Bob wrote; re: rudders > >johnw, you design both ... what are your thoughts [and i duck and run >awaya again ;-)] There are people who need rudders no matter what boat they paddle.They lack the skills or physical ability to handle a boat without one. There are boats that need rudders because their design is such that they cannot be held on course or manoeuvred without one. There are people who have sufficient skills to handle a boat without a rudder. There are boats that are designed in such a way that a paddler can easily learn to handle the boat without a rudder. I do not design boats with rudders because I expect the customer to learn the appropriate skills. however, I can understand the reasoning behind designing boats with rudders for those people who may not want to learn those skills or have a physical barrier to doing the required strokes. Whether a rudder is desirable depends upon the persons skills, the type of paddling, and the boat. It is unrealistic to use any one person or any one boat as an example to support either a pro or con rudder argument. Conditions, paddlers, and boats are unique and even the same boat when improperly loaded will change its characteristics so much as to shift from the "don't need one" to the "do need one" category. (This has been, mentioned elsewhere but it bears repeating) There is no reason why boats can't be designed that do not need rudders. On the other hand there are reasons why it just isn't worth the effort to convince the buyer that he or she can handle the boat without one. >From a purely philosophical approach no system should be more complicated than it has to be. In the case of a sea kayak the basic premise is remarkably simple. The paddle/paddler provides both power and control. The need to portage and the nature of small creeks, lakes, and rivers forced natives to develop a craft that did not need a rudder and so canoes are often both adequately manoeuvrable and adequately directionally stable while paddlers learn to control their boats because there is no option. Modern sea kayaks, not faced with portaging and shallow water problems, adopted the rudder as a substitute for skills and/or to compensate for certain design characteristics. If there had been some physical reason why a rudder would have been undesirable then sea kayaks would have been designed to be paddled without and this issue would never have surfaced just as it has not surfaced as a serious issue for white water kayaks. It is worth noting that some Inuit adopted crude rudders on directionally unstable boats once they saw European ships and boats with them. It is difficult to tell if the boats got directionally unstable after the rudder became available or if the rudder came along later and was used to cure a long standing design flaw. Not sure this helps anyone. if you are interested in how and why boats turn you can read my page on the topic at http://home.ican.net/~735769/control.htm It is non-commercial so there is no sales pitch on the page. Cheers, John Winters Redwing Designs Specialists in Human Powered Watercraft http://home.ican.net/~735769/ *************************************************************************** PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List Submissions: paddlewise_at_lists.intelenet.net Subscriptions: paddlewise-request_at_lists.intelenet.net Website: http://www.gasp-seakayak.net/paddlewise/ ***************************************************************************Received on Sat Mar 28 1998 - 09:30:32 PST
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