Do other people get this problem? When I paddled my C1 J190 especially in the fall, my bow is a powerful magnet for Reeds, grass, and leaves, which become a big mass with a relatively big wake and I’m sure definitely some drag. I always get Between six and 16 leaves tangled up with Reeds and grass. I tried to ignore it, I can’t reach them from my seat, and to get them off requires a full stop and a short reverse in the water.
Do people purposefully try to avoid leaves and reads while paddling? That’s basically impossible right now, but in the spring and winter , there are still some floating in the waterways. In a C2, I suppose the bowel paddler could just reach out and push the leaves off. Is this a problem for other people, or is the J190 just known for its leaf gathering abilities? Any advice would be appreciated!
Yes. Even not so plumb stems may do that and overstern rudders too (when used
Nothing you can do about it, although it sometimes helps to deliberately paddle through other leaves and branches.
I’ve never used a canoe which has any tendency to collects debris on the bow, but I weigh about 160 and induce a lot less draft on a solo canoe than the average middle-aged guy (many group trips on rivers with shallow spots have illustrated this). I have two rowboats which are prone to collecting debris at the bow (I have special tricks in that case for quickly clearing debris, but those tricks can’t be adapted to a racing canoe like yours), but unlike those rowboats, every canoe I have experience with has enough “rake” at the bow to prevent this, or if the bow doesn’t have much rake overall, there’s enough curvature within the transition area between the upper part of the stem and the bottom of the boat to effectively provide a raked profile right at the waterline. So, being curious, I looked at the specs on your canoe, and they include the following:
“Up-swept bow sheds weeds and rides over floating objects.”
With that in mind, I looked at a side profile of the canoe on that spec page and indeed there is a wide zone of transition between the main portion of the stem (which is nearly vertical) and the bottom of the boat, which should provide a “raked” zone at the waterline. Unless that diagram is wrong (which could be the case if there were different designs over the various years of production), I can’t see how it could collect weeds on the bow unless the boat were either overloaded or bow-heavy. My first thought is that maybe you have your weight too far forward. There’s a lot of adjustment range in the sliding seat to allow for changes in trim. Figure out how level the boat sits in the water when you are on the seat, with the help of an outside observer, by placing a carpenter’s level on the floor, by looking at the waterline through the translucent hull, or by putting roughly a half-gallon of water in the boat and seeing where the puddle wants to go when you are just sitting still.
If no changes to trim are justified, maybe you’d want to make a pole with a slightly-curved “wiper” attached to the end, which you can use to reach forward and clear off the debris while coasting (eliminating the need to stop, back up, and pivot before getting underway again). With a boat having such a narrow, straight-line taper toward the front as what the J190 has, clearing debris in this manner should be be very easy to do. You could put a couple of “ears” on top of each of the two thwarts in front of you and thereby have a handy and secure storage rack for this leaf-clearing pole. If you can find an old-fashioned “cane pole”, that would be ideal, in terms of being cheap and light in weight.
I thought of something that might be worth trying, depending on your skill level. I’m making this a separate post since if I added it to my previous post and you had already read that, you might not see this.
I realize that “J-Boats” are basically incapable of doing any of the basic things that normal canoes do well, EXCEPT for going fast and in a straight line (which they do better than ordinary canoes), but if you have the skill, you might try heeling the boat quite a lot with the intention of lifting the stems free of the water. There will be a tendency for the debris to continue to cling since some portion of the debris will still be dragging in the water even when the stems are free, and thus be held more tightly to the hull, but if you can lift the stems quickly enough, maybe a few times in a row, there will be a rinsing action that pulls the debris loose. I know that lifting the stems forcefully to create that rinsing action works to flush off debris because I accomplish this in my rowboats via a completely different method. Then, since in any “normal” canoe it’s pretty straightforward to clear the stems by heeling the boat, I thought this might be worth mentioning (by me,) and worth investigating (by you).
Can you actually do this in a J-Boat? I don’t know, given the boat’s extreme limitations as mentioned above. You definitely would want to maintain a strong brace, well out from the boat, to broaden your base of support. In case this isn’t in your repertoire, if you are moving, you can make this a static brace that utilizes the lift you can generate with the paddle blade via your forward motion. Maybe the stems will not lift enough when heeling the boat to accomplish anything, but you probably won’t know until you try.
On my older J200, you can ditch all but the most stubborn leaves and reeds by bobbing the bow.
Take a hard stroke, carry it wayyyy too far back intentionally, bob up and down at the same time. Using a combo of Power and Bobbing at the same time, you should be able to get your bow high enough for a moment that the leaves go under.
If that is not successful, take a long piece of wire like a coat hanger or similar wire from Home Depot. Bend it such that it can mount to the bow, protrude a foot in front, then slant back to the bottom of the bow-curve.
With some fine-tuning, you can play with the length and angle so that you hit the critical slide-off angle ( >45* generally). This also works well with milfoil and other stringy aquatic plants.
This idea of adding that section of bent wire in front of the bow is a gem!
What you described for “bobbing” the bow is one method I use on my rowboats, but I had doubts it could be made to work on a canoe of this kind. It’s interesting to hear that it can be done.
