Bristol-Blue Lake Michigan Sailing Adventures

I haven't posted in a while and a few people have been wondering what is up. This summer Myles and I have been fishing a bit and he has been using his Mom's sit on top Kayak.  I decided it was time to go ahead and build him one of his own after all he is starting to get too big to sit and just ride along.  First I looked at  Yostwerks .  I highly recommend Tom's boats.  I built a Sea Tour about 10 years ago I'm building a Canvas Back Kayak.  Here are the plans  for those interested.  This came from an old  Mechanix Illustrated  magazine. My brother ran across someone selling a pile of already cut out kayaks a few years back and he assembled one but has had limited success with his canvas skin.  We took it out this summer and it is far more stable than my kayak, a plus for a young child in my eyes.  After about 30 minutes, the water started soaking through the canvas in my brother's kayak and we came back.  I'll do a clear vinyl skin on the one

Today, I started sewing up a new Genoa for Kraken .  This summer, I patched and taped the old Genoa several times.  It is ripping down the luff seam, the foot seam and it is pretty thin in several other spots so it is well past time for the old sail to be retired.  I believe the Genoa may have come with the boat in 1978.  Happy birthday to me and the boat; at 38 years, we are the same age.   This is my second sailrite sail. A few years ago, I built a working jib. Here's a link to that project.  The previous owner built a main and a storm.  So this will fill out the sail inventory with all sailrite sails.   Over the last few weeks I've been working on getting a sewing machine fixed and tuned up.  It has been interesting as I have pulled apart and checked the timing on my machine. I even made a few modifications to beef it up a bit and allow for some extra clearance at the base plate.  Friday the kit from sailrite arrived! This was super fast I did not expect it to even