The original inspiration for the Bootlegger family of kayak designs was the image of the famous 1923 Gold Cup winning speedboat called "Baby Bootlegger". This boat came to define the elegant lines of the mahogany runabouts. Based out of the Thousand Islands region of the St Lawrence River between New York state and Canada you can well imagine that Baby Bootlegger was a product of the vigorous importation of alcohol that thrived in this area during Prohibition. My kayak design are not as fast as the boats used to smuggle Canadian whiskey, but the inspiration for speed remains.
Using the latest computerized evolutionary optimisation methods to design super-efficient hull shapes that produce very little wake and are easy to paddle through the water, these designs are exceptionally smooth paddling boats. The flag ship of this design is the microBootlegger, which shows the most obvious relation to baby microBootlegger. It is a roomy comfortable tandem kayak. With a single wide open cockpit it is actually a good example of a traditional deck double paddle canoe. The solo version of the microBootlegger is scaled down to be a comfortable boat for a single paddler. The fastest design in this family was my Mystery design. This boat was designed to race on the open water and it cuts through chop cleanly and quickly.
