Hull sections in K1 kayaks?

As sea kayakers we would demand our kayaks to have hull sections that prevents the kayak from beeing flooded. Typically the hatches do this work for us. They are also excellent places to store our camping gear and food. In the worst case senario a fully flooded kayak would dive forward an unknown distance from the location where it was seen for the last time above surface.

The Annual Gullö Runt was paddled for the 27th time today. The distance is 20 km, starting from Ekenäs and going around the Gullö island. More than 60 paddlers appeared to sunny Ekenäs. 18 of them were in the so-called competition class, and some of them are officially competition kayakers that train hard almost every day. The fastest paddler did the round in 1 hour and 24 minutes. They paddle K1 kayaks and the like. Myself decided to use the SeaStrip, a strip build kayak of my own design. It is fast, but I might not be the man to paddle and maintain the speed of the top paddlers. Starting to consider myself a recreational paddler in comparison...
Considering I did a K1 paddler rescue while "competing" my total speed of 10 km per hour was not too bad.

When bracing on the K1 for the rescue from my 38 cm wide SeaStrip I noticed that the K1 kayak had a hull section wall behind the seat. Would I have known I might have emptied the water before the rescue, but I did not. It bugs me I did not emty the water! I also started to wonder why hull sections or bulkheads have not been introduced to the K1's for common safety. A Swedish competition kayaker diseased in the winter of 2008 as his kayak was flooded. His fellow kayaker had no means of getting him out of the cold water, but the kayaker died of hypothermia while being towed to the shore. Had there been bulkheads - the flooding would have been minor and even without emptying the kayak he would have been able to paddle or be towed ashore, and in a fairly good shape for final recovery. So why don't K1 builders start adding bulkheads?

Stripbuilt Nordkapp alike kayak

With two stripbuilt kayaks on the journey towards the bright future it is time to add a third, fairly ordinary kayak model to the set of Paddlingsfabriken stripbuilt kayaks. It was the 620 cm long and 38 cm wide fast kayak with a rudder, then the 350 cm long toddlers kayak, and now a model following the lines of the Valley Nordkapp. We might offer either of them with client specific modifications - sharper chines, flatter hull, wider, more narrow... lower deck.... you name it. We are curious ourselves to see the hull beeing built and to try and compare its' perfomance against the factory built counterparts.

The hatchcover solution will get some special focus. We are targeting on excellent dryness of anything that has been stored underneeth.

Finetuning selfrescues

We had a warm and beatiful day today. T-shirt and factor 25+ weather. Two couples went kayaking, and myself went doing some rolling and remounting excercise in the Finnish midsummer dawn.

One couple went for a slightly longer daytour. The husband of the woman had previous kayaking experience and desired to share the experience with his partner. They both joined my kayaking class the previous day and quickly became comfortable in paddling and manouvering their kayaks. Today they picked the faster single kayaks from yesterdays class. It was another success of enjoying nature and getting even more comfortable with kayaking.

Another couple went on a first time paddle for a couple of hours. They were equipped with a stable tandem kayak. Should not say it is impossible to capsize it - but almost. This couple was inspired by a paddler passing by under the Snäcksund bridge to Ramsholmen. Again happy faces. We will do it again.

I used the evening to finetune my selfrescues. Rolling right and left. Sculling up and sweeping. With force and speed, and with slow smooth motion. I did find a couple of positions where the lift of the paddle and something in the "hip" movement did not match perfectly and I failed to do an unforced roll. After a failed roll, sculling up did not seem to work as an immediate backup. Had to go back down and start from the beginning. This will be my homework for the next training session: To fail a roll and then on halfway up, with a sinking paddle, switching to a sculling brace, from where rising up should be safe and easy.

Re-entry and roll with a closed spraydeck succeeded first time for me. There was a little bit of nervousness when being underneeth. An anxiety was closing in on me while I let the paddle go to fix the spraydeck using both hands. I had to "trackback" in my head and convince myself that a) I do still have oxygen in my blood and lungs for many more heartbeats, b) It is also possible to go and sip for air without rolling if I fail. c) calm down - close the spraydeck as you normally do above water - grap the paddle - roll up. Easy! And yes!! I was up with spraydeck closed!

Some improvement is still needed on the re-entry-spraydeck-roll. One disappointment with my performance was that the cockpit flooded with as much water as when doing the re-entry-roll with spraydeck open. Some more confidence and finetuning should improve those scores too.

Mounting the Valley Nordkapp by "jumping" up from the water to initially lie across the cockpit seems to be quickest. I also have less water to pump out. At the moment cross-mounting is much better than re-entry and roll measured by liters of water.

All while doing the training manouvers I could hear cheering and applaudes. "He tipped again!!" And after awhile - applaudes! A group of boys had much fun around their illegal campfire on the shore.