Along these lines, I've been using a friend's boat, a Looksha IV. She is maybe 130 pounds and I'm 180+ gear, she doesn't carry any gear in the boat except the paddle float and pump. I've got about 10 pounds of stuff I carry. So the way the boat acts with us is totally different. I find the boat tracks badly for me. She was having a similar problem and she put 2.5 gal of water in the stern hatch. She felt this helped a great deal. I tried the same thing and though it tracks better it felt like a tub. It was like I could get out and push the thing faster than I could paddle it. I had tried a bit of weight in the front and it seemed a bit better without the side effect of working so hard to move it. It really didn't solve the problem, though. It may be I'm just too big for the boat. I have a rudder I can use but if there is any way to trim the boat so that I don't "need" the rudder under normal circumstances I'd like to paddle it that way. Where we were last week could get really shallow really fast so the rudder would have been a problem, anyway. The question is in general for tracking in light wind/calm sea conditions how do you improve tracking with the distribution of weight? Maybe the answer is the same as you have been giving here but I'm having a bit of trouble sifting it out of what I'm reading. Joan Spinner *************************************************************************** PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List Submissions: paddlewise_at_lists.intelenet.net Subscriptions: paddlewise-request_at_lists.intelenet.net Website: http://www.paddlewise.net/ ***************************************************************************Received on Fri Sep 03 1999 - 05:23:20 PDT
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