How the Siskiwit LV Happened

Recently I was looking through old photos and came across a few of my old kayak building photos. I’ve pretty much given up building canoes and kayaks for the moment, but I do have a few that I would like to build in the future. It’s interesting looking back from a perspective of 18 years after I built my first kayak.

The first kayak that I built was a SOF using Cunningham’s Building the Greenland Kayak book. I really liked the kayak, but it had way too much rocker to be practical at tripping, which is what I wanted it for. In retrospect, I should have just added an external skeg and called it good.

But, another guy and I hatched a plan to paddle from the headwaters of the Mississippi River to Dubuque, IA. Dubuque was where we both grew up. I didn’t want to bring the SOF and I had ordered a glass Necky Chatham 16, but it hadn’t shown up. Since it was a pro-deal through my employer, I had to cancel it when I quit to move north. I never got the Chatham, but I built a plywood boat based on the SOF. I called it Fool’s Gold. I really loved that kayak, except that I built it with an ocean cockpit. That made it hard to get out of the boat. I build it using the ideas in The New Kayak Shop.

The Mississippi trip started poorly, took a turn for the worse and then ended alright. At the last minute, the other guy decided he couldn’t start at the headwaters, so we went as far north as we could and started at Jacobson, MN, which is west of Duluth. The other guy ended up quitting the trip about halfway at Wenonah (if I remember right).

After we moved north, I decided I wanted a better version with a rounded hull for paddling on Lake Superior. So, I built the Siskiwit Bay. I built it using the methods that Nick Schade outlines in The Strip-Built Kayak. After paddling it locally and tripping in it, I knew I had a great hull design. I ended up selling this kayak to a friend of mine. He took it to Florida. The plan was to build an updated and more playful version.

I designed that version as the Siskiwit LV, but I never built it. Instead, someone else whose opinion I trusted built it and was happy with it. It did everything that I wanted. By then, I had bought a Romany, got an NDK Explorer and now I paddle an old Dagger Meridian. Maybe someday, I’ll build an LV. Until then, I’m envious of each new LV that is built.

That’s the story of this kayak.