Come on down to Dodge City. The 2009 Potomac Whitewater Festival is coming the week of July 10-12. Events range from the Class V Great Falls Race, to the beginners’ Community Gorge Paddle. Check it out at http://www.potomacfest.org/
Photo of Ryan Bahn styling at the Wave Surfing event by 
Potomac Paddlers.
Check out the vid from lastyear’s party. More info to come.
The Outdoor Industry Association has published more participation data for kayaking and canoeing in their new Outdoor Recreation ParticipationTopline Report, 2009, adding 2008 data to those published earlier in their 2008 Outdoor Recreation Participation Report. The news isn’t great, but it isn’t terrible either.
Whitewater kayaking participation is down slightly, but not drastically. The graph from the earlier data posted below now looks like this:
This report has some demographic data, which looks like this:
For some reason the 2006 data from this report disagrees with the number reported by OIA earlier. In other figures for recreational and sea kayaking indicate that the former is still growing strongly, while the latter is shrinking somewhat.
The better news is that canoeing is enjoying a small amount of growth, as shown below. Note that canoeing still has higher participation numbers than all forms of kayaking combined.
This supports my iconoclastic theory that open canoeing remains the basis of whitewater paddling, providing the ideal vehicle with which to introduce newcomers to the sport as well as the broad, purchasing base of the commercial pyramid.
The Outdoor Industry Association has published their annual review of statistics on the numbers of people participating in outdoor sports. The new document is the 2008 Outdoor Recreation Participation Report, and it includes some numbers for recreational, sea, and whitewater kayaking. The plot above shows the numbers the OIA has reported for whitewater paddling since they first started tracking the sport in 2001.
For the first few years the OIA reported on two categories of paddlers: participants are defined as anyone who reported being in a whitewater kayak at least once during the reporting period. Enthusiasts were defined as someone who reported being in a whitewater kayak at least three times during the period. After 2004 the OIA ceased to track the enthusiast category; they indicated that the number of enthusiasts were too small for defensible statistics. I added the dotted line for enthusiasts using the ratio of participants to enthusiasts from earlier reporting years.
The current extrapolated level of enthusiasts is about 100,000. This number is probably still somewhat too high as an indication of the number of “real” whitewater paddlers, that is those who own their own gear and get out regularly, as the OIA reported that the average number of outings per year for those in the enthusiasts category was just over three, the minimum for the category. Does going boating three times per year make you a whitewater paddler? I don’t know, I’d call that pretty marginal. So, the real number of boaters is probably somewhat less. AW says 50,000 and that sounds closer to me. Other reports said that there were about 11,000 whitewater kayaks sold in 2006, and years ago Bill Masters of Perception said that about one in ten kayakers buys a new boat each year, so that would support the higher number. Incidentally, Masters sold some 10,000 boats per year in the late 70s; that indicates the total number of boaters now is about the same as 30 years ago.
Whatever the actual numbers are, the trends are the most interesting information. So, the bad news is the number of people in the sport is still down about 75% from the high in 2002. The good news is that the precipitous slide of the last six years may be bottoming out. This will only be proven in future years, but it has to stop somewhere.
Do we care that this is happening? Intuitively I say yes. As an amateur boater with no stake in the commercial side of the sport I’m not losing anything from the downturn, and the decrease in participation means that some of my destinations are less crowded than they once were. The lower Yough, for instance, has been a famous madhouse on summer weekends through the entire 40 years I’ve been paddling, a place and time avoided by most experienced boaters. In recent years, though, I’ve been able to walk up to the permit window on prime days and get a launch permit and shuttle ticket on the spot, no waiting.
I do have friends in the industry, however, to whom I wish no pain. Most of them will agree if pressed for an honest answer that the commercial side of the sport is in serious pain. The firestorm currently overtaking the broader economy has been a fact of life in the whitewater industry for years. In addition, it has long been an axiom of all outdoor sports that paddlers, climbers, hikers, etc. make good environmental stewards. This is reason enough to be alarmed at a drop in the number of whitewater boaters.
If we do care about this situation, how did we get in this fix and what can be done to improve the situation? That will have to wait for another post.
I finally got the Augsburg out on the Potomac for a little test drive. It paddles as nicely as I remember it, and the boat is watertight, so you can’t ask too much more than that.
The boat is about as close to being done as any project like this ever is. There are additional details to work out, but it’s paddleable now, so I declare victory. I haven’t had it on the water yet due to some health issues, but it won’t be long now.
I see only one major mistake I made in designing the cockpit mods. The rear of the cockpit rim is too high. If you look at most boats the cockpit rim, especially the back, is down in some kind of well. This is done to allow greater flexibility for the paddlers waist. When I made a bigger cockpit hole in the deck this well area on the original Prijon was cut out of the boat. I dithered on creating a new well in the location of my enlarged cockpit rim, but decided to stick with the simplicity of mounting the new rim right on the deck. This may turn out to be a major error. Just sitting in the boat on dry ground my mobility while leaning back is seriously restricted. It may be challenging to do a back deck roll, for instance. One thing you learn from doing it yourself, though, is that there are very few things that can’t be fixed. If I have to I could cut the cockpit a few inches of the rim-hull joint, move the whole thing down and re-glass it in place with the rim at or below the level of the deck. We’ll see.
Here are some pics of the finished (sort of) boat. In the tradition of other custom-modified factory boats like the Sweet Hahn and McKnight Hahn, maybe I’ll call this one the Kirbsburger.
It’s almost impossible to get seams to perfectly cover the very ends of the boat, so we seal the ends with plugs of solid resin, poured in from the middle. We tilt the boat on end and mix up a batch of resin with some glass shavings or other way to keep the curing resin from cracking, in the same way aggregate is used in concrete. It turns out the height of the workshop floor is perfect to align with the cockpit on a stood-up boat.
We use a cup with two strings on it to pour the end plugs: lower the cup holding the resin down into the boat with the top string, then dump it out by pulling the lower string.
Mini-cell walls are fitted, for strength and safety.
A simple foam seat, glued to the hull with 3M #77 (The cans are there to hold the seat down while the adhesive dries thoroughly). I’ll stick a couple of self-adhesive velcro strips on this and attach a Jackson Sweet Cheeks to it. Best thing since night baseball. Similarly, a couple of smaller foam blocks form hip pads and some more velcro will allow adjustable hip pads to be fitted. I haven’t decided on exactly what to do for foot braces yet. Also, I’m playing with ideas for an adjustable backband.
Here’s the finished Kirbsburger with its great-uncle from 1972.
The view of the new boat that will seen by any rival Potomac attainers soon. That is, the stern, leaving them behind.
So, a couple of wrap-up notes on the project.
How long did it take? about 7 weeks of calendar time. It could be done much quicker. I remember a grueling long weekend in Pittsburgh at Jack Wright’s shop wherein we mostly finished three boats in three days. The actual labor for this boat was about 50 hours, including my cockpit mods.
How much did it cost? The materials came to about $1000, and additional tools and disposables added about $300 to the total cost. A well-outfitted shop would make some of that cost unnecessary. I could have used cheaper materials and knocked a couple hundred off the material cost. On the other hand, I could easily have doubled the cost if I’d gone for a foam-core vacuum bagged graphite construction. Just depends on what you want.
How much does it weigh? About 28 pounds, outfitted and ready to go. Could have been lighter, but not bad.
So, how did it turn out? Overall, I’d give it about a B. There are some cosmetic issues, and the cockpit design isn’t fully worked out. For the first boat I’ve built in decades, though, it’s not too shabby.
For any whitewater paddler who has any bits of do-it-yourselfer in them, this is an eminently doable project. It doesn’t require any real art, just a bit of care in a few steps. And there’s nothing like the satisfaction of paddling a boat you built yourself. Go for it.
The outside seam for this boat is a single layer of 10 oz. kevlar tape. As usual, preparation is most of the task. The dry tape is trimmed to fit the length of the boat and laid out on the seam. Masking tape is affixed on both sides of the tape with just enough room to fit the tape. This allows us to sand, sand, sand the area where the seam will lie without scratching up the rest of the boat. Then, to protect the boat against drips, and it always drips, we affix a drape of plastic sheet outside of the masking tape. Finally, we paint a layer of resin on the sanded area, impregnate the seam tape with resin, and lay it down on the the seam. Wait a couple of days for one side to cure, turn the boat over and repeat.
We’re almost done. You could actually paddle the boat now if you had to, but there are a few more details.
Boat gets its protective drape. The seam area is the space between the two lines of masking tape.
The yellow kevlar seam is in place and curing. I tilted the boat somewhat to one side so I only had to drape one side against drips.
The seam is cured and cleaned up.
Next and final step: Outfitting
Finally, we get to the last major step: seaming the hull and deck together. This step is a bit of a pain, as it requires a bit of contortion to lean inside the boat the apply the inside seams. In this case, the type of mold we used adds a bit of extra work.
With a classic mold, the halves are left in the mold until the seaming step. The mold halves have been precisely matched, so we merely bolt the mold back together with the new halves still inside and you have the seams precisely aligned for application of the seam. Since this mold has the cockpit hole closed, for vacuum bagging, we can’t do that since there is no opening through which to apply the inside seams. We popped the halves out of this mold early in the process, so aligning the halves to apply the seam has to be done by hand and eyeball. This is a bit of a pain, but on the other hand, having the pieces out of the mold makes some parts of the process easier, such as preparing and installing the customized cockpit described earlier.
Another price of popping the halves out of the mold early is that they cure into slightly different shapes. In this case the hull is slightly narrower than the deck at the seam line. This must be dealt with during the seaming process with a combination of muscle, finesse, and lots and lots of masking tape. Some pictures of the process of installing the right-side inside seam are below.
Aligning the edges is done an inch at a time. As each bit is aligned properly, masking tape is generously applied to hold it in place. The blue hacksaw blade in the foreground is helpful in levering the edges into position.
The right seam is completely aligned and the boat is turned on its edge so the seam tape will lie flat as it cures.
The inside seam for this boat consists of two layers of glass tape. Back in the day we used to cut our own tape from glass cloth, but the loose strands on the edges were a nightmare. Ready-made glass tape is a great improvement. The tape is carefully measured to fit the length of the boat, in two pieces, and will be rolled from the cockpit to each end. The rolls above are ready to be impregnated with resin.
Looking inside the boat toward the bow. The first layer of impregnated tape is rolled up and lying on the seam, ready to be unrolled. The stick in the middle is a broomstick with a disposable foam paint brush taped on the end. We will use this tool to push the tape roll down the seam to the end of the boat. The droplight on the left is essential to see what you’re doing.
Looking down the stern from the cockpit. Both layers of tape are laid up on the seam and the operation is complete.
Now it’s time to go away and let the seam cure. In a couple of days we’ll flip the boat over and repeat the process on the left seam.
Next step: the outside seams.
Modifying the cockpit and creating a completely new cockpit rim proved to be considerable work, but I think it will work well on the water. The cockpit rim is about ten layers of all glass, laid up of many small pieces to fit the radical curves inherent in the shape. As a result, when the resin hardens you end up with a nice smooth part surrounded by ragged, spiky edges. This stage of the boat-buildng project is characterized by cutting and sanding, followed by more sanding. Then you sand some more. This is one of the least fun parts; it consists of lots of repetitive, messy tasks.
The photos below show some of the process. There are also some pix of odds and ends that need to be done before putting the two halves together.
The cured and trimmed new cockpit rim sits on the trimmed deck, ready for installation.
The new rim installed on to the deck. Tape masks the rim from the visible drips and holds the rim in place while the installation sets up. The rim is glassed to the deck with about eight layers, forming a chimney bonded to both the deck and to the new cockpit rim.
The glass bonding the rim and hull wraps around the edge of the hole in the deck and forms a thick rim around the edge. Just like the construction of the rim, the radical curves require cutting dozens of small pieces of glass to fit the sharp curves. Tedious.
Grab loops consist of short lengths of 1/2 inch poly rope glassed into holes on a factory-molded deck recess.
The grab loops are knotted on the inside of the deck and glassed in place to seal the holes.
The deck and hull have little glass tabs to guide installation of the reinforcing minicell walls and help prevent the walls from slipping sideways inside the boat. Walls are even more important for strength and safety in glass boats than they are in plastic boats. The tabs here are covered wax paper to help hold them in place while the resin cures.
Here’s what happens if you mix a little too much resin and leave it in the pot. If you have too much mixed resin in one place the exothermic reaction can start to run away, the heating causes the reaction to go faster, which causes more heat, etc. If you look carefully you can see smoke curling out of the plastic container. If you do this with a big enough pot of resin it can actually burst into flame.
Next step: seaming the halves together.
If you’re building a stock boat, the mold usually comes with a mold for an integral seat and cockpit. For this modern update of the Augsburg, I decided to modify the cockpit to a larger cockpit and make a custom seat. While I’m sure this will be worthwhile it adds a fair amount of work to the project.
One of the old methods for making a cockpit rim without a mold is to just contact cement a length of 3/4″ plastic hose around the hole in the deck and lay glass over it to make a cockpit rim. I tried a couple trial versions of this and I wasn’t happy with the way I envisioned it turning out. I decided to make the cockpit rim similar to my modern playboat/river runer. I know this cockpit shape fits me well and if I get it close enough to the playboat shape and size I can use my existing skirts with the new boat. I decided to make a cockpit rim mold off my modern boat and modify it to fit the Augsburg.
Here are some pictures of the process so far.
This is the seat/cockpit mold that came with the mold. The rim is too small for the modified Augsburg and the factory original seats were always too small for me anyway.
The popular modern river/play boat cockpit is prepped to serve as a plug for the new cockpit rim mold. The white stuff is clay used to fill niches in the cockpit rim. Epoxy doesn’t bond to polyethylene, so you don’t even have to wax and mold release it.
You can’t see them, but the wax paper is covered with cut strips of fiberglass impregnated with resin. We’ll lay layer after layer of these on the plug to create the mold.
Building up the layers of glass strips on the plug. The tape and kraft paper protect the plug boat from drips.
The cockpit mold is cured and popped off the plug boat. I made this mold fairly light, as I will need to bend it a little to make the final cockpit rim conform to the shape of the Augsburg deck.
Getting the cockpit mold ready involves sanding and cutting fiberglass. The dust is nasty stuff, so it’s time to suit up.
Next step: Laying up the cockpit rim.
The deckis out of the mold and it turned out well. Here are a few pix of the new deck.
The deck fresh out of the mold. The paper cockpit template is still stuck to the part.
The bow portion of the deck. I’ve always loved the lines of this boat. There don’t seem to be any major flaws. Cool.
The new deck laid on top of the new hull, starting to look like a boat. Tradition dictates that you stand there and make whoosing, splashing noises at this point.
I peeled back a bit of the mold release film to get a look at the real surface of the deck. It doesn’t show up that well in the photo, but it’s a beautiful deep purple with lots of metalflake sparklies.
Next step: fabricating a custom cockpit rim.
The deck is laid up in much the same way as the hull. The deck is somewhat lighter than the hull. For this boat I’m using two layers of glass and one of kevlar, with a large amount of reinforcement at various places. There are two additional layers of kevlar at the bow and stern and several layers around the areas at the bow and sterm where the grab loops will be attached. There are also kevlar ribs in the large flattish areas of the bow and stern deck. The cockpit area is heavily reinforced to make this region very rigid. This is because the cockpit area takes the stress of getting into and out of the boat and is also a safety feature in a pin situation. In this boat there are a total of 9 layers of glass and kevlar around the cockpit.
The only innovation I’m bringing to this project is the cockpit. Old boats like this one had cockpits that were very small by modern standards. They worked fine, but large cockpits are one of the most intuitively obvious safety improvements of recent years. So, I made a paper template of the cockpit on my Super Fun and set this template on the deck mold. This template allows me to lay up the deck up to the limit of my new cockpit, without making a bunch of deck that would only be cut out later.
Here are some pictures of the deck layup process.
The mold was labeled by Ted when he made it decades ago. Carter Hearn says he think it’s been at least 15 years since anyone used this mold
The deck mold is cleaned and waxed. The cockpit hole is sealed with a wooden plate for use in vacuum bagging.
The mold has been coated with mold release, polyvinyl dissolved in alcohol. It forms a plastic film when dry and it sticks to neither the mold nor the epoxy part. It happens to be purple in this case, just like the pigment I’m using in the boat.
The gelcoat has been applied. In whitewater boats we don’t use a true gelcoat, which is a different kind of resin specifically designed for cosmetic appearance. It adds weight without strength, so we just pour a thin layer of the structural resin into the mold so that the finished part does not have exposed glass at the surface. The kraft paper template shows where the new enlarged cockpit will be.
The deck is laid up and ready to cure. It will be hard to the touch in a couple of hours and ready to pop out in a day or so.
The cockpit has several extra layers of glass and kevlar for rigidity.
I should have waited another day or so, but I couldn’t stand the suspense. Popping a part out of the mold poses two big questions:
1) Did the mold release work? (Did I avoid total disaster?)
2) How does the part look?
As it turns out both answers are good. The hull had been curing for about 24 hours and was hard to the touch, although it still needs more curing. It was very gratifying to get the part to slide out of an ancient, long-dormant mold with only a minor struggle.
For us old school builders the term “gel-coat” is kind of a bad word. We just paint a layer on the mold with the same resin we’re using for construction. I didn’t do a clear layer as I’ve seen in the past that un-pigmented structural resin turns brown after a while exposed to the elements. So, I took a chance and sprinkled metalflake in the purple outer resin coat. I wasn’t sure it would work, but I just popped the hull out of the mold and it worked great. I’ve got an opaque outer resin layer and the metalflakes shine through.
The deck is going to be tricker. We’ll see.
Here are a couple of pics of the brand new hull.
Tyler Kirby inspects the new hull. The blems you see in the surface are actually in the plastic mold release, still stuck to the hull. The mold release washes off with water.
The bow area. It’s difficult to see in the photo, but the silver metalflake is shining through nicely.
The hull is the biggest single piece of the project, and arguably the most important part of the boat. For this project I’m using a four-layer hull: 2 layers of 6-oz. s-glass on the outside and 2 layers of 5-oz. kevlar on the inside. In addition, there are multiple layers of extra kevlar in the bow and stern and under the seat, as well as strips of additional kevlar to serve as longitudinal ribs for extra stiffness. Finally, in the foot area there is an additional pad of diolen to protect the kevlar from abrasion from the paddlers shoes.
Kayak in a Can. It may not look like it, but there’s a whitewater boat hidden in these cans, waiting to be released.
The boat-building process is 90% preparation. Epoxy is a very good glue, so the first responsibility of the boat-builder is to make sure that, when the layup is complete, the hardened boat part and the mold separate cleanly. So, after the cleaning the mold the next crucial step is waxing. Five coats of hand -rubbed carnauba wax seals pinholes and rough areas in the mold and forms the foundation for the mold release, a liquid plastic film that is painted onto the mold after the waxing is finished. It may seem like over-kill at times, but this is a critical steps, as a stuck part means both the part and the mold are trashed, and thousands of dollars are down the drain.
Cutting the cloth. The layers that go in to the boat must be carefully planned, with an eye toward constructability, strength, weight, and cost. Each layer is cut to fit the mold before any resin is mixed. Kevlar is fun to work with, as it’s soft, pliant, and one of the few ingredients of the entire boat-building process that isn’t toxic, carcinogenic, allergenic, or something.
The first layers are laid up. For this boat I’m using a purple pigment with silver metal flake accents. The purple contrasts strongly with the yellow kevlar. Note that the layers are carefully trimmed along the edge as they are laid up. This saves a dreadful chore of trying to trim a fully cured kevlar and glass part. This stuff is tough, and will ruin saws and knives quickly.
The hull is finished. The stern rib reinforcements are seen in the foreground, the seat reinforcement in the middle and the diolen foot pad in the distance. The white fabric along the edges is peel-ply, a material that can be peeled off the part after the resin has hardened, leaving a surface ready for application of the inside seam without the extensive sanding that is usually required.
It doesn’t look glamorous from this angle, but the exterior will be beautiful when we pop it out of the mold in a couple of days. I hope.
The last couple years I’ve been learning how to playboat and how to handle modern short boats in general. It’s been a tremendous learning experience and loads of fun. For all the advances in modern boats, though, there’s one thing they just don’t have, and can’t have, based on simple physics: SPEED. A fast boat means a long boat, and a long plastic boat means a heavy boat, which defeats the whole purpose of having a long boat in the first place. Fast, light boats are simply not available in the marketplace except for highly specialized craft like squirt boats or slalom boats. Great at what they do, but they come with heavy trade-offs in terms of comfort, safety, and cost.
When I started paddling in the early 70s almost everyone built their own boats for the simple reason that good whitewater boats were unavailable any other way. The few commercially made boats were so inferior that they couldn’t be expected to last more than a few river trips without major repairs. The modern paddler who wants a high performance river boat is presented, ironically, with the identical dilemma, i.e. the boat he or she wants isn’t made or sold anywhere.
Luckily, the old boat-building culture hasn’t disappeared completely. Stashed in workshops and under decks across the country are untold numbers of boat molds awaiting the attention of the discriminating paddler. My favorite long boat of all time was the Prijon Olympia 400, aka Augsburg, designed by Toni Prijon for the 1972 Olympics in Germany. This boat is a contemporary of the Hahn C-1 that is still popular with C boaters in some areas of the country. I’ve always felt the handling characteristics and aesthetics of the Prijon were superb and I still have the old one I built ca. 1973, although UV degradation has made it unpaddleable.
I casually inquired around the DC area for quite a while before I discovered that Carter Hearn (father of paddling legends David and Cathy Hearn) still had an original Augsburg mold. This mold was made by Ted Waddell, one of the best local custom builders throughout the 70s. Carter agreed to let me use the mold. Carter’s son Davey and his wife Jennifer operate Sweet Composites, a complete source for all boat-building materials and equipment. After quite a bit of dithering, I finally committed to the project, bought the materials and picked up the mold from Carter. So, for the first time in at least 20 years I’m building a boat. Here’s how it starts.
Carter helped me load the 80+ lb mold onto my car.
It may have been decades since this mold was opened. It was amazingly clean and ready to go. Ted Waddell built outstanding molds and boats.
This is the deck portion of the mold. A little cleaning with water, get the cobwebs off and it’s about ready to go. Note that the cockpit hole has been covered up; this indicates this mold was intended for vacuum bagging. I’m sticking to old fashioned hand layup for this project, keeping it simple after a long layoff from the trade.
Here the mold halves are hanging in the shop, the hull below to be worked on first, the deck hanging above out of the way. They will take some more cleaning, waxing, and covering with mold release before we’re ready to start laying glass.
More to come as the project develops.
Here are a few photos from the 2008 National Slalom Championships yesterday at ASCI. There was a pretty good crowd there; I’d guess at least a couple of thousand. There were also a good number of racers, about 70 on the start list, including six C1Ws (women C-1 paddlers.) A lot of people are commenting that slalom is enjoying a resurgence and the scene at ASCI yesterday encourages that view.
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