Whats your take on the Mad River Legend? I know its based on the Dagger Legend model, but it there any diffence??
Fine boat
The Dagger legend, designed by Steve Scarborough, was/is one of the very best river tripping tandems. Fine boat!
Needs Current to push it
In a whitewater setting the Legend is a fine tandem. Where you have to provide the propulsion, it is a dog with a capital D. Big blunt bow, bow seat way back from the bow, and lots of bow volume. Good stuff in whitewater, but all negatives when paddled on slow or flatwater. If you are paddling where you don’t need float bags, this is a poor choice. It won’t even keep up with a “benthic feeder”(Charlie Wilsons term from another post) like the Old Town Discovery 174.
I spent a day in one in NJ and it was fine in the twisty narrow sections of a Pine Barrens creek. But out on open Lake Lenape it was a barge, We paddled hard to keep up with slower couples in Penobscots and the usual lake crossing took about twice as long as in my old Wenonah Spirit. The bow paddler complained about the wide paddling station and long reach to the water, and the noise of the water gurgling off that blunt bow. The heavy rocker made tracking across the wind a struggle. It was seaworthy as you would expect of a whitewater oriented hull, but more of an exercise device than an long distance canoe.
On my scale of 1 to 10 this is a 3
I used to have a Dagger Legend
had a lot in common with a benthic feeder on flatwater…wouldn’t move.
A great whitewater tripper for sure…but we lost some rec races with it because the races had flatwater sections.
We scuttled it before a 1998 Missinaibi trip figuring that we had ten days and not ten years to do that mixed ww and flatwater river with north winds on the James Bay flats.
It would be a fun boat on say the Buffalo or any constantly moving water.