a review template?

Very good idea
For more specialized boats, I’d be interested in additional feedback (e.g. ease of boofing, surfing, cartwheeling, etc.).

3 types of reviewers
There are basically three types of reviewers:



Super-enthusiastic newbies. They are just so happy to be in a kayak that everything is great. And they have no experience, have paddled only “their” boat and don’t know what is important. They rate 10 out of 10 always.



Just bought a new boat. Paid a lot of money and not willing to admit that it is anything but the perfect boat. They rate 10 out of 10 always.



The experienced paddlers who just go paddle. They don’t post reviews.

not quite, obviously
Since reviews with scores of less than 10 do exist, there must be at least one other type of reviewer. I suggest that these reviews are from people who, themselves, have read and appreciated the reviews, and, who wish to contribute to the system.



When reading reviews, you learn to read between the lines, to detect unwarranted bias. You look for preponderance of opinion from multiple reviewers. You look for the most negative reviews, to identify areas that may warrant more attention in your research…


Sure
But the presupposition is that the reviewer has the ability to judge what those things really mean. And it’s very relative – a sea kayaker moving to a shorter boat might find it very easy to turn whereas a whitewater guy moving to the same boat may find that it tracks hard. There is no way to really fix a rating system that is open to the masses…



Best I can tell, the only use of it at all is for eliminating boats with poor ratings. If it has several low ratings, there’s a high probability it’s a pig.



Mythbusters proved you can indeed polish a turd, but is it something you really want to do?



Jim

Paddler is the wild card

– Last Updated: Oct-09-12 5:13 PM EST –

I can get into a bunch of boats that anyone newer would call tippy, even considering rated for my size in terms of volume, and wonder what the heck anyone is complaining about. That is because I expect a boat to be wobbly on flat water but find itself a solid secondary resting point. For new paddlers, they generally don't know where that point is let alone trust it. They tend to relate an active hull on flat water to an unnerving issue were the water to get lumpy, not understanding yet that it is these conditions that the boat is likely settle down.

Ease of turning is another tough one. And by the way, the term should be edging more than leaning. But a boat may turn snappily when it goes to an edge that a more experienced paddler will normally take, but sit there like a big old raft if it is not taken over that far by a newer and more unsure paddler.

I can see organizing the aspects of boat behavior to make reviews easier to read. But I doubt that there will ever be a way to balance the responses of two very different groups of paddlers. One is the unknowing enthusiasm of newer paddlers for boats that they love of day one but may find boring as heck just three months later when they start figuring out how to use them. The other is longer term paddlers who are looking for very specific performance attributes that newer paddlers would find disagreeable at least, maybe daunting.

The above is why I haven't tried posting any reviews... my profile says what we have and if someone wants to ask us about any of those boats, they can email us.

A very good reason for…
… any review ‘template’ to also include a part where the reviewer lists their skill level… ‘beginner’, ‘intermediate’, ‘advanced’, or perhaps ‘years paddling’ instead.



I’m sure some reviewers will mis-rate/misrepresent themselves, but anything’s better than having no info on that at all (which is what most reviews are currently like).


Side-note comment
Nearly every time the topic of reviews comes up, at least one person will say that many of the 10/10 ratings are by people who spent a bunch of money on a boat and need to justify it by proclaiming it to be terrific, or are somehow trying to avoid facing the fact that it isn’t. Well, I don’t buy that notion at all. I think it’s almost always the result of a high level of enthusiasm combined with a low level of experience. Most of us have been in that situation at some point, even if we don’t write boat reviews. Could anyone REALLY feel make themselves feel better about a buying a mediocre boat simply by telling the world that the thing they bought is wonderful? Come off it. The whole reason they want to tell the world is because of their enthusiasm, not their feelings of inadequacy or guilt.

simple skill level names mean nothing
But if I saw someone say they’ve been paddling in some area with say 15kt winds and 4 foot wind waves and some other boats tended to do XXXX but this boat tended to do YYYY when say taking a broach wave hit then I’d have something to work with. One has to be someone specific about both what conditions they are used to, what they hoped for vs got and ideally how that compared to some other boats (which maybe the read has tried).

Who determines validity of skill set?
I don’t think that people intentionally misstate their skill set. I do think that many people don’t really realize their limitations or the limitations of the skill set that they possess.



Someone who has many hours on the water but has it in lakes or on flat conditions may not be the person to judge how worthy a boat is for someone that is looking for a boat that has certain characteristics.



I’ve reviewed many incidents where the paddler in question is considered to be experienced and an ‘intermediate’ paddler. Upon examination, it’s easily determined that they didn’t have the skills to cope with the rough conditions or other scenario’s that led to them being rescued and written about in the paper, magazine etc.



Where this comes into play in reviews, I don’t lend much credibility to a reviewer who is new, just bought a boat or won’t use it in similar conditions that I would, to say nothing of similar physical characteristics.



Similarly, I generally chuck reviews that give the lowest score…unless there are a lot of them.

so do conditions, as stated by many ppl
Can you imagine the tall tales?



“I was in 15 foot waves, with 50 knot winds!!!”



And then you woke up. =]


true
but still way better than “intermediate”. We all know that after just one week we are intermediate and maybe never advanced (cuz then you gotta prove it) :wink:

Even that is complex
I’m an expert at Class II, Intermediate with Class III and total Nivice at Class IV. I am a novice in sea kayaks, but fairly adept at paddling rec boats and SOTs on lakes and slow moving water.



Even so, I’ve only paddled a couple of whitewater boats, so I can tell you some things, but I can’t compare them to others very well – even with my expert hat on. But, I can tell you many of the weaknesses of certain boats in certain conditions. When the guy with a keel on his rec boat jumps into the squirrelly outwash from a Class II+ rapid, I can often predict the outcome – he will flip upstream as he gets into the current…



So, am I qualified to rate boats? I can’t even answer that…



Jim

Yeah - the problem with skill levels
They mean very little unless everyone agrees to rate themselves against a common set of actual skills. Pick the ACA or the BCU sea kayaking, or canoe, or whitewater skill sets - just as long as it is consistent. But many flat water paddlers spend years managing to evade any of this stuff. So they are intermediate based on butt time, not in terms of handling difficult situations on the water…



This comes up in discussion of skill level in paddler profiles too. There is just no good way to get by this one with the necessary common understanding on a board like this.

There is theory and research
Google “dissonance theory”. For example, there is research that shows that when people buy a new car they read literature afterward that supports their purchase. It is a perfectly reasonable and a long supported idea in psychology that people avoid dissonant cognitions (I bought this expensive boat and it paddles like shit). So it is not just enthusiasm that results in 10’s.

Price
I bet with boats it correlates to the price paid.



$300 I can be honest about a crappy boat

$500 I have to have something positive to say

$800+ It’s better than any other boat on the planet!

$2000+ I’t better than sex



If $500 is a lot of money to the buyer, the scale moves down accordingly.

or maybe you link the two…
…i.e. define skill level by conditions handled/“worst conditions you still feel comfortable in.”



You list skill levels and define what it means to be in that skill level.


My point exactly
Reviews are only as good as the reviewer. That goes for any sort of review.



It is complex. I’m a class IV WW a complete novice surf kayaker and a skilled (though crazy to many) sea kayaker. What I review is going to biased by the conditions under which I test a boat and a whole host of other factors.

Here’s what I base it on.

– Last Updated: Oct-09-12 6:42 PM EST –

I based that statement on my own experience, since I really don't think I'm all that strange in my level of enthusiasm for small boats. When my only boat was a 12-foot aluminum Jon boat, I thought it was a fantastic vessel for traveling on ponds and small rivers. I thought it was quite fast and efficient because going 8 feet per stroke seemed like really good progress (it's easy to mark progress in a rowboat since you can always see the swirls where the oar blades were). Further, I could easily outpace my brother in his tandem canoe when his paddling partner was a kid. If asked to rate the boat, I would have rated it really high for all the uses I put it to, including traveling several miles at a time. I DID know that it performed poorly in choppy conditions, but that was it. I noticed that it bogged down with a load of camping gear, but didn't know that this was the boat's fault. By the way, I paid nothing for the boat.

Eventually I got a 12-foot rowboat that was roughly based on a "good" design that's been around for more than a hundred years. Now I was getting 22 feet per stroke with a fast cadence (I only checked this one time, just to compare it to the old boat since the improvement was so marked, by counting strokes for an extended distance measured by GPS), and quite a bit more than that with a moderate cadence, and suddenly I realized that the old Jon boat was pretty slow AND inefficient. Not only that, the new boat made almost no sound, so it was then that I realized that the prolonged sloshing sound coming from the bow of the Jon boat with every stroke was something I didn't have to put up with. Finally, when loaded with camping gear, the new boat didn't slow down dramatically in spite of a high exertion rate on my part like the Jon boat did, so I finally figured out that having a tiny boat become a pig when loaded wasn't unavoidable. At this point, if someone had asked me to rate the Jon boat I'd have said it's fine for fishing and hunting, especially if you don't have to go far, but crappy for long-distance travel, especially with a load.

I wasn't able to accurately rate the Jon boat UNTIL I had something better to compare it to. I enjoyed it perfectly well for years. I was doing fun things I simply couldn't do without a boat, so the boat seemed great. I just didn't know what I didn't know. For a person in that situation, I really don't think that's such an unusual way to interpret things.

Hey
Wait a minute I have not reviewed the last boat I bought. But I have only paddled it 22 times since June is that enough?

No
You need at least 23. -:slight_smile: