C-Forum

Paddled a borrowed Esquif Zoom Saturday and Sunday on the Tellico since my Prelude's still busted up from ALF. Wow! That's a fun little boat. I'm surprised it's not more popular. I suppose the reason is that it's royalex and wears too quickly, especially with such hard chines. Based solely on performance, what's the general opinion on that boat? I loved it.

I had a short test in it recently at the Open Canoe Festival in France. Ok, on an easy class II with really low water. Comparison is with the prelude.
And I liked it, it's fast, really fast for such a short canoe. And really stable in comparison to the prelude, but yet still very responsive. Also a rather easy roll, except that I tended to tip it over to the offside again after the roll

For me the major disadvantage is the material. The type of paddling you take out this kind of canoes is rather asking for PE then for royalex. But next to that I think it's a really high performance design!

Few paddlers can really master the edges of that boat without turning it into a wooZ but I've seen awesome moves been thrown out of them. Fast and quick on a turn for sure. Very square-bottomed.

Yeah and I think that PE would make this one such a heavy boat it would just kill a big part of its quality. Royalex is still there as a good compromise between PE and composite boats for "medium" rock banging.

There are some good sequences of an excellent paddler in a Zoom in this video that I just posted: http://youtu.be/_MZW3Gf8ILo