Personally, zero. While the sliding seat is an ingenious engineering idea for me it ruins the purity of the boat. Sorry Matt, but I would never own one. We bought our Express and Elan to avoid having any mechanisms to fail or adjustable gizmos to distract from paddling. I even threw out the contoured foam pad that came with the boats. I glued a one inch thick mini-cell foam pad to the hull so that comes right up the sides at the hips and is long enough (for/aft) to allow any reasonable seating position. My maximum position forward it set by the foot braces and the maximum rearward position by the seat back. Primary positioning is by the foot braces though, so it's repeatable. I've got an inch or two of "trim" just by how I position myself in the boat and that's enough. It took 4 or 5 paddles to get it optimally adjusted, but now it's done. It allows some movement, but is still plenty tight for surfing, bracing, rolling, etc. The boats track and turn wonderfully with the simple foam pads I have glued to the hull. Overall they work far better than any rudder or drop skeg boat I have paddled. Do they track perfectly in all conditions? No, but minor edging takes care of the rest. They just don't need "fixing" with a complex seat. I'll admit that we haven't paddled the boats loaded yet, but we have been able to balance other boats while packing a full load without using whatever gizmos the boats had for tracking. I am confident we can do the same for the Mariners. There will be some trial and error and even then it won't be perfect, but that's one of the reasons I go on multi-day kayaking trips rather than ocean liner cruises. Steve Brown -----Original Message----- ............ A few posts back I listed every minor failure I knew about with our sliding seat system. I'll add that it might take a new paddler a little while to learn how to move it (especially if they have not gotten any instruction). Someone with experience doesn't have to even slow the kayak down but can move it with, at most, the loss of a stroke or two. How many failures with sliding seats have you seen? ............ Matt Broze www.marinerkayaks.com *************************************************************************** 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 Fri Jul 02 2004 - 10:33:04 PDT
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.4.0 : Thu Aug 21 2025 - 16:31:15 PDT