To modify or not to modify, that is the question.
On one hand we have the accurate history of another culture and the sincere desire not to mess it up. On the other the reality that this thing is covered with nylon and every cockpit is longer to even allow our entry into the mystery.
Somewhere here there is a confluence of comprimises that will give us a decent boat, mostly accurate, with reasonable performance. For a while now I’ve been calling that the Type V Greenland kayak (see Golden, Kayaks of Greenland). These 20th century Southwest Greenland kayaks are predictably stable, they paddle pretty good in bouncy water, weathercocking is usually manageable, the low back deck is great for rolling, the moderate bow keeps it from diving in smaller wind waves, and the geometry of the boat offers much easier entry and better foot room for such a small kayak. That’s pretty good for something that was not designed for what we do now with sea kayaks.
I’ve put about a hundred of these on the water over the last few years, varying from the extremely accurate to the mostly accurate to the deliberately slightly modified. The kayak above is the #176 from the Fram museum in Oslo, Norway. This boat was built by a gentleman who’s apartment was only 17 feet long so I had to make it a bit shorter than the original. I chooped two inches off of either end of the gunwales and cheated the stems back a few more inches as well. The result is a kayak that is volumetrically identical, but noticably more playful due to the ommission of about six inches of slicey stems at the extreme ends. It is still well within the historic range for this type if kayak and exhibits all the key Type V shaping features.
The interesting thing about these boats is how different people experience them. For a 200lb person, this kayak is a full-on low volume rolling machine. For a 160lb person like myself it’s a little more playful but still quite low in the water, a good rolling kayak that’s good for a bit of cruising. For a 125lb person, like Susan pictured above, this may be the first sea kayak they’ve ever owned that actually fit them, it has a moderate freeboard of about 2 inches, but still much lower volume than anything they could possibly buy in a kayak shop. Of course these small people could go smaller still, but I think they should consider keeping to the original size because they are the few lucky people for whom an accurate Greenland replica kayak could actually be their primary use sea kayak.
Although I am always tempted to introduce one of the sexier, tippier, and more exotic greenland kayaks to my teaching program, it’s really hard to beat the wider Type V’s, they paddle, roll, and look pretty nice too. I think I will be building a lot more of the seventeen foot kayaks like the one pictured above.
