Finally, a kayak for myself. I named this one after a great old movie about life aboard a German Submarine in WWII. I'm a history buff. This movie was amazing in it's depiction of the hardships and eventual bad ending for U-boat crews. 

 This was designed with Ross Liedy's 'Kayak Foundry' software. It's my second boat using KF. I tweaked this out for over a year, and hopefully it will be a good boat.

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I started building in September 2011. This will be one I'm taking my time with, and I will be completing a couple SOF's at the same time.

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The name of this boat comes from a WWII movie about the dangers faced by German submariners. Let me be clear, I'm not some kind of  nut, (except for a kayak building obsession) I just thought it was a very powerful story. My folks fought on the other side. I thought the title made an interesting name for a kayak design. 

I intend to add the 9th Flotilla's 'Laughing Sawfish' as part of the design. The black version isn't historically accurate, but would look best on a cedar deck.

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The movie:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082096/

 

The real story:

 http://www.9thflottilla.de/flot9c.htm

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 After some amount of work done in 2012, I got very busy and had to step away from boat building. I became Fire Chief in late 2012, and this took up 10 to 20 hours a week on top of my full time job. I had a heart attack in February of 2014 after getting smoke inhalation at a major fire the day before. Apparently carbon monoxide exposure thickened my blood, and previously unknown narrowing of coronary arteries due to plaque got clotted, and down I went. Sort of. With my fire service training  I knew what was happening. Since I was on the way to work I drove myself to the hospital. Anyway... it wasn't fatal (although I was kind of dead a couple times through that week). I was in good shape when it happened, and have concentrated on fitness since. I finished my term as Chief and stepped down in December of 2014. Since then I've fought my way back to the point where I'm now fit enough to deploy with the military my cardio guy tells me. So long story short, I'm back to boat building now.

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