West Greenland Kayak Build, Frame number 3, first water test. (there’s music on this one).
I’m not sure I actually got a good sense of the kayak this time out. We ran out of the clear shrink wrap and so this time I bought black wrap to try to reduce the number of distracting conversations with onlookers. The wrap wasn’t as strong and didn’t seem to stick quite the same way and I kept taking on water and having to empty it out every five minutes.
Initial impressions are that it’s a bit more stable and more comfortable than the last version. Predictably, the increased skeg in the stern knocked down the maneuverability a bit. It’s tempting to shave down the ends but I really need to get out in a lot more wind and waves to decide if that’s actually a good idea or not.
Trim on the water seems to be just about perfect, and it’s a really pretty boat so that’s nice.
It doesn’t feel any faster or slower but that rarely means anything. The sensation of speed and actual paddling efficiency are usually completely separate things. You can’t tell anything without a GPS. That’s an interesting topic that I should post about sometime.
I’m not sure if feels any surf-ier either, but that could be an artifact of the plastic wrap or just the fact that it’s pretty much impossible to effectively surf small boat wakes in anything but my F1. Again I need some steeper wind chop to get a feel for things.
Basically I’m gonna have to go out again. I was hoping to just move straight into finishing this boat but considering how much I learned from the last series of saran wrap tests and the fact that I will probably never work on this particular design again, I think it’s worth taking the extra time and experimenting with as many configurations as possible.
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