The outfit I finally setted is, strangely enough, something I never seen anywhere else but it seems to work great so far. As some of you requested I am posting here what I did.
I call it the appaloosa squish-in setup. An image is worth a thousand words:
http://picasaweb.google.ca/marcgauthier ... directlink
Very little to explain, really. I took the mesurement of the front cockpit's height and cutted the floor of the saddle 1 1/2 inch to fit this. That wasn't enough to touch the pegs at all. This did change the position of the body in the saddle so I had to dragon skin the interior of the knee holes a bit to change their angle, also scraped back the backbench and saddle height to taste; 7 1/2 in my case.
Then I trimmed the sides of the saddle about an inch on each side, working my way up in a round movement, imitating the boat's shape as I could.
It was a little fight to squeeze that bulky foamy thingy in but hey, it's just foam after all! Worked the saddle's front bottom to fit the weird shape of the front post and added a spacer there. For the back I had to cut a corner out of the rear post's bottom to accomodate the saddle, and added a bunch of foam blocks to make the whole thing stiff enough. Sure a big kick could move the saddle's rear on sides, but is stiff enough for a test and I decided to wait before to glue it in place to make sure of the position.
Not much to say about the hip pads; they suck for now I have to redo them from scratch.
Took it on a lake once, then at a local class 3 river last saturday and the saddle didn't move too much, even after running a couple of rapids without me in.
Now the question that's left on the back of my mind is: why nobody else seems to have done this before? Either a saddle like that is too expensive to most folks or simply nobody cared about posting this type of stuff just yet. Chances are also it was done before and I oversaw it.
My first comments about the boat itself.
I am a very intermediate paddler and can essentially compare the boat with the other ones I owned and paddled so far: a prelude, a smaller riverplay C1 (perception amp) and my big MR ME. Oh yeah, and I am about 160# and 5'11".
The boat is very responsive. About half the weight of my prelude and it shows also. When leaning forward in an aggressive paddling position, the boat is VERY carvy, accelerates fast and loose its speed almost as fast too.
The thing that amazed me the most is how much control you get from leaning the boat on its sides.Another good surprise was that when sitting back in a more relaxed position, the boat then gets a very nice glide and shows some fair tracking. The cockpit isn't as small and low as my other C1 so I was even able to get back at that good old "swing & pry" type of paddling. That was way unefficient and uncumfortable in my other C1, besides, I had to paddle more intensely to follow other folks in their big boats. Now I am back at sugar cookie-chatting with them when the river is calm, with a little extra effort to follow but that's it.
The boats also rolls very easily. Primary stability is better than my prelude (was very poor) and secondary probably just as good. The boat sides are quite rounded up so it doesn't seems to "kick" you on sides like that square-bottom narrow amp.
The fact that the remix is available in different sizes is also fun, now I wonder what the 79 would feel like for me...
I have to say it again; I would never have made such a move without reading through on cboats forum and a big thanks to everybody I previously spoke with to get advices of all kind.
That's about it, hope this helps anyone out there!
See ya on the river,
Marc Gauthier.
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