Canoe Makeover

It has been a little while since we have given an update on our preparations progress. Nevertheless, we have been busy getting things ready to go for next summer. The large focus of our time lately has been our canoe.

We are taking a 17’ Dagger Venture canoe in Royalex. The canoe was in need of some new paint and a little repair. To date, we have given it some new paint, new skid plates, new gun wales, and made some new ash thwarts and yoke for the canoe. It has been very fun to see the canoes transformation - we have really enjoyed the process as well.

We have now shifted our focus to the spray deck of the canoe. This is largely used for preventing big waves in whitewater or big lakes from getting in the canoe. On colder days, it also helps preserve some heat for us as well. To attach the spray deck, we needed to drill holes throughout the whole length of the canoe (a scary thing to do). This would allow us to feed some cord that is backed with a cemented vinyl plate to the inside of the canoe (see photo). The loop of cord that sticks out on the outside of the canoe is then where we will weave rope between the canoe and spray deck to hold it down tight.

We spent a good chunk of time yesterday drawing out how we want to spray deck to be sewed and what features we want to incorporate into it. This was a fun process and the best part about making it ourselves is we get to customize it how we want to.

Next step is to actually start sewing the pieces of fabric together and assembling the vision we created - We are looking forward to it. More photos and updates to come soon!

-Z & J