Jon C wrote in
:

Dave wrote:

I'm looking at building a kayak for my 14 year old son (110 lbs and
not likely to get much bigger than 140 lbs). I like John Winters canoe
and kayak designs. If I could get plans for a stitch and glue version
of the Tasman Sea, I'd buy them. I'd like a stitch and glue for this
project to keep down the frustration level of building with a easily
distracted, easily frustrated 14 year old. In addition, the stitch
and glue designs start looking like a real boat faster to keep the
interest level up. But stitch and glue plans don't exist for the
Tasman Sea so I've been looking at Pygmy stitch and glue plans and
kits (amongst others which I've started to rule out). Specifically
I'm trying to choose between the Pygmy 14' Arctic Tern or biting the
bullet with frustration and some additional cost and building the
Winters Tasman Sea design.

But can anyone shed some light on the handling differences? Granted
the Pygmy Artic Tern is a hard chined boat compared to the strip
configuration of the Winters design so there will be some obvious
handling differences, but has anyone had the opportunity to compare
the two? If not, have you been able to compare a Pygmy Osprey,
Coho,or Arctic Tern to a Swift Caspian Sea or a QCC 300 or 400 (John
Winters designed boats)? The use for this kayak will be tooling
around the chain of lakes we live on and for playing on waves on our
frequent trips to Lake Michigan. Thanks for any help you can give.

Dave

I can't help you much with most of that, but you won't find a S&G
version of the Tasman simply because it's not that style of boat. I
plan on building a full size Arctic Tern for myself at some point when
I have the money, and the 14 looks like a much more fun version of it
for a smaller paddler. I've only seen one actual Tern being paddled,
and I was impressed with its looks and its owner was impressed with it
in general.

I've paddle a full size Arctic Tern and thought that is was too wide and too
high in volume for what is supposed to be a greenland style kayak. Of the
Pygmy boats I prefer the Coho.

CLC's Chesapeake 14 might be worth looking at also.

As for non-wood boats, you might want to check out Perception's 13.5
foot Sonoma. It's not a poly boat, but it is plastic.. their very
stiff, strong, and light Airalite. The stuff is really impact
resistant (the "beater" boat the Perception rep carries around has
taken lots of "whack it as hard as you can with this hammer to see how
strong it is" hits). The boat is decidedly on the narrow side, but it
should be very fast and lots of fun. I'm probably going to paddle one
in a few days and let you know how it goes.

I was at a demo day last year and saw lots of beginner trying out the
Sonoma. I saw more people capsize in that boat that any other by a wide
margin. It's unecessarily tippy and doesn't have strong secondary stability
to compensate. It also is a fairly high volume boat and would likely be
much too big for a 145lb paddler.