catsittingstill

It is pretty important to decide what kind of load your boat will be carrying. If you intend to make solo day trips, your body and your day bag are the only weights to worry about. If you will be doing wilderness camping with two paddlers and two weeks worth of gear in the boat, the weight will be substantially different. A short, beamy boat and a long, slender boat may have the same load capacity, but they will handle very differently. I had to design my boat for two paddlers, even though I knew that most of its uses would be solo, so it was larger than I would have preferred, but no larger than it absolutely had to be to carry two lightly equipped people on day trips. I ended up at sixteen feet, with a thirty-four inch maximum beam at the gunwale, which was flared, no tumblehome. I would have liked to build a solo boat at about fourteen and a half feet, but I couldn't afford two boats, and wanted the wife to be able to accompany me from time to time. Figuring out the displacement of your design without using the model technique described elsewhere is tricky. Boat design software can do it, if you are fortunate enough to have some. If you have a reasonable number of frame stations, you can do a kind of pseudo-integration and come up with something that way. If you have a hull shape that you like, but the displacement is off your desired number, rather than change the beam, change the length. Adding or subtracting a foot or two in the center won't cause much of a change in the overall shape of the hull. Going longer is better than shorter, in my opinion, so be conservative in your original dimensions, and add displacement if you need to. You want your trip to be enjoyable, and you want your boat to bring you home safely at day's end. Seakindliness will contribute to those goals. We have already considered stability, which in the case of a narrow boat like a canoe is an aspect of seakindliness, since the proper kind of stability can keep you out of the water when you don't want to be in it. Lower initial stability keeps the paddler from having to fight all the time when waves are on the beam. Another aspect of seakindliness is the ability of the boat to cope with bad weather, which in the case of canoes usually means wind and waves. We have already considered the effect of wind on the boat, and determined that low bows/sterns are better able to deal with wind. Unfortunately, they also allow waves to enter the boat more easily. I got around this problem by decking the first three feet of the bow, and by flaring the bow very substantially, which made it resistant to digging in to oncoming waves. It was a nontraditional approach, but my experience in whitewater kayaks led me to it, and I don't think it harmed the look of the boat, just the contrary in fact. Flared sides keep waves out better that sides with tumblehome. Make sure your design has adequate freeboard for the load that you anticipate. Nothing will put you in the water quicker in bad weather than waves coming in over the side because you only have four inches of freeboard.