By Corran Addison

When Chairman Mao was asked what he thought about the French Revolution, he remarked, “It’s too early to tell.” This echoes my thoughts exactly on the ‘new’ crossover creaking kayak revolution. Is it here to stay?

The crossover revolution

The Beginnings:

The reality in fact is that this is not new and depending of your definition of a creek boat and a crossover creeker you could realistically go back and start calling the Dancer a crossover. However, for the sake of drawing an arbitrary line in the sand, for me the crossover movement started (for the most part) with the crowd in Friendsville WV. These guys were paddling composite kayaks, mostly based on mutilated slalom designs, that had slicy tails and puffed up bows, and they were charging down class-4+ creeks in them.

Admittedly, coming from Europe in the mid-1980s, when I encountered these paddlers and their boats, I didn’t think much of it: it seemed perfectly obvious to me that you wanted a short, round, fat, boat if you were going to push yourself and I was particularly attached to the Pyranha Mountain Bat at the time. So when I spent a few weeks in and amongst these guys, squirting their tails off drops like Big Splat on the Big Sandy and National Falls on the Youghiogheny, all I saw was the most likely parallel outcome on something more challenging – but unintentionally.

Off I went and continued work designing the Perception Corsica: big and fat.

It wasn’t until I got into the Hurricane in 1993 (though you could argue that I had my first modern taste in the Crossfire in 1991) that I began to see potential for padding a creek with a ‘controllable stern’. I use this term, not because you can’t control a large fat creeker (of course you can, and when you’re really scared out of your wits, that’s the way to go), but because amazingly you have an incredible amount of very precise boat control when you can intentionally tap into currents right below the surface. By the end of 1993, I was running anything in the Hurricane that I’d venture to run in a full on ‘creek boat’.

Now admittedly, in the early 1990s the creek designs were junk. Let’s be honest; compared to today’s boats, they were really horrible and I was also at the very top of my game technically. However, interestingly enough, the crossovers of today are very much like the crossovers from the late 1980s and early 1990s. This either says a great deal about just how good those boats were, or that we are in this new ‘revolution’, at the very beginning of the design process and the best designs from that era are only our starting point today.

It’s too early to tell.

Some important base line things had to happen for these new crossovers to even be an option in todays super charged “you’ve never seen creeking like this” before environment. Kids are doing laps on drops we ran once in a lifetime, if at all. This means that the sheer confidence and skill level of paddlers is at such an impossibly high limit that the range of paddlers who possess the necessary skills to paddle crossovers is relatively wide.

Secondly, is the widespread adoption of progressive rocker. While I had creek boats as early as 1995 that had progressive rocker, this was not mainstream until sometime well after 2010. Before then, boats had a long flat rocker mid sections, and then abrupt upswept ends. This is not a conducive shape to making slicy tails effective and easy to use.

Ironically, because the Friendsville paddlers were so close to Washington DC, America’s focal point for slalom in the 1980s, they were using and chopping up slalom boats that already had this progressive rocker shape. Why it took so long to become universally adopted in creek boats will remain a mystery to me, but there you have it. As soon as I moved from slalom to creeking (and freestyle) after the 1992 Olympics, I immediately began designing using slalom style rockers (albeit exaggerated).

These rockers make it easy for the nose to ride up and over river features, with less ‘stopping’ at the base. The key to this is that a sudden unwanted stop has the potential to let incoming water engage the tail unpredictably, and no one likes unpredictable on a creek. If the boat is running cleanly through and over everything, then the tail isn’t catching (most of the time). That means you can engage the tail when you want it to, not when it wants to.

Sometimes…

Ironically if you go back and look at the Crossfire and Hurricane, they had progressive rockers.

So now we know how and why these shapes work, the question is just how practical are they? Should you be in one? Last I checked money doesn’t grow on trees, so should you spend your heard earned dinero’s on one of these machines?

That’s a loaded question. My initial response is, “Oh, hell yes!”

One of the 90%?

Let’s forget for an instant the 5% of paddlers who are just so bad-ass they can paddle any river in any boat. Let’s also forget the other 5% of paddlers who only ever paddle super scary and dangerous rivers – they don’t leave home unless they’re going to go risk life and limb.

That leaves 90% of paddlers who are between average to advanced skill ability, who for the most part, run somewhat challenging rivers (for themselves) but are not constantly pushing the possible (for their skill set). If you’re one of these paddlers, then there is literally no negative to spending a large amount of your paddling time in a crossover.

If nothing else, it will teach you how to paddle your boat proactively, and also to get used to being more vertical than you’d otherwise like. In a creek boat, once you start to explore the vertical zone (at the base of drops) it’s usually a precursor to a beating, and if you’re not accustomed to this feeling, you’re less equipped to handle it. Getting used to controlling a boat that is not always being co-operative in water you’re more than comfortable in, translates to fewer really scary beat downs when you are challenging yourself.

But this is not really why you should be in a crossover. You should be in one because, simply put, they’re a lot of damn fun! If you’re not on the very edge of your control zone, you’re potentially bordering on the boredom zone. Crossovers take that ho-hum run-of-the-mill river you’ve run 1000x and they make them fun!

Crossovers are essentially safe as they have high-volume, rounded bows, all the outfitting features and mod cons of the modern creeker and design features that tend to ride up and over things. So they have less likelihood of submerging and pinning like a river playboat, but the squishy tail means you can squirt, splat and surf your butt off all the way down the river and still be safe and in control when it matters.

Choose one

Now here comes the rub. If you can only afford one boat, should you be looking at a crossover rather than a full-on creeker? Another loaded question I’m afraid. It really depends on what you paddle and your skill set.

I’m going to use myself as an example. Once, many eons ago, I was a pretty good paddler and I loved pushing myself to the very limit. Those days are gone on two fronts: I’m not the paddler I once was, and I have almost no interest in spending my weekend cheating death. Truth be told, I have more fun on class 2-3 with my four-year old son paddling than I do on class 5. So I generally don’t venture out much onto really hard class 5 anymore. When I do, I have a boat that’s so good it allows me to keep up with the most insane kids and at least feel like I’m not going to die trying to paddle with them. However, this is something that happens only three times a year or so.

More often than not, when paddling ‘harder’ rivers, I’m on some class 4, to easy 5 ‘creek’, and nowhere near my limit. Here, I simply have more fun in a crossover than in my full on creek boat, which is basically so massively overkill on these rivers as to make them somewhat uninteresting.

These sorts of easier creeks I run several times a month, as opposed to something really hard and challenging just a handful of times a year. So if I had to choose between a creeker and a crossover as my only ‘creeking boat’, I’d go for the crossover and just not go hard creeking those few times a year where a real creek boat is needed. To me, this is a far better compromise than being bored four times a month just so I can be safe four times a year, because my creek boat is overkill.

That’s me. Obviously owning a kayak company means that in reality I have one of everything, but the decision making process would be the same if I didn’t. I look at which boats I paddle and which ones I don’t. My Chaos Monkey tends to sit in the garage, and my Funky Monkey gets paddled all the time. That’s all I need to know if I had to make that decision.

Thankfully most paddlers have more than one boat, and as a result it’s not an ‘either or’ decision you have to make, so much as, “Would I have fun in a crossover?” To that my friend, the answer is a definitive yes!

Are crossovers here to stay, given that they’ve been around since the mid 1980s? I don’t know. It’s too early to tell.