View Single Post
Old 12-27-2009, 05:09 PM   #32
Damn Yankee
Scooby Newbie
 
Member#: 53066
Join Date: Jan 2004
Chapter/Region: South East
Location: I guess a legend and an out of
Vehicle:
work bum look a lot
alike, daddy.

Default

Quote:
Originally Posted by WhiteH2O View Post
Of course you should take advise from everywhere you can get it, and sort through it and see what is best for you. Again, the best way to do this is to paddle as many boats as you can before you buy.

As for being stuck in a sit-in boat when you flip; that isn't the case in a sea kayak. You aren't in a kayak tight enough to get stuck in one. What really happens, is that gravity pulls you out before you even know what happens. To learn how to roll in a sea kayak, you have to outfit the boat so that you are in fairly tight and so that you don't fall out. I have tried to roll sea kayaks that aren't outfitted correctly, and I was even falling out while rolling one.

If you find a group of kayakers, often times some of them rent college swimming pools to practice rolls and wet exits in a controlled environment. I strongly recommend doing this at least once to get the feel of how easy it really is to get out of a boat if you flip. Also, you can see how hard it is to get back in once you are out. That is something that you should practice as well, especially if you paddle more than swimming distance from shore.
This is what I was thinking. It's been about 12 years since I did any paddling, but I worked at Eastern Mountain Sports, and we could take our rental boats out for free. I took advantage of that.

I paddled a Swifty 3.1 Perception boat one weekend through a slow, tight river and over a few beaver dams. It was a blast, pretty maneuverable, and very stable. It had a very open cockpit, and I didn't have a skirt (can't find any pics of the boat now), and I didn't get that wet.

I also paddled one of their longer lake boats on Lake Champlain, and it was a blast. Much faster than the Shorty, but harder to turn too - which was great in the lake when the winds kicked up and I wasn't drifting sideways across the bay.


Neither boat ever made me feel like I was going to be trapped in it if I rolled - they weren't white water boats like a Dagger or something, and the cockpits just weren't that tight.
* Registered users of the site do not see these ads.
Damn Yankee is offline   Reply With Quote