: Water will go where gravity pulls it. If you pull down on the near side of
: the yak, chances are, the water will be there soon, too.

: With a side compartment, pushing the compartment under water actually
: displaces water outside the hull, so tends to push upward..

: Displacing water inside the boat doesn't do you much good, as any water in
: the boat is still displacing an equal weight of water outside the boat for
: a net buoyancy gain of 0.

When I was trying to decide to build in the side storage flotation compartments, my mind was going back and forth why this would work and then I would think why it wouldn’t work. I drove my self nuts thinking and rethinking this in my mind. I finally decide to go ahead and build it because if it didn’t work I still had water tight compartments to put equipment in. So I had lost nothing. I put the boat in the pond and while I was in the water I grabbed the side and it spun very easily like a barrel. They was no way I could even begin to climb in because very little hand pressure would just spin the boat over. When the boat went over and water interred the hull I spun it right side up and it was much more stable but still not enough for me to climb into with out the boat spinning over and dumping me. So I grabbed the side and put my weight on it forcing more water into the boat. This time it was stable enough for me to inter over the side with a swimming start as you see in the picture but I could have use a little more water in it. But this was in calm water. So I found that even more water in the boat would make it even more stable and easier to climb into. I carry a folded canvas bucket attached to a line inside of the boat so I can actually dip even more water into the boat if necessary. Then once in the boat has more water in it the boat is very stable and can be paddled to shore. As for the longer and narrower Shooting Star, you may very well be right that one inch thick and six inch wide foam would not do the job. I would guess to make it as thick as you can and as wide as you can and still get into the yak. Perhaps thick enough that it becomes your hip braces in the cockpit and then becomes even thicker as it runs to the bow and stern and perhaps completely filling the bow and stern back a couple of feet for a solid foam fill. Many years ago we had a man drown in a small pond fishing out of a canoe. I thought why didn’t he just grab onto the canoe. I had a canoe at the time I took the canoe out into a lake and flooded it. It had floatation in the bow and stern. When I grabbed onto the side of the canoe it just rolled like a barrel and I couldn’t hang on. When I grabbed onto the ends they just slowly sank until I was going under water. The only way to hold on was to have two people reach across the mid section and lock arms. But even then you just had to set there until rescued or hypothermia set in. Also, I wouldn't us a foam seat in my kayak because of it's boyancy being at the bottom of the kayak hull and trying to counter the high ull boyancy. Anyway, I think this can work but I wouldn’t bet the farm on it.

John