I'm not a good kayaker. I'm not the person who can hop into a boat and do all sorts of impressive moves right in front of you. I will never aspire to any BCU stars. I'm good at precisely two things: making the boat go places, and staying upright. Elegance does not figure into it, brute strength sometimes does.
See, I don't love sea kayaking for the kayaking. I like the kayaking. I especially like it on windy days where the paddling itself is exciting. But far more than that, I like to go to the wilderness. For me, the kayak is the means to get there, and carry all the stuff I want to have with me. Stuff like camping gear and food and clothing and a field guide or two. If we're going to talk about passion, wilderness camping is it for me, not the kayak.
This orientation - the kayak gets me where I want to go - has been reflected in my boat purchases. First there was that Boreal Inukshuk. I got teased for that big yellow banana, but I didn't much care: it was a boat, it was mine, it went places, it carried my stuff. Unfortunately, it went a bit slowly, and I was always the last one and I didn't like that. That didn't happen once I got the Current Designs Solstice GTS. It went where I wanted to go, and it went there with fairly good tracking, and it carried my stuff. When just about everybody I know started falling in love with skeg boats, I still didn't care, because the GTS goes places, and I can handle it in big stuff, and who really cares about the rest of the stuff. And when the Seaward Quest X3 came up at a price you couldn't turn down, I bought it. I figured it would be a good boat for expeditions of 10 days or longer, on cold water, because it carries a *lot* of stuff. More stuff than anybody really needs.
There is just one problem: I want *another* boat. When I spent only a few minutes paddling that NDK Romany last September, I thought, oh! It's not that I had never paddled a hull other than my go straight go fast do not play hull before, either. I switched into the Romany from a Boreal Ellesmere, and while I liked it fine, I didn't have this immediate I WANT reaction. But that pretty much sums up how I feel about the Romany. And then, this past weekend, Sonia wasn't using her Impex Force 4 for a whole day and told me I was welcome to it. And that day just happened to be a day where there was the opportunity of instruction from Tim Dyer. And again, I felt the stirrings of I WANT. I want a boat that lets me do a half assed high brace turn and still get way more than 90 degrees out of it. I want a boat that responds to a bow rudder by doing exactly what I expect a bow rudder to do. I want a boat in which my response to "you're being conservative" from an instructor isn't an inside voice saying, yeah, whatever, I can't do it anyway but instead makes me push my limits a little bit. I want another boat. (I still pick the Romany.)
I am not buying another boat at this time.
And then, on Sunday, I got into that big pig of a Quest, and went to the McCoys in it. Bill had advised me to put some weight in it. I figured, yeah, whatever, my bum is weight. Turns out, that Quest needs a whole lot more weight than me and my lunch in it to go well. I'd guess it needs about 200 lbs before it behaves like a boat and not a cork. I don't really know, though, since I decided against loading it up with rocks when we got to the McCoys. Reason prevailed for a change, and besides, it wasn't really windy and it wasn't that I couldn't handle it. At least, in those not-windy conditions I could handle it. But I don't love it. I can get used to the almost non-existent primary stability. I'd say I did get used to it, but given that my biceps ache a bit today, I could also say that I didn't get comfortable enough to really get any torso rotation going. Every time I turned - even to look behind me - I had that boat tipping feeling. It's ok, the secondary stability is good, but there was still that brief moment of oh no! It's okay, though, since that was the one and only time I'll ever paddle the Quest empty. I bought it for expeditions, and that's all I'll ever use it for.
I keep waiting for that magic moment when I have all the stuff I'll ever want. Every year I think, I have *everything* I need. And then the zipper on my tent gives way, or my mapcase starts to leak, or I try somebody else's fuzzy rubber top and realize that my life is not complete without fuzzy rubber of my own. And then I scrape along a nail getting into my boat, and I need new fuzzy rubber pants, and my downmat no longer holds air and I can't find the hole, and my sleeping bag is just too bulky to go on a bike trip and the panniers I got for Christmas last year are not waterproof and there are these Ortlieb panniers on sale that are lighter *and* waterproof. Yeah. By now I should accept that it's never going to change, that after over 15 years of accumulating sporting goods I have nowhere near all the stuff I will ever want. I don't have a Romany, after all.
My only consolation is that 90% of the stuff I end up getting replaces stuff that I used, and used a lot. I have few things that I bought and then never really used. I can think of some: the sponsons that I got with the GTS, for example. The storm cag, for another - though I may yet use it. I could have used it on Sunday, for example, but I didn't have it with me. However, at the end of the day, I get a lot more joy out of *using* the stuff much like I use my kayaks: to make doing what I want to do possible and comfortable.
Posted by Johanna at June 15, 2009 08:01 PM