I grew-up just a couple of miles from the Palos Verdes peninsula along the coast of Los Angeles County  and would often snorkel in those waters for abalone and lobsters with a group of my friends. One of the first “boats” I ever worked on, a leaky, 12′ paddleboard rescued from the heap out behind the main Lifeguard station in Redondo Beach, was used to explore the area with my buddies. 

Guarding the northernmost entrance to Lunada Bay is Rocky Point. The waters around Rocky Point can be anything from totally benign and calm, to a full tilt, out of control melee of oceanic surges and thundering waves. When I started to design boats, I instinctively drew upon locations from my boyhood watery exploits and the name for this sea kayak, Rocky Point, came from this familiarity.

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Posted: July 5th, 2008 under Sea Kayaks.
Comments: 1

A modular approach to SOT kayak sailing and paddling

Sit-On-Top (SOT) kayaks are easy boats on which to learn to paddle. They have none of the “get inside the coffin and drown” psychological identity that one finds in the Sit-Inside boats and they’re amazingly adaptable to a wide range of paddling activities. It also doesn’t hurt that they are pretty straightforward boats to rotomold, which makes them very cheap to produce in large numbers.

I didn’t envision just one boat for this niche in the home-built kayak market. Instead, it came to me that there would need to be at least three models that could address the wide-ranging styles of boating interests in this area of the kayak world. The result was a couple of very clean, SOT models at 14’ and 16’ called the Corona and the Back Bay. The third model was going to be called the Wahoo, as it was specifically designed for the folks who spend a lot of time fishing with their SOT’s. I’ll get to the Wahoo in the next article for Duckworks.

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Posted: July 4th, 2008 under Kayaks, Sit On Top Kayaks.
Comments: 4