Customer Test Results

Interesting test results one of our customers did on our canoes:

My son and I love to canoe, and we have made a lot of great memories while camping and fishing from our Osagian canoes. I bought my first Osagian when I was in Jr. High over 30 years ago. Lately, some of my buddies have been giving me a hard time about using "old fashioned" aluminum flat bottom keeled boats. They claim that the newer shallow arch bottom (no keel) boats made out of Royalex are more efficient, so my son and I ran a little side-by-side comparison on a small lake up here in northeast Iowa. We put an Osagian up against a Wenonah Spirt II and an Old Town Penobscot. All of the test boats were 17' long, and my son and I were the motors for each boat. Since most of our heavy paddling is done on flat water, the evaluation criteria was top speed and straight tracking. We measured speed with a hand held GPS, and tried to get each boat as level as possible (front-to-back) for maximum paddling efficiency. I think you will find these results very interesting:

17' Spirit II - Royalex

5.3mph into the wind

5.8mph with the wind Poor tracking

17' Penobscot - Royalex

5.3mph into the wind

6.0mph with the wind Fair tracking

17' Osagian - Aluminum (no side sponsons)

5.8mph into the wind

6.2mph with the wind Excellent tracking

As you can see, the "old-fashioned" Osagian was 7%-9% faster than the Spirit II, and 3%-9% faster than the Penobscot. The Osagian's rigid Aluminum hull held its shape while moving through the water, but the Royalex hulls flexed a lot while we were paddling. We wasted power pumping water around under the Royalex boats, so our speeds were lower. A speed advantage may not be a big deal on a short float down a river, but if you need to paddle upstream or across a lake for a few hours, every bit of efficiency helps.

When is comes to tracking, the Osagian was again the clear winner. The most efficient track up a river or across a lake is a straight line, and it is hard to beat a keel if you want to paddle in a straight line. The flexing of the Royalex hulls seemed to add rocker, making it difficult to hold a straight track. I straightened the track out as much as possible with use of a j-stroke, but we still found ourselves travelling a zig-zag path in the Royalex boats.

I should mention that we also paddle a lot of rock bottom streams and small rivers here in northeast Iowa, so we did not consider any of the fiberglass or Kevlar boats in our test. These boats are certainly efficient, but will not endure the beating that the Osagians take on sharp limestone rocks. My buddies got a real kick out of this test, and I would not be surprised to see an Osagian leaning up against one of their garages in the near future. It is hard to beat the cost, robustness, and efficiency of the classic Osagian. Keep building those great "old fashioned" boats!

For more information check out our website at www.osagian.com