REFLECTIONS
THE PERFECT BOAT TO MOVE 750 POUNDS OF
SEAL MEAT AND BLUBBER. ANYONE? PHOTO: CHRISTOPHER CUNNINGHAM
ENDANGERED SPECIES
When I first took an interest in kayaking in the late ‘70s I didn’t have much to go on to get afloat. My father and I drove to downtown Seattle and bought a copy of Bark Canoes and Skin boats of North America at the Government Printing Office book- store in the Federal Building. While the book devoted a short chapter to kayaks, there were only line drawings of museum specimens and almost nothing about what the frames under the skin looked like. In the fall of 1978 I attended the Wooden Boat Festival in Port
Townsend, Washington. There I met David Zimmerly, a Cana- dian anthropologist who had documented the construction of a Hooper Bay kayak. The Hooper Bay was designed for hunt- ing seal on the sea ice off Alaska’s Bering Sea coast. It’s a big kayak, only a bit over 15 feet long but over 32 inches wide and 18 inches deep. The hunters who used these kayaks traveled far from their village to find seal and needed a high-volume kayak to carry home hundreds of pounds of butchered kill. David was in the process of writing a book, Hooper Bay Kay- ak Construction, and he kindly gave me a copy of his draft. I was psyched. I didn’t give much thought to how the kayak would paddle—I’d find that out soon enough—I couldn’t wait to get started on building one. I couldn’t afford to buy lumber, and really didn’t have to. I could collect better wood off the beach near home, just as my father had to build the fence around our house. There were always tugs towing rafts of logs up and down Puget Sound, and there was no shortage of stray logs that drifted ashore. I walked the beach with a maul and wedges, splitting logs
into pieces I could haul home on my homemade bicycle-wheel cart. Spruce was good for the gunwales, red cedar for the stems and stringers and yellow cedar for steam-bent ribs. I followed David’s instructions and in about a month wound up with a fair replica of a Hooper Bay kayak frame. Since the original kayaks
176 KAYAKING || Annual 2015
WHY THE HOOPER BAY KAYAK IS BETTER BUILT THAN PADDLED
were covered in sealskin, I sewed on a canvas covering and sealed it with airplane dope. When I paddled the Hooper Bay it came up to my armpits
and required a long reach to get the traditional single-bladed paddle into the water. It wandered about like a canoe. Without a third of a ton of seal meat and blubber aboard it rode high in the water and was at the mercy of the wind. I didn’t paddle it far. Greenland kayaks and, to a lesser extent, Aleut kayaks would
later catch paddlers’ attention. It’s not a surprise that people who paddle for sport prefer these sporty designs. The Green- land kayak is a great day paddler in all kinds of weather and a terrific roller. The Aleut kayak is a speed machine. The Hooper Bay, like many Arctic kayaks designed for hauling, never caught on—to take an interest in it you’d have to want to paddle some- thing as utilitarian as a panel van. Though you won’t find anything like the Hooper Bay in the
pages of this Buyer’s Guide, it would be wise not to forget the wide variety of traditional kayaks. Traditional designs served very particular purposes and were refined by generations of Arctic peoples whose lives depended upon them. Ranging from the 21 foot needle-nosed Caribou kayaks that could chase prey at seven knots to diminutive Koryak kayaks propelled with breadboard-like hand paddles on inland ponds, these boats are the ancestors of the kayaks we paddle today. I still have my Hooper Bay, less its skin, and have fond memo-
ries of it, largely because it’s the only kayak I’ve ever been able to sleep aboard. I would often paddle a mile or two off the beach into an onshore breeze, slide down under the deck and doze while the Hooper Bay carried me safely back home. Christopher Cunningham was the editor of the former Sea
Kayaker magazine and is a regular columnist in Adventure Kayak.
INSET: COURTESY DAVID ZIMMERLY, HOOPER BAY KAYAK CONSTRUCTION
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