First trip with the Shadow

This morning I fixed the skeg knob with a stainless steel screw that I happily could find at home.

The Shadow's skeg knob, quite a strange design

And herewith the Shadow was ready for take off. It was a beautiful day in spring and I took the Shadow on a longer trip, this time to isle Drost in the IJmeer. The wind was 2 (-3) Bft.

After entering the boat, it felt quite tippy. I may have expected this with the Legend but not with the Shadow, strange. The seat seems too big for me as I could slide an inch to both sides. And the seat felt quite hard as I was sitting on a bulge it the middle. For certain this seat has been designed for someone with a much wider stature.

The seat of the Shadow with the extra backrest

The positive news is that the thigh braces are okay and the front bulkhead is on exactly the right distance for using as footrest. During the trip the backrest started to hurt a bit, there is an extra backstrap before the foam bulge and it seems too much. During the rest I tried to remove this backstrap but this appeared impossible without a knife. It is bolted to the cockpit coaming as you can see on the picture. Not original I think. Also, I taped some foam at both sides of the seat to fill the gap between my hips. This helped a lot to help with the tippy feeling on the way back.

Rest on isle Drost

It is clear that the Shadow has low initial stability but high secundary stability. This makes it not an easy boat to just paddle away. At least it takes some time to get used to the tippy feeling. But it enhances edging and as expected, the Shadow reacts very quickly on edge. With edging you can correct a certain amount of weathercocking. The skeg works but I got the same behaviour as with the Skarabee: it needs a lot of skeg to become effective. It is now that I start to think that both these boats may need more load.

When returned I checked the hatches, rear and day hatches were dry but there were a few drops of water in the front hatch. Probably sucked into it because I saw the lid almost imploding during the trip. It had been a nice trip but it got me a bruised back of the backrest. And I was afraid for the other Nigel Foster kayak, the Legend: would it be even more tippy?