Pygmy Murrelet Specs
Length: 17’
Width: 22”
Weight: 36 lbs
MSRP: $1,089 USD
pygmyboats.com
“I think people who’ve never worked with wood are intimidated,” Dan Jones tells me when we rendezvous in the border city of Buffalo. He leans forward conspiratorially, as if sharing a secret, “But you don’t need any skill to build these boats, just patience. If I can do it, anyone can.”
Pygmy Boats Murrelet is a build-it-yourself beauty
Jones is referring to the gleaming Pygmy Murrelet that we’ve just transferred from his roof rack to mine. In the interest of expediency, I was only too happy to leave the laborious side of this review to Jones—a veteran Pygmy paddler and builder—but now the seed is germinating: “Hey, I could build a kayak….”
It’s this spirit of self-reliance that inspired Pygmy Boats founder John Lockwood to build his first stitch-and-glue kayak in 1971. A fall at a construction site three years earlier had destroyed Lockwood’s hip and left him on crutches, but the lightweight, drag-anywhere durability of his homebuilt boat gave him the freedom to explore British Columbia’s remote Queen Charlotte Islands for months at a time.
Trained at Cambridge and Harvard as a computer scientist and anthropologist—admiring of the peaceful Mbuti people of Africa, Lockwood’s college friends nicknamed him “Pygmy”—he designed cutting-edge naval architecture software before selling the world’s first computer-designed, precision-cut wood panel kayak kit out of his Seattle workshop in 1986.
Given the growth and popularity of Pygmy boats since then, the Murrelet looks and performs exactly as it should—like the culmination of 26 years of design experience and refinement.
Video review of the Pygmy Murrelet sea kayak:
This article was first published in the Spring 2013 issue of Adventure Kayak Magazine. The Pygmy Murrelet looks and performs like the culmination of 26 years of design experience and refinement. | Feature photo: Vince Paquot
