Canoe Question

[ColdWaterFshr]

Chief - your 4th boat in 30 years?? You don't need our opinion man!

My brother had a Wenonah fiberglass canoe for several years and it was a great boat. Very light, quick, tracked well. He just had to patch it fairly often, which caused him to be overly cautious with it, and then the final hole he put in it was its death nail - just unrepairable. Had he bought a Royalex boat instead of the fiberglass, I'm sure he would still be using it.

[brownieman]

I used an old wooden canoe my father refurbished many years ago...it's now in a local antique shop.

The old boat had been repaired with glass so much it was terribly heavy but was one hell of a true floating quiet canoe.

If you get a keeless canoe they respond faster when steering but do not float true in the water...constantly have to a paddle in the water to keep them floating straight and on a windy day you get blown in circles. Keeless canoes tend to be better for white water but for a fishing rig I would take a canoe with a keel. Also a canoe with some weight takes less paddleing to keep them moving. jmo

[ness]

I used an old wooden canoe my father refurbished many years ago...it's now in a local antique shop.

The old boat had been repaired with glass so much it was terribly heavy but was one hell of a true floating quiet canoe.

If you get a keeless canoe they respond faster when steering but do not float true in the water...constantly have to a paddle in the water to keep them floating straight and on a windy day you get blown in circles. Keeless canoes tend to be better for white water but for a fishing rig I would take a canoe with a keel. Also a canoe with some weight takes less paddleing to keep them moving. jmo

A well designed hull won't need a keel, and will float in a straight line -- especially if its load is balanced properly. But you're right -- a lot of canoes perform like you suggest, especially with the bow up in the air.

[Al Agnew]

I have to disagree a little more strongly on keels. The ONLY reason manufacturers put keels on canoes is to stiffen the bottom, whether it's an aluminum canoe or some kind of plastic. The keel on an aluminum Grumman does a bit to keep the canoe going straight--maybe 10% or so better than the shoe keels that Grumman put on the canoes they marketed as whitewater models. But the keels on canoes such as the Colemans and some of the Old Town Royalex do VERY little to make the canoe track better. The keel on the Coleman is simply a groove to make the internal bracing fit without sticking up so high off the bottom on the inside, and the rounded keels on some Royalex canoes keep the bottom from flexing lengthwise--you'll only see them on the canoes with wide, flat bottoms.

I always preferred a keel on an aluminum canoe rather than a shoe keel, which was just a narrow ridge about 1/2 inch thick on the bottom, because the higher regular keel was often the first thing to hit a rock, and thus protected the rest of the bottom of the canoe to an extent. I do NOT like keels on plastic canoes for much the same reason--they catch more abuse than the rest of the bottom, and the problem with that is that they are simply a wrinkle in the bottom no thicker than the rest of the bottom, so they concentrate the wear.

What makes a canoe more easily go straight when you want it to--or turn when you want it to--is purely a function of the hull shape below the waterline. The straightest tracking canoes have no rocker (the ends below the waterline do not turn up but the whole bottom is a straight line when viewed from the side). Whitewater canoes, designed for easy turning, have considerable rocker--the canoe looks somewhat like a banana when viewed from the side. Straight tracking canoes are narrower than whitewater canoes in proportion to length. And perhaps most importantly, straight tracking canoes have very sharp entry lines. If you were underwater and looking straight up at the bottom of the canoe, the waterline would have very sharp points on both ends and stay very narrow for a considerable distance toward the center before gracefully widening out in the middle. Whitewater canoes have a waterline shape that is closer to a bathtub--blunt ends that very quickly widen out.

Most "recreational" canoes are somewhere in the middle between these two design extremes. Most Royalex canoes fit that description. The wider, flatter-bottomed Royalex canoes marketed as sport or fishing canoes lean farther toward the maneuverability extreme. The Old Town Penobscot I mentioned before has the sharpest entry lines of any Royalex canoe, which is why I like it. It is still fairly maneuverable, but tracks very well.

[Crooked Creek Angler]

I'd second third and fourth the purchase of a Royalex or crosslink plastic canoe. I just successfully patched my 10 year old Royalex Old Town Tripper with a technique shared with me by Ozark River Company. It involves using thin successive layers of an adhesive called Marine Goop, which is available at many hardware stores. The Tripper has been very durable despite a brutal life on Crooked Creek and the Buffalo river.

The Ozark River Company is an Old Town dealer that carries blems and overstock inventory. I've had good experiences in dealing with them. Here's a link to their website. Good luck on that new canoe.

http://www.ozarkcanoe.com/

[taxidermist]

The one without a keel are for whitewatter, so you can slide them sideways in the water easier.

I have floated in several of the Buffalo Canoes and like the fact they slide over the rocks, whay better than the aluminum in the yard!

http://www.buffalocanoes.com/

The Buffalo canoes will slide over rocks in water where fiberglass has to be carried, makes for a way better time ont he water.

Most of the rentals around here are the Royalex material and they do take a beating a hard beating!!! Remember they are rentals.

[Al Agnew]

Taxidermist has a very good point if you're talking about any plastic or fiberglass canoe compared to aluminum. Aluminum sticks to everything, logs, rocks, even gravel, and makes pushing it over shallow areas or obstructions much more work. Most of the plastics and also fiberglass slide over obstructions with ease. Royalex is probably no better than fiberglass in that respect. It IS a little better than the Ram-X stuff. If you have a fiberglass canoe you should give it a buffing of paste auto wax every couple of months, which makes it even more slick to slide over stuff. If you have a Royalex or other plastic canoe (other than the Colemans and such), a coat of Armor-All, Formula 303, or Teflon Protectant does the same thing. It really makes a difference--in fact, you have to be careful with it afterward because if you set it down on a bank with any kind of slope it may just slide right into the water and halfway across the river. Trust me on this, I've had it happen to me...in cold weather! And whatever you do, don't put a coat of any of that stuff on the inside!

Again, keel-less is NOT necessarily for whitewater when you're talking about any canoe material other than aluminum. All the best tracking designs (and poorest whitewater designs) in fiberglass or plastic are just as keel-less as the whitewater models. Keels on plastic canoes are purely for stiffening the hull, and do nothing to help the canoe track better. And they do almost nothing to make moving it sideways more difficult, either.

[taxidermist]

Gotta tell yea about a canoe trip.

Marshal AR use to sponser a canoe race from Gilbert to Buffalo point. A couple years out of high school a friend and I decided to enter it. I knew one of the outfitters at Pruitt and he loaned us a brand new aluminum canoe. I took it home and buffed the bottom, waxed it looked like a mirror!!! Man it was like it was chrome plated!!!!!!

We entered that Saturday AM. had the 6" paddles the rules called for, we were the only people with 6" paddles everyone else had wide blades really wide blades.

KY3 was there to cover the take off, we did and on the forth stroke my buddy switched side on threem that canoe jumped out from under us so fricken quickly it would make your head spin.

We made the trip in 3 hours and 54 minutes from Gilbert to Buffalo Point and we finished next to last!!!!!

Sunburned, blistered and sore!!!!

But we finished!!!! Never again did we or I canoe race.

But yes wax the bottom of any boat and its going to slide thru the water.

But really RoyalX is great!!!!

[Al Agnew]

Reminds me of my only canoe race. My buddy Rick and I entered a 22.5 mile race on Big River back when we were teenagers. There were a lot of serious canoe people there with fiberglass canoes so light you could see through them, a lot of what I later would learn were very fast canoe designs. We had an old 17 foot Grumman aluminum with a bottom that bowed noticeably upwards in the middle. We DIDN'T wax the bottom or anything else, just showed up and signed up for the race.

Our only advantage was that we knew the river like the backs of our hands, and knew where we could cut across the inside of bends. That may have gained us a few minutes, but not much. At least we didn't have to scout riffles, we could just pound our way through them. During the course of the race we simply paddled like crazy, and when we'd see another contestant up ahead we'd paddle even harder to catch up to them. We passed a bunch of other contestants, and ended up coming in 6th, covering the 22.5 miles in a little less than 3 hours. The winners were more than an hour faster than that, but we beat some of the people who had really fast canoes and looked like they knew what they were doing. When we reached the end of the race, I raised up to get out of the canoe, fell out of it into 6 inches of water at the edge of the gravel bar, and just laid there for several minutes until I could move. If I hadn't landed with my head on my arm to prop it up out of the water I think I'd have drowned!

[Chief Grey Bear]

Thanks for all your input guy's. That was way more than I was looking for and in enjoyed it.