Wonderful one-man boat
Newhaven boatbuilder and adventurer Chris Tipper has taken on a 3,000-year-old quest for kayaking perfection. David Parker reports
A British boatbuilder is hand-crafting sea kayaks using a design perfected over 3,000 years by Inuit tribes
Under the white cliffs of Newhaven, East Sussex, lies Selkie Kayaks: a well weathered workshop on a windswept patch of shoreline. There's no sign outside, but I know I’m in the right place because nearby, on a rough patch of ground, sits not a kayak, but an extraordinary 26ft wooden boat that once crossed the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans under pedal power alone.
Moksha was built in 1994 by Chris Tipper
and played a key part in adventurer Jason Lewis’s 13-year human-powered circumnavigation of the world. These days, however, Chris runs Selkie Kayaks, building hand-made kayaks on the beach to a design perfected over thousands of years by Inuit tribes along the coast of Greenland.
“I’ve always loved the West Greenland style and most modern sea kayaks had evolved from this in terms of the shape,” explains Chris. “There are other boats that are used in Alaska and that region but they’re all very similar to a West Greenland
boat. It has not got a particularly long waterline but it’s got a really attractive sheer with quite pointed ends, high swept up bow and hard chines. You look at it and you think ‘wow that’s a beautiful kayak’. It is the most iconic and the most striking.”
But looking good is not going to look after you at sea. It is the performance characteristics which make these craft stand out.
“A lot of things have been tried but somehow a boat that evolved millennia ago and in some of the harshest conditions on Earth can’t be improved on. It has evolved very, very slowly in the most extreme climate in the world. It could be any shape but it has to be right. It is a very critical marginal environment to live in. For me that’s one of the most beautiful things about these craft.”
Basically it is a working boat built to do a job and was extremely capable at doing it.
Chris adds that people are often deceived by the apparent tenderness of the kayak’s shape.
“They think they’re going to be clambering into something which is not like a normal kayak but it is a transformative experience getting into a skin-on-frame boat. They feel really solid even though most of them are narrower and lighter than their counterparts. You get into something which has a 3,000-year-old design and it has got higher performance characteristics than something which was made yesterday.”
They are also made to last.
“A well-made skin-on-frame boat will last your lifetime as long as you look after it. They can also be handed down generationally.”
Chris is a boatbuilder who has worked on all sorts of craft. In his time he has also made furniture for Conran in London, shaped moulds for jazz guitars, built a Carpathian cabin and built sets for the BBC. But you can see that the kayak has special qualities which appeal to him.
“The nicest thing about building the skin-on-frame boat is the revelation of the build technique. It is beautiful, utterly simple,” he continues. “All you really need to do is make a stick with your basic statistics on it. With that as a storyboard you can make the kayak around it. It’s incredibly ingenious really.”
He also pointed out that the simplicity of the design allows adaptations to suit the user. However while getting the actual shape is quite a quick process in the construction, the rest of the design is more demanding.
“It is the steam bending, the hand-cut mortice joints, pegging the ribs and all the lashings that take the time.”
Time is a consideration for him at the moment because the specialisation of kayak building is a new business venture
‘You get into a 3000-year-old design and it has got higher performance characteristics than something which was made yesterday’
for Chris. He wants to concentrate on offering custom kayaks and in addition to the skin-on-frame boats he is also making high-quality timber kayaks. However, they all have one particularly interesting design concept in common. They are all built with a single hard chine in a way the original West Greenland craft was.
A lot of epoxy-plywood boats are made with chines but often that’s not because that is the most suitable hull shape. The chines have been put in because the panels can only bend one way so essentially they are compromised designs. But these kayaks are built with the keel as a shallow ‘V’; with shallow sloping sides and a hard, single chine because that’s the shape of the boat that works best. “The design came before the material,” says Chris.
The chine also has a stiffening effect along the hull. Basically a chine on a boat works the same way as if you put a crease in a piece of paper. Fold it and when you hold it out it stays rigid. But leave it flat and it just flops over. A kayak built completely out of GRP would need a thicker laminate for example if it was an all round bilge boat and did not have a chine.
The chine allowing a narrower boat also affects the way it will paddle.
“The full length chines make the craft track really well,” says Chris. “Also hard-chine sea kayaks have got really nice secondary stability with a lot of volume on the outside edges because of the box section.”
Primary stability is how the boat feels when you’re sitting in it upright and how tippy it feels. That kind of stability is dictated by the width and the angle of the sides. Secondary stability is when you lean over slightly and you can almost feel it’s like sitting on an edge. It is like the way certain sailing boats bite the water and will sit somewhere in a groove near the rail when they settle in.
However chines have fallen out of favour with many production kayaks due to a phenomenon which you also see with sailing craft. That is making boats to fit a mould rather than the other way round. When sea kayaking became popular in this country the ‘mould mentality’ in manufacturing had already started to take over. The Greenland shape was adapted so it would be easier to make as a fibreglass copy.
But if you throw away one set of priorities the parameters change and you get a completely different sort of boat.
“Of course we like to experiment and
push the boundaries but the hard chines were lost for quite a while,” Chris continues. A typical British sea kayak has now got a round bilge. “This means no chines to grip the water so you don’t have as much directional stability. You can probably swing them around on tight turns easier but you have still changed the characteristics of the boat.”
In the last 10 years it seems the rationale has almost gone full circle. Designers have been going back to basics and the West Greenland design is becoming more mainstream again.
Composite hybrids
But while he much prefers the purer design form, Chris is equally enthused about how modern materials can be adapted to traditional shapes. As well as the skin-on-frame boats he also makes plywood craft and is now developing a high specification composite kayak. Unusually this will have a wooden top and instead of gelcoat this composite hybrid will have a painted finish.
“I hope this boat is going to be quite a bit lighter than a polyester boat. All of the weight of the resin in this boat is going into its strength, unlike with a very thick gelcoat,” he says.
He spent a long time researching the laminate layout schedule to make his first one and this was done using a West Greenland kayak as the plug. Chris felt that making an actual boat first would help get the best results. “I also got some sea kayak instructors to paddle it to give me some feedback and once I knew it was the right boat I made a mould from it.”
But while in boatbuilding new composites have a cachet, he still feels stitch and glue marine plywood boats are the most undervalued and underrated. “Out of all the boats I’ve made, the ones I like paddling the most are these,” he continues. “Epoxy-coated plywood is incredibly strong and impact resistant. It is also very light and almost continually repairable.”
In North America this type of craft has a huge following whereas in this country they are more for the bespoke market. Most of the UK market has been swallowed up by rotomolded polyethylene craft. He’s not a fan.
“Repairs are difficult and rarely last. Also once they’ve gone through a certain lifecycle they start to split and crack. You’re left with a massive chunk of polymers which then ends up becoming somebody else’s waste problem.”
There is another important difference between the shape of kayaks which he says often isn’t explained to people.
“With a proper kayak the paddler can keep it upright by using their own weight, regardless of the movement of the water. But once kayaks get ungainly and too wide the paddler has less influence on how the boat stays upright. On a nice, flat, gentle breezy day polyethylene sit-on-top kayaks are fine but become dangerous when the weather changes quickly and the surface of the water starts moving unpredictably.
“The paddler can no longer have an influence using their weight and technique keeping the boat upright – that’s what catches them out. Certain types of kayaks are stable platforms to sit in and fish from, but should be viewed in that way. Other types of much narrower craft might need a bit of extra skill of the person initially to keep them upright, but when the weather gets bad or when conditions change they are infinitely more seaworthy.”
He concludes: “If you take a sea kayaker who has paddled plastic boats all his life and put them in a wooden boat, they’re in something that’s 30% or 40% lighter. It offers completely different stability characteristics and is so entirely different to paddle, I can guarantee they’ll come back with a smile on their face.”