boat1

IOWA PHOTOGUY

BOATING and

BOATBUILDING

PADDLEDUCK

The desire to build a boat is one of those that cannot be resisted. It begins as a little cloud on a serene horizon. It ends by covering the whole sky so that you can think of nothing else. You must build to regain your freedom.

... Arthur Ransome

PUDDLEDUCK RACER

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Last year, out of nowhere, came the strange desire to build a boat. Now this is strange when you consider that I have not even been in a boat in the last thirty years or so. Also I have only the slightest passing knowledge of tools or woodworking. The last thing I built from wood was a pair of book-ends for my mother when I was in Junior High School about a million years ago (and they would only marginally keep books upright)

But some desires are not to be denied. So I found myself surfing the web and scouring the library for sailing books, What I found was the Puddle Duck Racer. The PDR is a plywood, homebuilt sailing scow. Roughly speaking it is an 8 foot by 4 foot square shaped, flat-bottomed boat. More info can be found at PDracer.com.

By this time, my youngest son had also caught the bug and was really excited about out soon to be boat. But there were still worries about our lack of skill and knowledge so we decided to do a test build by building a smaller (same length, half as wide) version that we would refer to as the Paddle Duck.

The Paddle Duck turned out fine. We had lots of advice and encourgement from the guys at the Yahoo! Puddle Duck Group and learned that we could, indeed, build a boat.

This year we went all the way and built out own full sized Puddle Duck Racer, The Lucky Duck.

The bottom line, we learned, is that our boat may not look like a professionally built craft, but it is great fun to sail, and I wouldn't trade the building process for anything,

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