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| OSA Lake, calm August lunch time. 16'6" Kevlar Prospector by Holy Cow Canoe with third (middle) seat, almost ready to go with one teenager in place with the gear for three people for five days |
1: Style
The most important question is "what are you going to do with your canoe". First priority is to stay "dry", ie upright, so you need stability. For Lake Camping, there will be a load of gear (so you need good load capacity), space for the right number of people, and the boat must behave well when un-loaded on day trips and fishing expeditions. This type of usage suggest a reasonably wide, flat-bottom canoe. When renting at a park, this will generally be what is offered, and a few minutes discussion with the rental folks will make sure you end up with the right thing.
Canoe manufacturers describe their product in terms of primary and secondary stability. For racing and white water use, primary stability is not so much of an issue, but secondary always is. For recreational use, both types of stability are very important, and they are functions of the shape of the hull.
Primary stability means how stable the canoe is when paddling along, under flat calm conditions, with no load. The canoe will move slightly, but under these conditions, it should feel calm and confident. Adding a load (as low as possible - heavy packs lying on the floor) will increase primary stability, but for me, I want a canoe that feels stable and comfortable with just the people in it.
Secondary stability is how well it tries to stay right-way-up while leaning due to steering motion, waves, wind, current, etc. All of this is related to the shape of the hull.
If you want to read more - follow this link to an article on the excellent site www.paddling.net
The basic style is the Prospector type of canoe. There are a number of specialist styles - wider ones for more cargo (but slower), short wide ones for duck hunting and fishing for stability, ones with flat sterns to mount a motor, etc. However, in my view, the most likely ones to consider are symmetrical conventional canoes (with names like Prospector or Expedition) or asymmetrical ones. The asymmetrical ones are shaped to be faster for a given input effort on behalf of the paddlers, at the cost of some primary stability and maybe some load capacity. Some manufacturers or stores can let you try out the canoes, which is great but you can't cover the wide range of conditions you will see (loaded, unloaded, portaging, waves, wind against you, wind across, etc.) unless you live with it for at least a weekend.
There are many trade-offs. A keel helps you to stay on track, which is the same as saying the canoe is less maneuverable. So for lakes and slow-moving rivers, a keel is an advantage. For faster water, it's bad. It's all about your needs.
So rent a few times. Shop around, and decide whether sales people are credible - how much do they paddle and what can they tell you? Talk to people at portages about what they like about their canoes, talk to the rental shops about which ones need most maintenance.Some canoe manufacturers have built in clever design features like bottoms that tend to deflect instead of puncturing if you step in while grounded on a rock. Read the reviews on various paddling sites to see what people say, and try them out.
2: Material Choice
Now the best style for the canoe has been decided - what is the best material choice?
That depends on your priorities. And this is one reason why you need to rent a canoe and go on a trip or two before committing yourself. It's even possible you might find a kayak is best for you: for instance, if you want to go into rougher water and you don't carry much gear a kayak makes a lot of sense. For back-country canoe camping though it doesn't, and that's what I like to do and what these pages are about, so this may be the only mention of a kayak that you will see. I admit they look like great fun in the waves or on rivers...
If you are portaging, then you want the lightest material you can find. If you are going to hit rocks (and you will) then you want the most durable material you can find. And due to the Universal Cussedness of Nature these are contradictory choices.
Have a look at the chart below showing the typical finished weight of various lengths of canoes when made of several materials. There is of course variation between manufacturers, so a kevlar 16ft canoe can differ several pounds either side of the figure below.
So why consider all of these materials?
Plastic (polyurethane) and aluminum canoes make ideal cottage boats for a couple of reasons. Plastic ones are very cheap, although not very resistant to abrasion or cuts. Aluminum ones bash-in very easily and they stick to rocks when colliding with them. But either can be left outside year round and Aluminum especially will not deteriorate. Neither material is a good vacation experience. They both get very hot on sunny days, they are noisy, and very heavy to portage.
Fiberglass is a better choice for vacations: much less expensive than kevlar, and not as heavy as aluminum. It's typically easier to carry because the yoke is wood and is shaped for your shoulders, rather than the straight aluminum pole you usually find on an aluminum canoe, so the fiberglass is more pleasant to portage.
Royalex is a special composite invented by Uniroyal, and it is the material of choice for whitewater. Heavy compared to fiberglass, but tolerates abuse.
Cedar is a life-style choice of material. It is the most beautiful of all canoes, and it is not for beginners: for a start, it needs real care and maintenance. You don't choose cedar for practicality, it is chosen for aesthetics and emotion. Weight-wise, it's not a bad choice. Just goes to prove that sometimes nature knows what it's doing (all canoes born in the wild are cedar).
Kevlar is the conventional choice these days. You can go ultra-light kevlar and even go for carbon-fiber which are lighter than a traditional kevlar construction and less durable, but you're getting into serious money. You really have to decide if the extra money is worth it to you.
When renting though, especially as a newcomer, try to take the lightest rental you can afford. Portages are a small part of the time you are on vacations but if you have a bigger, heavier canoe than you need, they can make you miserable.
3: Size of Canoe
You will have noticed that the extra weight of a longer canoe is not too bad. It's about 2lb/ft for most materials, but more than that for plastic or cedar. For two people, for a comfortable trip for a week, a 16ft canoe is plenty big enough. Our family canoe is a 16'6" Prospector with a third seat in the middle, and we can manage three (small-ish) adults with five days of stuff in it.
Another way to make sense of this is to look at the rated capacity of the canoe. Our 16'6" canoe is rated at 1100lb (500kg) and that's about standard. Our three people are about 400lb and our gear is about 300lb total (2 large packs, 4-person tent, and about 4 smaller bags). In theory we have 400lb more to reach capacity, but I don't want to be a lot lower in the water than we already are.
Balance against this that shorter canoes are easier to steer on the water than longer ones, easier to maneuver around trees while portaging, don't stick out so far each end of your car, easier to store...
But when you're packing it the weight needs to be low down for stability so don't make it too short (decisions, decisions...).
