Sexy? I guess I hadn't thought of it that way before. My mind's eye had always set a kayak in a fog-morticed silent scene, floating on flat glass-water. There's only the whisper of splash off the paddle punctuated every now and again by a distant but comforting foghorn. It slides along on lines of mystery, and this is literally true. Kayaks are ancient, a distinct product of the maritime culture that spread into the new world across the Bering Land Bridge in a late wave of migration, maybe only 4,000 years ago, then ringed the Arctic Circle on east to Greenland. Somewhere in that legacy there lies the single individual who first thought to roll one, to capsize a boat into waters that float icebergs, to set a paddle just so and to sweep it perfectly coordinated with a snap of the hips to ride the rolling kayak, not fiberglass, but skin on bone frame, back to the air and light. Who came up with this idea, and who finally convinced someone else to field-test it?

Yet this is not the craft's principal mystery. Something more significant than a buzzed-headed gen-exer's version of sexy lies encoded in those boat's lines, or, come to think of it, maybe he's onto something. Marine architects understand that every boat's hull has a theoretical maximum speed. Until a point, the graph of the curve relating speed to power of all boats is relatively straightforward and predictable, with speed rising in proportion to the added force. The point can even be calculated; it is proportional to the square root of the boat's bow length. Then hull speed is reached, and additional power produces no additional speed. Except in kayaks, traditional skin kayaks.

The secret to this was in the hull lines, a concave curve near the bow that now appears on modern racing yachts designed by people who understand square roots who are simply copying something dreamed up by people who, as far as we know, didn't. Who thought of this design? Was it accident or wisdom? It must be wisdom in that an exquisitely refined knowledge of the relationship between power and speed is grace.

Sexy? Maybe there is no better word for the lines of the boat before me. They flow not from an engineer's design, but from a lineage of trial and error that is ancient and lost. This is a design as deep as genetics, not built but bred.

Move on to Eddyline Raven

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