Call it a canoe, a pirogue, a bateau, or whatever you like. The Peace Canoe is good basic transportation that you can build in a weekend. However, with its appealing shape, it won’t look like you built it in a weekend.
The Peace Canoe is intended for first-time builders working on a limited budget and on a timeline. The hull is engineered for locally sourced materials and is held together with polyurethane adhesives dispensed from a caulking gun. You won’t need to mix epoxy or anything toxic and it’s unlikely that you’ll need to order anything but the bronze ring nails. Anyone from a troop of enterprising Scouts to a fisherman with a nearby lake to explore will appreciate the ease and economy of build. With a payload of over 600 lbs, this hull will absorb a family of four and a good-sized picnic lunch.
This canoe is best suited to sheltered waters; I don’t want to read about any attempted Atlantic crossings. If you’re after a bulletproof hull for sliding over oyster shells, you can fiberglass the bottom. But if you use simply decent plywood and keep after the paint, your Peace Canoe will last a long time.
The construction sequence has you prefabricating side panels, bottom panels, and seats as subassemblies—a “kit” of parts, as it were—-then bringing them all together in one exciting step. If you’re patient with your measurements and with the subassemblies, the hull will leap together without any wrestling. I built the first hull solo but there are a lot of steps that benefit from a patient helper.