Otter pics.