big guy boat
this is a great deal of info. I just recently started thinking about a solo canoe so this provides some good detail. I’m 6’4 and 300+lbs. I’m looking for a boat that is stable for running rivers, lakes, and an occasional class II rapid. I apologize for not being familiar with the lingo on these, but I think I want one that you sit down in a bit more.
Any recommendations?
new thread
How about starting a new thread with this question?
If you want a boat for both flatwater and Class II whitewater, you will have to compromise performance on one or the other.
Twice…
Yes, because we can’t just go to the local walmart and buy whatever used boat we want, and we may not be able to test paddle it.
I found a used black gold wildfire…a rare find…it was located on the other side of the country.
I had a friend who was going that way pick it up for me.
I was sure I was going to like it but I didn’t.
No biggie…I just re-sold it. It was used adn I got my money back out of it.
When it comes to buying used boats you have to wait until they come available, can’t control where they pop up, and if it is a good deal you need to jump on it or someone else will.
so yes…I paddled it twice adn that was enough for me to tell that I definitely did not like it.
Very few boats that I end up making a decision on so quickly.
I think part of the reason I did not like it is because I really thought it would handle more like the royalex one I had put the longer thwarts in (royalex was a YS solo with less rocker in the stern than the symmetrical wildfire).
However, my modified YS solo handled much better for me as did the Osprey. So…did not keep the Wildfire.
Quick and easy decision and got one boat out of the garage.
Matt
Flatwater to Cl II with no compromise
– Last Updated: Jul-21-10 8:30 PM EST –
The Swift Osprey is my go to boat for mixing those up. Rumor has it that the Swift Shearwater would be good for big guy's.
Based on a very little experience and hearsay I believe the Bell Wildfire and Rockstar would make good candidates as well.
Edit bub bub bub I meant to say the Bell Yellowstone and Rockstar Royalex hulls. But as Turtle points out the Wildfire and Starfire are very good composite boats that will easily do Flats to Class II. At 180 lbs I'm quite happy in a Wildfire and I like the Starfire too. The Star will certainly carry 300 lbs and camping gear.
Rockstar YES, Wildfire no. Wildfire
is a bit small even for me at 225#. For him it is out of the question.
Shearwater or Rockstar for botrod
I don’t care what the designer may say, but I think the max weight for true Spindarella performance in a Wildfire is about 165 and for a Flashfire about 135.
DY needs to design the Bubbafire for Colden or someone.
Additional lenght not additional beam!
At 140lbs (ish) and 6’ tall… I found the Flashfire more than enough canoe for me: works well for me with an additional 70-100lbs on board as well. That seems to equate to 2.5" waterline unladen and just over the 3" waterline with dog, daughter and a bit of daytripping junk aboard.
I’d plug the Wildfire about 1/2" less whether unladen or laden… which sounds good in principle, but I found the Wildfire to be more boat than I really wanted: I was happy kneeling in a Rapidfire… and by comparison, a Wildfire seemed like a barge. I’m not an extreme case either: bigger folk than me (including some serious accomplished freestyle practitioners) prefer the Flashfire to the Wildfire!
Seems to me that rather than DY designing an upscaled (even beamier) Wildfire, he needs to stretch the Flashfire to 14’ and 15’, and to offer a 15’ Wildfire: keeping the hulls from plugging so far through adding waterline length to hulls in which the beam already allows for the knee-spread of even seriously tall folk.
Ultimately, though, I’d suggest that the gap in the market is at the other end: the Flashfire is HUGE for smaller paddlers… and if you are sub 5’4" tall and sub 120lbs (surely not uncommon for those who ain’t adult males)… the Flashfire AND PRETTY MUCH ANYTHING ELSE GOOD may be too much hull.
Big folk are well caterered for: it’s the littlies than ain’t!
Starfire
Colden has the molds for the Starfire(15’) also. Paul has not layed one up,but they are in the works. This iS the boat that Jeff Liebel(a big man) uses in his beautiful freestyle performance duet with his wife Laura.
TURTLE
I wonder
what proportion of the population is so small? Surely in America, that is an awful small segment of the market, hence the lack of a dedicated mass produced product. As an aside, I have been interested in buying a canoe livery for some time. For that reason, I tend to notice the rental patrons I pass on the river. America is a large-bodied population, getting larger all the time. Maybe there’s a market niche for a small-person boat. Not around here.
P.S. I enjoy reading your reviews.
a little hipper
… the kayakers are recruiting 99% of the kids. How 'bout re-badging it “Pfatfire”?
Size Curves
– Last Updated: Jul-22-10 9:51 AM EST –
We should have a hot hull for 120 lb folk. Curtis had one, sold 20 hulls in eight years, which never paid for the mold. Best bet for the few remaining petite; Placid's SpitFire, specially reinforced for a kneeling seat or ORC's Bell DragonFly if they'll put in the extra belly bands.
Beyond that, we have super sized our nation to the point few solo hulls are available for the larger among us.
Wenonah has the 31" Wilderness, strangely w/o rocker, Bell has the 31" RockStar with differential rocker and Nova's Super Nova at 32" has heroic and symmetrical rocker. All three are 15 feet long.
We need more and better boats for the larger amongst us. But they can't get much longer than 15 feet because larger folks are usually limited in torso rotation, so we need to limit the surface area and drag of their hulls.
That said, I do not under stand how Matt finds the WildFire too narrow. I'm formerly 5'10", now reduced to 5'9" and short legged, and I rattle around in WildFire like seeds in a gourd. The boat is too wide for me to triangulate my knees and bottom into a firm fit. If Matt did his WF time in a YS Solo with seat dropped for sitting, it would be tight to kneel in.
Supersized = longer legs?
– Last Updated: Jul-22-10 5:34 AM EST –
Between very small blokes, sub 125lbs women and the majority of the nation's teenagers... even supersized America surely has a bigger pool of potential SMALLER paddlers than it has 6'4"+ blokes needing a 31"-32" beam for fit... yet demand for large hulls seems to be greater. Do 125 women / youngsters see kayaks as more aimed at them? If many think of the open canoe as a thing for bigger blokes (stereotype: Bill Mason) then I guess enquiries about a hot hot hull for 125 lb women ain't going to be what they perhaps should be!
Does sales experience suggest some sort of correlation exists between paddler size and tendency to prefer open canoes to kayaks?
I'm assuming, of course, that having "super sized our nation" you mean the population tends to have increased weight on the same underlying frames. If so, and if the Flashfire and Wildfire were a good fit for paddlers a generation ago.... then the Flashfire and Wildfire beam should surely be appropriate (a good fit for paddlers) now - at least for those picking hulls for performance rather than stability.
I suppose the 15' Solotripper / Nomad / Peregrine / Heron / Merlin II is the closest one can currently get to a maintaining the beam of the Flashfire with additional length for carrying additional body weight: they would seem to carry ~20% more weight at the same 3" / 4" displacement. The Osprey is perhaps the closest one can currently get to a Wildfire "fit" for a weightier paddler.
Bigger is better?
Another factor that I notice is solo paddlers seem to choose boats that are bigger than they need. DY once told me people should pick a solo boat acording to their inseam measurment. I paddle a Flashfire and Hemlock Kestrel on 4 day wilderness trips and am 5’10 and 175#. I watch people struggling to get the paddle out over the rail in big boats or having trouble on tight narrow stream turns while insisting they need a boat this big. After trying one of my smaller boats they often change their mind. Maybe dealers play it save and recomend big boats? I find smaller boats much more fun.
P.S. My “big solo” is a Swift Osprey.
Turtle
Inseam measurement plus…
Fit, for a solo canoe, strikes me as paramount… and inseam would seam as logical a figure for boat fit as shaft length is to paddle selection… but seat height preference presumably prevents any nice formula linking inseam to fit for any given hull.
In theory, every hull could presumably be indexed for inseam measurement at (say) three standard seat heights. I’d anticipate no direct correlation to maximum beam though (rounded bottom hulls vs. distict chines)… and I suppose you might need different tolerance figures for different hulls (depending on how easy they pack out with foam).
Fundamentally, though, “as small as you can get away with” has always struck me as a sound principle: I reason that it’s better to occasionally put up with plugging to the 4" waterline (or slightly beyond) and with finding the hull unresponsive than it is to routinely be lumbered with more hull (beam, length, wetted surface area) than you really need!
It’s using small non-ww canoes (13’)
in whitewater that has convinced me that I would rather have a slightly larger boat that is lighter on the water. But I can see why, for swamping or freestyling, one would prefer a somewhat smaller hull.
I started my solo career in a ‘73 Mad River Compatriot, a 13’ very V-bottomed boat. I weighed about 195# at the time. The Compatriot needed a lot of pure-force managing in class 2 rapids. It wasn’t until much later, when I bought a used MR Guide, actually a narrower boat than the Compatriot, that I learned how much an extra 1.5 feet could do for boat handling in whitewater. I already had cranked rocker into the Compatriot, but it just didn’t sit light enough on the water.
Whitewater folks often want to go shorter and shorter, and no doubt, there are tight, technical rivers where shorter is better. But on slalom courses, the really short boats don’t look better than the best 13’ designs. Sometimes a short boat needs some plumping up in places to sit lighter on the water and be less susceptible to cross currents.
Too Small is Possible
We can find boats that are too small for us. Notably, where we cannot clear the stems when heeling to the rail. The little boats accelerate nicely due to minimal skin, hence less drag, but they hit the wall in terms of top speed and if we can’t spin them by lifting the stems, they get boring pretty quickly.
beam
I am 6’ long and 160 lbs and I started my solo career in a 13’5" * 26.5" Mad River Pearl, which was never boring and fast enough for me to keep up with the sea kayakers from our canoe club on flatwater. After that all solo canoes feel too wide for me, except the RapidFire that comes close.
At 180+ lbs
My Wildfire spins quite nicely. Add 50 lbs of gear and she spins sluggishly. The same goes for my Osprey.
Canoe width and leg length
– Last Updated: Jul-22-10 2:42 PM EST –
There are a few people here who make a big deal out of the idea that a shorter person can't spread their knees enough to fit a wider boat. I say that's hogwash, or the maybe the words of people with very poor flexibility in the hips, or people who are simply not willing to alter the forward-backward location of their knees relative to the edge of the seat. As one example for which it's easy to find actual photographs, everyone knows that Bill Mason was a shrimp of a man (I don't know how tall he was, but he was well known for being quite short), yet he had no trouble speading his knees all the way out into the chines of a Prospector while positioned just a bit behind the boat's midpoint, while still having his butt high enough to fit a standard-height kneeling thwart. That this is so easy for a short person to do is easily demonstrated on paper with geometry, or just "measure yourself" in different kneeling positions and you'll see that changing the amount of knee spread by as much as 9 or 10 inches only changes the height of your butt by a very small amount, an amount that can easily be "re-zeroed" back to your favorite seating height by placing your knees just a tiny bit closer to (for a wider spread) or farther from (for a narrower spread) the front edge of the seat (or kneeling thwart). I wouldn't go so far as to say that a 5'0" woman can be expected to kneel comfortably in an extremely wide solo boat, but I consider that a moot point since such a small person will already have a problem reaching comfortably beyond the gunwales for efficient paddle strokes in such a case. In other words, I think the limiting factor that first comes into play as a boat gets wider is the ability to reach out enough to paddle efficiently. It's just too easy to demonstrate that knee spread is easily adjusted to different boat widths (unless perhaps there are kneeling blocks installed which are the wrong distance ahead of the seat for a particular person - remember that slight adjustments in knee position toward or away from the seat edge make very large knee-width adjustments possible without changing the height of the seat). In short, I believe that as long as a person can comfortably reach beyond the gunwales for proper paddling, then the knee-width problem is totally a non-issue for anyone with at least a modicum of flexibility and a reasonably fit body. It really doesn't take much flexibility at all to be able to fit your knees in a boat that's too big to consider paddling in the first place, so if a person simply can't spread their knees wide enough to fit a larger boat, I'd recommend working on flexibility, because it will pay off dividends far beyond your wildest expectations during ALL everyday activities (as a guy who always had extremely poor flexibility but decided to do something about it, I can say with absolute certainty that anyone who is so stiff that they can't spread their knees to fit a boat that's too big for them is suffering in all the rest of their life more than they will ever be aware until they fix the problem).
Neat Boat
The Pearl was a neat boat. That saddle was a hoot; uncomfortable and heavy but one was locked in. I converted two Pearls to canted seat boats for a couple small folks; ~120 lbs each. Wildly Swede-Form, they loved to skid their tails around!
But, it was a small hull and it soon disappeared from the marketplace.