West Greenland Kayak Build, Frame number 3, final Saran wrap test.
One of the reasons I started designing my own kayaks is because as a coastal paddler it was almost impossible to find a sea kayak with tolerable maneuverability when I started paddling. As an equally avid surf and white water paddler, if I can’t turn a sea kayak 180° with two strokes I get pretty salty pretty quick. Salty, or rocky, or crunchy, or maybe stuck sideways in a sea cave in Tasmania for 10 minutes in a borrowed fiberglass kayak….
Fortunately sea kayak design has evolved and you see a lot more boats with shorter waterlines these days which really helps both maneuverability and efficiency.
Traditional Greenland Kayaks span the maneuverability spectrum, from reasonably loose to impossibly stiff, and my original version of this boat was towards the looser end but still just a little stiff for my taste. This slightly scaled up version really helped to unlock the ends, and then iterating let me dial in the bow and stern grip on the water. The cool thing about doing these tests is that I can give people a range of end rocker heights in the plans so they can choose the maneuverability they prefer.
Personally I like the bow to wag back-and-forth about an inch with each stroke at cruising speed and about a half inch at about 75% effort. Some people think that this represents a loss of energy but that’s not actually true for reasons I don’t have the space to go into here.
Edge turning is my other obsession. If you can design a boat that edges well it will turn a kayak faster than a rudder with less drag. With my modern kayaks I can edge turn a kayak up or down wind even an extremely high winds. I’m not expecting that with this Greenland kayak but It will be interesting to try once I get the kayak finished.
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