Yeah, somewhat relatedly… I think the real lesson (at least if you grew up near the coast) is that everything is hard for somebody. I can’t really think of a kayak as an easy-to-flip craft, but that doesn’t really matter for this person’s journey.
An extreme example, but: I used to watch this channel from a guy that built canoes and kayaks in both modern and traditional styles. He says in some videos that the traditional hunting kayaks are incredibly unstable and uncomfortable to use, because that instability granted them superior agility for hunting.
Have you read The Starship and The Canoe? Interesting book to goes into a good bit of detail about hunting craft (made from animal skin). Book said that they practiced 10 different was to turn a flipped one back over.
I haven't, but I've read "Birchbark Canoe" by David Gidmark. He's written some technical canoe-making books, but this one was the story about how he came to live in Northern Quebec amongst the Algonquin and learned how to make birch bark canoes from William Commanda, with whom he had a fairly turbulent relationship. I saw it in a big library one day and uncharacteristically actually managed to read the whole thing, it was very good!
Huh, neat. Unfortunately that site doesn’t seem to play videos correctly on my system. What do they use the agility for? Traditional hunting, so I imagine… a bow or something, maybe they need to turn quickly to help aim?
No idea, iOS + Safari + Firefox Focus + the built-in Apple blockers. The video seemed to randomly freeze when not in full screen, but it would exit full screen when I tried to hop around in the video. I bet there’s an easy fix but I’m not a big video guy anyway.
Something about how they shared the link encoded a preference for the desktop version of YouTube, but since you’re on iOS, I have stripped all of that off their link:
Sit ins are definitely easy to flip, but sit on tops aren't. Especially thin ones. They probably went for the thin, fast one instead of the wide, slow one while being naive to the implications.
kayaks are muchj tipier than canoes but shouldn't be flipping if you're just sitting in them, unless these are highly specialized racing kayaks, which are tougher to navigate.
Interesting! I never felt like I was going to flip a sit-in kayak, but I don’t even remember the first time I went in one really, it is a fuzzy early childhood memory.
Canoes, I’ve been in canoes that are destined to flip whether I want them to or not (although they were overloaded, or may have had some traitors aboard).
That's funny, because I grew up canoeing and have never on my own flipped one - other people in the boat doing dumb stuff, of course, or trying something silly in white water (maybe that counts as "on my own"?), sure - but I feel totally stable and comfortable in a canoe. Kayaks, though? Man, they're trying bite me! I've never felt like even the most stable beginner-friendly of kayaks wasn't trying to throw me off it.
I think the difference is stroke technique? I'm sure I'm instinctively trying to paddle a kayak like I would a canoe, and they don't like that. If I had more opportunity I'd get someone to teach me proper kayak stroke shapes, and then they'd probably feel more friendly.
