Boats

I’ve been lucky enough to do a lot of boating. Some of the most fun boat adventures have been in a boat I built that was designed by my friend, Matt of Hermitcoveboats.com. Red Zep is a 13 foot Pacific Loon Row Camper. It is designed to carry everything you need for multi-day sea adventures. After building our boats, Matt and I rowed for two weeks from Port Townsend, Washington up into the U.S. San Juan Islands and then up into the Canadian Gulf Islands. The Pacific Loon is designed with a tent cover that allows sleeping at anchor or pulled up on the beach. It’s a very fun boat to row and the design has survived a variety of wind and water conditions comfortably.

Boating trips are the ultimate engineering test. Good design and implementation is essential to a safe and fun passage. Even with good designs, equipment needs to be fixed and improvised along the way.