Moving up to grade 3/4 rivers - kayaks

 

This page is a sequel to the previous web page, about moving up to paddling on grade 3/4 rivers. This page looks at kayaks. I am afraid there are too many people out there buying boats that aren`t the best for what they want to do with them. So this page is about kayaks which may be suitable for people as they move up the grades.

I`m not really wanting to say which kayak to buy - however hopefully I will provide some information to help people make a reasoned choice, so there is a good chance their new boat works for them, not against them.

But first some history, as it helps to know where you are, if you know where you`ve been.

 

Back to the beginning

I guess it started many hundreds or so years ago, with kayaks made out of whale bone frames, and seal skin stretched over them.

The western world adapted the technique by using wood frames and canvas, and as a youth, I played around on Loch Lomond in a wood and canvas kayak.

Then came fibreglass, and kayak design took a big leap forward. One of the interesting things about moving from wood/canvas to fibreglass is that it allowed for a change in the fundamental design of kayaks.

Canvas can really only be bent in one dimension, so wood/canvas kayaks were usually hard chined. However fibreglass can be laid up in 3-dimensional shapes - so fibreglass kayaks mostly had, and mostly still have, more rounded hulls. There are exceptions of course - there are a few sea kayaks still made that have hard chines, but they are the exception, they are made for a small niche market in the sea kayaking world - interestingly, it is a growing market.

There is an additional advantage in designing fibreglass kayaks in 3-dimensional shapes - if fibreglass has got any straight sections, it is weak and flexible - fibreglass gets quite a lot of strength from 3-dimensional shapes - it likes to be curved in every direction.

Some of the composite sea kayaks that have V-hulls have flattish portions on either side of the keel, but they soon curve upwards to gain strength.

Most of the general purpose fibreglass kayaks were around the 4 metre length. When slalom started up, it specified an exact length of 4 metres, and this still stands today, some 30 or 40 or so years later.

Then plastic arrived, and the kayak took another big leap forward.

Like fibreglass, plastic gains strength and rigidity from 3-dimensional shapes - and with plastic kayaks being produced in a mould, much more fancy shapes can be produced, shapes that could never be produced with fibreglass.

I am not sure if it is just coincidence or not, but plastic kayaks started getting shorter. Previous to plastic, the adventurers were trying to run rivers in 4 metre fibreglass kayaks. As plastic started to get used, kayaks started to shrink, the Perception Dancer was one of the classic early plastic boats, and had a length of around 3.5 metres.

It wasn`t too long before a length of around 3.3 metres was regarded as being the best length for white water.

Pyranha was another early maker of plastic boats, one of them was the Rotobat, quite a bit shorter than the Dancer, it was shaped like a bent sausage, and if you were really brave, you used it on white water.

The Rotobat had a BIG brother - the Mountain Bat. I`m not sure how long it was, probably around the 3.3 metre mark, but it was enormous in every other direction. Some of them had aluminium safety cages in them, and they had big V indentions in the deck just behind the cockpit which were designed to be the place that the boat would fold, if it was going to fold.

It had a huge volume, and if the paddler ended up swimming, the Mountain Bats were an absolute nightmare to tow to the bank, they held so much water. However if you fancied a trip down the Zambezi in spate, it would be right at home.

Eskimo have often been leaders in boat design, and they took the concept of the huge volume of the Mountain Bat, but chopped a good metre off its length, to make the Topolino Spud. It revolutionised river running with its 2.2 metre length. Very slow in forward speed, with big rounded ends, it required a completely different set of skills to produce a completely different way to run rivers. It was probably the first boat that you could call a creeking boat, and it still has a loyal following to this day, and fetch good prices on the second hand market.

Prijon was another manufacturer who was active in the early days of plastic, and they had a big range of boats. One of the more interesting ones was the Hurricane - produced around the early to mid nineties - it had its roots strongly in slalom boat design, it was, I think, about 3.2 metres long, and it responded well to good paddling skills, and provided an exciting ride. It was useable on some grade 4 water.

2 or 3 years later, it was replaced by the Fly, which was similar in concept, but shorter, and was one of the first kayaks that had the word playboat attached to it. It was sold as a river running playboat, and was about 2.7 metres long. I used one for a few years on many of the classic grade 3/4 rivers around the middle of Scotland, and also on a few in the Alps. It remains the only boat that I have ever done a 360 in, at Stanley Weir.

Eskimo produced another unusual design in the Diablo - not to be confused with the present day Diablo. There have now been three versions of the Diablo. The original version was a quite distinctive shape - quite long for a river running boat, rather flattish in profile, lowish volume ends, and an amazing amount of rocker. There was no mistaking them if you ever met one on the river.

Around the mid nineties, there started an explosion in kayak design, and the other thing that started was the diversification of creeking boats, and play boats. There was a huge potential market from people who wanted to push up the grades in more and more technical white water, and from people who wanted to push the freestyle limits. Manufacturers responded with a rapid and continuous succession of new designs - some radical, some more cosmetic, but the number of new boats coming onto the market just mushroomed.

I have a Prijon catalogue from 2001, and even by then the Fly looks quite dated compared to the other playboats and river running boats in the same catalogue - they had three much more play orientated boats in the same catalogue, the Delirious, the Luv, and the Machine - they all had quite long very squirty ends.

Necky was one of the companies that started feeding boats into the marketplace, with designs like the Gliss, the Bliss, and the Jive, plus some others. The Gliss was a river running playboat, I had one for a while, and it performed beautifully - except it had a major snag - it had a fairly low volume back deck, and hard rails, and every now and then the back deck caught, and flipped you over quite unexpectedly, and very fast, and you were upside down long before you could even begin to think about doing a support stroke. Not a good characteristic in a boat for use on grade 4 rivers. The Bliss was a bit bigger, with more volume under the rear deck, and I wish that I had got one of them instead.

Another area which developed at the same time was the design of, and the market, for surf boats - sea surfing, that is. Surf boats continue to be a completely different category of boat design.

Somewhere around the mid noughties things slowed down a bit - there are probably two reasons for this - firstly, boat design in both the creeking and the playboating arenas had reached a bit of plateau - there was becoming less and less to distinguish the product from one manufacturer with product from another. The other reason was a change in the market place - sea kayaking had come of age - it had quietly moved from being a somewhat niche market into a massive growth market. Instead of paying £1500/£2000 for a composite sea kayak, plastic sea boats were under £1k. Many manufacturers turned their attention to the sea kayak market instead.

Since the mid noughties, things may have slowed down a bit, but evolution still goes on. There was a creeping feeling amongst some creekers that maybe creeking boats had got a bit too short - 2.2 - 2.4 metres are the typical sort of lengths. Corran Addison broke away from what had become convention in creeking boat design, and produced the Dragorossi Critical Mass - it had several different features, like a rear hatch, and more length - it is 2.69 metres long. Dragorossi say it has continuous rocker, but looking at pictures, the mid section is I think a bit less curved.

Wavesport produced a revamped version of their classic and well respected Diesel creeking/river running boat, the revamped version has a planning hull with significant rocker at the ends like a playboat - it is a creeking boat that can do flat spins on a green wave. A few years ago, this was unheard of.

Dagger have the Mamba - their version of a creeking boat with a planing hull.

Have we gone full circle, and is there now perhaps a bit of convergence going on between creeking boats and playboats, and if so, is it a good idea, or is it a bad idea ?

 

So where are we now ?

People who are moving up the grades towards 3/4 are maybe in for a bit of head scratching as to what boat to go for.

In amongst this harder and harder diversification between creeking boats and play boats, there was a casualty - the middle of the road paddler who wanted a compromise design for general river running and low level playing was a bit neglected, and by the mid noughties it was quite hard to get a middle-of-the-road boat, that wasn`t a rather long older design.

You could say that there are three broad classes of river running boats out there in the market place -

The trouble is, none of them are probably what the improving paddler should be looking for, if they are moving up to grade 3/4 rivers.

Hard core creeking boats are really only good for creeking - put them on a grade 2 river, and they stick out like a sore thumb. They are just out of place, and you`ll miss out on lots of playing as you run the grade 2/3 rivers. They are probably not the best type of boats to learn about boat control, edging, and leaning.

Hard core playboats are great for freestyle, and the designers have enabled paddlers to do all kinds of moves that were unknown a few years ago. But unless you are quite experienced, they are going to be just too unpredictable for improving paddlers who are moving up to grade 3/4.

Remember that play boats are designed to catch the water in some way, to use the water to produce moves. The better a boat is at catching and playing, the more likely it is to catch just when you don`t want it to, and you`ll flip or loop at the worst possible time.

The older style river runners are generally longer, you may be struggling a bit in them. These would include boats like the Dagger RPM, Perception Arc, and several of the Pyranha boats as well - in many cases these older style boats are available quite cheaply now, but often they aren`t equipped as they should be for grade 4.

So what should the improving paddler be looking for ?

The sort of boat I reckon an average sized paddler should be looking for to help them move up to grade 4 would be something like this -

I`ve put some footnotes at the bottom of this page about some of these attributes.

I`m reluctant in a way to name specific boats, but I`m also not sure if I can avoid it. There are quite a few manufacturers now, and I don`t know all the types of boats they produce. I can only mention those that I am aware of. There will be others that I haven`t met, and the fact that I haven`t mentioned them shouldn`t be taken as an opinion that you should avoid them. Go look for yourself, and try them.

Two that I know about that more or less fit the above "ideal" specification are the Perception Sonic, and the Dagger GT.

The Perception Sonic is for small to medium sized paddlers, its big brother is the Supersonic, it is exactly the same, it is just a bit bigger, for bigger paddlers.

The Dagger GT series is available in four different sizes, to suit four different sizes of people. So plenty of choice there to get the best fit. They also offer a choice of outfitting, with significant differences in price.

Both Perception and Dagger make other boats that sort of fit the above "ideal" specification, however the above ones are probably the best ones in their respective product ranges for the improving paddler looking to move up to grade 3/4 water.

The Dagger Infrared and the Dagger Redline both somewhat fit the ideal specification, and I`m sure that hundreds of people have run grade 4 rivers run in them - but I think it might be better to think about the GT series.

I am not sure how many of the Perception boats are still available - the Sparc, the Madness, the Method - however I am not sure that they would be all that suitable anyway - the Madness and the Method were somewhat orientated towards play with low volume ends, so would probably be a bit catchy.

I currently paddle a Sonic, and I think it is great all round boat. It has a high initial stability, it`s easy to roll, it spins on a dime, it bobs down big bouncy rapids a bit like a Spud, and it surfs green waves like the right hand half of Wee Eric a lot better than many of the shorter playboats. It could do with a bit more speed though.

I have played on a wave in a GT, it surfs nicely. I haven`t taken one down a river but I have seen them in action, and they appear to behave well - I suspect that it will be a bit less Spud like on rapids, and a bit more classical in feel, which can be advantageous in many cases.

That`s the two I know about, there may well be others out there, go look.

That`s about it - I hope it is useful for people who are hoping to move up the grades a bit toward 3/4 - I don`t think it`s a market that is well supported by the manufacturers, so you`ll need to do some legwork so that you end up with a boat that will help you progress your skills and capabilities.

Bear in mind that fit is very important - the best spec in the world is no use if you are rattling around in the boat because it is too big. So try and go for a boat that you fit into neatly and comfortably. Then be prepared to pad it with bits of foam to fit you even better. In particular, you need to have the sides of the seat padded so you don`t slide from side to side. You need to have knee grips that hold your knees firmly in place - neccessary for good boat control, essential for rough water rolling. You need to have padding on the upper part of the sides of the seat, to hold you down onto the seat when rolling. Just don`t have so much padding that you can`t get out in a hurry if you need to.

Backrests are vital as well, and the distance between the foot plate and the backrest needs to be set exactly for your frame. My experience of the ratchet style adjustable backrests is that they have a habit of changing their own mind as to where they should be set to - I removed the one on the Sonic and fitted my own fixed one.

Also bear in mind that as you progress, you may well tend toward one of the many different sectors within white water, or even outside white water and into some other bit of kayaking - within a couple of years you may well be looking for a different type of boat - one that is better suited to the specific type of paddling you want to do.

 

Footrests

The type of slotted footrests that look like giant combs, and sliding footrests, have no place in kayaks which will be used on grade 4.

If you are coming down a drop or a ramp at high speed, and hit smack onto a rock, there is a significant risk of your feet dislodging, the bones in your feet or ankles are liable to be fractured, and you may end jammed in the kayak.

The only types of footrest suitable for grade 3 and grade 4 are either full plate footrests with a foam buffer that are bolted on to the side of the kayak, or solid blocks of foam.

Walk away from any kayak that doesn`t have them.

 

Hull shapes

There are two basic hull shapes for plastic river running boats -

You will see references to semi-planing hulls - they are just half way in-between the above two.

Displacement hulls have advantages in that they tend to produce faster boats. They also have an advantage in that if a boat comes off a drop and pancakes - ie, lands flat - the water is displaced around the side of the hull, which absorbs energy, so this reduces the impact.

A characteristic of displacement hulls is that they have a lower initial stability - a lack of initial stability is what makes a kayak feel "tippy" or "wobbly" to novice paddlers. However a low initial stability can be useful on rough water or rocky rivers.

Planing hulls have a completely flat portion of hull - typically the middle half of the hull will be flat lengthwise, and across most of the width. Planing hulls are slower than displacement hulls, but of course they spin better. And of course the planing hull has allowed the whole growth in freestyle to happen at all.

An advantage of displacement hulls over planing hulls is that the bottom outer edges of the hull don`t catch or ride up over rocks the same way, and the boat stays more upright - so they are more accommodating in that respect. I guess it is the same argument that sea kayakers use about deep V-hulls being better than flatter hulls when paddling along waves - the kayak doesn`t tip over.

Displacement hulls have another advantage over planing hulls - they are stronger, because they are shaped in three dimensions. Planing hulls, being flat, are weak - it is a well known weakness of planing hulls that over time, they tend to distort so they are no longer flat - it is known as oil-canning. It is quite difficult to remove, because the plastic has actually stretched, and it is very difficult to make it shrink again. I did manage it once on an old boat I had - I sat it in a warm room for three months in a wooden mould that was the required shape, with bricks in it to force it on to the mould.

Planing hulls are really bad news if you come off a drop and pancake - because they are flat, the water can`t displace, and you can get very high impact forces - compressed spines are the result, and serious injuries can occur, sometimes with permanent disability.

Maybe we should be wary of adverts that describe a creeking/river running boat with a planing hull that is good for boofing.

It may be good for selling boats, but should manufacturers be designing and selling creeking style boats that are going to increase the risk of capsizing on rocky rivers, and the inevitable risk of injury from that, or increase the risk of spinal injuries after boofing ?

I don`t know, maybe I am being paranoid.

 

Rocker

Rocker is of course the amount of longitudinal curve in the hull - the more rocker there is, the more the hull is curved. Rocker has two effects relevant to white water -

Boats for any grade of white water need rocker, otherwise you couldn`t negotiate round obstacles or bends. But where the rocker is also has an effect on the performance of the boat.

On some of the older style of river running playboats boats, like the Hurricane and the Fly, there was a fair bit of steep sloping rocker at the bow, and a much more gently sloping rocker over the rest of the hull. On the Fly the tail end of the hull was almost straight, it had very little curve. This was a benefit for surfing, as you could lengthen the effective waterline length by leaning back. These are known as asymmetric hulls, and are good for surfing.

However with planing hulls, the middle portion of the hull is flat, and both ends are steeply curved - all the rocker is in the ends. So leaning back isn`t really advantageous as a way to gain speed. These hulls are know as symmetrical, they are shaped the same at both ends. Symmetric hulls are not so good for surfing.

The Infrared and the Redline are different again - they are sort of symmetrical, but they don`t have what I would call planing hulls - they have a continuous curve right along the full length of the hull. The Dagger website says they have planing hulls. Maybe semi-planing would be more accurate. Compare them with the GT and the Sonic.

I think I`m right in saying that the Gliss and the Bliss had a sort of asymmetric planing hull - more of the rocker was at the front, but they were quite flat widthwise.

Looking at the Perception website, the Arc has all its rocker at the front, and with its length, it might be rather good for surfing - either on the sea, or on long green river waves. You would get quite a long waterline length by leaning back. I`ve seen one in action, and they have a fair turn of speed on lesser grades.

The other thing I notice about the Arc from the Perception web site is that, because all the rocker is at the front, and the middle and rear of the hull are almost straight, the deepest part of the hull is under your knees. I think that means that the turning point of the boat is under your knees. Several decades ago I paddled a plastic club kayak down a grade 2 river somewhere in Aberdeenshire, and it behaved like that - the pivot point was under my knees, and it was superb. Even in my relatively inexperienced state I found it a fabulous way to go, much more fun than the more usual rather lethargic boats. I think it is a design that came from slalom - you drive the front of the boat round the pole, you follow it round, and the back of the boat, which is quite low volume and shallow, just slides round under the other pole. If the Arc does behave like that, then there is more to it than I first thought there was, and I want to try one. I`m not sure about grade 4 though, even though it is shorter than the Hurricane was.

 

 

 

 

 

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