Night Heron

This Night Heron kit includes The Strip-Built Sea Kayak, drawings, CNC-cut forms & strongback, hatch blanks, epoxy kit, fiberglass, precision-milled bead-and-cove Western Red & Alaskan Yellow cedar strips, foam "tractor" seat, Rapid Pulse backband, Keepers footbraces, and hardware.

• This Complete Kit ships with a Premium Epoxy Kit: Learn more!

This Night Heron "wood parts only" kit includes drawings, CNC-cut forms & strongback, hatch blanks, and precision-milled bead-and-cove Western Red & Alaskan Yellow cedar strips. Typical "wood parts only" kit buyers have an existing or ready supply of their own epoxy, fiberglass, and hardware.

This Night Heron kit includes drawings, and CNC-cut forms & strongback.

This Night Heron kit includes drawings, and CNC-cut forms.

Nick Schade suggests MiniCel Foam for bulkheads in his boats. Two 3-inch blocks ready for fitting.

Many kayaks can benefit from a retractable skeg. There will be conditions in which no skeg is needed at all, other occasions when just a little skeg will help, and days in smooth water with a strong breeze over the aft quarter when a skeg is essential.

The Skeg Kit is comprised of three basic components: the skeg itself, the skeg box where the skeg lives in the boat, and the control slider. The skeg is a fin that can be retracted in and out. The skeg box is just big enough and wide enough to hold the skeg. The control slider is mounted up near the cockpit where it is convenient to the paddler.

A kit for flush hatch hold-downs, requiring no deck hardware to sully your strip-planked deck. Internally mounted bungies hook to hatches. Includes machined wooden parts, hardware, and instructions. Read the instructions here.

Kit includes enough material for two hatches. Specifically: eight wooden blocks, bungie cord, stainless steel hooks, and hatch cover reinforcements.

Almost any hatch system, flush or otherwise, will work with the Invisible Hatch Hold Down scheme. These kayak kits include flush hatch kits: Shearwaters, Arctic Hawk, Sea Island Sport, Night Heron S&G and all Guillemot strip-planked kayaks.

By Nick Schade. 202 pages, 1998. "Strip-building" - assembling a pile of thin wood strips into a functional hull - has been a popular canoe-building method for many years. Now boatbuilder Nick Schade, an engineer by training and a self-professed sea kayaking addict, has refined this time-tested method to build the more complex shapes of sea kayaks. The method is simple, forgiving, allows a liberal amount of design flexibility, and requires a minimum number of tools.

In The Strip-Built Sea Kayak, Schade presents full plans for three elegant designs inspired by the grace and seaworthiness of the Inuit and Aleut skin boats. Profusely illustrated instructions provide the details that will guide you through the process.