catasup padamaran standamaran supCAT

August 7, 2025
Summertime and the living is easy....If not easy, at least sunny and warm, so far, for our time 'up north'. Over the winter, our kids found a pretty sweet place near Tomahawk and...here we are. The supCAT is wonderful. While I might be a bit biased, the shape is just right and tracks really well. I'm paddling an eight year old, early version, and loving it. Newer version incorporate a few changes, but overall it remains a sweet ride!

Plans for you DIYers out there are in the works. The goal is a roll of paper plans and an instruction manual in time for Christmas 2025.

As always, a supCAT starts with two pontoons and a deck. It includes a base set of pontoons and a deck, but the phrase ‘build to order’ figures heavily into how those base pieces look. For example, the pontoons can have a barrel back stern end, and the deck can feature a thin contrasting pinstripe in between the larger pieces. Options include a variety of lengths and widths, several different wood species, ‘pinstripes’, a custom decal, hatches, and ‘one of a kind’ deck designs.

There's something about wood boats that is hard to quantify. For me as a builder, I love the smell when I'm working the wood into shape, the feel of a spokeshave as it moves across a piece of wood, and the look of the wood as it comes alive under epoxy or varnish. As a paddler, the feel of a wood boat as it slips through the water is very satisfying.

Pictures below are from the July 2018 supCAT splash (aka the rare time a daughter and a boyfriend visit the old home place and are willing to model.) It handled well and felt great. As the pics show, this fourteen foot model nicely fits two people. A sixteen foot model is on my strongback right now (Nov 24), but coldness is messing up my epoxy plans, something about not curing at lower temps...