: Nick,
: Glad you bring your expertise to this one.

: I can't argue with your engineering logic.

: All I can say as an "operater" I think of them as two very seperate
: but related class of boats. Like cousins in the same family.

: I find I paddle them differntly. And expect different things out of each type
: of boat. To my feel they just feel different. Sure that difference is not
: as as pronounced as a canoe vs yak. Part of that may be that most of the
: Bidarkas I have paddled are SOF and most of the yaks I have paddled are
: wood or composites.

: Still to my feel they just seem to fly different. Both have ther benifits. As
: Rob mention the lifting action I expect out of a Bidarka bow can at times
: add distance to the ride. (up and down) In surf I find something very
: different.

: Having said all of that as ever, your post is another good lesson in how
: think "design" Thanks for the good lesson

I would just say that it is the individual boats that you tried that were different. And it is quite possible that the individual baidarkas you tried were all based on the same original Aleut boat. In the scheme of things there are not that many baidarkas documented and modern designers tend to choose between one or two boats when they are searching for inspiration. So, most of the generalizations made about baidarkas are based on the observations of a couple boats which may or may not be representative of the class as a whole.

A lot of modern "baidarkas" are based on a boat collected on Atka Island in 1934, pictured in Figure 17 of "Qajaq". It is one of the best documented baidarkas, complete with a table of offsets, so it is an easy source of inspiration. It also has fairly reasonable dimmensions for use by modern paddlers. This boat has fairly deep "V" bottom which will create a boat with fairly stiff tracking characteristics. However, if you look at other documented Aleut boats you will see that that this shape is not a universal characteristic of all "baidarkas". Many of the other boats have a much more rounded bottom and as such you can expect them to feel quite different in the water.

So I would say you could generalize about the performance of baidarka style kayaks based on the 1934 Atka Island boat, but the conclusions may not apply to all kayaks based on the general baidarka profile. I suppose that since so many modern baidarka's are based on that one sample design, the generalization about baidarkas tends to work, but it is too small a sample to really be accurate.