@thecomplex1@outlook.com said:
Am looking for kayak or canoe for fishing and hunting. Maybe square stern. Want boat 11’ or less and 50 lb or less. Any thoughts.
The format of the message boards here is such that it makes more sense to start a new discussion here in the fishing forum with your question, instead of piggybacking on this one. In any case, few if any folks here will have any experience with the kind of boat you are looking for, since most of them will prefer a boat that’s made to be efficiently paddled. Still, I just did some looking, and was amazed at how many brands of square-stern canoes there are. Among choices close to your specs, two caught my eye.
First, there’s Golden Hawk Canoes. http://www.goldenhawkcanoes.com/home.html I was perusing a message board recently that’s dedicated to hard-core fishermen, and saw that plenty of people just love these boats. I was surprised that they are reasonably good-quality, at least in terms of the method of hull construction. Personally, in spite of the fact that I regularly do fairly long-distance trips in a solo boat, upstream and downstream, on tiny brush-obstructed creeks, and would benefit from a very short boat as much as anyone, I would never consider a canoe shorter than 14 feet, and I suspect that most people who like such short boats don’t paddle in a way that gets the most out of their canoe, but that’s not to say I can’t see a plus side to such craft (see below).
Another one that caught my eye was this square-stern model from Esquif. http://www.esquif.com/en/sporting/mallard/ The description says it’s made of Royalite (a light version of Royalex), and that’s a material that’s not available anymore, but there’s also a tag page describing the hull material they call T-Formex, which is a Royalex replacement, so that’s probably what it’s made from. For motorized canoeing when the need is for a craft that is very small, this would be hard to beat (but you can find many different brands that are quite similar. I was surprised how many).
Fishing kayaks of the sit-on-top style are all the rage right now, but as a person who grew up using several kinds of very small, traditional boats, I can’t help but notice that fishing kayaks are actually a terrible choice for most of the people who are using them, if you consider the manner in which they use them (however, for some people, like those fishing off the ocean shore, they are perfect). Most fishing kayaks will weigh roughly twice as much as your target weight (especially when you consider that they usually list the weight without any of the “extras”, and that can even include the seat!). The two canoes linked above are far lighter than any fishing kayak (but any good ones that are similar will be within your target weight range), allow carrying a lot more gear (even the deer you just shot, along with your portable tree stand, and that’s especially true for that Equif model or similar styles that are more like a traditional boat than a bloated pea-pod), and allow far more variability in your seating and your ability to move around inside the boat as you reach for stuff. If you aren’t paddling on wide-open waters and being blasted by the wind, such boats will greatly outperform fishing kayaks in most of the ways that matter. Do a Google search with relevant keywords like “square stern, canoe, 11, 12, feet” and you’ll see how many choices there are.
Hope that helps.