I decided to go with an 16' Evergreen Prospector. The reasons being, it's a reasonably fast boat. But it will also do fast water. For me every pound over 65 lbs. is torture. It's about 65 lbs. As far as I could tell, that's about the lightest royalex prospector around, without going to Royalite. I can use it as a solo boat when the wife would rather sit at the campsite and paint and I want to explore. I don't do a lot of fast water, probably less than 5% of my paddling, it doesn't make sense to own a Starburst or a Dumoines where so much speed has been sacrificed for manouverability. It's just barely big enough for a major trip , but more than adequate for the 3 to 10 day trips I do most of the time. I think the next best selling point was my wife talking to the guy who took his new one to the Paddle the Don event. He couldn't stop talking about how much he loved it. I'm sure I'll have lots of pics of it after the long may weekend.
Evergreen is 15 minutes from my house, so it just made sense to shop there.
Anyway I really enjoyed this thread and the poll was informative, I'd still like to see a lot more responses. 44 out of 1400, doesn't seem like a lot. I don't know if it a high percentage of people are multiple canoe folk, or if they were just the ones more likely to respond. We need a program that will randomly select a given percentage of the mebership and mail them out a questionaire, so we get a more balanced selection. After all, we want to be as accurate and scientific as possible. (':lol:')
