Re: Spraydeck for MilCree

Posted by Peter Lyons on Jun 9, 2004

Not to be a party-pooper; I've just finished the same boat myself... but my sense of it is that if you're taking the boat out in conditions where you really need a spray skirt, you probably have the wrong boat for the conditions. The MC 16.5 is designed as a flatwater boat. Sure, she can handle some waves nicely, but once they start coming over the top, then I think it's time for a sea kayak with a single or multiple small cockpits which can be covered by conventional spray skirts. If you're just getting wash over the front deck splashing into the open cockpit, perhaps you could look at modifying the front of the coaming to better turn back the water? Just a thought.

You know what, my other boat is a plastic Old Town Loon 111. It, like the MC 16.5, has a large open cockpit (although not as large as the MC's!). Old Town actually does make a spray skirt to fit this boat. On paddling.net I once read comments from someone who owned the boat and the skirt, and had used it some playing in surf. They reported that while the skirt did fine at turning away normal "spray", if you had a wave break over you (an instance where you most want the thing to keep the cockpit dry) the large skirt could not hold up under the pressure of so much water, and would simply collapse into the cockpit. So it's with that in mind that I say I suspect the same would be true of a spray skirt for a Mill Creek - only more so, because the cockpit in this case is bigger still - over 7 feet long, if memory serves.

In Response to: Spraydeck for MilCreek 16 by Doug on Jun 8, 2004

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