Moving seats in saranac 146xl canoe

Bought this canoe a few weeks ago. Great canoe but hard to get the balance right as I am a big guy and add ing stuff for balance takes up more room. Thinking about moving seat and storage compartment up a little to help but not sure that’s a good idea.

If you are handy,…
you could remove that seat and put a sliding one in.



You might even be able to use the same seat with some re:engineering.

In that way you could keep the trim perfect no matter what load you put in



Jack L

You really can’t
The Saranac is a single-layer, thermoformed polyethylene canoe. The problem with single-layer polyethylene is that it is quite flexible.



Single-layer poly will work for very short canoes like the newish whitewater OC-1s that are less than 10 feet in length. For anything longer, a single-layer of poly that would have minimally adequate stiffness would be unacceptably heavy.



So how Old Town and other makers get around this deficiency of single-layer poly in a 14 1/2’ or longer boat is to add a keel or keelson to the hull to add some stiffness and to stretch the poly over some type of endo-skeleton. In your case, the endo-skeleton consists of those molded polyethylene seats and that center seat/console/storage area, with footers that extend down to the keelson. Without the seats and center console, the whole hull bottom would flex up and down like crazy.



With the molded contoured seats, you can’t sit backwards and paddle from the front seat facing the stern, a technique used by many people who paddle tandem canoes solo. Since the seats are molded to the width of the hull, you really can’t move them. And you can’t take out the center seat/console to mount a sliding seat either, since a slider suspended to the gunwales would not support the hull bottom.



The best you can do is to trim the boat using weight at the very front. Water-filled milk jugs or dry bags weigh very little when empty and can be filled with water and used for this purpose.