the ideal boat for shallow rocky rivers?

[Doug Johnston]

I'm looking for opinions on what is the best boat/canoe for the fast flowing and rocky rivers and streams of the type found here in western North Carolina. It would be an added bonus if it were to fare well in the odd lake too. Thanks

[Don Maurer]

Plastic whitewater kayaks and canoes are best. Anything else won't last on the rocks, steep descents and fast current. You need a short boat with plenty of rocker to turn quickly. Travelling in a straight line is secondary. If you use a canoe, be sure to include flotation bags.

[Stubing]

Check out a Mckenzie River Driftboat. Very popular for drifting rivers out here in the Northwest. I've been building one for the past 14 years--scheduled for launch soon!!!

Try www.raysriverdories.com (http://www.raysriverdories.com)

[Vern D]

Definitly the driftboat!!! I have friends that also loaded theirs up and rowed throughout Puget Sound on vacation. Good boats!
:D
Vern and Jake (the wonder dog)

[Wayne Williams]

If you're talking about the Nantahalah and Hiwassee then the dory would be cool. Bigger high volume rivers would be ok too, once you get some expererience on the Nanny. You can use a trolling motor or oars for the flat stuff tho' I hear rowing for any distance in flat water is no fun.

If you're talking about the Ocoee, it's plastic boats and rafts only. It's just too much gradient and not enough flow for anything but a playboat.

WW

[Don Maurer]

The Nantahalla is pretty small for a drift boat. There are places where the span of the oars would reach shore to shore. And with all the boat and raft traffic that river sees, it would get very congested. I agree that a drift boat might work on some of the more open high volume rivers like the French Broad, but not on the smaller, more technical rivers.

[MikeV]

Before deciding on what type of boat you want you need to have a good idea of what type of boating you want to do. Not all river boats are created equally. A drift boat is a great fishing platform or for viewing scenery. If you want to punch holes and surf waves a whitewater canoe or kayak is what you want. If you want to camp then you'll want a tripping canoe suitable for whitewater.

[Doug Johnston]

Thanks for all the considered thoughts, you have helped me to refine my thoughts somewhat. I definitely am not in the market for a white water boat. I love to row, but do not have the time for a drift boat project, even though the design is intriguing. (I have already built a shellback and tried her on the French Broad- wide slow to medium river, lotsa rocks. Each bump was painful). Is there such an animal as a quick to build, rugged, Light (probably contradicts the former), cartoppable canoe style boat built for one or two?

[Don Maurer]

How about a pirogue? Loggers used to use them for running rivers all the time. They can be paddled, rowed or poled. Get yourself some buckskins and a coon dog and you'll look right at home. tongue.gif

[MikeV]

Check out the Prospector Canoe at Bear Mountain Boat(See WB links). It's a woodstrip epoxy job. Weighs 50-60 lbs and can handle moderate whitewater. I'm not sure that it meets your quick build criteria orwhat the build time is.I'd bet it's around 80 hours. You'll have a great boat though!

[Todd Bradshaw]

A lot more than 80 hours, especially for a first time builder. Even with everything set-up, using staples and doing all the sanding with a big disk, it takes pro builders a minumum of about 75 hours to build a stripper. A first timer would usually spend at least twice that many hours on it. Plus, a stripper is a lousy boat for shallow rocky fast water.

[ 05-01-2002, 06:11 PM: Message edited by: Todd Bradshaw ]

[bud]

I'm up in Virginia, and I know the kind of water you're talking about. A west coast boat won't take to these steep rocky little rivers we got back here. The thought of any boat that I made myself in there makes me cringe. You need 2 boats, or 3. My Blue Hole canoe has been bent back double, pinned against a rock in the current, with minor damage.

[rodcross]

Sad to say, Doug, the boat you need for those conditions is not made of wood (or fiberglass, or Kevlar, for that matter).

You can take an old aluminum Grumman to those rivers...It will look like hell when you're done, but then it looked like hell when you started. Also, there is a material called ABS (or some derivitives) that can take an extraordinary beating and can be restored to its original shape with some hot water. I've had one of them for 25 years, now, with a sailing rig (lee boards and a Sunfish sail). This thing has been hammered by my children; I've done nothing to it and it looks like it might be a couple of years old.

[Don Maurer]

A bumper sticker on a shuttle vehicle parked at a whitewater takeout...

"Friends don't let friends paddle aluminum." smile.gif

[Jamie Hascall]

I sold my stripper canoe after damaging it slightly on the Stillaguamish river. The trip showed me that I wanted to do a lot more river canoeing but needed a plastic boat to make it fun. I bought a Mad River Royalex(ABS) canoe and had more fun bouncing that thing off rocks than you can imagine. It truly is the appropriate place for the tupperware. Save the wood for those quieter waters.

Jamie

[Tom Dugan]

I'm afraid I have to agree that wood ain't your first choice, if you want to use it more than once ;)

Aluminum seems to be magnetically attracted to rocks, and tends to stick to a rock once it hits it. ABS just skips off.

A reasonable compromise would be to find an ABS hull and fit out the gunwales, thwart, and seats in wood. Ours is (red!) oak gunwales, with ash thwart and caned seats. Looks better than those all-plastic jobs by a good bit.

-T

[Fitz]

If the old timers had to wait for ABS and Kevlar to be invented, we still wouldn't know what was west of the Appalachians....

[Doug Johnston]

Thanks again for your thoughts. I see a decision as to the type of boat coming down to two areas. The first is a left brain /right brain type choice. Sensible plastic or more fun to build wood. The second area is one of cost. A quick look at some of the recommended ABS boats shows them to be pretty pricey (although I'm sure they are worth it), while something like a six hour canoe (discounting labor) would cost a lot less. Time to mull it all over.

[patriot]

I built a pirogue for the rivers up here. covered in 6oz. fiberglass. beat it up pretty bad a few gashes and such, Layed up repairs with fiberglass tape. It looks like hell now but it was cheap and fun. Isn't it what its all about. Try 1/4 exterior ply with glass cloth, you won't be upset when you take damage when it only cost a couple of hundred bucks.

[Bruce Hooke]

I suspect that many of the rivers we now run in ABS canoes and suchlike would have simply been looked at as un-runable in the days when wood was the only material available for boatbuilding. On the other side of the coin I have heard that birchbark canoes are actually very tough, but anyone who would risk a birchbark canoe on serious whitewater in this day and age would have to be nuts (as well as darn near criminal in my eyes!).

[Fitz]

Yah, I'm mostly stirring the pot up there in that thread - afterall it is the WoodenBoat Forum. Come to think of it, it would make a great research topic. You know - look for historical accounts on particular rivers. But I suspect the results might be surprising. Just this morning I saw a historical image of a logger poling a birch bark up a river in Maine. No shortage of current or rocks (or raw repair materials). Benedict Arnold also ascended a branch of dead river in bateaux. No shortage of rocks there either.

Although, maybe folks portaged more!!

[Tom Dugan]

' When French naturalist Constantin Volney visited the rapids at Harpers Ferry in 1804, he wrote, "The waters fret and boil up around these obstacles, which, for two miles, form dangerous falls or rapids. They were covered, when I saw them, with the fragments of a bateau, which had been wrecked a few days before, by which sixty barrels of flour had been lost."

He then editorialized, in the classic dismissive French way, "The temerity of the American navigators renders accidents of this kind as frequent in their rivers as on the ocean." '

A timely article on one example of Bruce's point. (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13425-2002May1.html)

Seriously, if you're not one of those that must have a mirror finish on his boat and can't stand the thought of docking without a dozen fenders over the side, by all means try a wooden boat. I said above that ABS feels like it glides right over rocks. This may be the critical difference in a fast moving river between canoeing onward or swimming. Wood won't hang you up like aluminum, but it'll be "stickier" than ABS. This is just one factor to take into account in your choice, but IMHO is an important one.

-T

[Matt Middleton]

I don't recall where I saw it, but I remember someone suggesting a layer of plastic over the bottom of wooden boats for the purpose of reducing friction and absorbing impacts over rocks. I used some type of plastic (can't recall the specific type) in a college project, and it was very slick, soft enough to spread the load from an impact with a pointed rock, but it would be tough to puncture it.
We were using it to cover the foam flotation on a miniature dune buggy- it got bashed on rocks and stumps and often supported the weight of car and driver, and it held up well.

[clancyb]

Don't some drift boats have a sheet of UHMW plastic as a bottom layer? Expensive some places, apparently lumber mills use it in large pieces. I think I read about that on the Yahoo Tolman Skiff site

[Greg H]

Plans for a nice looking Pirogue here:
http://www.cajunsecret.com/pictures.htm

This guy could be my twin ;) 'cept I'm more viking like. http://www.cajunsecret.com/cajun_man.gif

Doug, do you know any Krishers down there in Asheville?

[ 05-07-2002, 03:01 PM: Message edited by: Greg H. ]

[Jamaica Mike]

I believe that all my river floating guide friends would agree - the best boat for a rocky shallow river is a rubber raft, complete with rigid rowing frame. They are harder to row han a diftboat, even set up right. They are pretty much impervious to rocks and are the only way to travle a shallow rocky river with any cargo or paggengers.

JAM