The Modern Playboat Reimagined: Warren Williamson & Chessy Knight

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In this episode of The Dubcast with Dubside, we visit kayak designer and rough water paddler Warren Williamson in his Anacortes workshop. Warren walks us through the evolution of his designs—from the perfectly curved hull of the Cayenne, to the true-to-form baidarka, to the fast and fluid Rosario—each born from years of experimentation with how water truly wants to move around a kayak. We also explore Warren’s innovative paddle development, as he explains how a single Greenland paddle set him on a path from classic narrow blades to the short, wide, ultra-thin power blades he now carves by hand. Chessy Knight shares how these designs perform in the real world of whirlpools, surf, and tidal races. We close with a remembrance of Warren’s long time friend and founder of the Skin Boat School, Corey Freedman, whose mentorship and legendary “Corey’s Goop” helped shape an entire generation of builders. 

LINKS: 

Masik Kayak Rolling (Chessy Knight) 

 The Skin Boat School 

Transcript

[ANDREW]
There are sea kayakers who thrive in rough water, surfers of tidal currents and ocean waves. There are those devoted to the precision and beauty of traditional Inuit rolling, and there are those who fell in love with the craft of building kayaks. But it's rare to find someone who excels at all of these things.

Hello everyone, today I'm going to present a video of our visit with Warren Williamson, a master paddler and designer whose handmade kayaks and paddles, quietly built in his workshop in Anacortes, Washington, have become legendary among those who've watched him dance through the tidal race of Deception Pass. This past June, on our meandering path to the South Sound Traditional Inuit Kayak Symposium, Dubside and I met up with Warren for a tour of his workshop and the kayaks and paddles he's been obsessing over for the last several years. We were joined by Chessy Knight, whose rough water paddling has become the real-world test for Warren's ideas.

We'll talk about the Cayenne, a strip-built playboat born from a single idea, that when you edge a kayak, the water should feel nothing but a perfect curve. We'll climb into his baidarka, inspired by historic Aleut designs, but tuned with modern materials and features. And we'll look at the Rosario, a fast point-to-point boat that still plays happily in whirlpools.

Then we'll talk about paddles, how Warren went from using a Euroblade to a wooden paddle of traditional Inuit design, why he started making his own, and how he ended up carving short, wider blades with enough power to convince even committed playboaters that they never need a Euroblade again.

And finally, we'll talk about Warren's long friendship with the late Corey Friedman, visionary founder of the Skinboat School, a generous, eccentric mentor, whose Anacortes workshop launched and supported a generation of skin-on-frame builders. All that coming up on The Dubcast with Dubside.

[WARREN]
This is the Sencha, and I built this in my earlier days of kayak building. It's a East Greenland, I call it an East Greenland rolling kayak. And I built a lot of, quite a few more Greenland kayaks back in the early days.

And then, when I moved here, I started building, you know, strip kayaks. And so this was the first one that I built, the Cayenne.

You know, I look at other kayaks, and it's like they got so much going on. They got chines, they got concaving surfaces, you know, they got a lot of rocker. And so this one doesn't have anything like that. It has very little rocker, okay?

But the ends are relaxed, okay? It doesn't have any chines. And so on this kayak, if you look at the longitudinal lines, the water lines, the butt lines, and the diagonal, they're all perfect curves.

Okay, so looking at the diagonal, the diagonal would be, would start like here and run like this, okay? And then come back up like that. And if you take that curve and lay it down flat, it's a perfect curve.

Okay, so the thinking there is, it's like a kayak has rocker, and that's the center line, and everybody talks about the rocker. And so if it's a performance kayak and you're up on a wave and you're cocked up on one side or the other, now the center line is what's right under you. And so if it's a kayak that has concaving surfaces and chines and all that, the center line is going to be kind of like cattywampus.

You know, it's not going to be a smooth curve. And so on this kayak, when you're up on edge, it's a smooth curve that's right underneath you. And so I built it, I paddled it, I liked it, and I didn't realize how good it was until Chessy got into it.

So do you want to tell us about it?

[CHESSY]
Okay, so I had been looking for a playboat for a long time, probably tried just about everything out there, couldn't find anything I liked. Got in this and immediately said, this kayak, I wish this kayak was in production. For me, when I experienced this kayak, there's absolutely no resistance in the water.

There's nothing pushing back against the water. There's no chines. There's no weird rocker.

And I can be as aggressive in it as I want to be. It will do anything I want, as aggressive as I want to be. And then when I'm like tired and I want to just chill and kind of spin around in the whirlpools, it does everything.

Yeah, it's the best playboat I've ever been in, and I wish it was in production.

[WARREN]
Okay, so you want to look at these ones over here?

I'm not afraid to design and build something that's completely different, right? So this is my version of a baidarka.

And on this baidarka, it's what I call a true baidarka. And I think, you know, I think I know what I'm talking about here. I mean, I'm basing off of the famous drawing, the M-A-E by David Zimmerly. Does that ring a bell to you guys? And if you look at that baidarka, the shear is straight. It's parallel to the water.

And most baidarkas that you see, you built a baidarka, right? And the shear is more like other kayaks, right? It has a curve to it.

And so on this baidarka, the shear is absolutely, this shear right here is absolutely straight. It's parallel to the water. And so I drew this, and I did it, you know, with the full bifurcated bow, the truncated stern, and I recessed the coaming a lot.

It's a high-volume kayak, but with this recess, you can sit in here and just lay right back without coming up out of the seat. It's a little bit stiff. You know, as you can see, this looks stiff.

It's a great kayak for stormy days, for big wind and rough water. And like anybody that knows baidarkas, they'll tell you that baidarkas, when you're in the wind and big water, they just do what, you just point it, and it just goes. It doesn't get smashed around with the wind and waves. A baidarka is really meant for rough water. So that's the baidarka.

And in this one, I call this the Rosario.

And again, when I sat down to draw this, just like with the Cayenne, I said, I do not want any tangent breaks. You know what I mean? I don't want anything that the water is going to grab onto.

And then the thinking there was just like, what does the water want to see? It wants to see a mirror image of itself. It just wants to be smooth, you know?

And so that's what this kayak is. It absolutely has no tangent breaks whatsoever. And so for a point-to-point kayak, it goes.

You saw it that day out at Sunset Beach. You filmed me. Remember, I was making it like it tracks.

It's fast. It tracks. It's stable.

And when you kick it up for a flat water turn, it turns really good. And it has a good layback, because I always do a recessed coaming.

[CHESSY]
So Warren has two of these, and we went out a couple weeks ago, and I took one. He took the other one. And it was really, really fun.

It's the recessed back that does everything, right? It's just fantastic. And so it's super fast, and then when, like Warren is saying, when we were playing in the little tide race, you can just put it on its side and it just spins right around.

So it's pretty neat. But, I mean, the recessed deck on all of these, the back deck is just such a superstar for rolling.

[WARREN]
Show us the baidarka. Sit in the baidarka.

[CHESSY]
Sit in the baidarka. Happily sit in the baidarka. This was the first kayak of Warren's that I paddled.

And I was like, I have no idea what to expect with this thing. But it's pretty fun.

[WARREN]
So it's a high-volume kayak, but when you lay back, all the way back, and you're not coming up out of the seat.

[CHESSY]
Nope. Nope. I was rolling it, balance bracing it in the current.

It was so much fun. I just had this smile on my face all day because this thing is so weird. I've never been in anything like this before.

But it was pretty great.

[ANDREW]
And hand-rolling it as well, right?

[CHESSY]
Yeah, just on a whim. I honestly didn't think that roll was going to work. I didn't think it was possible in this thing.

But it was.

[WARREN]
Okay, Chessy, sit in your Cayenne here for us.

[ANDREW]
Chessy and Dubside slide into two of Warren's kayaks to test what matters most to an aficionado of traditional Inuit kayak rolls. Fit, freedom of movement, the ability to lie on the back deck or touch your nose to the front deck. They rock side to side, stretch forward, and sweep all the way back, feeling how the recessed back deck and tight ocean cockpit opening lets their body merge with the hull.

Warren designs every one of his kayaks with this in mind. Rolling isn't an afterthought for him. It's foundational.

He's been an expert kayak roller for decades and knows that in places like Deception Pass or the Skookumchuck Narrows where tidal currents twist into huge whirlpools that can suck you underwater and keep you down and where massive boils and eddies can shove you into rock walls covered with sharp barnacles, coming out of your kayak can have serious consequences. And that roll begins right here in the way a kayak holds you, snug, balanced, and ready to move as if it is an extension of your own body.

[WARREN]
See, she won't get out.

That's the seat that I carved from a piece of incense cedar that Corey Freedman gave me. Corey was always generous.

[DUBSIDE]
You started with a thick piece and just...

[WARREN]
Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep.

[DUBSIDE]
There's no bending involved.

[WARREN]
No, no, no, there's no bending. It's like you get a big block of wood like that and you stand back and you go, there's a seat in there. I just got to find it.

And you just start carving away. So now you need paddles to paddle your kayak. So do you want to see my paddle collection?

Dubside, you've never seen my paddle collection.

[CHESSY]
There's one more kayak in here too.

[WARREN]
Yeah, there's another kayak in here.

[CHESSY]
And it's not finished.

[WARREN]
So this is my shop. Yeah. So this is my latest kayak.

So just looking at it, Dubside, what do you think about this?

[DUBSIDE]
You've got this...

[WARREN]
Yeah, it's more Aleutian, it's more baidarka. Yeah. So it's more like Mariners, what you call Swede.

Yes. Yeah, it's got a lot of Swede going on. So I named it the Bijou after my cat.

And I'm thinking it's the Bijou, also known as the big Swede, right? Yeah, because it's very Swede. It's very beamy.

I've never made a kayak this wide. And so the thinking here is that this will be like a rough water kayak for waves, big stormy days and stuff like that. Because it's 15 feet long.

Yeah. So that is yet to be seen. It's almost done.

I've got to varnish it. So yeah, this seat is a bunch of... Like when you build strip kayaks, you end up with a bunch of scrap.

And so last summer I said I got all this scrap out and glued it together and then carved a seat. So, it's the same thing, guys. This is a high volume kayak.

But when you sit in here, you can lay back and not come up out of the seat.

Okay, I started kayaking. I bought an Eddyline Falcon 18.

I'm using a Euroblade, right? And I'm trying to learn how to roll. And I was looking on the computer and I saw a picture.

I saw an ad for Mark Rogers. I saw a picture of the Greenland paddle. I had never seen a Greenland paddle. I just remember I didn't even know they kayaked in Greenland. I didn't know nothing about it. And I saw this picture, I saw this paddle just online and I said, "That's it.”

I connect with that paddle. And I stood right up and bought, I stepped up and bought these two. And when I unpacked this, it came in a tube, right?

I unpacked it and I said, ”That’s it. That's the paddle.”

And I went out and never used a Euroblade since.

So this is my first paddle. And it still works great. This is a Storm Paddle I bought.

Anyways, I paddled with a lot of Mark Roger’s paddles. I bought some other ones. I bought a couple of carbon fiber ones.

And then one day I decided I'm going to start making my own paddles. And I started making them typical Greenland like this. Three and a half inches.  Twenty-one and a half inch loom. Shouldered, not shouldered. And then over the years they start getting wider.

Because I'm thinking why not? This is like four and a quarter. And this one is the last paddle I built. And this is like four and a half. Super thin. Shoulderless.

And like for that not for Greenland rolling and stuff like that. I mean you could, but like for that Rosario kayak where you're just paddling point to point. I paddle with this.

And I actually do like a high European stroke if you want to call it that. So I have evolved over the years. And so these are my favorite ones right here.

These are the ones I use. These are the ones that don't get used very much. And with all my paddles— these are two refurbished Mark Rogers paddles here—with all my paddles I have at least some Sitka spruce. 

Like this one is all Sitka spruce. Oh actually I take that back.

This one, no this one does. This is a strip of Sitka spruce right here. The rest of it is AYC.

These, this is Sitka spruce right here. Here and here. Okay, this is all Sitka spruce.

This is Sitka spruce right here and the rest is cedar. This is ash. And so I always use at least a little bit of Sitka spruce because Sitka spruce is it. It won't break. I mean it will, but it's not going to break, you know, under normal conditions. 

And so I would say when I first started making paddles, I was more shoulder and then I started going shoulderless and everything I make now is shoulderless and as far as paddling I still paddle with a shoulder like this is a go-to paddle.

I still use a shoulder. Sometimes I use shoulderless and I like both. And if you say, if you ask me which one I like the best, I could not tell you.

I like both. They both work just fine. But I am getting shorter and wider.

Like this is really short. This is like 84 and a half. So here's the paddle I'm working on right now.

This is what it looks like.

So the Sitka spruce, red cedar, is going to get cut off about here, and then I start making it look like this. Right now it doesn't look like much of a paddle, does it? It weighs a ton.

[DUBSIDE] 
Is it getting harder to find good lumber? 

[WARREN] 
It absolutely is, and it's getting pricier. Yeah, there's like, if you call up, like at Edensaw, they got all the best in the world.

So, if you call up there and you say you want some old-growth cedar, they just laugh at you, because there is no more old-growth cedar. It's all been mined out, milled out a long time ago. But there's second growth that's pretty old and pretty tight-grain, and another thing is getting harder to find boat-grade lumber.

It's always kiln-dried, and you know, typically like for building a strip kayak, you don't want, I mean it's okay, you work with it, but it's better to have air-dried, that's called boat-grade. 

So, Dubside, what do you like, which would be your go-to paddle here?

[DUBSIDE]
Well, for my hands, these are kind of wide.

[WARREN]
They're kind of wide, aren't they?

[DUBSIDE]
Way wide.

So, I tend to prefer a shoulder.

[WARREN]
Yeah, so how about this one? That's just a little bit wide, that's like three and five-eighths.

[DUBSIDE]
Now, with all this epoxy you put on there, they're getting a little heavy. 

[WARREN] 
Well, no, that's heavy because it's all spruce.

[DUBSIDE]
Oh, well, either way.

[WARREN]
It's all spruce.

[DUBSIDE]
I noticed the weight of it. It's a little bit of weight. Yeah.

And my favorite wooden paddle at the moment is a guy on the East Coast. He's not making them commercially, he just makes them for fun and gives them away to people, but he's got a good deal of flex to them, which yours is a little more stiffer. 

[WARREN] 
Right.

[DUBSIDE] 
Which is, I mean, the wood, you can't get that kind of flex out of carbon fiber, so. 

[WARREN] 
Not at all. 

[DUBSIDE] 
If I have a wood paddle, I like to have a little bit of that give.

[WARREN] 
Right.

So, what about some of these?

[DUBSIDE]
I like the nice sharp edge you've got here. 

[WARREN] 
That's really sharp, isn't it? 

[DUBSIDE] 
Yeah. This one with shoulders on it would be nice.

This one feels pretty good.

[WARREN]
Yeah. That's light.

[DUBSIDE]
Yeah.

[WARREN]
Isn't that nice? 

[DUBSIDE] 
Yeah. That's a good paddle.

 
[WARREN]
Yeah.

[ANDREW]
Do you think laminating makes a difference?

[WARREN]
Absolutely. I would never, I would never make a paddle out of one piece of wood. Never.

Nope. I mean, look at this is what I mean. It starts with laminating, like this is a piece of Sitka spruce that I ripped here and glued it together so that the shaft is laminated. And then I glue the blades on.

And a lot of these are even more, it's like there's three pieces here on this shaft, because of strength. And because when you do this, like when I cut this out of this plank that I still have up there, I cut this, I ripped these two pieces like this and then I flip it like that.

So whatever possibility of warp could happen there, it's opposing itself. And so when you glue it together, this is not going to warp. Like if you look down any of my paddles here, and these paddles have been out and about, they're dead straight.

Yeah. And again, I don't want to ruffle anybody's feathers. A lot of guys paddle or carve from a one piece and if it works, that's good.

But I'm just saying for me, it doesn't. I'm just thinking it's better to take the time to rip it up and glue it back together.

[CHESSY]
I'm still pretty new to a lot of this and I got a lot of flack and people telling me a Greenland paddle is never going to deliver the power in playboating that a Euroblade will. So you got to always have a Euroblade.

I don't like using Euroblades. I don't like rolling with them. I don't like bracing with them. They're too inconsistent.

It wasn't until I paddled with Warren's paddles for the first time, I had no idea that something like this even existed. Because you can't typically get something like this, like this width, anything over three and a half or 3.6 inch. I think Lars Graham makes a 3.6 inch. But anything bigger than that, you can't get in production. So the first time I tried something really wide like this, I was like, it's not a rolling paddle. It's not for rolling practice in flat water in my rolling kayak.

It's for playboating in dynamic water in whirlpools, surfing. And I just couldn't believe what it could do. And I really came away with there's absolutely no reason for me to ever use a Euroblade again.

These paddles are so powerful. So that's the biggest takeaway I got the first time I used your paddles.

[WARREN]
So she's talking about this was just like about 10 days ago?

[CHESSY]
No, the very first time I came down here, and I think I was using your baidarka or whatever I was using. But I was using one of your paddles. It was the widest paddle I'd ever used.

And I was like, why would I ever need to use a Euroblade again? This paddle has so much power.

I'd never paddled anything this wide. I didn't know it even existed.

[WARREN]
Like last week when we were out in the Rosario kayak, we had both those. I call it the Rosario 1 and the Rosario 2. And we're paddling out in Rosario Strait, right?

We took both these paddles. This one is just a little bit less in width than this one. And she's using this one.

And like you're saying, she's like, there's no Euroblade that has anything on this. This has all the power that you need. I mean, look at that.

It's massive. Yeah.

[CHESSY]
It was just really eye-opening for me because I didn't know that something like that existed in Greenland paddles. So I could have all the benefits of the Greenland paddles and all the power of the Euro. If not, this is potentially probably even more powerful than a lot of Euros because look at all the surface area of the blade, right?

[WARREN]
And what I really pride myself on is, look at this. I mean, that's it. You see that Dubside?

I mean, that's as thin as you can get. It's very thin. So the question is, why don’t…people that make Greenland paddles, whether it's wood or carbon, why are they so stuck on a certain size? You know, it has to be this and this.  And, you know, why can't it just evolve a little bit? Maybe it will.

[CHESSY]
I mean, to me, these are playboat paddles, right? These are for dynamic water, most of them. You know, like I said, if I'm doing rolling practice, I want a paddle that's like maybe three and an eighth wide because I have little hands.

So for things, anytime reverse sweeps, anytime I'm out here, like it'd be very difficult for me to reverse sweep with this paddle, obviously, right? But that's not what I'd be using this paddle for.

[WARREN]
That's the other thing about paddles. How do you, it's still evolving. You know, like how do you come up with the perfect tip?

Because the tip, you know, needs to be strong because it takes whacks, right? And so on these ones, I went to all this work to put this ash on here. And then I put, I put four ounce glass on. There's one layer, four ounce glass. The glass comes up. The glass is right up to there.

Okay, so I don't know how much of a whack this would take. I know it's been whacked a little bit. But if you whack this really hard, it's, it's gonna, I think it's gonna, you know, ding it up a little bit.

Anyways, I think that what I have here is a pretty good solution using, mixing epoxy and then mixing in silica powder and also milled glass. Okay, and what I'm doing here is, it's like I taper the, I taper the wood down. So the epoxy goes over it like this.

Okay, so can you see the wood? You see the wood in there? The epoxy is, the epoxy is there.

So you can see how it's sleeved over the wood. Okay, so and then again, there's four ounce glass on here. So this would take a really good whack.

I mean, you could come right down on a rock and it's not gonna hurt it. And again, I try to get everything as thin as I can. Because, you know, I think a lot of Greenland paddles are too thick.

Because to me, it's, I hate to say it, but it's to me that seems clubby, you know, if it's too thick. Yeah, because like, how, you know, how thin can you go? Because this is pretty thin, right?

[CHESSY]
Like I said, it's all the rolling benefits and bracing benefits of a Greenland paddle with a ton of power.

[ANDREW]
Before we wrapped up our visit, the conversation shifted to someone whose influence runs through almost every part of traditional kayak building in the Pacific Northwest. Corey Freedman, founder of the Skin Boat School. Just a month earlier, in May of 2025, I'd received a short email from Warren.

He wrote, “I'm sure you've heard about Corey by now.”

I immediately thought the worst had happened. Only a few days before, I'd emailed Corey to tell him that Dubside would be back in the Pacific Northwest for SSTIKS, and that we planned to stop at the Skin Boat School for a visit.

I never received a reply. And knowing how Corey had ignored my invitations to appear on the Dubcast in the past, at the time, I didn't think anything of it.

Warren confirmed that Corey, apparently active and healthy, and still in his 50s, had passed away suddenly.

Standing in Warren's workshop, surrounded by kayaks and memories, the loss felt immediate and real. What follows is a remembrance of Corey, not just as a kayak builder, but as a popular and innovative mentor. Who trained and influenced so many of the people in the sport.

[WARREN]
Yeah, Corey was here about less than two weeks before he passed away. He came right here. We spent three or four hours together.

He was in the house, he was in here, we looked at everything. Yeah, I've known Corey for 25 years. And I, you know, I went out there and built two baidarkas.

I used to go out there just to hang out. I used to go out there when Dubside lived there and just hang out. Remember his dog, Chewy?

I used to go there just to see Chewy.

[DUBSIDE]
Yeah.

[WARREN]
I'd drive in and Corey'd be there: “Hey, Warren, what are you doing?”

“Corey, no, it's okay. I just come to see Chewy.”

And there's always so many people there, you know, that you can hang out with. And boy, what do you say about Corey? Like everybody's saying right now, he's, boy, we really lost a guy right there.

I mean, you know Corey probably better than anybody because you lived there.

[DUBSIDE]
Well, I suppose.

[WARREN]
I mean, you were there night and day, right?

[DUBSIDE]
Yeah. He had a very interesting cast of characters coming through there all the time.

[WARREN]
I'm telling you, they could have made a documentary about that place.

[DUBSIDE]
That's a sitcom over there, what happened, going on.

[WARREN]
Right.

[DUBSIDE]
Yeah.

[WARREN]
You could have made a sitcom about the whole place. And he had a tree house. People would come there and live in a tree house.

[DUBSIDE]
I remember the pond next to, in the compound there. Right. When I first saw it, the plan was for me to live in that mobile home trailer on the back lot there.

My first question was, how deep is that pond? Can I roll in that pond? The water was so dark because all the tannins from the leaves are filling, but it didn't bother me.

I mean, I started rolling in Philadelphia, so I'll roll in whatever. So that was my little practice pond over there. Well, there's some video of me rolling in there.

But so there was a family of ducks. Like a pair of ducks had little ducklings. It was seven or eight little ducks floating around in the pond.

And then over time, there was five or six little ducklings and four or five little ducklings because there's coyotes in the area. Right. It eventually went down. Just one of the ducklings survived because the coyotes got the other one. And it got into an adult. I think by the time I was there, it was an adult living in that pond.

It would fly out and come back to that pond. That was its home base. So we call this duck Lucky.

[WARREN]
Lucky Duck. I remember Lucky Duck.

[DUBSIDE]
Yeah. The coyotes never got it. And I believe it finally passed away of old age, but it escaped the coyotes.

So I'd be out there rolling and Lucky would be over on the side. And he'd come around and I’d say, “Lucky, what's going on?”

[WARREN]
And, you know, he got a lot of people started. A lot of people came there to figure out, you know, how to build skin on frame. John Peterson started there. Brian Schultz started there. And the list goes on and on. You mentioned anybody, like I remember talking about a guy back east.

And of course, yeah, he came here and I got him started.

You know, I think it was in ’98. He organized where when John Heath brought Maligiaq to Houston and then they came here and they did a thing at Bowman Bay. And and then they they went on, they went up to Alaska and traveled around. And I'm pretty sure that was Corey's doings to get them there to Bowman Bay.

I remember seeing some videos of it. That was early days. That was before anybody even rolled around here or did anything like that.

There you have Maligiaq at Bowman Bay and John Heath. Yeah, that was pretty good for for 1998. And then Corey also did every year he would do the Wooden Boat Festival in Port Townsend.

And he would I'm pretty sure he was there with his baidarkas, right? And he would give talks and lectures. And and then he went down and did classes, skin-on-frame classes down at Lake Union, the Center for Wooden Boats. He would go down and do classes there.

[DUBSIDE]
He had, it was a BMW motorcycle. He would zoom down for classes sometimes. If he didn't have any kayaks to bring in that motorcycle.

[WARREN]
Yeah. When he came here that he had a Ducati. He always had he was always driving something, you know, “Look at this. I just bought this,” you know. Yep.

[DUBSIDE]
And he had that it was a Mercedes like a… That he had figured out to run on on mineral oil. Before it was cool.

[WARREN]
Yeah. Yeah.

[DUBSIDE]
He would get these big, like the big containers of shipping oil from wherever it would come from to put in the car to drive around. He had that all figured out.

[WARREN]
Yeah. And he was always somebody who was always living there with him. He was people could show up there, you know, down and out and he'd he'd give him a place to live.

[DUBSIDE]
Yeah.

[WARREN]
Yep.

[DUBSIDE]
People with campers would come and park their camper there while they built the kayak or something like that.

[WARREN]
Yeah. And people came in there from all over the world to build. I remember he had his had a student come there one time from Switzerland. Stayed there all summer. Yeah, I think his name was Luke. In fact, we we paddled with him.

He was with us at Deception Pass one day with Maligiaq. I don't I don't I don't guess you were there that day. But that kid from Switzerland was there.

[ANDREW]
Before we left Warren's workshop, there's one last thread to tug on. Corey's GOOP, the legendary secret sauce of the Skin Boat School. 

[WARREN]
And Corey's famous for his Corey GOOP. People use it all over the world. Yeah. So I guess the question is now, is that Corey GOOP going to live on? Is somebody going to be able to get it and keep selling it?

[ANDREW]
Corey's skinning technique became the gold standard for skin -on-frame kayaks. Thanks in large part to this compound, a proprietary two part one hundred percent solids polyurethane that cures into an incredibly tough, flexible, waterproof coating for the nylon skin.

It was so prized, and Corey so famously protective of its origins, that rumors swirled about it for years. One story claimed that even a devoted student was once caught quietly rummaging through Corey's files, desperate to discover any hint of the supplier behind the formula. No one ever found out.

Corey kept that secret to the end. Fortunately, Corey's GOOP is still available, at least for now, through the Skin Boat School website. A small but vital piece of his legacy carried forward.

As the evening light faded, Dubside and I said our goodbyes to Warren and Chessy. It felt fitting, even poetic, that we found ourselves remembering Corey Freedman, the man who organized the very first traditional Inuit kayak gathering in the Pacific Northwest long before SSTIKS existed, bringing together legends like John Heath and Maligiaq. We were on our way to the latest chapter of that tradition while looking back at the man who started the very first one.

The next morning, we'd be catching the ferry to Friday Harbor, bound for San Juan Island to meet another one of Dubside's old friends, another story waiting just over the horizon. But we'll save that for the next time on The Dubcast with Dubside.