The hull is painted with 2 layers of transparent PU paint. In this tropical weather, paint dries so fast, after about 3 or 4 hours, I can start the various deck fittings: mounting the forward hatch with compass on top (and compass light). The electric wires (housing inside a plastic tube) supplying power to the compass light also serves as a holding line, just in the rare case that the hatch could fall out.

The signal light is done the same way, connect the electric wires, seal them inside tube with silicone glue, test if the reed switch work. Until now, all 3 reed switches works well, I shouldn’t worry much about them, as reed switches, though tiny in size (less than 3 mm in diameter), are in fact very durable (rated at 100 000 times of turning on / off). In the silent night, I can hear the click, click sound of them turning on / off.

Fitting the bungee cords is quite straight forward. The anchor points (made from wood) work well enough, I just pull a thread through easily, don’t have to “prime” with a small steel wire like before. The forward bungee cords also run through 2 wooden blocks (see the third image), each house a magnet inside. I use the NdFeB (rare earth) magnets, which are really strong, they could turn on the reed switch 2 or 3 cm away.

Next, I would fit the rudder pedals, run the rudder control lines and see how all things works. Then comes the bilge pump, with the water hose, then the solar panel. The ugly thing is that you just don’t know how much power left in your battery, or if the solar panel is doing its job. So I ordered a “12V battery fuel gauge” from Amazon to read out the current capacity of my SLA battery. Below: a short video to show how the reed switches work!

Final entry of the Serene – 1 series. There wouldn’t be any major updates, add – ons for the kayak since most everything is completed, and I need to shift my times and efforts into some higher – priority tasks. In a sense, an important milestone has been reached, the designing, building and equipping of my newest beloved kayak. A fascinating process at the beginning of which, I didn’t even think I could make it, and I didn’t know where it would lead to, a nice useful watercraft, or… a disaster!

Serene – 1 is the best kayak of mine until now, outperforms all others in term of performance, lightweight and agile, pretty much fast, with some sacrifice in primary stability. Yet, it is not without some weak points that could be further improved, and that would be the concerns of my next boat project (still have no plan for that at the moment). I’d tried to get out with the best design, the best building as I could, learning lots of new things about a hull’s hydrostatics and hydrodynamics along the way.

But let me make a clear point about this, even the best cruising hull, the best equipments won’t improve your mileage by 15 ~ 20 percent, for a whole – day paddling. After all, it’s you, your horse – power output, your determination and physical endurance, which are the factors that could make a key difference. To be honest, sometimes, I have a strange self – satirising feeling that I’m quite like Popeye, the Sailor man cartoon character, especially before embarking on some longer journey!

It’s good to see every parts of the boat work as intended. The hatches are completely watertight. When I left the hull out under afternoon sunlight for an hour for it to dry, the air inside warms up and expands, when I open the hatches, I can hear the sound of escaping air. That confirms not only the hatches, but the whole hull is airtight, and so they are obviously watertight. Then carrying gears inside could be housed with minimum protection against water (e.g: some normal plastic bags).

For the last two weeks, I only tested the boat on flat water, small river branches which are calm most of the time. Next would be some longer and rougher paddling. Been too busy lately and couldn’t keep up the planned pace of at least 40 km per week, and so my endurance has been falling drastically! Also, I’m quite lazy at video shooting and editing, after all, you can’t make it as good as a professional cameraman, and upto one point, you don’t see a necessity for much showing off any more.

Sometimes, I wish I could just put everything aside, pick up the paddle and go, go light and go now! Nothing comparable to the paddling experiences, you and only you in the wild, and you don’t have to depend much on those delicate electronics to have a joyful journey, they’re just some more burdens. So maybe I my next trip, I would just leave the GoPro at home, a single small still – camera is stilled needed though. 4^th image below: can only be happy when in open air and on bobbing water!