Thank you Kirk for your thoughts. OK, the Nordkapp and Anas Acuta have been with us for years. Why? I think because a lot of thought went originally into the design of these two boats and secondly because the lines of the Anas Acuta are taken off a West Greenland kayak - and in this kayak, in particular, lie a number of centuries of use in hunting and design tweeking by the Greenlanders, before we lay our hands on it and tweeked it here and there, but left the basic concept well alone except to build it so that we Europeans could comfortably sit in it. Agreed, we use our sea kayaks not for hunting, and here is where there is a disparancy between what is designed, what is tested, and what is used - in the majority of cases. Sea kayaks are used for perhaps playing in surf, day trips, weekend trips, weeklong trips, and much longer trips (I have packed all I need for up to a month of coastal kayaking in a Nordkapp). Horses for courses should mean a different kayak for each of these uses, as the boats will perform differently with varying payloads. Also to be taken into account are the physical make up of the paddler In a nutshell, when we look at tests in Sea Kayaker, for instance, we note that invariably, whatever the kayak was designed for, it is tested with little payload. The question I ask myself, on reading such reports is, for instance, how do I know that a sea kayak designed for expedition work but tested with nothing more than a pack of sandwiches and a thermos flask in the hatches, can be evaluated. If evaluation took in the use for which a kayak has been designed, then test results would, I am sure, be quite different. The problem is that who is prepared to have a kayak for each eventuality, who is prepared to put the time and effort into design, and which manufacturer is prepared to have a wide range of moulds for each eventuality. Then comes the question of individually fitting out the kayak with pumps, deck lines, deck fittings, knee tubes, etc, etc - it all adds to weight and cost. "You gets what you pay for - no more, no less." Coming back to the original theme - Derek Hutchinson's thoughts on design - in the early 1990s I bought one of his kayaks - a "Fjord." This boat turned out to be no better than the home built GFK I built from a mould in 1974. The first time I paddled the kayak, was in a quartering wind and sea on the first day of a week's trip with camping gear, food, etc. With the cross winds and sea, the boat would not hold its course. Fortunately, for me, the weather conditions deteriorated so much that after the first day we abandoned the trip. That was the first and last time I used the kayak - it now sits with a number of other kayaks on a boat rack - I could hardly sell it knowing how badly it performs. I saw Derek about a year later and asked him about his design. He replied "Oh, that was a mistake." I still wonder how he could design and then sell such a craft - he surely could not have tested it himself. *************************************************************************** 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/ ***************************************************************************
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