Perception 3D - Pool Roller?

From someone who mixes it up…
I have an original era Inazone for which I am probably about 10 pounds too heavy right now, but it serves as a great lazy way to do a pool session. I can throw it into the back of my station wagon and I don’t care if I am rough on it getting it moved in and out to the pool. On very cold winter nights it is hard to make myself wrestle with a full length sea kayak and frozen straps if I have an alternative.



The Inazone is a planing hull, if anything more of a pancake than the Perception 3D based on what I can see in pictures.



Its low volume definitely contributes to making it easier to roll, but the pancake shape makes the initial phase more interesting so the two probably balance each other out.



The big difference I find between this and a sea kayak in the roll is that, once the Inazone is up a certain amount, it’ll flop over the rest of the way without any help from me. In my sea kayaks, the Explorer will do much of the same thing but not at the same time, and the Vela is a boat that requires me finish the roll properly for it to be secure. All three boats start the roll the same way, get your body near the surface then sweep and finish the hip snap or thigh lift or butt push or whatever you want to call it. (I’ve heard all three and, once you understand their meaning, they all lead to the same result.)



I agree that an “old school” boat is a closer match to rolling a sea kayak, but even the ubiquitous RPM’s are getting harder to find because they are… old. I like having a little boat that makes it easier and more likely I will practice, as long as I understand where things might not translate perfectly.

YES!
That was the boat everyone got their first roll in at the classes I attended years back. People nearly fought to get to it first.

Remember that the part that planes
is not in the water as you start your roll, and doesn’t get in the water until you’re close to finishing. Some kayaks are more stable in the upside down position than they are right side up. (I have such a boat, and it is long.)



I have never found the planing/displacement distinction to meaningfully describe the difference between old school and new school boats. ALL kayaks have displacement hulls, and ALL kayaks can plane very nicely on a fast, green wave. Old school kayaks were designed more for straight line speed, and new school kayaks are often designed to plane on fast water.



No kayaker can paddle hard enough to get any kayak to plane. The kayaker must get help from fast water or ocean wave movement to get a hull to lift and plane.



The real distinction between old school and new school is length. New school boats are a lot shorter, trading away some speed to get better maneuvering. Creek boats usually have only minimal provision for planing. Play boats have flat bottoms and sharp chines to make them “loose” so they can stunt in a small area. River runners have flat hulls and sharp chines so they can carve into and out of eddies and do dynamic ferries. River runners are longer for speed.

Piedra is even easier…
if you can fit in it.

Don’t worry about bad technique
If you can roll a modern whitewater boat, you can roll most any seakayak.



There is a small difference in how the roll progresses based on the shape of the hull, once you get the principle down, and have a good hip snap you can easily roll a seakayak. A small boat lets you take it inside your car, throw it around the cement at the pool, leave it outside in cold weather etc etc.



I find it a huge pain at pool sessions with 17 + seakayaks, with people trying to get them into the venue, into the water and then taking up a huge amount of area in the pool. You can seal launch the whitewater boat off of the side, diving boards etc. and develop real skills for balance, rolling and bracing.

mechanics of rolling
are the same for white water and sea kayaks–my experience is that most sea kayaks are a little easier to role than WW boats. And WW boats are a heck of a lot easier to get into a pool due to size

vs
I suspect that a typical WW boat is easier to roll than a typical sea kayak because it is lower volume, and any low volume boat will be easier to roll than a similar length high volume boat, and that applies amongst WW boats also. A WW creekboat with big kneebumps is going to be more difficult to roll than a slim WW boat. Now WW boats with low-volume tails like playboats do feel different, because the tail sinks, and the boat does not feel like it is flat on the water.

WW boat will not hurt your technique
As seadart already said, rolling a sea kayak will feel different from rolling a WW boat. But it’s still the same roll. Assuming the boats fit you properly (this includes outfitting), if you fail in one and succeed in the other, something in your technique is not up to snuff.



I’ve been rolling both a Jackson Side Kick and various sea kayaks for years now. Switching back and forth has never been a problem.



For pool rolls, the WW boat is my go-to boat. It fits completely inside my truck bed, it weighs half what my sea kayak does, it takes up very little room in the pool (a huge consideration unless you go to a full Olympic size pool), and it is easier to get in and out of the pool facility’s doors.



An added bonus is that you can actually paddle the little boat in the pool, unlike with a sea kayak. If you want to practice strokes or turns there, the WW boat’s small size allows that.



Another bonus is that you do not worry about either spearing someone or having your boat damaged from spearing by someone else, in such a low-speed environment.



If you paddle the WW boat outdoors, it will also help you clean up stroke technique, because its inherent turniness is less tolerant of asymmetries in stroke.



If the price is good and the boat fits, I say go for it.

Dive board launch?

– Last Updated: Oct-21-13 12:18 AM EST –

I wonder if they'd allow it...

RE: long boats in pools: Something most people probably don't consider is that being able to fit more WW boats in a pool than you could sea kayaks means that the pool rental fee gets split more ways! Which means either cheaper per-person fees or higher likelihood of getting enough people to commit to paying their share to reserve a pool session.

There is a pool in my town. Supposedly, there are lots of paddlers who roll. But trying to get enough people to commit to paying even $10 per hour to reserve the pool is like herding cats. I suspect that if it was a big WW boating area, I'd have no trouble getting reservations for weekly pool sessions. As it is now, I drive 50 miles each way, once a month, to attend a session elsewhere.

Have to admit, I do miss being able to drop in on a 4-hr pool session held every week, in a full-size Olympic pool, for a mere $9 for as much of that 4 hrs as I wanted.

Thanks to all!
What a great response to my question once again!



Unfortunately I missed out not he 3D but am now pretty set on getting a WW boat to play in the pool and surf with. I have heard the Dancer or RPM are good starting points then I can upgrade later if the discipline suits me.



Will definitely need to get in more WW boats as I have found a couple already that are simply not right for my frame - the Redline was like wearing a plastic body cast for me… And while this might be a good thing when going over waterfalls, I think there is a better fit out there.



Again, thanks to all fort he great advice!

Actually…
Many WW boats are harder to roll than a well-fitting sea kayak because they are so wide and flat. A properly sized sea kayak for a paddler is well fit to their hips and volume and the hull is narrower and rounder. The part around your hips is mostly what matters - it’s not like those long skinny ends aren’t going to come along when you roll.



That said, I have known more than one WW paddler who got into an over-volume sea kayak because they thought that was the nature of the boats, and then of course found it hard to roll. Self-fulfilling prophecy.



My favorite story is one night at a pool session, one of the sons of the coaches was messing around in his WW boat. It was a boat from maybe the worst era of WW boats to roll - a flat pancake with a square box sticking out of the top, that came higher on him than my sea kayak did. He was skinny so he could get thru my XS cockpit (Explorer LV), and he was interested in trying the fit. Then a guy around the edge challenged him to a hand roll in it.



The young man was exhausted, but after seeing him roll that box-on-box I was sure he’d manage my boat, one of the all-time easiest sea kayaks to roll. So I didn’t get in the way.



Suffice to say he nailed it and came up with a complete look of surprise on his face, shared by his primarily WW father. Neither of them could believe that a sea kayak could be that easy to roll, both had bought the old-school line that they had to be harder because they were longer. Unfortunately I still hear this from time to time from WW folks,. It seems they just can’t get their heads past the boat being longer to really look at the fit and paddler match.

Rolling depends on proprioceptive
feedback, which will be different for very different boats. If I saw an experienced ww paddler climbing into a sea kayak for the first time, to go surf some waves, I would tip him over while he is close to shore, so he could find out how it feels to roll, or NOT roll, a sea kayak. I would not expect a roller with only sea kayak, or only ww playboat, experience to step into the other variety of boat and have instant surety with rolling.



Once one has roll experience with both types of boats, going back and forth may be easier than jumping back and forth from road bikes to mountain bikes.

Dancer, RPM, etc
You can probably find a Dancer with skirt for $50 if you look around, though they’re starting to disappear from the market as more of them succumb to age/brittleness. With a tiny (by modern standards) cockpit and narrow, rounded hull, a Dancer is probably the closest approximation to a sea kayak - very log-like and easy to roll. Certainly the few sea kayaks I’ve been in rolled a lot like a Dancer.



If you want easy, the RPM is probably the easiest rolling boat ever made, but that’s not necessarily a good thing. It’ll let you come up with some seriously flawed technique, especially in the calm of a pool. That can translate to a very unreliable roll in conditions or if you get in a less forgiving boat.

Part of the trick may be that in a very
short ww kayak, any misdirected rolling effort may be wasted just in causing the upside down boat to hump toward its bow or stern.



In a sea kayak, the length will help channel misdirected effort into rotation. Same applies in longer ww kayaks like the Piedra or my Animas.



Early on, “new school” designers were focused on how their designs would play or surf, and not on how they rolled. Now, companies like Jackson swear that their designs are all made and tested to roll easily.



Fortunately, most ww kayaks can be optimized for their intended roles, and optimized for your intended rolls.

Have heard that from Jackson owners
… that Jackson has gotten ease of rolling back into the newer designs, especially the river running/play boats. I am not sure that is true of some of the play boats from other manufacturers. I know a couple of reliable rollers in both sea and WW who took a class in spring conditions on the Hudson in new play boats from a major manufacturer a couple of years ago. They both came back indicating that rolling the boats was much more difficult once they got at all fatigued. One bought a boat, the other decided they did not need to try and relive their 20’s.



:slight_smile:

flat pancake
I’m curious. Can you remember the name that flat pancake WW boat?

We asked for forgivness not permiss.

Not by now
The young man was a terribly good WW paddler as was his father, who the boat might have started with years ago. That means it had had dueled with many rocks. Even if the name had been evident at some point, it wasn’t by then.



They change designs so fast with WW boats, it’d be a ton of digging to even get to an image. Probably the only way to spot it would be for me to stand at the take out of the West, on the one day they run it now, and look at each boat as the history of WW paddling gets pulled onto the bank.

Liquidlogic Lil Joe
I ended up getting a used Liquidlogic Lil Joe - it is in good condition and the cockpit fits me nicely. Going to add some foam for the hips and get a new skirt, the one it came with is a 2 man job together on, but I think I will have a lot of fun in it. Going to the pool this evening and hope to get it out in the surf as soon as I get the new skirt.

Congrats!