The Surfyak

I started this boat with the intention of finishing it in a week. Several months later (due to my schedule, not to the boat) it is complete. It is a fun and easy design to build. The construction video is available at www.surfyak.com.

	Early stages. The hull is in place.
The long view. The boat is stock except for an additional inch of width, the molded fiberglass coaming, and unidirectional carbon reinforcement in the nose and behind the cockpit. Basically, the carbon was on sale and it looked cool, so...
	Shot of the bow, the black is the carbon. The blue at the bow is dripping from the final bottom coat that needs scraped off.
A profile shot.
	Detail of the bottom. I used TAP Plastics color additive in the two fill coats.
Coaming profile. I steamed a wood riser, then used a piece of styrofoam insulation board as a form to make the coaming.

Sea Trials:
The SurfYak went through sea trials at Oysterville, WA. Luckily, there were quite a few crash test dummies (oops, I mean experienced paddlers) of various sizes to test it. Stability is interesting. It is quite tippy, despite its width. It is akin to sitting on a surfboard (duh). Even with the extra inch of width, I was burying the stern. We started backing down the size of the testers until we had a 185 lb. subject. This seemed to be the optimum weight for the design. For it to be viable for larger paddlers, I think it would need to be one foot or so longer in the stern and have a bit more stern volume (width and depth). All in all, it was a fun experiment and a really easy project.

All images and text are copyright by Marcel Rodriguez unless otherwise noted and may not be used for commercial purposes without the prior written approval of the copyright holder. Noncommercial use is permitted.