This journey began with an interest in building a Stitch and Glue kayak - I was getting very close to purchasing plans from CLC and had priced out the main materials locally. The boat I was interested in was the Mill Creek 16. Then I spotted a 16' ply 'kayak' for sale on TradeMe (NZ equivalent of EBay) which I got for $200. This saved a lot of building time and money. Here is one of the actual photos from the TradeMe listing.

This boat is a design by Hartley which he named a 'kayak' and it is broadly similar to the CLC Mill Creek I was looking at building. The hull shape is quite kayak like: fairly low and flat but the very open cockpit seems more like a decked canoe. Sometimes I call it a canoe-yak. The lines are quite pleasing to the eye, Hartley is no slouch although this is the extreme small end of his extensive design portfolio.

At 16' (actually 15'6") with two seats it seemed perfect for my wife and I or the kids to paddle in. But it felt pretty 'tippy', even with just one in it. I think the position of the seats was too near the ends which did not help.

This lead to the first conversion, a small outrigger on a couple of poles that bolted across the centre of the cockpit. This was an instant improvement: suddenly the boat was rock steady. You could even stand up and walk around, dive off for a swim and climb back on board. It made a great fishing platform in the 2007-08 summer. And it still paddled easily.

Lurking in the back of my mind was the desire to put up a sail - which began when I saw the CLC Mill Creek could be fitted with a lug rig. Then I discovered Gary Dierking and his beautiful range of sailing outriggers. I wanted an Ulua, but I'm working with a shoestring budget and I have a Hartley 'kayak'. So it decided to try and create an outrigger canoe with a tacking crab claw rig, starting with my canoe-yak.

Over the process of assembling and building most of the parts I've learnt a lot. I can now look at that Hartley hull and see it is not at all an outrigger canoe shape, being low, wide, and with not much rocker, the exact opposite of the high, narrow, rockered hull of a real tacking outrigger. I just recently discovered the class of boats called 'decked canoes'. If I was putting a more conventional sail on my hull it would fit quite nicely in that category. But I've already cut and rigged a crab claw, and it's going to have an outrigger. So I've made of boat of 'mixed heritage', some might say mongrel.