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.
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.
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.
I've always assumed that inside leg measurement was principally relevant to MINIMUM beam: if you're 6'4" tall then you're likely to want a bit more room into the chines than someone 5'4" tall. I'm afraid I've rather taken forgranted that if all else works AT that minimum, additional beam BEYOND that minimum is generally undesirable - hence I'd go for additional length rather than additional beam for increased volume / carrying capacity - but at ~140lbs, having trouble getting the stems out of the water has never crossed my mind!
ps. My most comfortable stance is perched ~10" off the floor of the canoe, with room for about 24" of knee spread. Narrower starts to feel cramped, and whilst I can spread my knees wider (30+ inches if need be)... my stance ultimately has to drop in order to be able to reach the hull... and in practice, even soloing a wide tandem, I stick to the same ~24" spread that I find comfortable in the solo.
Clarification I agree with you about that minimum width for comfort. I’m tall, and in a narrow canoe I find I’d like a bit more width to allow a wider stance. However, I’ll re-state what I mentioned above regarding a wider stance and its effect on your height within the boat. There is NOT any need to sit lower just becausse your knees are spread wider. You can simply move your knees a little farther back, closer to the seat, to restore yourself to the elevation that you prefer. You don’t have to shift your knee position backward very much at all to “undo” the lowering effect of a wider stance, and the average person will do this without even thinking about it since it’s necessary for maintaining proper contact with both the seat and floor. It might mean that you will be more comfy on a seat that has somewhat sharper forward tilt than in a narrower boat where your knees are closer together and thus farther forward, but that’s very minor adjustment to deal with (unless the boat is not yours to customize).
And Some of us lift the high side of the hull with the high side knee when heeling the boat, so hull to body fit is still important.
One can also shim a hull with knee blocks or pads, but the real issue is shoulder width. The average 120 lb person cannot stack his/her hands across a 30" max beam boat, and when the paddleshaft isn’t vertical, every forward stroke is a sweep, which increases correction and decreases efficiency.
We’re getting a ways from Matt’s reviews, maybe a new thread?
Is my 13 year old Dagger Reflection 15. I've owned many canoes and kayaks. In fact, i have a Merlin 2 up for sale on paddle net right now. The Dagger is slower and less manuverable than almost all the boats mentioned. It doesn't track as well as many on this list. But, I gotta tell ya, what a great boat! A boat is more than the sum of its performance numbers.