Deck Designs

It's time to start thinking about how I'm going to design the deck using the contrasting strips of wood that I have. Most of my wood is a dark brown in colour but I have ~100 feet worth of a uniform light coloured wood (yellow cedar). I have sketched out a few ideas that I think might work with the wood I have. Please submit your vote by leaving a comment below!

Some notes on the designs:

• * I didn't take the time to fill in colours on all of the designs, you'll have to use your imagination for the others.
• * I used the most powerful graphics tool I could lay my hands on for this - MS Word! So that will explain a lot when you view the designs. (I copied and pasted the kayak outline off the Guillemot site, cleaned it up and used that as my template to overlay my designs onto.)
• * I have more of the dark brown cedar than the light brown. The designs are geared towards using less wood in the light colour.
• * Ease of stripping is important.
• * I may incorporate some sort of compass rose inlay into the deck. Pedro has an excellent example on his kayak.
• * There will be a forward hatch and rear hatch in the deck, and I am going to attempt to do flush hatches.
• * There is a spot shown just fore of the cockpit in these designs, that was to indicate the location of a paddle park. However, I think I may move it to the side of the cockpit instead like John did, but haven't decided (having it in front of the cockpit with the paddle perpendicular to the kayak may be easier and quicker to use and add a bit of stability?). It's a long time before I really have to consider this fully.

I am open to suggestions, etc. Perhaps somebody with stripping experience can point out the advantages or pitfalls of certain designs from the point of view of what's going to be easy or difficult to strip. The ultimate decision will be made when I start playing with the strips laying things out on the deck.

Theoretically you should be able to click on the picture above and have it open up a larger version. That doesn't seem to be working for me, so to see the full-sized version, click here where I have it uploaded to my main web site.