Info on "Vega canoes and kayaks" please

K

kinsinger@cedarville.edu

New Member
I bought a glass canoe at a yard sale and I'm trying to get some info on it. It doesn't have a SN....The name sticker reads "Vega canoes and Kayaks", manufactured by Vega Integral Plastic co. 7501 Westfield rd. Indianapolis Indiana.

I bought it because it really looked like it had nice lines for a touring boat. I took it to Algonquin last week and my notions were verified. It paddled beautifully! But, it’s ugly and kinda heavy. Does anyone know anything about “Vega” boats? The original owner purchased the boat in 1968. It has aluminum gunnels & thwarts and glass tractor seats. It’s 17’6” long asymmetric hull with very little rocker (haven’t measured it). I know this isn’t a wooden boat but it probably was at one time (the plug) and whoever made it must have known something about paddling. Thanks for your help.

Jay Kinsinger
 
Vega canoes were built by the Moore family in Indy and most were designed by the late, great Howie LaBrant. They later changed the company name to Moore Canoes and somewhere around 1974 or so, the factory burned and the company went out of business. Modern solo canoe designer/builder Pat Moore is the son of the people who ran Moore Canoes/Vega.

I suspect that the boat you have is a "Peter Pond" model, named after the early explorer. If so, it would be a fairly low, lean design with squarish stems, similar to many Sawyer and We-No-Nah quick, general purpose touring boats. Other models that I can remember were the "Voyageur" - a pretty big (maybe 18') traditional-looking tripping boat, the Canadien - an 18'6" deep hulled, whitewater canoe with rather odd looking flared sides and the "Ladybug" - a 16' traditional boat from a mold pulled off of an old wooden canoe. It was nice looking, kind of like a Rushton Indian Girl, but the bottom had rounded out quite a bit on the original wooden boat and the fiberglass reincarnation of the Ladybug was quite "twitchy" in the water.

They also pioneered bolt-on mold sections which could be attached to their marathon racing canoe molds to make deep-sided hulls for whitewater distance racing. The "Vega Venture" was also a popular model. It was a rather big touring kayak (not a great design, but roomy). You could send them about five yards of light, printed cotton fabric and they would lay it up under the clear deck gelcoat and make you a custom kayak. We had customers bring in all kinds of crazy fabrics (plaids, zebra-stripes, and a lot of different versions of stuff that looked like a Hawaiian shirt) to make fancy-colored boats.

By the way, just in case you're wondering how the gunwales are attached to your boat - there are small holes drilled in the hull's top edge. Little hunks of wooden dowel are stuck through the holes, like little cross-wise pins, and the round gunwale extrusion with a slot cut in it is slid on from one end of the boat over the doweled hull edge. It's clean looking, but won't take quite as much abuse as the heftier aluminum gunwale extrusions used by Sawyer, We-No-Nah and others. The hull layup is what the Moore people called the "Octametric" layup - hand layup, mostly cloth, with a few mat stiffener pieces. The Octametric part had to do with running some of the inner cloth layers with the weave running at an angle to the keel, rather than the common practice of running them all fore and aft. They claimed that it made for a stronger fiberglass hull. In reality, I don't think it made a drastic difference, but they were generally pretty nice boats.
 
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