onna end the series on my Hello World – 3 kayak building & fitting here with some comments on the design. It is an excellent boat in almost every aspects. The outlook is beautiful and attractive, extremely good stabilities (both primary and secondary), good tracking capability, and turning is easy with some slight edging. The hull shape is good for surfing too, it goes into turbulences, water or wind, with great confidence. And it is roomy, having lots of space for gear storage on longer trips.

On another side, the boat is more suitable for bolder paddlers, in order to sustain a higher speed. Me, at 64 kg, belong to the medium – low paddler group. With my inexperiences (still) in building, boat weight is quite large. Everything put together, my whole day sustainable speed with HW – 3 is bounded into the [6.2 ~ 6.5] kmph range, a bit behind my expectation. Of course, my expectation is of my own, some goals set and to be reached, not something to blame on the kayak design.

And maybe my physical excercising has not been hard enough too! Like I’d mentioned earlier, boats are like shoes, you try until you find something that fits your needs, and also like shoes, owning 4, 5 pairs or more is just quite normal for an average person nowadays 😀. Looking back on all my building and boating experiences, the last 2 years is, anyhow a short period of time, for a life – time hobby. I’m still at the beginning of the road, there’re lots of things to be learned and to be accomplished!

Lots of things happened during that less than 2 years time period, at the beginning of which I even can’t tell the (now – obvious) differences between a kayak and a canoe, I didn’t know how to operate a hammer or a block plane, never done any woodworking before (as well as any other real ‘manual’ labour). Started from the most primitive A, B, C… sometimes I’d wished I didn’t have to do everything the hard way like that. Well, things gradually unfold, like the sceneries ahead of your kayak! 😀

he other day, I was conducting some re – entry tests: supposed that you’re thrown out of the boat by waves, and you need to climb in again, pump the water out to continue paddling before another wave hits you. But the hatches leak so much that re – entry is very difficult, the harder the next tries, as the kayak continues to take water in, it becomes heavy and unstable. This is very dangerous, imagine if this happens on open sea, and I would never want to be in an… “Abandon ship” situation.

I ordered some Beckson deck plates (plus other things) from Amazon.com as a fix to the hatch leaking problem. But it took forever for the ordered packages to be delivered, first from Amazon to a friend in the U.S, then from him to Saigon (some goods can not be shipped directly to Vietnam, so you have to make it via a “freight – forwarder”). Can’t wait the progress, I decided to try another solution: install some rubber washers and tighten the locks to help sealing the hatch better. It works quite well indeed.

The packages arrive today finally! But 2 Beckson screw – in deck plates would be used for the next boat instead, as I’m satisfied with the leaking problem now. Also arrived are some rolls of 2″ – width fiberglass tape, those would be very useful for my next builds, and a spray skirt. A spray skirt is absolutely important for kayaking in rougher conditions. It recalls to me that I was really risking (and was lucky too) when paddling to Vũng Tàu last year with no working water pump, and no spray skirt.

Below are a couple of shots showing the spray skirt in action. On calm rivers and canals, it’s not of pretty much usefulness, but it would become critically important once you enter the steep estuary and coastal sea areas. Also showed is the beautiful lines of my HW – 3, people is all taking photographs or shooting video on the kayak when encountered along my paddling routes these days! Despite some building faults here and there, she looks so gorgeous, almost sexy, doesn’t she!? 😀

pdates after updates, Hello World – 3 has become quite heavy indeed, now around 30 kg, too heavy to be handled on my back for long distance. Weight has been one of my weakest point in boat building, I’ve always had fears that the boat will not be strong enough, so put more and more materials in, that results into a much heavier boat than originally speculated 😢. This is the most important thing to be improved in my next build (projected to be toward the third quarter of this year).

Want it or not, HW – 3 is my main boat for now, though quite heavy, it’s strong and has the best performance characteristics among my boats. And I’m gonna have some more preparations for my upcoming trips. I added one more mounting point for the light and camera poles, there’re one aft and one forward of the cockpit, so the camera can be mounted in different positions. Also decided that the Canon Powershot D30 would be my sole camera onboard, used for both picture and video shooting.

The Canon Powershot D30 has much better battery life compared to my GoPro Hero 3, and video quality is comparable, though video resolution is not as good. Furthermore, bringing just one camera, one kind of backup batteries would make things simpler, having less to be cared for when on the waterway. I’m not too keen on taking super fine photographs, bringing a DSLR is too bulky and risky for me, so this D30 is already good, an all – round cam: pictures, videos, and can also be used for diving.

I’ve built another cart for my kayak from cheap MDF, made water – resistant using thinned epoxy and paint, it’s smaller and lighter compared to the previous one (which was made of iron tubes). And I reused the two big air – filled tires, you know how it is pulling a heavy load with small solid wheels on a ‘sinking’ sandy beach. There’re some stuffs I originally planned for my kayak, but they turned out to be very troublesome when faced reality. Among such things are the hatches, simply put: they leak too much!

ade some more miscellaneous improves to my HW – 3 kayak… First is filling the two boat’s ends with Polyurethane foam. For an example of how PU foam works, see a demo video here. It takes just a few minutes for the mixed – two components to expand into a closed – cell (water proof), somewhat rigid structure. The foam I bought is exactly the one used for refrigerators’ insulation (see the 2^nd image below, two bottles containing two components called: Polyol and MDI).

The foam adds about 600 ~ 700 grams to the boat’s weight, it fills about 1 meter of boat length at both two ends, occupying a total volume of about 60 liters (estimated). This is just an act of precaution, as in the worse case should the boat cracks, or if there’re holes punched into the hull, the whole boat could be flooded, but it will still stay afloat. I erect the kayak upright, pouring the mixed PU foam through the hatch, wait for 15 minutes, then repeat the same thing for the other end.

Instead of making a complex foam seat as I originally planned (which could be very time consuming cause it requires creating a mould), I chose to install instead the simplest thing that works. Bought a small plastic kid seat, cut the four legs away. A strap line helps holding the seat in place (bolted to the cockpit coaming) and supports its back. The size of the kid seat is about right, not too small for a comfortable ride, and not too big so that a spray skirt could be deployed later.

This season, Christmas, Gregorian New Year until Lunar New Year (about 1.5 month from now) the city is decorated with all kinds of lighting, creating splendid sceneries. I’ll try to have some night paddling to capture those colorful moments. With the overpopulation situation in Sài gòn becoming worse and worse day after day, I dare not step into the urban districts these days anymore, viewing the city from above the water seems to be a very nice alternative option to me! 😀