Water Bottle Kayak with Outrigger

Step 4 November 12, 2009 - Thursday

After I got home from school, I started to work on the kayak again. I only had one layer of bottles where I was going to sit and about 3 or 4 layers of bottles at the two ends. I thought that the bottles would hold up my weight above the water (I'm 105 lbs.) so I stopped working on the bottles and I wanted something extra. So I found a trap, still in the packaging, so I was going to use the tarp for the skin. This turned into one of the biggest mistakes that I've ever did on the kayak.

After much trial and error, I got the tarp onto the kayak without moving any bottles. When I was measuring, I only measured it once and that cost me the whole tarp. After I pulled the tarp tight over the frame, I zip-tied it together, but when I did, the skin wasn't tight anymore. It continued until the very end. When I finally got to the end, I didn't have enough tarp leftover to zip-tie it together. So what did I do? I used a piece of scrap of tarp and patched up the hole.

Because I had some leftover tarp, I decided to build a sail just in case. I built it like a triangle and I used duct tape for the seams. It wasn't that pretty and it didn't really work that well. So I scrap that idea off of the game plan.

Now that I got the tarp on, I thought that it was finished and all that. I wanted to try it out tomorrow, but when my mom and I inspected the hull, we found sooo many small holes that we didn't want to try and patch up with duct tape. So that night, I removed the tarp off the chicken wire and I just thought that it would float now. Luckily, I found more chicken wire and we brought home several more bags of bottles soo I guess that I'm going to make the kayak bigger tomorrow.