i know i should choose a kayak more or less the same length as those who i will be kayaking with .
if one friend in my circle has a 45lb fiberglass 15 sea kayak, if i get a poly 60lb sea kayak 15’ will it be significantly harder to stay together?
thanks & sorry for the bombardment of questions
Width and hull design will have more impact than absolute weight. A narrow boat with a more vee-shaped hull will be faster than a wider flat-bottomed boat. Also other factors, like having a rudder (I personally don’t like rudders because they create drag when in the water and weight and wind resistance when retracted onto the deck. )
My 21.5" wide hard-chined 15’ plastic Easky kayak (45 pounds) is significantly faster than my friend’s 25.5" wide Tsunami 140 which weighs 53 pounds. But my other friend’s Riot Edge 145, also 21.5" wide is 61 pounds and is just as fast as the Easky. All three of us have paddled together and switched boats on trips so this is a first hand observation.
Do you weigh the same as your buddy? Are you the same strength? Do you have the same technic? Do you have the same paddle?
Not going to matter all that much if kayaks are generally the same dimensions unless you were racing.
It might take just a little more time to accelerate a heavier kayak up to speed, but once you and your buddy are at the same pace you’ll stay there.
Poly kayaks are typically much cheaper and more durable than fiberglass, although if they do get damaged, fiberglass is easier to repair.
I don’t find boat material to be that large an impact on speed. Other factors (paddler’s ability, hull shape, etc.) play a much greater part of this.
I find that most people underestimate the degree to which extra weight eats up paddling power. Displacing water while on the go consumes energy, and nothing can break that rule. I notice it most on upstream overnight river trips, where at the end of the trip I might do an extra 5 or 10 miles upstream without my camping gear, and the sudden improvement in performance is like suddenly having a better boat.
However, when you are only talking about the difference in weight between different boats, that’s not such a big deal - usually in the range of 20 pounds or so. Just look at the range of paddler weights and you can see that other factors affect the overall weight much more. When looking at this kind of weight difference, hull design will matter at least as much.
Never did loaded expeditions. Did throw 50 lb in kayak front and rear of bulkheads. More stable but definitely slower acceleration Little worse once I got going not horrible. Supposedly I could put another 150 lb. for 200 lb. total. That would be have submarine I guess.
Hey Randall, so to summarize it’s good news for you. The 15 pounds will make no practical difference and the material is not as important as the overall shape of the boat…and the width gives you a good indication of overall efficiency for 2 boats of the same length. There is often a “waterline width” listed in the specs for a boat. That’s a good way to compare any boat you are looking at with your friend’s boat. If waterline width of both boats is within an inch or so then they are well matched boats. Differences of 2 inches or more are getting “big”.
Hey Randall, do yourself a big favor and look at boats around 17’ and make your paddling friends work harder than you.
thx for feedback,
if my friends realized why i got a longer boat they would quickly stop inviting me magooch 
while we are on this subject, if a kayaker in a group gets tired, can he take advantage of the ‘wake’ of the preceeding boat,
or is the effect at these speeds negligible ?
@Randall said:
while we are on this subject, if a kayaker in a group gets tired, can he take advantage of the ‘wake’ of the preceeding boat,
or is the effect at these speeds negligible ?
Here’s a thread on drafting: https://forums.paddling.com/discussion/922990/optimum-kayak-drafting-position
@Randall said:
thx for feedback,
if my friends realized why i got a longer boat they would quickly stop inviting me magoochwhile we are on this subject, if a kayaker in a group gets tired, can he take advantage of the ‘wake’ of the preceeding boat,
or is the effect at these speeds negligible ?
Tuck in nice and close with a bit of overlap between your bow and the back of the boat you are following (to elininate the lead boat’s stern wave) and you effectively create a single boat with nearly twice the waterline length, but without increasing the wetted surface area for either boat. That’s a pretty ideal situation, at least in principle. Most people won’t like you constantly bumping the stern of their boat around though. Less aggressive drafting will save some effort, but not nearly as much as this ideal (and rather rude) method described here.
@Randall said:
i know i should choose a kayak more or less the same length as those who i will be kayaking with .
if one friend in my circle has a 45lb fiberglass 15 sea kayak, if i get a poly 60lb sea kayak 15’ will it be significantly harder to stay together?
thanks & sorry for the bombardment of questions
No problem. Your buddy sucks as a paddler. He’s over weight has a broken arm, vertigo and the flu. He paddles in circles.
The boat is only one factor.
@Overstreet said:
@Randall said:
i know i should choose a kayak more or less the same length as those who i will be kayaking with .
if one friend in my circle has a 45lb fiberglass 15 sea kayak, if i get a poly 60lb sea kayak 15’ will it be significantly harder to stay together?
thanks & sorry for the bombardment of questionsNo problem. Your buddy sucks as a paddler. He’s over weight has a broken arm, vertigo and the flu. He paddles in circles.
The boat is only one factor.
I’ve been all of those, just not at the same time and never paddled in circles.
One of my frequent paddling partners has a plastic touring kayak with a hull that is so badly oil-canned off center under the cockpit that as soon as she stops paddling the boat drifts in counterclockwise circles. Of course, she has to exert more force on the port side when she is paddling to keep straight.
@willowleaf said:
One of my frequent paddling partners has a plastic touring kayak with a hull that is so badly oil-canned off center under the cockpit that as soon as she stops paddling the boat drifts in counterclockwise circles. Of course, she has to exert more force on the port side when she is paddling to keep straight.
That sucks. Did she try and fix it?
@Randall said:
if my friends realized why i got a longer boat they would quickly stop inviting me magooch
Getting a longer narrower kayak doesn’t mean you have to paddled faster than your friends. You can just take it a bit easier than them.
Hook up a tow rope to a tired paddlers boat. If they paddle too you will hardly notice them and they won’t have to work as hard. The problem with this is how the person being offered the rope perceives this offer. It can be consider an offensive affront to their dignity.
I like to draft sometimes on long paddles. It takes skill to stay within a foot of the stern of the boat in front of you without tapping them. However the concentration it takes to do this doesn’t allow for observing the scenery. all you can look at is the stern of the boat in front of you. However they have to be keeping a steady pace or you will be constantly backing off and catching up which takes more energy than not drafting.
Here’s a good rule of thumb: Don’t go paddling with anyone you think might need a tow. You still might have to tow someone anyway, but don’t even start out if you think a tow will be likely.
If you absolutely must tow someone, get a tow belt with a quick release, or learn how to tie a quick release tow hitch. Never think you can tow anything by attaching it to your boat; it has to be attached to you, or there will be no boat control. The exception might be if you have an attachment point right behind your cockpit, but you want to be able to release it very quickly.
One more thing, if you must tow someone, or something, be sure you have a line that is long enough to trail the tow way back there and not right behind you.
PD52, You can’t fix the amount of distortion on her boat. It’s the worst I have ever seen. I’ve never even been able to reduce even minor oil-canning with repair efforts (heat guns, bags of sand with the kayak bridged on sawhorses, etc.) Was only able to fix an oilcan once when I had an old Aquaterra Chinook without bulkheads. Some body gave me a bulkhead for the model that they had never installed and by pounding it into place we were able to pop out the flat spot under the rear of the cockpit. I can’t imagine anything working for her boat.
Once polyethylene is severely stretched out of shape, you really can’t restore it. With her boat we’re talking several inches of both vertical and lateral warping. She lives on a super steep hill with 3 flights of stairs to the house so she has kept her kayak stored deck up on the roof rack of her sedan parked on the street 24 hours a day for months every Summer. And before she started paddling with me and I told her she shouldn’t, she was using ratchet straps cranked way down. That kayak was doomed from day 1. I recommended she carry it hull up and gave her a set of regular cam straps, which she uses now but the damage is already done.
It was once a really decent boat, a Riot Edge 145. Being a working single mom with 2 college aged kids she really can’t afford to replace it at the moment. She loves to paddle and we regularly do a 16 to 20 mile up and back on the Monongahela River – she gets a hell of a workout keeping that thing straight.
This is her house, so you get an idea of the logistical difficulty of kayak ownership in that location:
@magooch said:
Here’s a good rule of thumb: Don’t go paddling with anyone you think might need a tow. You still might have to tow someone anyway, but don’t even start out if you think a tow will be likely.
I paddle with my wife, and when in heavy wind I attach the tow rope to her kayak since she would fall way behind otherwise. I do have a tow belt. I also have done a tow with a young person that was unable to paddle back. As long as the person being towed is paddling some it is very easy to tow them. Not a problem.