In preparation for re-shooting our West Greenland hunting kayak design video we spent a few days on the water with the Skydio2 drone.
This original of this kayak was collected in 1931 in West Greenland and has a variety of features that make it unique for its type. The overall balance of ease of construction, paddling ability, rolling ability, and relative comfort make this surprisingly user-friendly for a true hunting kayak shape. It also scales well, and I offer it in four sizes for paddlers up to 225 lbs.
I’m thinking about building a brand new one this week and trying to decide whether or not I want to make any modifications. So far I’ve been strongly opposed to modifying traditional arctic kayak shapes to preserve and celebrate the history of these watercraft. On the other hand, the original users had no qualms about modifying their own designs, and viewed through that lens one might consider innovation and evolution to be just as ‘traditional’ as any particular historic shape. Certainly many skin on frame kayaks being built in Greenland by Greenlanders today are not congruent with the historic shapes.
For me it’s less about where I would start to modify as where I would stop. I could absolutely make this kayak more stable, more maneuverable, faster, more comfortable, and a better roller. It would look very similar and I think it would give more people what they actually want when they think they want a traditional Greenland kayak.
But here’s the trouble: if I’m modifying the historic shapes to improve modern performance why not finish the job and cut off those long pointy ends and make it much better in tight spaces and wind and waves? From a design perspective those ends are simply inexcusable and the performance gains would be almost as significant as all the other modifications put together.
This is about the point where my brain starts to freeze up and I go back to just focusing on replicas of historic Greenland Kayaks.
What do you think? Modify or no? And what modifications do you think violate the ‘spirit’ of what a Greenland kayak is and what it isn’t?
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This post was originally featured on our Instagram feed.
See the original post and discussion here.
