Re: [Paddlewise] Innovations in sea kayak designs

On Sat, Apr 11, 2009 at 6:28 AM, Dave Kruger <kdruger_at_pacifier.com> wrote:

I worked as a teacher for 30 years or so.  And, every year at the fall "in
> service" we were treated to dissertations on innovative ways of
> accomplishing our task ... but about 90% of the time those new techniques
> were never evaluated for their efficacy.


Good point. The teaching of mathematics from elementary school through
university seems to have hit a serious speed bump due to "innovation" in
teaching.

>
> So, when someone berates a community of developers of kayak designs for
> failing to be "innovative," my skin crawls.


Ya, but we're old guys. We really aren't likely to change our ideas.
Innovation is anathema to us because it represents change. In fact someone
backchannel mentioned that sea kayaking is chock full of old guys. Maybe
that's the reason. Heck, I'm as bad as anyone else my age as far as cranky
goes.

In fact, a person like Craig might berate the Broze Bros. because they
> failed to "innovate" after developing and successfully marketing there
> epoch-making designs of ... when? ... the eighties?  the nineties?  When I
> visited their shop in 1993, they had essentially the same hulls on the racks
> they were selling in 2005.


I don't think the Broze Brothers had to keep on innovating. Edison did it
(but there are even some questions about that) but how many strokes of
genius do we demand of a designer? And, to be fair, some of their innovation
was recognition of someone else's idea and implementation in their own
products (to wit: the Coaster). In Matt and Cam's case they had spent 20
years chopping up fiberglass hulls and rebuilding them. I think berating
them for not continuing to innovate would be pretty unfair.

>
> So why would the Broze Bros. change their hulls?  To be innovative?  No. So
> they would __work__.  Engineers know that if a design meets its goals, and
> tinkering with it only degrades its performance, you should not mess with
> it!  If the goals change, _then_ the design might change.


The Mariner hulls worked pretty well but, again, as people get older they
find little need to change. If it works, then don't fix it. Matt and Cam had
built a pretty nice little business, had created at least one legendary
kayak, and eventually wanted to do something other than sit in a storefront
listening to other people plan kayak trips.

But, speaking as an engineer, tinkering with a design is pretty much what
engineers live to do. We don't need no goals; we just like to tinker.
Somewhere there are kayak designers who are tinkering with designs right
now. Maybe the problem is just getting those designs out and recognized. I'm
just curious as to why there were so few willing to take a Mariner design
and take it a bit further. Actually, someone has...  or at least thinks he
has. Brian at Cape Falcon Kayaks has tweaked the Coaster into a
skin-on-frame design that he thinks is an improvement on the original. I'll
be able to comment on that better in a month or so.

>
> Which leads me to the second reason sea kayak hull design innovation (the
> real kind, not the marketing kind) has plateaued:  paddlers are not doing
> radically new things with their hulls.  Most want a compromise boat ....


Well I'm not so sure about that. I drove over Deception Pass last weekend
(moving the Muthah-Ship to its Oak Harbor slip) and there were lots of
kayaks on the water. Certainly paddling Deception Pass is more radical that
what the majority of sea kayakers were doing 10 years ago; or even five
years ago. And anyway, most sea kayakers are over 40. Maybe we'll need to
see a large influx of 20-somethings enter the sport in large numbers before
we find out whether radically new things can be done with the hulls. For
years white water kayakers were told that it was the sales of sea kayaks
that supported the white water designs. That they didn't sell enough white
water boats to justify the expense of the new designs but that the sea kayak
crowd kept them going. I wonder if that's true any longer.

>
> In contrast, the WW crowd _did_ change what it wanted to do with its hulls,
> and there _was_ true innovation in hull design:  playboats came into favor
> over trippers.


This was, I firmly believe, because the people who were doing white water
migrated into other sports. The last two years I was on white water it was
damned hard to find anyone over 35 on the river. And the older people were,
like me, mostly in RPMs. What changed was the demographic. No one my age was
interested in 65 foot drops, that's for sure.

>
> Finally, a breakthrough in the basic understanding of the craft can also
> generate true innovation:  if someone develops a better understanding of
> hydrodynamics, then we may see some true design changes in sea kayaks, in
> the same way winglets appeared on airliners to increase wing efficiency. To
> date, nothing parallel has occurred in the science of pushing a hull through
> water.
>

This is a "chicken and the egg" argument. Does innovation stem from a change
in goals or does a new design promote a change in what people decide they
can do? It's probably a little of both. Pastic boats certainly changed white
water paddling and allowed people to do things that they wouldn't have
risked a fiberglass boat doing. But I also think that the sea kayaking
culture might be in for a new period of innovation. As I said in the
original post the Illusion offers an innovation in its ability to vary fit
over a wide variety of paddlers. The fit that white water paddlers have had
for the past five or six years is probably going to find its way into sea
kayaking.

Nice to see a spirited chat on here. It was getting way too quiet.


Craig Jungers
Moses Lake, WA
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