“NO, I’M AFRAID YOU’LL HAVE


TO BUILD YOUR OWN…” PHOTO: VINCE PAQUOT


The Murrelet BY PYGMY BOATS


“I think people who’ve never worked with wood are intimidated,” Dan Jones tells me when we rendezvous in the border city of Buf- falo, New York. He leans forward conspiratorially, as if sharing a secret, “But you don’t need any skill to build these boats, just patience. If I can do it, anyone can.” Jones is referring to the gleaming Pygmy Murrelet that we’ve


just transferred from his roof rack to mine. In the interest of ex- pediency, I was only too happy to leave the laborious side of this review to Jones—a veteran Pygmy paddler and builder—but now the seed is germinating: hey, I could build a kayak… It’s this spirit of self-reliance that inspired Pygmy Boats founder


John Lockwood to build his first stitch-and-glue kayak in 1971. A fall at a construction site three years earlier had destroyed Lock- wood’s hip and left him on crutches, but the lightweight, drag- anywhere durability of his homebuilt boat gave him the freedom to explore British Columbia’s remote Queen Charlotte Islands for months at a time.


42 PADDLING MAGAZINE Trained at Cambridge and Harvard as a computer scientist and


anthropologist—admiring of the peaceful Mbuti people of Africa, Lockwood’s college friends nicknamed him Pygmy—he designed cutting-edge naval architecture software before selling the world’s first computer-designed, precision-cut wood panel kayak kit out of his Seattle workshop in 1986. Given the growth and popularity of Pygmy boats since then, the


Murrelet looks and performs exactly as it should—like the culmi- nation of 26 years of design experience and refinement. Murrelet builder-paddlers can select from four deck versions and


two hull options. Our borrowed beauty featured the most popular deck style, a four-panel rear deck (or 4PD) that has the highest storage volume for extended trips. Both hull versions use multiple chines and a shallow-V bottom


for very comfortable initial stability and crisp, confident edging. We tested the more rockered hull and found it responsive and ca- pable of graceful carved turns, while tracking on an even keel is


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