C-Forum

Anyone paddle the Esquif Raven? I'm looking for a little review.

I happen to have given it a little test last week on a well known slalom course. I still have to write the review-ish article for my website, but I can give you a short first impression. Take the grain of salt, I've been paddling a prelude for the last months, and my other boat is a Viper11.

Overall I'm not so pleased by the raven, it was not a boat which I paddled with confidence, even though I know the slalom course pretty good.
As many other Esquif designs, the raven is hard to bring up to speed, which I think is a big disadvantage for performance whitewater paddling. Often you need to accelerate in 2-3 strokes, which is hard to do with the Raven.
Due to the soft chines, it's a boat that gives relative few feedback from the river. I've been paddling into eddies totally flat, resulting in just a slight wobble. Surfing in a hole, not making the tilt and still staying upright (at least for some time ).
It is dry running on small to medium wave trains, but it's horrible to boof and rather wet to take drops without boofing.
I also think it's not a very agile whitewater boat. It's kind of slow to turn into eddies in comparison to other boats of the same length (viper11, Nitro, occoee). And I don't really like slow turning whitewater boats. Also the max speed is not amazing. Unfortunatly I didn't have my viper11 with me to compare the moves (only the prelude)
The good is that the boat is really stable, good primary, good secondary stability. This makes the boat easy to brace, and rolling goes amazingly smooth. If you think the spark or paradigm are easy to roll, you haven't given the raven a try yet.
The boat I tested was outfitted with the esquif strap system, which I didn't like. At first it looked very nice, but the straps came loose to easily and I even pulled the clip a couple of times. After every roll I had to redo the straps. But here I just think it was a sub-optimal outfitting, not really a failure of the Esquif strap system as a whole.
Also the bottom of the boat I tested was very weak and "wobbly". Not something that gives confidence.

So it all depends on what you want. I personally prefer boats that give more feedback, accelerate better (might have a lower maximum speed like the prelude) and at least turn faster -> thus having more rocker, thus being dryer in drops. It might be a nice boat in bigger water due to the stability, but on technical paddling it's definetly not my boat of choice.

Oh, there is some video footage of the test in the beginning of this clip:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmogbTL_w-w