After the swimming pool session the broken backrest support had to be repaired. The strap should be also placed a bit more to the front as it was too far aft to actually support my back. Finally I decided to go for a simple solution: With a disc cutter I made a new slit in the seat side walls, a few centimeters before the old one. The backstrap goes through it, then to the front of the seat side and then backwards on the inside of the seat where it is hold with velcro. In this way the forces on the strap are well distributed on the seat sides. When the temperature rises I can make a repair of the broken seat side part, just for optical reasons. This solution has proved to be sturdy enough.
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| A new slit in front of the broken one |
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| New backstrap fixation around the sides |
The first real trip was on a cold but sunny afternoon. I paddled a few kilometers along the shore of the lake Gooimeer. At that time it was on the news that three sea kayakers had died in France and for some reason it witheld me to make a crossing over the open (and very cold) water alone. Happily it was the leeside shore so there were the most waves.
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| View on the lake Gooimeer |
The seating position was perfect and the new backrest fixation worked well. The Skarabee didn't give me that sporty feeling as the NDK Explorer, it's more a comfortable ride. It needed a lot of skeg with the 3 Bft cross wind: almost all. Not a real problem but I am still spoiled with the excellent skeg working on the Baidarka that you can trim so easily with the vario skeg. The boat seemed a bit slower than the Explorer and that proved to be true after examining the GPS tracks: around 7 km/h.
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| Skarabee on the shore |
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