What a $100,000 Canoe Looks Like

‘I love that it takes so long to make canoes,’ declares Trent Preszler. The artisan boat maker took up his craft after his father died, using the tools he inherited to create a canoe over the course of fourteen months.

  • Words: Rachel Halliburton

‘I love that it takes so long to make canoes,’ declares Trent Preszler. The artisan boat maker took up his craft after his father died, using the tools he inherited to create a canoe over the course of fourteen months, matching elegance with exquisite detail. The hundreds of layers of wood include cedar, black walnut, zebrawood, purpleheart and Mexican ziricote, sourced from an exotic wood dealer close to his Long Island studio.

In that first canoe, and those he has made subsequently, the aesthetically stunning design is then coated with fibreglass and epoxy, and varnished. The seats – outsourced to Jason Thigpen, of Texas Heritage Woodworks – are made of hemp and leather, while the cutwaters are cast in solid bronze by Kristian Iglesias of Kai Design.

Preszler loves testing his 150-pound creations on the water, declaring them to be ‘light and agile’. Some clients are so beguiled by the canoes’ beauty they have even been known to keep them as works of art.

The Preszler Woodshop
Video Duration
Articles

Further Reading

View All

Soviet Bus Stops

Photographer Christopher Herwig recounts the epic Central Asian road trips he took over 12 years, covering 30,000km, to document the unique and architecturally experimental Soviet bus stops.

Up Close: Ice Fishers

Photographer Aleksey Kondratyev on the generations of Kazakh men who brave temperatures that often reach forty degrees below zero in the hope of catching fish beneath the ice.

The First Woman To Row Across An Ocean

Sylvia Cook tells the story of how she rowed across the Pacific with adventurer John Fairfax in 1971: surviving shark attacks, a cyclone, a broken rudder and being washed up on a coral reef.

Castro, Cousteau and I

In 1985 Jacques Cousteau visited Cuba. He stepped off his legendary ship, Calypso, and into the welcoming arms of Fidel Castro. From the Plaza de la Revolución to the bottom of the sea, Paula DiPerna looks back on the months she spent with the unlikely pair.

The Kombai

Oliver Steeds describes the fast-changing world of the tree-dwelling Kombai tribe in Papua New Guinea, whose members are as fond of wisecracks as they are of the Sago grub.

The Politics of Map Projections

Most journeys start with a map. Yet creating a map is far from an exact science. Here we look at both the historic and modern calculations made by cartographers trying to render the world flat.
Browse by Category