A New & Improved Canoe Sailing Magazine

Coming January 2012!

We are developing Skinny Hull Canoe &Kayak Sailing Magazine, a new, more inclusive version of Canoe Sailing Magazine. With this, we will rename so it is very apparent that it includes not just canoe sailing, but a broader range of skinny-boat sailing. The new version will include sailing kayaks, proas and similar style boats, Chesapeake log canoes and a variety of purpose-built two- and three-hull boats that are essentially canoes (or kayaks) with outriggers. So, if it mounts a sail and has a skinny hull we’ll cover it.

While Skinny Hull will be separated from the Canoe Sailing Magazine you are accustomed to, the 'old' version will become our regularly updated blog and will continue to contain our forum. We will harvest the articles we have published here and replant them in the new model, but until that’s done, they may reside there as well. 

Skinny Hull is intended to be a monthly publication if we can get enough new articles to populate it. (We strongly encourage you to suggest what you would like to see, ANY ideas about topics, articles and photos are welcome—don’t be shy!) It will have better coverage, more usability and much, much better art and photos. We will also have a subscription button in the new one so you will get automatic updates as they occur.

We hope you will find the new model to be a vast improvement over what we have been bringing you so far.

Happy sailing!

Ed Maurer, Publisher

CLC Kayak/Canoe SailRig

Kayaks are so easily driven that the urge to equip them for sailing must be as old as kayaks themselves. The original CLC SailRig, from 1995, has been built in vast numbers. There hasn't been a SailRig kit for years. When we noticed recently that it is the second best selling plan set (after the Chesapeake 17), we decided to study how to make the kit easy and affordable to build. 

The SailRig MK2 matches the effortless performance of the original, but features simplified construction and easier kayak attachment. The SailRig is adaptable to almost every kayak and canoe in our catalogue, and many other production kayaks as well. Mounted on a single kayak, the acceleration is neck-snapping, with good handling upwind and down and 9-knot potential. Ten-foot beam gives you monolithic stability (and thus sail carrying power with no hiking out), but the whole rig can be dismantled for cartopping in a half-hour. The SailRig components weigh only about 30lbs total.

Read More!

Touring by Sailing Canoe

Out Among the Islands by Sailing Canoe

by Bob Halsey While camping at Sugar Island, I have made several camping trips with my open sailing canoe. I sail to one of the fifteen campsite islands in the St. Lawrence Islands National Park of Canada.
Typically, after a busy week of sailing races morning and afternoon and maybe taking part in the swim around the Island race, I am ready to relax and do something different. For example, at the end of the first week of the annual encampment in 1989 on Saturday, I packed up the canoe with my tent, food, small stove, sleeping bag, clothes, most of which I put in garbage bags to protect from rain or spray. Then Sunday morning I sailed over to shore and went to early church and breakfast in Gananoque and started (from TIV motel) sailing up the river against the wind. The wind is mostly out of the SW and usually is pretty dependable. The seas were not too much for the loaded canoe and I had plenty of room to be comfortable myself. I was sailing my 18 ft cedar strip I had built the winter before and was quite happy with its performance.

As I was tacking back and forth upwind, I got a good view of many of the Islands- Corn, the Punts, Leek, Huckleberry, Bostwick, Lindsey and others. Some islands are wild, some have beautiful homes. I was planning on going to the last of the Admiralty Islands, a park island named Aubrey island, but I had to be aware that if the wind didn't hold up or if I didn't make the speed I thought I could I might have to stop at a different park island. By mid-afternoon I arrived safely at Aubrey Island. I had a government chart of the waters in a zip-lock bag to help locate myself among the islands.


Read More: Touring by Sailing Canoe