Seat Height and Location
What was the cause of your kneeling discomfort? Your own knees, contact with the bottom of the boat, or not enough room for your feet under the seat? There’s not much to do about pain from inside your knees, but the other issues can easily be fixed. If you can make the seat work for kneeling and be comfortable, you’ll be a lot better off in whitewater than is possible when sitting.
Moving the seat farther back from its current location will hurt the overall handling. The Yellowstone already is biased for forward travel and doesn’t go backwards as well as many other boats. Moving the seat farther back will make that problem a whole lot worse. Being able to back-paddle with good control is one of the most valuable tools to have in rapids (that will ALSO solve the water-over-the-bow problem in most cases too), and removing that option from your bag of tricks by having the seat too far back seems like a bad idea to me.
Kayamedic said a mouthfull when she said to work on your paddle skills before making major changes to the boat. Right now it sounds like you plan to make it into a different style of boat than what it was designed for, but once you are comfortable in it the way it is (for example, so it feels like it’s “easy to turn” instead of feeling like it’s “directionally unstable”) you will probably appreciate it a lot more.
feedback is
appreciated, i’m the first to admit i dont know what im doing, so this is good stuff for me.
i gotta get back to work…
Scott B and his Yellowstone
I’d have said you need to kneel to run class II in the Yellowstone.
Here’s Scott proving otherwise…
http://outdoors.webshots.com/photo/2520574300063026580JwUvBL
dont throw away any parts
if you do lower the seat…because as you grow as a paddler (in a good sense) you may want that seat higher.
A kneeling pad really helps. Bell’s are wimpy. Dan Cooke makes a much better one that is thicker and firmer. I have tried almost every kneeling pad known and Dan’s is the best. The Bells will wear right through in a year or so…of everyday use so that might not be germane to every paddler.
Pads are a pain for tripping…but minicell ovals glued to the bottom of a tripping boat help…the best were the innards from the Grade VI pads of early 90s vintage. I discarded the outer and glued the inner to a tripping boat. They are still going strong after 15 years of every year month long trip use.
Grade VI pads and drops
Grade Vi’s trapezoidal pro pad is available again from the Bag Lady.
If you want to lower the seat an inch, drops are available from Ed’s Canoe parts. You’ll need longer machine screws, 10-24, either from Placidboats or McMasterCarr.
A solo canoe is the toughest game on the water, but also the best game on the water. Keep at it; it’s worth a few swims.
i just
ordered the how to solo canoe dvd, maybe that’ll help get my head out of my ass and my boat down the river…
That’s a good start
I've seen that one, and it covers the basics. Since you will be doing some whitewater too, I highly recommend Bill Mason's "Path of the Paddle" video. I bought the Path of the Paddle BOOK a few years ago, and it's certainly packed with info, and though I enjoyed the style of the book very much, I eventually figured out that it's a little too "slow" and sometimes difficult to figure out by one who does not yet have much experience to build on (this is true at least if you tend to read "too far ahead" relative to your skills). On the other hand, I just bought the Path of the Paddle VIDEO a few weeks ago, and it's perfect for teaching a beginner and quite enjoyable if you already know the basics too. It'll get you on the right track as far as how to "think" about how your canoe will best negotiate typical obstacles (VERY different from just "pointing the boat where you want to go" which is the normal approach until you "unlearn" that natural reaction). Of course the book is great for that too, and someday you might want both, but I'd start with the video.
Just my two cents.