: Dave - Just was looking at the lines plan of your last kayak. Very
: symmetrical hull. Is the cockpit slightly too forward ? It looks like it
: would weathercock in wind. Nice looking all the same.

Tom,

Thanks for the compliment on the lines.

The bow is a fair bit higher than the stern, and the keel line is slightly concave towards the stern, giving a small in-built skeg. The end result is that there is just a tiny bit of weathercocking, which you only really notice when you're looking for it, it isn't a problem at all. Overall I've been very happy wih the way it turned out. Pic below shows the trim when afloat - you can see the stern ends up quite low. (This pic is pre-cockpit cockpit coaming and a bunch of other stuff - as it was my own design I wanted to test it worked at least OK-ish before finishing it off). There's more on how it handled in my blog if you're interested.

But your question about the cockpit in the plans is a very good one! The cockpit on the designs is really just there as a mock-up to see how the whole thing would look. I didn't put any effort into getting it in exactly the right place, or exactly the right shape. Instead I took the location of the centre of bouyancy from Delftship, and the collecive wisdom of this forum that 16" behind the centre of bouyancy is a sensible place for the back of the cockpit. I then built the deck and cockpit 'Point Bennett style' (thanks and compliments to Duane S). See his Roll or Drown pages on building the Point Bennett for more info, but basically you cut out a totally flat deck, shaped to fit exactly on top of the hull, then cut out the cockpit - which I located as described, and just shaped as I wanted. Then form a peak at the front of the cockpit and add a long thin V of ply to keep it in shape, and glass it together. Duane creates the deck from 4 pieces of ply meaning the split in the deck infront of the cockpit is there to start with, I just used 2 pieces of ply end to end (the advantages of an S&G kayak less than 16' long!) and cut the split forwards from the front of the cockpit after cutting the cockpit out.

Dave.