Alternative idea: We each choose one canoe, use whatever paddling skills we lack/posses to adapt to the positive/negative attributes of that canoe choice.
Put in at Cedar Grove on the Current river & lollygag downstream to Doniphan, Missouri. It's a piddling 116 miles; good test paddle distance.
We might hate our canoe choice, but would probably have a good time suffering, and "endeavouring to perservere".
Might even recruit a couple of more masochists to tag along with us.
Brian, Duggae, Terry, Rpd, Pat C, Rambling Jack, et al; you masochists out there somewhere lurking?
I’m game As long as everybody who goes agrees that we put in at least 20 miles a day. Five nights in a row of sleeping on gravel bars is as much as I can do.
Sorry I propose 55 miles a day and camp on a gravel bar most every night. It is quite enjoyable. I am thinking of doing the Yukon from Lake Bennett to Dawson or Circle in 2013 solo.
We just did Johnsons Crossing to Dawson City in 2012.
I have some thoughts on a drop skeg with a trailing wishbone frame hinged on the gunwales. I’ve wanted to do it for our traveling solo/tandem, our 15’ highly rockered MR Synergy. It is a very cranky tandem, and when I take my spouse out on a lake below the Tetons, a drop skeg would allow the hull to proceed more efficiently.
But even on easy whitewater, a skeg in a box similar to those in sea kayaks would leave the stern of a composite canoe very vulnerable to ledge damage. The beauty of a drop skeg is that it can be knocked up out of the way by rocks and ledges, and there’s no skeg box to be damaged.
Usually I have to think about such a thing for a year or two, and suddenly it exists and works. I hope.
why vulnerable? I hadn’t thought about the possibility that a skeg box would make the stern more vulnerable in whitewater than it would otherwise be. You mean because the skeg box locally stiffens the hull? Or do you mean that the hull itself would be okay but the skeg box would be damaged by impact transmitted through the hull?
