Thank you for your attention to the details Monkeyhead. Details are NEVER boring to me. I am ravenous for good information.
I also keep my level of exertion at a level that keeps things fun but not fatiguing. On my own personal “scale of 1 to 10” I paddle at around 7-8 for the most part. After I go for a few hours I drop back to about a 6 for a while and them go back up to the level of 8. I vary my cadence and sometimes my strokes to keep from getting too tired from non-relenting repetition.
I have only 3 different kayaks I am paddling now. My Chatham 17, a 1986 Pyranha Everest 390 and an Old Town loon 106.
The Loon 106 is slowest and most stable and can carry gear enough to day trips with my wife, up the rivers and across the lake.
The Pyranha is by far the most nimble and easiest to roll and turn, but the hardest to keep straight over long legs on open water, and a bit of wind can make getting to the place you want to go pretty “interesting”. It’s a 1986 White Water boat, and it feels like one.
The Chatham 17 is the one for the long days and turns the slowest at 17 feet long, but is not hard to turn and I can reverse it 180 degrees with 3 strokes if I get in on a steep edge. If edged only lightly it takes me about 5 strokes to get a 180 degree turn from it. It’s the one that covers the miles the easiest and fastest too. My longest day trip so far in my Chatham was 7 hours and 6 minutes and the mileage was exactly 22.8. (Statute miles, not Knots) After almost 23 miles I felt I’d done some work, but nothing was sore and nothing was tired enough that I could not have gone back out for another 4-6 hours.
The Pyranha 390 moves a lot easier then the Chatham, but it moves so much side to side I am sure my mileage is a lot farther then I measure on a map when I am paddling it. I feel like I am paddling the equivalent of a moth on the water.
Our longest trip to date (my wife Anna and I) was about 27.4 miles in out Old Town Loons, but my wife and I left at 5:45 in the morning and didn’t stop until 9:30 at night in July. The Loons are not fast, but they move very easily and don’t wear us out. 27.4 miles is longer then 22.8 miles, but the 22.8 mile trip was a 7 hour trip, and the 27 mile trip was over 15 hours. We did stop on the shore for a picnic, and we stopped at a lot of little inlets to look at birds, a few beavers, and sneak over the edge to look at some antelope, so the trip ate up time because we were not always moving on the water.
Anyway, I don’t have enough experience with a lot of different kayaks, so most of what I believe I know is simply from chatting with folks that do know, and have years of experience. I covet their opinions and knowledge.
Now… About my hybrid GL paddle:
It’s made from Poplar. Western Red Cedar is hard to get here in our small town (15 miles from my home) and the lumber yard had some poplar that was nearly dead straight and 100% clear. So that’s what I used. I did make 2 Greenland paddles before, but I didn’t make them correctly. They were 7 feet, but the blades were 3.3" wide and the loom was too long, making the slimmer blades too short. So the blades don’t grab a lot of water. I do well with them for sculling and all the maneuvers I have tried, but I just could not get much mileage from them, even when I’d step up my exertion to my personal “10”. So my 3rd one (this one) was a hybrid. “Too long”, “too wide” and “too heavy”. But my idea was to go oversized and slim it down later if I want to, as I learn it’s feel and abilities.
I was interested in the design of the Aleutian paddles too and saw they have a ridge down the power face. The users tell me that type doesn’t flutter like GL paddles do if you get your angles a bit off. So my latest paddle is what I’d call 90% Greenland and 10% Aleutian.
The blades and the tapers are exactly what I see in pictures of some of the GL paddles that are on the larger end of the scale, BUT I made both blades with a tapering ridge running from the loom down almost the full length of the blades (both sides) that tapers to only 1/4" wide and 1/8" tall before it disappears. The 1st time out I had the ridges higher and more square in shape. It did grab water VERY well and it didn’t flutter at all, even when I purposely angled the blade “wrong”. But it made a “plunk” nose every stroke and caught air so it would pull a bubble under the surface, even at pretty slow cadences. I left the tips nearly square too.
So I brought it home and planed off about 1/2 pound more wood, tapering the ridges down a great deal,rounding them reducing the thickness of the blades and also tapering the ridges down about 50%. The next time out it was nearly as stable as the 1st time, without any flutter unless you got it quite a bit off it’s useful tilt. It was noticeably lighter after my modifications and I rounded both tips a lot. In my 2nd test the paddle was very quiet and still was easy to make strokes with, and had no flutter. The ridge was now quite small out in the mid blade to the ends of their tapers, but looking at the ridge on my Euro/spoon blades, they were small too. I reasoned I could make them thinner on my wood paddle and stand up off the blade a bit less too, because they were 2 X longer then the ridges on my spoon bladed paddle. It worked.
I am taking it out in the morning again to see if there is anything more I want to do to it before I finish the oil build-up. It’s got 3 coats on it now and I will have 6 before I am done, but I think I want to be extra sure before I invest the 6 days more to build up the finish (2 days per coat)
The paddle now weighs almost 3 pounds. It may be too heavy, but so far I have not felt any fatigue with it. I guess I need to do a 10 hour trip before I make any decisions about that.
I work every day with hand tools to earn my living, so perhaps I will not feel it’s too heavy because working with old fashioned tools (like those used 240 years ago around the time of the American Revolution,) and having been using those types of tools since I was 8 years old, (yes, Eight) I am used to exerting force with my hands and arms.
Paddling is NOT the same, but my muscles are already used to working and enduring 12 hour days, because I have done that kind of work for over 1/2 a century now. But if the new paddle feels like it’s too heavy or too large I’ll have it on my bench pretty fast, and give it a “Radical Weight Loss Program”.
If I can get my wife to take a picture and down load it, I’ll post a picture of the finished paddle soon.
