More footage from yesterday’s kayak sail testing. The first sail is a 1 square meter ripstop nylon sail in 10-15 mph winds. The second is a .8 square meter laminate sail in 15-25 mph winds. I’m sailing upriver here and current against me was 1 to 2 mph.
More technical details in yesterday’s post.
I get a lot of questions in the comments about adding leeboards and things like that so I just figured I would respond in the post here. Basically, unless you have commercial manufacturing capabilities, adding leeboards and outriggers to a kayak just turns the whole thing into a frustrating contraption. To do it right you need properly shaped and sized foils rigidly attached at exactly the right location and balanced underneath a sail that is airfoil shaped, with a rudder and outriggers. But once you’ve got all that crap on your kayak you can’t really paddle it very well as a normal kayak. AND it’s still a pretty crappy sailboat.
I’ve seen one commercial outfit that managed to build an elegant, but expensive semi-upwind kayak rig, but the name escapes me.
After decades of experimenting with small sails on all kinds of small boats the conclusion I’ve come to is that if you want to sail upwind, build yourself a sailboat. The costs and compromises of adding an upwind rig to a paddlecraft vastly outweigh the benefits. I literally have half a barrel of meticulously carved foils in the basement that can attest to this fact.
Another reason to keep foils out of the water is the drag. Running downwind I could achieve 7 mph but that would instantly drop to 5 mph anytime I steered with the paddle.
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