mais, oui, mon ami…
We like comfort over here. And the doog is very large…
Don’t need to go hardcore WW
Geoff,
The suggestion of a whitewater biased hull was to accent the importance of a short full hull to carry your specified load and be manueverable by a solo paddler in the tight flowing streams of the pine barrens. A really hardcore whitewater solo, a banana shaped deep flatbottomed royalex hull, is not necessary. Just look at hulls that are fuller at the ends, and have rocker, and are narrow enough at the middle for you to reach the water.
The Mohawk Solo 14 may be big enough for your needs and is inexpensive and durable. My own solo, a Wenonah Mocassin has made many trips to the Pine Barrens, and it fits thru Upper Cedar Creek just fine. But i am paddling with maybe ten pounds of gear on these day trips and no dog. Loaded with my typical Adirondack tripping gear and food, the Mocassin would be a big handful in the same creeks. The increased draft would give the current a lot more hull to work on, and the stern would be swept to the outside on the 180 degree turns, which is where all the strainers seem to form. Paddling the same steams tandem in a 15’Dagger Reflection is easier than going loaded in a solo. The paddler position at the ends of the canoe gives a lot more leverage in bringing the canoe around. Solo you are trying to force the ends around from the middle. A long straight keel-line makes open water paddling very efficient but is a killer in the really tight streams, and moves such normally great solos such as the big Wenonah tripping solos (Encounter and Voyager) way down the list.
Where we picking a canoe for you & dog and load for a trip to the Adirondacks the list would invert, and the short full rockered boats would move to the bottom.
Bill
If you’re going to consider a smaller
solo, I would choose the Mohawk Odyssey14 over the Solo 14. It has a little more freeboard and rocker. I had about 250lbs in it Sat. and it rode very high in the water. Could have used more weight in the 30mph wind. I think our streams are similar to your Pine barrens and these boats are nice for small streams. Our Royalex canoes crawl over logs and we don’t have to sweat it.
To give you an idea of how much the Odyssey will handle, two of our instructors jumped into one of our Odysseys in the pool class and paddled the boat in and out of 10 other boats in close quarters. They weren’t going slow; the boat was up on plane about 1/2 of the time. Estimated load in the boat: 450-475lbs.