Canoe Ponderings by Red Rock Wilderness StoreCanoe Ponderings by Red Rock Wilderness Store
Prismatic Coefficient of the Souris River Quetico 17
Q.
I have several questions about SR canoes and have been told that you are the man to talk to. I will call later today (Monday) but a few of these will be somewhere between difficult and impossible to answer, especially straight off the top of your head. You must be "the man". The folks at SR talked like you know more about their canoes than they do. Andy from Ohio (close to us) has nothing but praise for SR canoes and you. You may know Andy, he and his wife have stayed at Northwind Lodge (several times, I think). Most of the tough questions relate to the design. A couple winters ago my wife and I built a cedar strip/fiberglass/epoxy "Bob's Special" with the plans from Bear Mountain. In fact we built it exactly as described in Ted Moores "Canoe Craft". We stretched the 15' to 16' but he described how to do that too. We compared a lot of designs before deciding and I know how our's handles relative to these specs. Some of these things may have never been calculated for your canoes. I'm interested in the Q17. Even if no quantity is known for some of these I'd like your best estimate of how the Q17 would compare.
For our stripper, with beams and depths fairly similar to Q17:
displacement at 4" is 345lb with another 122lb/inch to immerse afterwards.
prismatic coefficient is .543
mom trim is 577 in. lb.
You mentioned removing the front thwart for solo paddling. What is the beam at the gunwales just aft of the bow seat? The thing I'd really like to see is the body plan (cross sections) for the stations from center to end. The photographs on the web site are very good, but any photo distorts a bit with each angle. One looks like it has a very fine entry, the other looks like the fullness is carried farther forward.
You also mentioned occasionally refinishing with a good quality marine UV blocking varnish. Are SR canoes varnished at the factory?
At one point in your web page you mentioned picking up a canoe at your store after it arrived from the factory. Do you usually have these in stock? Can a customer walk in, decide between a clear kevlar or le tigre and walk out with it or do they need to be ordered some time in advance?
What is the going price of diesel fuel in your area? I have a pretty good estimate of mileage from my house to yours and the quantity of fuel I would need for the trip. If I come get it there would be no need to crate it. I'll have truck &/or trailer rigged with a canoe rack. (Some people think it's a ladder rack, shows how much they know.)
Thanks for your time and help, hope to meet you soon,
Bob
Andy actually does stay here at our lodge. Nice guy and knows a ton about fly fishing and I'm pretty sure a lot of other subjects, too.
As for comparison, reading your displacement questions reminds me of reading a gun magazine where they talk about changing grains of specific gunpowders to tighten up a target grouping by .00005" at 300 yards. I figure if I can knock down a deer at 300 feet away with one shot, that's good enough. I can't help you with the prismatic stuff and I'm positive nobody at SR can either. I do know that the Q-17 can repeatedly transport novice to expert paddlers with their gear comfortably over great distances and very rugged, unforgiving, terrain. It also solos very well for a bigger guy (need the weight and leverage of a bigger paddler) and can survive being folded in half backwards by a tree. Nobody else makes a kevlar canoe that cand do this anywhere in the world. Also, very few ever sell their Q-17 once they own one yet one can find a lot of used Wenonahs on the internet and other models as well.
Regarding how a Q-17 handles, it's stable, fast and will haul 1100 lbs. max. leaving only 6" of canoe sticking out of the water (at the middle of the canoe) with that much weight which is not a recommend travel weight but intended for payload comparison. With two, 200 lb. guys and 350 lbs of gear, (people or dead weight) you'll have about 8-10 inches of canoe sticking out of the water (remaining freeboard) in the middle. At that load, it will still remain very buoyant so the canoe will ride up and down in rough conditions
.
We only varnish the canoes after they've been all scratched up and it's mainly for refinishing them so the scratches go away or lessen in appearance.. The added benefit of the marine varnish is the UV protection and the reduction or elimination of "chalking" that can occur on some SR canoes. Chalking only looks bad, has no real affect on the canoe and is a result of epoxy resin in certain areas and conditions. If you leave a SR under the eaves of your roof , the acidic rainwater that comes off of your shingles combined with constant sunlight will cause an "amine blush" [ chalking / oxidation ] . Sometimes this never occurs at all, other times if happens easily. It can be sanded off the canoe with varnish then applied. Revarnish every two to three years and it pretty much goes away while maintaining a nice appearance. SR does not varnish the canoes at the factory.
In the spring and early summer, we will usually have 80-100 canoes in a very big pile here at the store. Right now we have very few in stock. We pretty much completely sell through 300 canoes each year with 250 of those being Q-17's primarily in Le Tigre kevlar. If you are looking for clear kevlar, call ahead. We don't normally stock it because it does not sell well to private owners. Le Tigre is much nicer in real life than it appears in our website photos. Right now we're down to about 4 or 5 used or demoed canoes, hence the reason for selling canoes that are hanging in the factory warehouse with the "spring pick-up" caveat. The truck doesn't roll in the winter due to potentially hazardous driving conditions. Something about putting 36 canoes in the woods that carries low appeal...
Shipping to PA or WV is going to cost about $450 (ballpark). Diesel is about $2.39 per gallon here but by spring, who knows? Unless you have a special truck, my guess is that it'll cost you about $280 for fuel, plus 36 hours of drive time, meals, lodging costs, plus highway exposure for accidents. Unless you plan to make a vacation trip of picking up the canoe, it's probably cheaper to have it shipped. I'd prefer that you did pick it up here because shipping is no small task on our end, but we do it all the time.
If you have more questions (of earthly nature :-P), please feel free to call or email. Thanks!
Joe
Red Rock