Whitesavage & Lyle wrote: <LARGE AMOUNT SNIPPED> > needed them, I use a rudder on my sailing canoe, my old klepper tandem > was easier to paddle with the rudder in the water (you couldn't raise it > anyway). Actually you could. When I bought my Klepper at the old shop on Union Square in my native Manhattan, I pointed out the lack of a way of pulling up the rudder. They said it wasn't necessary, that the rudder would just get pushed out of the way when you came into a beach or hit an object. I insisted and they finally and reluctantly mentioned that you could rig up your own rudder lifter line (The shop manager, the beloved Dieter Stiller, was always slow and reticent in ever admitting that Klepper could do anything wrong or have overlooked an important detail. :-)) This is now standard with Kleppers (post around 1993-4) but back then, you drilled a small hole in the rudder to which you attached a line. You then pulled on that line to get the rudder out of the water when you did not want to use it or to practice paddling the double without a rudder (a practice encouraged by the Klepper shop in order to hone rudderless paddle coordination technique of the two paddlers). The problem was what to do with the other end of the line in the cockpit area. (Later when Klepper did provide a rudder lifter, it attached that line to an added sewn-in D-ring alongside the cockpit.) People would tie it to a crossrib inside the cockpit but that wasn't possible if you used a spraydeck on the boat. I studied and studied the situation and finally one day a light bulb lit up over my head. I "invented" my first folding kayak specific item, a rudder lifter, that required no sewing and took advantage of a unique thing on the Klepper (it is on page 138-39 of the Modifications chapter of The Complete Folding Kayaker). A little later I started thinking about what other specific fixes as well as techniques could be applied to folding kayaks and another light bulb lit up over my cranium...start a newsletter. The rest is, as they say, history. So you can see, Klepper rudder lifters hold a special place in my heart. ralph diaz -- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Ralph Diaz . . . Folding Kayaker newsletter PO Box 0754, New York, NY 10024 Tel: 212-724-5069; E-mail: rdiaz_at_ix.netcom.com "Where's your sea kayak?"----"It's in the bag." ----------------------------------------------------------------------- *************************************************************************** PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List Submissions: paddlewise_at_lists.intelenet.net Subscriptions: paddlewise-request_at_lists.intelenet.net Website: http://www.paddlewise.net/ ***************************************************************************Received on Mon Sep 06 1999 - 05:07:15 PDT
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