I developed the Lunada Bay design to fill a niche in the double touring kayak market. The design brief addressed such things as being car-toppable, easily stored in the average garage or basement, able to carry two adults for day paddling and the odd overnighter, highly responsive to turning input and able to track effortlessly. The boat did not need to be able to carry a week’s worth of gear and food or produce a high, sustained speed under paddle, as it was to be a comfortable cruiser for leisure outings.

The result was an asymmetric hull design of 18’ LOA with a beam of 28” to be built in a hybrid construction method. Hybrid build style is basically the combination of marine plywood, multichine hull with a cedar strip built deck. This type of boat takes advantage of the two build styles to offer quick hull construction combined with the natural wood beauty of a stripped deck. It also allows the soft sweeping contours of a stripper on the part of the boat that is most often seen by the paddlers.

In this style, the builder first assembles the hull panels, fillets the hull seams and glasses the hull inside and out. He then inserts a series of building stations for the stripped deck process and begins to create the patterns as desired with various colors and species of wood to suit his taste. The hull, itself, provides the strongback form for the stations and soon, the deck is complete and ready to join to the hull with the bulkheads in place.

The cockpit openings are laid-out on the deck surface taking care to measure the Center of Buoyancy of the design to balance the paddling positions in the boat. Once cut out, the cockpits are finished with the construction of the rims and flanges for the paddling sprayskirts. There are probably five recognized methods for cockpit rim fabrication. All of them work and it more or less comes down to how you want the whole thing to look. Something like choosing plaid instead of print for a shirt pattern.