Celeste is the second kayak I have built of this design. The first I built for my wife and she has enjoyed it paddling around Washington and Vancouver Island, B.C. I was quite pleased with the design but wanted to change the second one to challenge my building skills a bit more and add more artistry. While I knew I wanted to do something truly unique and with a lot more artistic challenge, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. I was waiting for inspiration when one morning I woke up and saw the planet Saturn lying on the deck, The Heavens had spoken! As an astronomy geek, (I built my own 10″ Newtonian reflector telescope grinding the mirror by hand), I decided to do inlays of planets, moons and comets orbiting a sun. My palette was not just woods but wood with character, knots became storms on the planet’s surface, creamy streaks became clouds flying over the surface, Spalted Maple texture became continents, and purple grain became seas. The woods also had to be special, I used extremely dark-figured Peruvian Walnut that was almost black as the background for the planets and moons but was extraordinarily lucky to get some incredibly figured Western Red Cedar for the topsides that I book matched and sequentially routered. But I also build advanced composite parts for rockets, aircraft and racing yachts so the coaming was clear finished carbon fiber.
