[Rendello]

It depends on the kayak too.

An extreme example, but: I used to watch this channel from a guy that built canoes and kayaks in both modern and traditional styles. He says in some videos that the traditional hunting kayaks are incredibly unstable and uncomfortable to use, because that instability granted them superior agility for hunting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=DtnUq5v7cyw

[cpursley]

Have you read The Starship and The Canoe? Interesting book to goes into a good bit of detail about hunting craft (made from animal skin). Book said that they practiced 10 different was to turn a flipped one back over.

[Rendello]

I haven't, but I've read "Birchbark Canoe" by David Gidmark. He's written some technical canoe-making books, but this one was the story about how he came to live in Northern Quebec amongst the Algonquin and learned how to make birch bark canoes from William Commanda, with whom he had a fairly turbulent relationship. I saw it in a big library one day and uncharacteristically actually managed to read the whole thing, it was very good!

[bee_rider]

Huh, neat. Unfortunately that site doesn’t seem to play videos correctly on my system. What do they use the agility for? Traditional hunting, so I imagine… a bow or something, maybe they need to turn quickly to help aim?

[_9ptr]

Ok, I'll bite. What did you do to make youtube not work?

[bee_rider]

No idea, iOS + Safari + Firefox Focus + the built-in Apple blockers. The video seemed to randomly freeze when not in full screen, but it would exit full screen when I tried to hop around in the video. I bet there’s an easy fix but I’m not a big video guy anyway.

[aspenmayer]

No who you were replying to, but trying to help.

Something about how they shared the link encoded a preference for the desktop version of YouTube, but since you’re on iOS, I have stripped all of that off their link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtnUq5v7cyw

[tomjakubowski]

Same principle as aerodynamically unstable fighter jets?

[Rendello]

But without the benefit of a computer to make hundreds of micro-adjustments per second!

[ge96]

That was pretty cool surfing that wave on the kayak ha at 1:27