: I don't think hand size or hip width is weight dependant. There are heavy
: people with narrow hips and light people with large hands. Sure, as a rule
: larger people will have larger hands and hips, but it is a rule with a
: huge amount of variance. Weighing yourself is so easy that I am not sure
: why you would want to try to use your hands as an estimate for your
: weight. It just seems kind of silly. SNIP

Nick, You seem to be hung up on how arbitrary measurements such as the hand can possibly relate to sizing the kayak. There is nothing mystical about it and I did not state that your hands estimate your weight. They are only part of the beam calculation. I'll try one last time: the critical dimension of the beam is determined by your hips. The "hands" at the hip provides additional clearance.

: I certainly don't advocate ignoring the width of your hips and length of your
: legs. Obviously, they are important for a good fit. but use your hip width
: to determine the fit of your hips. If you want more width then add enough
: to satisfy your needs. If this happens to be similar to your fist width,
: then that is a good measurement. 4 inches, 10 centimeters, one hand width,
: whatever they are all arbitrary units. But I don't think there is any
: useful correlation between hand width and boat performance.

Since you are challenging Greenland anthropometric measurements, lets stick to Greenland kayaks for the moment instead of mixing apples and oranges. It might help if I explained what the measurements are trying to accomplish. Greenlanders don't use hip pads, any unneeded volume would only degrade performance, especially with regards to rolling. The kayaks are built to fit instead of padding out a kayak that is too large. However you do need a small amount of extra beam for ease of entry, comfort, stability and to shift your weight (for sculling, balance braces, etc). Too much extra width and you can easily become displaced to one side, making recovery after rolling or bracing difficult. A hand on each side of the hips or the flat of the hand on each side of your hips (for less stability) is simply a convenient shorthand that time and experience found to coincide with the proper kayak/hip clearance. Using a fist, instead of say, three inches, allows some scaling to different body sizes. In a similar way three armspans for length, two or three fingers on each side of the rib to determine rib length, serve only to match useful guidelines. As I said in my last post, they get you in the ballpark.

Building a SOF in the traditional manner does not rely on volumetric calculations (which would be quite intricate considering that you would have to account for the gaps between the skin and frame) and does not use cross-sectional forms/strongbacks as used in stripped construction. Since eye, intuition and common sense are a key part of the process, I am quite content to work with the anthropometric measurements and don't demand something more "precise". I would hope that your slim-hipped but overweight paddler would have the sense to add some extra beam and volume, just as the racer with excellent balance might make similar intelligent alterations to length and beam.

: Luckily it is hard to design a really bad kayak so using a system that works
: for someone else will probably result in a decent boat for you. Anyone
: starting out in kayaking will have to make some arbitrary decisions based
: on little experience and choose a boat. Choosing dimensions of a kayak
: based on a system developed by some folks in Greenland will probably
: produce a better boat than average if you want to do paddling similar to
: those Greenlanders. If you are lucky it will be perfect, but be prepared
: to make some changes on your next boat.

So what exactly are we in disagreement about?

Greg Stamer