I was editing some footage of the East Greenland kayak last night and it got me thinking about updating the design.
For my modern skin on frame kayaks I pursue performance with almost no consideration to history, aesthetics, or anything else, but on the traditional side of things I’ve always been really strict about adhering to the lines of the actual historic kayaks to represent them as they actually were, not as we might wish them to be.
For me that’s always meant only building nearly exact copies of museum kayaks, but on the recent West Greenland redesign I decided to let myself pull elements from all the collected examples of a specific type (West to Southwest Greenland rifle hunting Kayaks of the early 20th century) and that gave me a much broader design palette to work from without exceeding historic parameters. The result was a moderate boost in performance and I also built the ability to scale the kayak into the system (11 sizes from 110 to 230 lbs) massively improving comfort and fit.
I’m pretty happy with how all that turned out which has me thinking about the East Greenland kayak. What I build now is a copy of an early 20th century in East Greenlandic Kayak that is presently held in the Greenland national museum in Nuuk. I chose this particular kayak because I feel like it is one of the most user-friendly of all the collected examples. It’s quite quick and surprisingly stable for an 18 inch wide kayak although it’s pretty darn tight even for me at 5’8” and 160 pounds. (The average historic size of an East Greenland Kayak hunter was 5’5” and 145 pounds).
A redesign pulling features from other collected examples of the same time period and location would give a more comfortable base size and the ability to scale.
Unfortunately I’ve got a LOT of big projects stacked up for this year, but if I can get through all of that maybe I can redesign this kayak as a reward for myself. It’s a lovely little boat and it would be cool to make it more accessible to a wider size range of sizes.
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