Im hoping to start creeking a lot more ive only done it a few times but I really enjoyed it. Ive tried a few different boats and i like creek boats that feel more like play boats and turn easily as opposed to more rounded displacement hulled boats. If you have any suggestions on boats please let me know i was thinking about a jefe.

Lots of guys are going to a plaining hull (flat) because of the rails. They have found that the displacement hulls bounced out of eddies on strong boils. The rails allowed them to grab the eddie. Some good boats to look at are the Mamba by Dagger and the Diesel by Wavesport.

alright ya I'll deffinatley have to try out those boats
thanks

Flat hulled creekboats suck. They do not hold a line and they lose speed. Having a boat that did not hold a line cause me to flip and roll right above a death hole. The line was 2 feet and i missed the hole by like 6 inches. Having a flat hulled boat my feel nice for someone who has always paddled with a playboat, but after 2 or 3 runs you will be used to a displacement hull boat. I paddle a pyranha m3 which is kick ass. After 3 strokes the boat reaches full speed and can punch through anything. Unlike a planing hull boat the more my boat punches the faster it seems to get. The m3 is nice, but it is tough to control with draw strokes so edging and carving are crucial for tight turns and catching eddies. I used to run this creek in a LL trigger and get anadvertinly caught in holes a few times on the run, now in my M3 i haven't gotten surfed once. It took sometime to get used to a round boat, but it was worth it. I urge you to push any flatbottom boats out of you search, they are dangerous and are not optimal for the creeking environment.

Talking to many of the Wavesport Team paddlers they are moving away from displacement hulls because of what I mentioned above. Arguably team paddlers are paddling the hardest stuff out there, so they can stay sponsored. Talking to the WS rep, who was a freestyle champion and runs class 5+, that is where the market need seems to be going.

Please remember this is all opinions of people you don't know. Talk to you local shop and the local paddlers who are doing what you want. Then try boats. Try as many boats as you can get your hands on. Ask people on the river to try their boat, I know I let people all the time. Then at the end of it be the judge yourself. Don't take what I, or anyone else, says to be the final authority. It is really just advice based on the experience that a person has, which you can't confirm.

This discussion is good for me because I am also trying to decide on a creeker. I have been creeking for 2 years on rivers in Quebec such as the Doncaster, Simon, Mulet. I have been using an old Necky Bliss. It serves me well because it seems very stable, it ferries easily, and steers well, and is fast enuf to get me where I need to be. But all my friends tell me I need a real displacement hull creeker because the Bliss tends to get caught up easily in holes. I rented 2 Mamba's recently (the 7.5 and the 8.0). They are both fast big volume boats, with rounded bottoms and rocker, features unfamiliar to me. They seemed to me to be extremely unstable compared to my Bliss. I had alot of trouble even maintaining a ferry angle on class 3 water. So: should I stick with the planing hull that I am so used to, or should I just get used to the Mamba's features?? ( I am 5ft 8 in and weigh about 170 lbs)

Ethan

Nathan,
the M3 is a fairly flat bottomed kayak, with hard edges in it. I don't understand your comment.

PB Kayaker,
As someone else said, remember that you'll get OPINIONS here, so keep that in mind as you get more repsonses. Good luck with your quest for the proper creek boat. It's a tough decision for sure.

I'll throw my opinion in here and start with an observation that I think many people try narrow things down too much into only Flat/Round. There is much more to it than that (as surely lots of observant paddlers are aware)

I got into it a bit in my blog when I compared the 3 DragoRossi creek boats
totalwhitewaterfun.blogspot.com/2006/10/...nes-and-rockers.html
and I'll add a bit more here to consider the discussion, specifically on the cross section of a kayak.
Imagine that you cut a kayak in half, from side to side, right through the cockpit. You would either get a generally round shape, or generally rectangular shape. Modern freestyle boats are very close to the rectangle shape,and old-school 4meter boats are very close to a circle or oval.

When sitting still, a rectangle shape feels more stable where as a circle would feel tippy.

The circle is easier to lean up on edge, and rectangle takes a little bit more effort.

The rectangle spreads out the paddler's weight (it \"displaces\" your weight) over a larger area, so the boat floats higher in the water: when the circular boat sinks a bit deeper into the water because more displacement happens at it's center.
This leads me to illustrate how these two extemes feel to me in a kayak.
The circular/oval cross section feels like it is riding on it's center line, like balancing a bicycle.
The rectalinear boat feels like it on two railroad rails, or more accurately like a modern roller coaster, even a jet airplane making banking turns.

Of course the reality of boat design is that each boat lies somewhere in the middle, just favoring one extreme or the other.

Examples:
Jefe is a very round boat
Mafia is a flat boat with round edges
Diesel and Mamba are flat boats with hard edges

A quick thought about edges:
Very rectalinear boats have hard edges, the sharp corners of the cross section. Hard edges run a higher risk of being tripped up by rocks on a creek so many companies tuck that edge in a bit, or round it off. By rounding the edge off, there is a higher chance that the boat will skip over more of those little rocks (kind of like extra \"sideways\" rocker). But, round the edges off too much, and you've gotten rid of the edge completely and you now have a round boat.