Construction of a stitch-and-glue plywood and fiberglass sea kayak, and an inaugural tour of the east coast of Bohol.

I built the boat using the mostly complete plans available in Chris Kulczycki's book "stitch and glue boatbuilding". I had a lot of help from my skilled and underemployed neighbors, some great things like dead-level sawhorses whipped up in 5 minutes out of bark-covered off-cuts.

Working on the kayak provided two distinct experiences. First, the pleasure of manual labor on a simple cool project, seeing the progress hour by hour. But the great surprise, once the hull had taken shape, was the fun of looking at it--coming home and sitting down in front of it like flipping on the TV, half planning the next step, half daydreaming about big waves and long crossings.

I need deadlines so I bought in advance a ferry ticket to the island of Bohol during Holy Week, during which this catholic country shuts down as Filipinos visit families, pigs die and engineers paddle kayaks around remote beaches. Maps and Google Earth showed no roads so I packed food and water for backcountry, I instead found thousands of fishermen and their families without plumbing or electricity who welcomed me into their homes, killed chickens, cooked Adobo and cut down coconuts for me. Most catch fish and raise animals which they sell in Ubay (my starting point, where a fisherman's family let me stay while paint was drying and seat and deck lines were finished).

All the gear worked and it was a very cool trip.