: We went thru this recently on the Greenland forum, the boats in
: Harvey's book are designed for people much smaller than the
: average people today. Unless you're around 5' tall and weigh
: around 140 lbs. the boats are going to be way too small for you.
: You need to scale the whole design larger to keep the
: proportions correct. Might want to look at the cockpit size too,
: looks tiny and flat.

: Bill H.

This is absolutely true. There's an epidemiological study in Circumpolar Health that surveyed the height and weight of adults in Greenland in the late 60s, and for men the average was 5' 4" and 141 lbs. It makes a lot of the issues around historic boats very interesting size-wise. It's especially interesting that kayaks built for Westerners like the Ken Taylor Igdlorssuit kayak around the time of that study are in the same size-range as the historic boats. Then- to confuse it all- someone posted a while ago after attending a kayak building workshop with Maligiaq Padilla that he prefers a kayak 19-20' long for ocean paddling. He's scary strong- but he's still only about 5' 5" tall. For me, and I think for a lot of people, I want to build a replica to see what it paddles like. Just out of curiosity. I know it's a lot of work to do something out of curiosity, but it's a lot less than a strip or S&G kayak.

m