There are lots of things to consider when looking for your first kayak. You will hear lots of advice from well meaning people, many of whom have no kayaking experience. This will often include staff in outdoor shops and fishing shops who often point people towards wide stable sit on top kayaks. Their arguments usually run something along these lines.
- It’s really stable so you won’t fall in.
- If you do capsize, you can just climb back on.
- They’re great for fishing and diving.
Most people who get into sea kayaking, very quickly find that the distances they paddle increase rapidly and they like to paddle all year round. I know septuagenarians who routinely paddle over 30km in a day. Some do a lot more. None of them do it on short wide sit on tops designs. Here’s why;
- Short, wide sit on top boats are generally hydrodynamically inefficient. They have a huge wetted area which generates a lot of drag and they have a low theoretical hull speed which also means more resistance at higher speeds.
- They generally have very high primary stability which means that carving turns by edging tends to be hard work, it means more correcting sweep strokes and a loss of forward propulsion. They often have neither rudder nor skeg so tracking in windy conditions becomes an issue.
- The width of the boat forces a wider, lower angled forward stroke with more turning force and less forward propulsion. Ie the boat zig-zags along more than a longer, narrower, harder tracking boat.
- These boats are designed to be very stable, many of them are too stable when the waves get up. Stability is basically the boat’s tendency to stay in the plane of the water surface. Boats with high primary stability will tend to stay in that plane, even when the water surface is not horizontal. Very stable, flatter hulled boats really live on flat water not the sea.
- You get no protection from the elements in these boats. In summer you fry and in winter you have a cold wet ride.
- While you can climb back on fairly easily it is very difficult (but not impossible) to roll these boats. In rough water a roll is always the fastest and safest recovery after a capsize.
Having said all that, there are a couple of sit on designs that are essentially deck-less sit in designs and are not a bad compromise, the dimensions of these boats are quite similar to mainstream sit in designs though.
Tracking is the ability of the boat to hold a straight course. Boats with a long waterline length, little rocker and a pronounced keel tend to be inherently hard trackers. Rocker is the term used to describe the curvature in the keel line of a kayak. More rocker generally means softer tracking and more maneuverability, less rocker means harder tracking but less maneuverability.
