I'm a pretty busy guy these days, and with the number of unfinished project piling up, its time for me to step back from the drawing table for a few days (or more) and finish some of the major ones up. The biggest one I've been working on, and by far the most time consuming, has been the sea kayak I've been building since March of 2009. I worked on it very little the first year, and part of the next… False starts, restarts, scrapping what I already had built, etc. When my dad took a turn for the worse early last year, I needed something to take my mind off of all that, and the kayak was a welcome diversion. My dad never did get to see it finished.

Now, I'm nearing the end of the whole process, and I'm ready to assemble the two painstakingly assembled halves of the boat- deck and hull. Over 800 hours so far- It contains just over 1/3 mile of 5/8 inch wide wood strips, most of which I hand milled from rough sawn lumber. The majority of the deck is made from the wood of a 150 year old cypress, that fell when hurricane Charley came through Florida a few years back. I guess its appropriate, given the name of the boat design: Cape Ann Storm. Its been a long, long road. I bought a paddle from one of the many talented paddle makers out there- I didn't feel like yet another project, and I wanted to know it would work. Being the unconventional type, I bought a Greenland style paddle. Its made from a single piece of red cedar, and its only about 3 1/4 inches wide in the middle of the flats. It looks like your paddling with a broomstick, or two cricket bats glued together at the handles!

Anyways, this otter is taking a week or so away from the computer, away from the desk, to finish his boat. Sometime next week, I'll slide into the tight cockpit, don my wallaby ear hat, and paddle off into the Gulf of Mexico. I'll glide through the mangrove tunnels, picking my way along the Cortez waterways, and at the end of the day, slip into the Mar Vista and enjoy some stone crab claws, beer, and more beer while I watch the sun go down to the strains of someone trying desperately to sound jut like Jimmy Buffet. Because its five O' clock somewhere, bitches…