Good thread. I’ve been blown all over lakes before and would certainly have appreciated a retractable skeg at times. But it would add to the cost and weight and maybe spoil the simplicity of a canoe. I think the simple answer might be that canoeists are traditionalists and aren’t demanding innovative features, so there’s not enough market for design experimentation.
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Would a skeg even work in a canoe. My sea kayak turns bow into the wind, so skeg at the stern helps. My canoes get blown bow downwind, so a skeg isn’t going to help with that.
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It might if it was on the bow.
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Yes, a skeg would work in a canoe too to counteract weather helm (= stern blown downwind, which results in bow turn upwind).
If your canoe suffers from lee helm, a skeg does not help, only makes it worse.
Only way to remedy that is to trim somewhat bow heavy then.
Or add a keel, but then that ruins certain performance aspects. Sounds like experienced canoe paddlers have figured out ballasting and seating. Canoes typically can handle grester ballast loads than a kayak.
Ballast works great but you can’t get around the physics of mass and work. My canoe weighs between 80-100 pounds without me in it depending what I’m hauling with me and that is just a day trip. No way do I want to add another 50-100 pounds in order to trim it even if the weight is just water I can pour out when done. Another advantage I have found to a central seat location in a converted tandem is it provides two locations to place gear one ahead and one behind. Having two places helps with staying trim and having a varying ability to load the boat up.
Ideally in wide open water I think I would like a keel and in streams and rivers with less wind and higher banks where maneuverability is important a canoe with a slightly curved to flat bottom. In my case buying an Old Town Guide that isn’t anyone’s ideal canoe and the flat bottom was hogged to the point it didn’t know what direction it wanted to go. I blocked the hull under the seat to force it out and to a rounded shape. Doing that I instantly noticed a difference in stability being less but also a big improvement in holding a line and being pushed by wind. My guess is I moved the center line out about an inch to inch and a half. I don’t really know for sure if the new thwarts I added didn’t also reshape the hull to be a little more round than factory. I know that also will change the rocker also.
In the end it feels much better to me now than the first time I tried it and was thinking of selling it right after I bought it.
Paddling a double solo without being in trim also takes away so much of the stability you get from having the weight centered about the widest part of the canoe. I’m sure it can be mastered with practice though.
Trim is important.
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A skeg placed in the area where kayaks typically placed them might be more susceptible to damage from cargo and people moving about. Takes up storage space as well. Also canoes are more likely to be used in shallow rocky rivers and near shorelines than big open water where wind is more of a factor.
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Maybe canoes differ from kayaks in this regard…I don’t know…but I’ve never had a kayak exhibit lee helm but I’ve had plenty that exhibit weather helm. I’ve actually not heard these terms before but instead, “weather-cocking.” At least in a kayak, underway, you have more pressure on the bow as it parts the water and acts as a pivot point.
On my kayak, a Sterling model, the “skeg” is more towards the center. The designer calls it a “skeel” and says that it is more neutral than an aft-positioned skeg.
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Agree with @bud16415 and @rstevens15. I am not a advocate of adding ballast to anything but sailboats. However, properly balancing the load, as in the picture using your partner up front to ballast the canoe is more than effective. Ballast could be improved by moving her back a few inches which might level the canoe a bit. I resist offering advice on canoes since I don’t have extensive time in quality canoes but agree that the drawback of skegs and rudders on a canoe seem so foreign and unneccessary. As I pointed out elsewhere, I’m an advocate of long double bladed kayak paddles, but I can’t imagine the gain of using such a paddle in a canoe.
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Lot of rocker, but the unusual skeg location must be intended to help riding waves. The point that it can surf backwards is interesting but beyond my fun level. Nice looking boat.
I’m used to the terms “weathercocking” and “leecocking” too. I’m not suggesting that one style of terminology is “right” and the other “wrong”, but the terminology that’s new to me has the word “helm” in it, which to me - if I didn’t know otherwise because of current context - implies steering input, so I find myself preferring the other style.
Regarding your main point, different solo canoes I’ve paddled are affected by wind in different ways. In some, the angle of heading, relative to the wind while underway, will make a difference in whether the boat tends to veer upwind or downwind. Actually, I think this is true to some extent for all canoes I’ve paddled, but for some, this variability is extremely pronounced, while for others, it’s a minor issue. I think if I weren’t such a lightweight person, weathercocking is all I would ever see my solo boats do, but since my boats have very little draft when the only real load onboard is me, the bow isn’t always as “locked up” due to forward motion as might be expected, and certainly less so than is usually the case for kayaks.
That brings up another thing. For me, I think a skeg would make a canoe un-paddleable in some circumstances unless the skeg could be set to a position that is “barely there”. In unloaded or lightly-loaded canoes, I find that my direction of travel in a strong crosswind is very strongly diagonal to the direction the boat is pointed, but I’ve even seen that when paddling tandem with a load of gear onboard. That pronounced sideways drift of the whole boat would be impossible to control if one end of the boat had substantially more “grip” on the water. Related to that, in a very strong crosswind, a canoe that is making little or no forward progress will be “pinned” crosswise to the wind, and building up a bit of travel speed can be necessary before the canoe can be gotten “unstuck” from that cross-wind heading (making it possible to turn upwind once the stern loosens up). I think a skeg would complicate that situation by pinning the canoe into some degree of a downwind heading and making it very difficult to turn upwind from that heading. Another poster mentioned that a keel would be useful in this situation and I agree. While keels are usually an attribute of “cheap” canoes, some good-quality canoes can be special ordered with some kind of keel, and such canoes are intended for use on lakes (an environment where the keel would very seldom have seriously negative affects on handling).
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Weather helm is the more or less officlal term I think:
but is also known as weathercock or weathervane.
It is all fine with me as long as we understand what we are talking about.
(I call it “oploeven” anyway 
)
No that does not make a difference.
When paddling forward with a crosswind a canoe or kayak can turn into the wind or downwind depending on:
- the design of the boat;
- the trim of the boat (both lengthwise and athwartships);
- the use of a skeg or rudder;
- the speed of the boat – more speed can mean more weater helm and vice versa;
- the force of the wind;
- the waves (if present of course).
All my canoes (tandem and solo) sufferred from weather helm mostly.
When too lightly loaded and paddling against waves some of them occasionally suffered from lee helm, but that was also because of the stern heavy trim then.
Touring kayaks will usually suffer more from weather helm than touring canoes, because they are relatively narrower in design and paddled with more speed thus more prone to weather helm.
Lee helm is considered to be more problematic than weather helm because when there is a problem downwind, lee helm will make it even more difficult to avoid that problem.
If there is a problem upwind, weather helm is not such a problem as you can just slow down a bit and/or paddle or just drift downwind away from the problem upwind.
I think most touring kayaks are also designed not to suffer from lee helm at all and not too much weather helm, as weather helm is the better of the two evils.
My kayak with a normal load turns broadside to the wind. Makes it easy to turn either up or downwind, but not so desirable if I want to take a break in rough conditions.
I’m not an avid canoeist, but when I have occasionally taken my grand daughters out in the Old Town Penobscot i can only paddle on the left side (left arm won’t raise above level. I don’t concern myself with concepts like lee helm and weather helm or weather cocking. Paddling on one side with a single blade paddle seems natural and normal to me. Realizing that solo paddling is bound to make the boat turn regardless of conditions, I use a simple stroke and a rudder correction at the end. I guess there’s a fancy name for it. All I know is that it keeps the canoe going straight, regardless of the wind. The only thing that matters is how long and how aggressively you rudder the paddle. It works better with at least one kid up front to keep the bow from sticking up so high. It actually seems easier and less technical than a kayak, but the kayak moves faster that the the Old Town.
Canoes and pack boats have always been used on rivers. They need to be able to move sideways in the current to avoid obstacles. Sea kayaks are primarily designed for lakes and ocean and need to be able to handle winds and tides.
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Perhaps the best one is what you find in a couple of Stellar’s recreational boats like the S12 and Dragonfly. The rear hull shapes into a bit of a fin in the bottom stern to help with tracking so its part of the actual boat, has no moving parts and the surface itself serves as a skeg. That said the Dragonflys are only 24 lbs and have a high freeboard so while the track wonderfully in flat water and mean flat, wind and waves make these boats a no go. Any packboat really on account of being a light open topped, high boat is a poor choice for rough conditions yet they remain my favorite paddle craft for other reasons.
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It’s all in the design. One boat doesn’t fit all people or all purposes.
Underside of a 12’ Pungo. No need for a skeg here, it already has one … it’s just not retractable. 
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