This blog post is going to be a bit of a brain dump for me,
I don’t even know how it’s going to end but hopefully it will be cathartic and
help me come to some kind of decision on a boat.
This weekend began with the kayak gods smiling on me. After
the Thruster left my all too brief care earlier in the week to go to a better
home and hopefully a better paddler I was left without a K1, I had a relatively
small budget to play with and the clock is very much ticking for training. Then
out of the blue I received a letter from the bank saying that they had made a terrible
mistake on a loan I had long forgotten about and wanted to make it up to me by sending
some apology money, overnight the budget for my kayak doubled.
This meant that Sunday we had a road trip to Southampton to look
at a boat I have had an eye on for a little while, a Knysna Lancer CX. Looking
over the internet the manufacturer says it is a stable boat for the smaller
paddler, which could mean anything but with a weight limit of 80kg, I’m going
to be at the top end of that. It does look great though, the gel coat on the
one I am looking at is a love/hate lime green colour which I very firmly love, and
it has a tiller which I am more familiar with as opposed to the gas pedals that
were on the Thruster. This boat ticked most of the boxes for me, the only thing
left was to try her out for stability.
We met the seller next to a river for a test drive, and
lowering myself into the kayak I was greeted with the all too familiar wobble
of these unruly boats. Once I got the boat underway I did feel more stable than
I ever did in the Thruster, and although it was quite sketchy turning the boat
around I didn’t swim and consoled myself that you don’t often do 180 degree
turns in K1s. According to my wife, I looked a lot more comfortable in it, and
I didn’t have to throw in many low braces to remain dry for once. I think that
some of the stability comes from the fact that I am near the design weight and
the boat felt like it was more in the water, with the Thruster I was nearly
fifty kilograms lighter than the stated weight so often it felt as though the
boat was balancing on the surface.
I decided to sleep on the decision and ended up spending
most of the rest of the day, and a fitful night of sleep replaying in my mind every
wobble and incident that occurred during my first DW race, this time in a lime green boat wondering how I would cope. Most of my thoughts were of the last day
on the Thames because the river is huge, the waves are many and I really don’t
want to fall in.
So is this the racing kayak for me? It’s a lovely boat and
is practically brand new with not a scratch on her, it looks great, is light,
comfortable, and fast, and is possibly a good wobble factor for me… The “but”
is that it is a lot of money to spend on a kayak that I may chicken out on
paddling and decide is too wobbly to take on the DW. I’ve already done that
once and I don’t want to do it again... The wobbles that I had when testing though
were the familiar ones and maybe they are in the nature of K1 racing and I just
need to man up and accept the perpetual threat of falling in if I let my guard
down. Argh. I just don’t know!
I told the seller that I would let him know if I wanted it
or not today so I really should make my mind up on this boat soon.
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