Here’s another bit of drone footage of our canoe rowing and sailing system. More than anything else both of these features are designed to be as simple as possible. My recent experiments with the pedal drive not withstanding, I generally subscribe to the philosophy that complexity is the enemy in small boats.
The pop-up sail weighs next to nothing and tucks out of the way in normal canoe mode, but is ready to pop up in a flash to catch a favorable breeze. In a longer boat, it can run down wind and on broad reaches, and in a smaller, shorter pack canoe, it will run beam to the wind. Any more performance than this and you’re spending a lot of money and bolting a lot of gewgaws onto your boat for questionable benefit.
The rowing system is designed to perfectly mimic the rowing geometry of an Adirondack Guideboat. On a slightly larger canoe this gives me about 70% of the Guideboat rowing experience in a boat that is about 20%. as hard to build. I love rowing Guideboats but man they’re a lot of work to build (I’ve made 6 over the years).
Combining both systems is a lot of fun because oars do a significantly better job at fighting the wind than a canoe paddle. Here I’m using pinned oars because they work well for how I normally row but if I was rowing into the wind with any frequency, I would probably switch to featherable oars.
It’s worth noting that I only let the oars trail like this in mild conditions when I’m close to shore because a self rescue is a complete cluster**** if you tip over set up like this.
I can bump the oars for a quick course correction but generally, I don’t touch them and just steer the canoe with the sail and also shift my weight which makes this remarkably fast for something that’s only flying one and a half meters of sail. I really like how the outrigger doubles as a perfect back rest when I’m running downwind.
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This post was originally featured on our Instagram feed.
See the original post and discussion here.
