A dozen years ago, john townes “j.t.” van zandt built his first wooden fishing skiff. He loaded it onto his pickup and headed for Aquarena Springs near the campus of Texas State University in San Marcos for a paddle. But the boat never reached the water. “It took about a twenty-foot swan dive onto I-35 on the way to its christening,” says Van Zandt, forty. “It was kind of a tub, so I ended up just burying it in my backyard.”

Still, Van Zandt remained obsessed with building the perfect boat for stalking redfish in the shallow waters off the Texas coast. He didn’t like the ride he found in the plastic kayaks that are all the rage along the Gulf of Mexico. Even the lightest models bogged down in the mud and were uncomfortable if you had to stand in them for long. So he studied the time-honored techniques used by wooden boatbuilders, contemplated his options, and eventually dug up the old boat. Then, in 2003, he found an accomplice in David Escobedo, a custom-home builder based on the outskirts of Austin, who saw promise in Van Zandt’s plan. “When I met him, he still had this old boat with him,” says Escobedo, who hired Van Zandt in 2006 to run the cabinet and millwork operation at Escobedo Construction, the soon-to-be parent company of Escobedo Boat Works. “I have a lot of clients who are fly fishermen, and it made sense to cut a new prototype.”

Reborn as the Sea Dart, the new boat Van Zandt designed is no longer a tub. Built out of Joubert marine plywood imported from France and certified by Lloyd’s of London, the sixteen-foot decked skiff is a sleek canoe-kayak hybrid. It is tough enough to paddle in swift currents or light surf, yet weighs less than fifty-five pounds, so one person can carry it. A test run on Lake Austin, skipping over speedboat wakes and sliding into bass-friendly feeder creeks, reveals that the Sea Dart tracks arrow-straight, drafts shallow, and is a secure platform for poling or casting. Neither screws nor nails mar the cockpit or slick lacquered deck. That’s because Van Zandt used lapstrake technology, a construction method dating back to Viking times, to join the wood, which was then glued with high-test epoxy, coated with fiberglass, and hand sanded.