Canoe and Kayak Plans from Bear Mountain Boats

​

I am excited and deeply honored to be able to announce that I am now offering plans from Bear Mountain Boats. For those who don’t know Bear Mountain Boats is the company started by Ted Moores and his wife Joan Barrett back in the 1970s to make and sell wood strip canoes. For those few where that still doesn’t ring a bell, Ted Moores wrote CanoeCraft, which is pretty much the bible of wood strip canoe building. Its not that Ted invented strip built canoes, but through his book and teaching he helped raise it to an art form. More people have learned about how to make a cedar strip boat through him than anyone else in the world.

Besides innovations in strip building techniques Ted and Joan have been instrumental in making traditional and new canoe, kayak and small boat designs available for do-it-yourself boatbuilders for wood strip construction. Ted has preserved traditional canoe designs from historical boatbuilders and adapted them for cedar strip construction. Working with Steve Killing they have adapted these classic designs and created new canoe and kayak designs specifically for folks building boats in their basements, garages and sheds.

We are starting out with a small selection of the Bear Mountain catalog, but intend to expand to include almost all the designs the offer. It takes a bit of effort to set up each design on our website, but hopefully, over time, we will be adding more. It is our hope that expanding our line of designs to include those from Bear Mountain Boats we will be able to help continue expanding the number of people who can add “I built a boat” to their life experiences.

Watch this interview by Andrew Szeto with Joan Barrett, Ted Moores’ partner at Bear Mountain Boats