On Wed, Feb 28, 2001 at 12:00:52AM -0600, Erik Sprenne wrote: > At the risk of sounding 'old school', I'd suggest an older design boat as > and all-purpose *river and surf* boat. One that comes to mind - and that > might even fit 13's - is the Cruise Control by New Wave. It's an old enough > design that it won't break the bank, it's an excellent front surfing boat, > and has enough speed to make paddling upstream or though the surf less of a > grunt. You can't throw ends in this boat due to it's high volume bow, but > it will do respectable stern squirts. I'll second this recommendation's premise: get an all-purpose river boat. I recommend that beginners start with any of: Perception Pirouette Perception Corsica Dagger Crossfire Dagger Response Wavesport Lazer First, all of these boats are available *used* in quantity. This immediately saves a beginner a bunch of cash. And a beginner will abuse them anyway, so there's no sense in buying a new boat. Second, all of these boats perform basic whitewater moves well: the eddy turn and peel out, upstream ferry, front surf, and and side surf. They're all easy to roll. They're all large enough to avoid the (increasing) problems we're seeing in the sport with small boats in difficult whitewater. Third, none of these boats are designed for rodeo moves. I think this is a good thing: rodeo moves are cool, rodeo moves are neat, but they're not terribly useful when you're trying to catch a 1/2-boat eddy halfway down a class IV rapid. I've been astonished at the number of developing paddlers I've run into who can do cartwheels all day but do not have a satisfactory eddy turn in class II water. (And learning to do rodeo moves in a standard boat, while harder, is not only possible but is a better learning exercise. [*]) Sure, doing 2000 eddy turns isn't as fun as carving up a hole. And if all you want to do is the latter, then I suppose it's fine. But the problem is that an increasing number of paddlers are incorrectly presuming that because they can surf all day in their Mr. Clean that they have the requisite skills to take on difficult whitewater; and this doesn't become apparent until problems surface. ---Rsk [*] I've seen a US team member pull off 4-point carthweels in a slalom K-1...13'2" long. *That* is impressive. *************************************************************************** PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List - Any opinions or suggestions expressed here are solely those of the writer(s). You must assume the entire responsibility for reliance upon them. All postings copyright the author. Submissions: PaddleWise_at_PaddleWise.net Subscriptions: PaddleWise-request_at_PaddleWise.net Website: http://www.paddlewise.net/ ***************************************************************************Received on Wed Feb 28 2001 - 03:13:06 PST
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.4.0 : Thu Aug 21 2025 - 16:30:38 PDT