Happy new year

 ...Well the year is not that new, but still first time in a long while I've had the time to put together some words and pictures on the blog. December was pretty busy, in a good way. Lots of positive energy, and no stress. We did lots of great work and projects, and some of them has stretched into the new year. I just want to show you a few of them.

Thomas Schmidtke and his sister Tini came to build a canoe. Canoe building has been off my mind for a long time, but with my new take-down canoe mould, we gave it a try. It took us a week to build, and their canoe came out really nice. Jannie and I grapped the opportunity and finished the canoe we started building last year.

Travelling to visit family in the Christmas holiday gave Audun the opportunity to use the workshop on his own. Audun has been building a little dinghy for his sailboat, all skin/frame. Now he got inspired to build a skin canoe also.

..You can see his dinghy before skinning above, below a view of his skin canoe. Below on the floor, our new open canoe and a kayak frame I just finished yesterday. The kayak is part of a bigger project that started last autumn, and may be going on until summer 2022. It's a project concerning the British Arctic Airways Expeditions in the early 1930's. For that project, I started building a replica of an East Greenland kayak from that expedition. It was built by a Greenlander for the British expedition member F. Spencer Chapman. I've always liked the shape of this particular kayak, and it seems that Mr. Chapman was very pleased with it's performance also. So it became a natural choice for a replica for my own private use.

As you can see, the hull shape of this kayak is pretty extreme. Very deep V-shape. From my experience, this is a very good shape for an East Greenland style kayak. However, the volume is critical, and can make the difference between an excellent and a not too great kayak. I think old Spencer's kayak is just the right size for my 75 kilos :)

The days are getting longer, and soon the afternoons will be light and we'll be getting to the water more. We'll follow up on this post very soon with some pictures and thought after using the new crafts :)

Happy new year everyone!