: My wife's parents live in the Archipelago outside Stockholm...
: Her father would love a sea kayak, and I'd love to build him one,
: but we live in the UK and I suspect transport costs would be silly.

That might be worth investigating a bit more. I bought a double sea kayak
(6.1m long and 35kg ish) direct from a factory near Helsinki. They only
charged me about £50 to ship it to my door, although I suspect that the
packing it came in would already have been in the price of the boat. I think
it went out in a container by road through Germany, then came in through
Immingham Docks, from where a port authority van brought it to me. So
shipping might not be completely silly. For my double, fifty quid was a
bargain as a Finnish-built boat was about a thousand quid cheaper than
anything I could have bought new in the UK :-)

I presume you will be travelling out by air ? Maybe you should plan a
paddling holiday out there and take a car across with boats on the roof !

Andy