Wavewalk Kayaks

A kayak is a small, personal boat designed for passengers to propel it with double blade paddles.

This definition satisfies hundreds of manufacturers and millions of people who enjoy using their sit-on-top (SOT) or sit-in, inflatable, folding or rigid, monohull, tunnel hull, outrigger or twinhull kayaks.
It would seem too inclusive for a small group of kayakers who believe that only kayaks designed to look like modern versions of the traditional Inuit boats are ‘real’ kayaks, but since this outdated view is becoming a rarity I’d rather not elaborate on it in this post*

Is the W really a kayak?
Well, as long as most people call it a kayak it is one, although it performs perfectly as a canoe**
However, people who call it a catamaran would not be wrong, and neither would those who see in it a new class of boats.

It is correct to call this boat a kayak since it covers a range of typical kayaking applications such as kayak touring, kayak fishing and kayak surfing.
However, it’s also used for other, new applications such as standup paddling, standup kayak surfing and standup kayak fishing, and it offers a new position called Riding (or ‘Mounted’) so it represents a new class of boats.
This new boat class that we call W is based on a patented technology explained in and protected by a U.S. utility patent. Being granted a utility patent means that it is recognized to be a new invention in the full sense of the word and not just another original boat design (I.E. outline) that’s protected by copyright or a design patent.

Wavewalk’s 2008 W Kayak models are the second generation of the first commercial W boat design out of thousands of other potential W designs based in this invention.

Yoav

*These issues and others are discussed in this article: http://www.wavewalk.com/KAYAK%20SEAWORTHINESS.html

** ‘Canoe’ even in the narrower sense of a small boat designed for passengers to propel it with single blade paddles.

http://www.wavewalk.com

Tags: definition, design, kayak

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 16th, 2008 at and is filed under Kayak design, Kayaks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.