[Paddlewise] Boat and People sizes

A couple of wees ago Pam and I met up at the Port Gamble kayak symposium...
or show... or whatever it's called (it combined kayaks and bicycles which I
thought was creative). Port Gamble is a small classic Puget Sound seaport
town just beyond (north of) the Hood Canal Floating Bridge north of
Bremerton and south of Port Townsend. It's "beach" is nowhere near as nice
as the one at Port Townsend but the price was apparently right and I thought
that there was hope for the venue.

Since Pam has recently bought an Illusion which was designed by Sterling
Donalson we more or less hung out there and watched the proceedings from a
shady spot. Quite a few Puget Sound kayaking personalities paddle Sterling's
kayaks (including Dubside) and just sitting around listening to him explain
his designs to potential customers is a good education all by itself. One
thing he said caught my attention. He mentioned to someone that big guys are
reluctant to edge and that to overcome this he had designed a new version of
the Illusion (the Grand Illusion) for big guys with some attention to the
fact that we (ahem!) don't much like edging.

I edge my kayaks pretty aggressively but I must also admit to a certain
trepidation to really laying it up on edge. I wonder whether that has
something to do with my size or whether it has something to do with the size
of the boats I paddle. Most of the boats I have paddled and/or owned are not
boats designed for "big" people but since I spent a number of years in the
white water side of the sport I preferred the smaller, tighter feel of the
standard designs. Yet I do have two boats clearly built for the larger guy:
a Nimbus Telkwa HV and an SOF F-1 that Brian Schulz designed for a bigger
paddler.

Since I generally prefer to paddle a boat designed for someone smaller than
I am (I loved my Coaster, after all) perhaps my own feelings towards really
getting my boats on an edge stem from the fact that the boats just don't
work as well with a big guy in the cockpit. Yet even the F-1 is, I feel,
more difficult to get right up on edge. And the Nimbus is, as well.

It makes sense that a lower displacement kayak will be narrow and a narrow
boat will be easier to edge. I remember the flash of insight I had when I
discovered that to a lot of paddlers the word "performance" meant how fast
it was from edge to edge; I had always equated "performance" with precise
and quick steering and movement. For me a shorter kayak with some rocker but
a hull designed to also track when not on edge was perfect. For someone else
a longer, more narrow hull was more important.

I may be wandering a bit here but bear with me. My basic questions are:

A) Do other "big" paddlers also have an aversion to really getting their
kayaks on edge?
B) Have they chosen a kayak based on that?
C) Can a boat designed to "fit" a larger paddler be as quick and nimble as
one designed for a smaller paddler?
D) All else being equal is it possible to simply scale a design up or down
to fit a larger or smaller paddler while retaining the characteristics that
made the boat "good" at its original size?
E) Can a big guy ever hope to get a boat with the same performance
characteristics as an "average" (smaller) paddler can get or does "mass"
play an important role here?

Sterling obviously felt that he needed to redesign the Illusion to fit
himself; the standard Illusion already has a way of scaling at least th
cockpit size up or down within a range of paddler sizes and preferences.
That wasn't, apparently, sufficient for Sterling; hence the "Grand
Illusion". Matt and Cam Broze produced several versions of kayaks (the two
sizes of the Express and the Elan come to mind) that seemed to fill a niche.
All of those boats are still in high demand on the used market.

It seems to me that if you weigh somewhere around 150 to 170 pounds you have
a much better chance of getting excellent performance out of a kayak design
than if you weight 240 to 300 pounds (or 100 pounds). Is there any basis for
this?


Craig Jungers
Moses lake, WA
www.nwkayaking.net
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