kayaklover and it’s okay

My name is Canoelover, and I’m a kayaker.  It’s been 21 hours since my last kayak.

Hello, Canoelover.

The P&H Delphin has been around conceptually for a while.  I think I saw a drawing of it last summer, and I was immediately intrigued.  For the twenty years I’ve spent in paddlesports, sea kayaks are sea kayaks, whitewater kayaks are whitewater kayaks, and never the twain shall meet.

It takes a creative mind like Graham Makereth, owner and designer for P&H, to come up with something new like this.  Graham is one of those “if it ain’t broke, break it” sort of guys.  In this case, we have something quite different.

So a week or so ago I get a call from Jim Hager, the head dude at P&H in the US, asking if I wanted to be one of the first paddlers in the U.S. to try a Delphin.  Why yes, I said, I would very much, since there’s only one of them in North America.  Turns out that Brian Day, one of P&H’s field reps, was coming to Madison for a friend’s wedding.  Well then.  Perfect.

Brian worked for us off and on for a decade or so, and he is always a welcome sight.  His old Honda Civic is battle-scarred and has spent most of its days with too many kayaks on top of it.  I think 5 is the record, about 150 pounds over the weight limit of the rack.  But I digress.

First Impressions:

From across the parking lot it looks like a compact sea kayak.  The closer you get, the more you see the differences in design.  The hull of the boat is unlike any sea kayak you’ve ever seen.  It’s fairly flat with a pronounced chine, and a strange but attractive bow.  More on that later.

There is rocker.  Oh yes, there is rocker.  Gobs of rocker.  Graham went to the Rocker Store and bought them clean out.  No one will accuse this boat of lacking in the rocker department.  Eight fingers of rocker is a fair amount.  The cockpit placement, however, removes some of the stern rocker and raises the bow, so while it might seem to be highly asymmetrical rocker, it’s not that pronounced in the water.

Like the Cetus/Scorpio family, the Delphin is a Swede-form kayak, so it’s going to be fast for its length (15’5″).

This is a pre-production boat, so we don’t expect perfection here, but it’s clear that P&H put a lot of thought into it, just as with their other boats.  The Scorpio (Brian says it like Sean Connery) has a similar deck, with a small dry hatch just in front of the cockpit, but unlike the Scorpio, the Delphin has no day hatch.  Rumor is that the Aries (composite version) will have a day hatch as well.

On The Water:

Brian and I went out in two boats — me in a venerable NDK Romany and Brian in the Delphin. The Romany is known for its maneuverability, a rock garden play boat.   Better yet, Brian and I have similar weights and heights, and the same barber too.

We took off away from the shop out into a large bay, pushing the boats close to hull speed.  The Romany is not a rocket ship by any means, but it should be able to pull away from a shorter, flat-bottomed boat with a weird bow.  It was marginally faster, but the Delphin kept up, partially because of hull design, but also because Brian’s a studly paddler.  It was a little noisier but that’s it.

We started playing around with edging and turns.  Follow-the-leader is a great way to compare and contrast boats, so we did some standard sweep/edge/counter-rotate/hold it there turns to see how the hull would react.  Three-two-one-go.  I intiated a turn with a sweep and holding an edge, the Romany began its typical turn, the bow holding fast while the stern bubbles and skids.

I turned around, and Brian was facing the other direction.  Same movements, same power.  I had turned 45 degrees, he had turned 150 or so.   Wow.  That’s maneuverability.

Then we did bow draws.  The Romany turned.  The Delphin whipped around.  Brian says it should come with a neckbrace.  I appreciate the salesman’s hyperbole, but it’s almost true.  After we swapped boats I did a typical whitewater bow draw and bang, I snapped around like I was catching an eddy.  “Try a cross-bow” said Brian.  I did, and again, it whipped around so fast I almost capsized.  A second one was a little better.

The Delphin edges effortlessly.  My feeling and observation is that it edges better without aggressive knee driving.  Just lift up one butt cheek and push down with the other.  A bit of edge goes a long way with this boat.  If you really crank it over, it doesn’t seem to help much.  Beginners can learn to edge their kayaks.  Pretty cool.

It rolls well.  Sea Kayaker Magazine will praise its low back deck to allow for layback rolls.  They always do.  Didn’t try a layback roll, but both a C to C roll and a screw roll were easy.

Carving an onside turn doesn’t have the same dramatic difference.  It works fine and carves nicely.  Yep, it turns faster this way too, but it’s not like offside sweeps and edging turns.

Philosophical Musings:

This is what I came up with.

• A surf ski is the kayak equivalent of a triathlon or high end road bike.  The Cetus is a cyclocross bike.  The Delphin is a full-suspension mountain bike.  It’s not a hybrid city bike, a short day touring boat with a little rocker.  It’s designed to be an extremely rough water boat.
• I regret not being able to surf it.
• Conventional wisdom is that sea kayaks steer from the stern.  The bow sticks, the stern skids.  This isn’t at all true here.  Whitewater paddlers will love this boat.  When edging and skidding offside, I felt like the rotation was under the bow hatch or thereabouts.  The b0w moves, I saw it.  It’s cool.
• I think a lot of sea kayak owners are going to want a Delphin for a few reasons.  First. it’s a great rough water boat and is clearly designed as a surf boat.  Second, it’s stable enough to loan to friends.  Drop the skeg and it tracks like a streetcar.  Third, it’s plastic so you can abuse the hell out of it and save your longboat for less abusive situations.
• The Aries (the composite version) will be out shortly.  I think some instructors will purchase one just for teaching.
• I want one.  It violates the 1989 Marriage Retention Boat Non-Proliferation Act, (co-sponsored by Wife 1.1).  I will attempt to introduce an amendment in the house.  Wish me luck.

Respectully sumbitted,

Canoelover

P.S.  I wrote this on 5 hours of sleep.  Typo fixes and feedback are welcome.