Beauty is in the eye of the beholder (as s/he admires the decorations on a deck) -- performance is in the hands of the paddler (as s/he pushes the hull that carries that nice deck thru the water.)

Judging a hull by pictures alone is difficult. Take a look, instead, at the bottom of this BBS page and you'll see Nick's icon for the design board. You can decipher more about a kayak's performance with a set of these curves. Check out the reviews in Sea Kayaker magazine, and you'll see a graph of righting moments, as well. When we discuss performance on this page, part of it is hard data (length, beam, amount of rocker), part geometric (hard-chine, soft-chine, v-hull, round hull) and part is hands-on paddling.

Dean

: I love looking at all the pictures posted of strip-built kayaks. I'm very
: interested in building one for my next project. However, I've noticed that
: all the pictures seem to be of beautiful decks, with none of the underside
: of the boat. It seems to me that the hull has more to do with performance
: than the deck. I'd like to see some photos of inverted strippers, so I can
: check out their lines and muse on possible performance. Does anyone have
: some nice pictures of (boats') bottoms?