On the factory floor of East Cape Boats this past June, Chris Campbell, the boat maker’s lamination manager, held a hammer above the upturned hull of a new East Cape model, the Flip Pallot-inspired Skanu, and glanced at Pallot and the company’s founder and co-owner, Kevin Fenn. True to its moniker, the craft is a love child between a flats skiff and a canoe. It is twelve feet eight inches long, formed of carbon and high-performance resin. It can be poled, paddled, and rowed, or affixed with a trolling motor to zip toward remote skinny waters. It is designed to carry two anglers, or a duck hunter and a hound, or a solo explorer on a mission to go where no one could go before. At the time, the boat on the factory floor was one of only four prototypes in existence.
Pallot, of course, is the outdoors sage, boat designer, and fly-cast whisperer, famously unflappable. Now the Obi-Wan Kenobi of the fly-fishing universe looked visibly alarmed. “Don’t do this,” he intoned. “You don’t have to do this.” He hadn’t seen anything like the Skanu, except in his dreams.
Fenn hesitated, and then nodded. Campbell brought the hammer down on the boat like a splitting maul. The bang reverberated through the Longwood, Florida, factory. The hull bounced and shuddered on the concrete floor. Pallot’s eyes widened, and Fenn’s face went white—even he didn’t expect such a vicious blow. Then the trio stepped up to view the damage: All they could find was a shallow indentation that matched the hammer’s striking face. There was not a crack, not a chip, none of the value-wrecking damage one might expect from such abuse.
Fenn breathed a sigh of relief. “This is not mythical, magical fairy dust we’re working with here,” he said. “This is Flip Pallot’s boat. It has to be awesome.”
Actually, it’s one of two Pallot-inflected boats from East Cape debuting this fall. In addition to the Skanu comes a limited run of a Flip Pallot edition of the Glide skiff, featuring hull modifications and a topside interior layout Pallot completely redesigned.
But the Skanu is a boat that speaks to Pallot’s heart in ways that wind deeply into the mystique of his South Florida stomping grounds. He has long loved small, self-powered craft. As a youngster, Pallot famously paddled air mattresses into Biscayne Bay to fish. For decades, he stashed canoes in remote corners of the Everglades, reaching them by skiff and then taking the canoes ever deeper into the mangrove wilds. He has poled canoes after fish, ducks, deer, and hogs, from Florida to Minnesota to Maine. “I don’t just like canoes,” he says. “I am a student of canoes. I obsess over every aspect of canoe design.”
Back in 2020, Fenn had started another company centered around an inexpensive roto-molded canoe-skiff hybrid, then shelved the product. On a visit to the East Cape factory a year ago, Pallot spied the hull on a dusty rack. Fenn hauled the boat out of storage and gave it to Pallot, who took it to Mosquito Lagoon for a spin.
“It didn’t take long to hear from him,” Fenn says, laughing. Pallot called from the water with the first of many design changes. He made the seats deeper and moved the rear seat aft, ultimately turning it into an entire rear deck. He cut the raised transom flush so the upside-down boat could easily ride in the bed of a pickup. And Pallot insisted Fenn shelve the strakes for easier maneuvering. “That one hurt my feelings,” Fenn says. “But it was the right thing to do.” Thanks to a cambered hull slightly arched so that the midline of the boat is higher than the outside edges, or chines, any water that finds its way into the boat drains to the sides. The chines also serve as twin keels to add strength and stability. Otherwise, skiff-standard features include a rolled edge with rub rails and a gunwale, a towing eye, and molded-in rod cradles for spinning and casting rods and fly rods.
The collaborative design results in a true marriage of old school and new. East Cape was a pioneer of using a manufacturing technique called “vacuum infusion,” in which the resin in the boat’s hull gets pulled through a mold with vacuum pressure, soaking sheets of material such as carbon, Kevlar, or fiberglass. The process creates very strong, light, and rigid boat hulls. Incredibly, the Skanu weighs a wispy forty-nine pounds fully rigged with seats. It can be strapped to a poling skiff or stacked into a mother ship and transported to distant waters. It will practically float in wet mud. “The cool thing about this boat is how it’s going to change fishing for a bunch of us,” Pallot says. “Throw it in the back of the truck and stop at any ol’ wet spot and go fishing.”
Pallot was a guest on Episode 1 of G&G‘s The Wild South podcast, in which he discussed his time as a young boy growing up in a small, wild town called Miami, his breakthrough TV show, how he casts with a fly rod differently than most anglers, and why watching as many sunrises and sunsets in a single lifetime is a pursuit worth beginning at any age. Listen to the episode.
