I have a prijon embudo and I have a a cockpit length of 34 and width of 19.25 which skirt would be best to get? If I can’t get that one what are good alternatives?
This is a whitewater boat, made for big stuff. Is that what you plan to be doing?
Between this and your other thread on paddling straight, I have a few questions in my ind on what type of paddling you are looking to do. Could you provide info on what you see as an average day? Location or type if water you plan to go on? Distance covered? And the like? This will affect the type of skirt we would recommend.
Mainly fast moving rivers but I plan on using this and have been using it for everything from still water to creeks to lakes. I love the rush of going through short drops and falls also.
Well, you have a boat that is not going to go straight on flat water unless you get a better paddle stroke. Or go very fast though creekers are way better than play/river runners.
I am going t go back to a recommendation that came up on the other thread - take lessons.
The skirt that you would want to use for even small drops and any sort of white water (fast moving river) is one that you need to make sure you know how to use intimately, or you could die. And in moving rivers, you are likely to flip often, so even if you use the skirt right, you will spend huge amounts of time swimming the boat to shore and draining. Taking a intro to white water course will get you started safely and quickly. And will also help you with the question of how to paddle straight.
The place that teaches likely is also a retailer, and could sell you an appropriate skirt.
If you do go with an online purchase, Seals (recommended above) has a decent system to ensure you find a skirt that fits you and your boat.
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Retailers around here don’t have skirts or don’t seem to even know what a skirt is. I haven’t checked REI yet because they are sold out of everything Kayak related.
I’m a stubborn guy and haven’t taken lessons for anything I have ever done. I may just try to meet up with people that live close to learn the ropes that way. I understand the dangers though and have already flipped a couple times going down rapids. I don’t mind stopping to drain the boat. I just want to have to do it less and yes I will need to learn how to properly eject from a skirt. Thanks for the feedback.
Weed- what does a 1.7 mean?
I likes seals skirts. Paddling whitewater is something best done with others. Shuttling and rescues become easier and safer when you include others that are more experienced. I don’t know where you are located but hope you can find some like minded paddlers to team up with. If you post your paddling area we might be able to assist with that. Go to the seals spray skirt website and check out their sizing chart. You might want to get a skirt that’s a little loose (one deck size larger than suggested) since the wet exit is your stay safe strategy.
Thanks I’ll check sealskirts out.
Clackamas county Oregon area is where I am. Mainly the clackamas River, molalla River, Willamette river, Columbia river, sandy river, Tualatin river are all 30 minutes or less drive time for me. But I hit a few lakes also.
“Retailers around here don’t have skirts or don’t seem to even know what a skirt is. I haven’t checked REI yet because they are sold out of everything Kayak related.”
Skirts are mandatory for WW. If you can’t find anyone who has an awareness you are talking to people who have zero idea about your WW boat. In sum the wrong folks.
Please find others if you go into anything white. Concern about other things above, like your saying you need to learn how to eject from a skirt. You don’t do that, you and the skirt come out of the boat together. I suspect you ave not seen much of the way this boat gets used.
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https://www.skirtfit.com/whitewater/prijon/. I would try to go down a class I stream w/o a skirt first before adding the complication of a skirt. It might be an eye-opening experience. If you don’t hook up with local experienced river paddlers, how are you planning to run shuttle to get your gear up and down the river? BTW go to the rivers section of American Whitewater. Even easy stuff can have unexpected hazards like low head dams.
Alder Creek Kayak and Canoe and NEXT Adventure are both kayak retailers in Portland area with good reputations. I think Portland Kayak Company is also - name seems familiar to me.
Tumalo Creek in Bend is also good. They used to be part of Alder Creek.
Every white water kayaker I have seen around here do not use skirts. Just wet suits and I keep hearing to ditch the skirt and use a wet suit.
I am hard pressed to believe that you are talking to real WW folks, like who can do higher class rivers.
The wet suit is about if you go into the water. The skirt is part of helping you NOT capsize in serious WW because it allows you to gt into difficult spots and recover by rolling rather than swamping the boat. I know WW paddlers who regularly do everything thru class 4 and one or two who have traveled to South America for really big stuff there. None of them would confuse the use of a skirt with the use of a wet suit.
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I agree with Celia on the skirt being MANDATORY for whitewater paddling. I am not into whitewater myself (I’ve had instruction and done it on numerous occasions over the years because my friends wanted to go, I just don’t enjoy it). But I’ve belonged to two outdoor clubs over 45 years which have had hundreds of members from beginners to experts who were avid paddlers of class 2 to 5 and even an occasional class 6 on the Upper Gauley in West Virginia. NOT A SINGLE ONE of those paddlers has ever kayaked without a full neoprene spray skirt. I worked for many years for outdoor sports outfitters and also don’t believe you that you can’t find one that knows what a sprayskirt it. This tells me that you are not going to shops that sell whitewater kayaks.
If you don’t have a sprayskirt in rough water the cockpit will constantly fill with water which seriously affects performance and will cause you to have to exit the boat and swim it to shore to empty it. Not only that, it will increase the potential for you to be pinned against a rock and drown. Plus you can’t roll without a skirt, and rolling is a necessary skill if you are going to seriously paddle in rapids.
Wetsuits are irrelevant – they are to keep you warm. Sprayskirts are NOT to keep you dry, they are to keep the boat from being swamped with and immobilized by hundreds of pounds of water. Nobody in their right mind would want to kayak a closed boat in rapids without a sprayskirt. If you are seeing people on rivers in just wetsuits that is because they are in rafts, duckies or sit on tops, not standard sit-inside whitewater kayaks.
I suspect you are not being completely truthful with us. You went from stating you were “new to kayaking” and knowing nothing about the boat model you bought and complaining that you could not get it to paddle straight and then jumped to claiming that you like to paddle serious whitewater and go over waterfalls (you only said that after we explained that was what the Embudo was designed to do.) Maybe you’ve done rafting trips, but WW kayaking is a whole different animal.
Are you seriously trying to learn about the necessary safety and skills development in kayaking or are you trying to justify a mistake you made in buying a boat for a sport you know little or nothing about? The fact that you seem to be scoffing at advice you are getting from experienced people is kind of troubling. There are a lot of red flags here.
I challenge you to provide me with photos of paddlers in your area doing whitewater runs without skirts. The only people I have ever seen kayaking rapids without a skirt are suicidal ignoramuses who try to take short cheap rec boats (the kind made for bird watching in ponds) into moving water. The lucky ones last about 50 feet into the first rapids before they swamp and sink the boat and have to swim to shore. The unlucky ones’ bodies are fished out of the river by Search and Rescue before the end of the day. In the area where I live, where we have a lot of whitewater runs, those deaths of poorly equipped and untrained paddlers happen every year.
As to your original question, the Seals company makes a number of whitewater sprayskirt models and your boat takes their size 1.7. That means that the circumference of the coaming (the lip around the opening of the cockpit) is 1.7 meters (67 inches.) Here is an example:
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Class matters.
As willowleaf says if you go to a class 1 stretch of water or even a class 2 on a hot day you may find people out there in general use boats without a skirt. Most people can get thru a class 1 without having much clue what they are doing, and in most cases they can swamp a boat and get out of it. Unless they found a strainer.
If you also see people in inner tubes, with a six pack of beer in their laps, it is not serious WW paddling. It can be fun and refreshing. This is not really WW paddling as much as recreational boating on water that happens to be a bit bumpy.
It is also, as suggested higher up, a relatively safe way to experience some minor moving water without a skirt. Just to understand what you re dealing with.
But proper WW boating means contemplating water thru at least class 3. And paddling that stuff without a skirt in a SINK is not something that any outfitter would support, or anyone who had a clue what they were doing would do.
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Okay well I am done asking questions here as I get mocked more than I get answers or input. I made zero mistakes on my boat. My biggest mistake was asking online for advice it seems.
You have gotten answers. You don’t like them.
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Willow leaf and a couple others have attacked me. I didn’t make any mistakes with my boat that I use every day. The responses I am getting seem to be biased as I have not got a response from someone who does the same kind of kayaking as me.