My Thinking…
multipurpose driven design. A picture says it all… 
http://www.qajaqusa.org/common_images/JohnPeterson.jpg
sing
I think it promotes safety.
If you’ve gotten used to rolling a few hundred times per outing, in every which direction and with a dozen types of rolls, then when you have an unintential capsize on the ocean or river, you’re back up before you even know how you did it.
Or at least that’s a good line of defense against people who might call you obsessive.
Sanjay
this reminds me of a game
where a hook is screwed into a wall and a metal hoop attached to a string is swung toward the hook until it catches…i’ve seen friends play this game for hours (beers in hand mind you) and several are dead on the money a high percent of the time. hey they’re having fun.
I have the same ocd
for skills, but I am also stubborn in that I want to do it in something other than a rolling kayak.
I guess you could think of a rolling
boat as “training wheels.” The only rolls I can’t reliably do in any sea kayak are the elbow roll and the forward hand roll. But if I’m ever going to make these reliable, it’ll happen first in a rolling boat. And I still have trouble believing that the infamous straitjacket roll can be done in a standard sea kayak.
Sanjay
depends on what you mean by "standard"
I would consider the Outer Island a standard kayak which just rolls REALLY well. Dubside straitjacket rolling the huge Kahuna (another standard kayak) seems to be an impossible feat until you actually roll the kayak and understand how and why it’s possible in that boat (rolls like an extreme whitewater playboat). Of course some boats are absolutely impossible to straitjacket roll but I’m sure there are a handful of boats that it can be done with if you find the right person (not me). Of course it also depends on how you define the straitjacket roll. If if it is coming up to a balance brace and then crawling on to the back deck over the course of an hour, quite a few boats should allow this as long as they have decent primary stability and a low rear deck. However if you’re talking about a smooth straitjacket roll, well that’s a different story.
oddly enough
one of the tougher skills in my silhouette due to the rounded bottom and hard chine is the balance brace without the paddle. But I am working on it, it takes a bizarre amount of back arching and leg torquing but I can hold it for a while, just not as easily as I can with the paddle.
I can hand roll all day, or balance brace with the paddle, but I think a v bottom allows an easier balance brace without the paddle. I think that is a limitation of my sea kayak.
As far as elbow or straightjacket, I think those are more technique related at the moment, and I just want to get my forward hand roll without the norsaq now, and also the offside handrolls, they are present but sloppy at the moment, need some time in the pool.
That’s about the size of it,
though the Walden Paddlers save the alcohol for after the rolling session, and prefer martinis,
Sanjay
Makes sense
I get that.