Ever since I got into kayaking, the stability of various Hobies and other yaks seems to vary across the board with the users.
Often we have no idea of the height, weight and body build of the person, who is stating that X Mirage is stable or not stable.
I want to thank pdxfisher for posting this reply which is very interesting:
pdxfisher wrote:
There is no single best fishing kayak for everyone. The thing that I have noticed is that a lot of the bigger (taller and heavier) guys here in the NW have an Outback. Most of the shorter and lighter folks have Revos. I am not huge (6'3" 200lbs) but being tall there was a large stability difference between Outback and the Revo. For me I do not have to think about stability when fishing from the Outback. From the revo I had to divert some of my attention to concentrating on my balance and to the boat wakes around me. I think that if my center of gravity was lower it would not have mattered. Now, to be fair I am not an expert kayaker and my balance is not the best. For someone with better balance my issues may not be an issue. In the end, only a test ride will tell.
An extreme example of these variables happened two summers ago. Close friends and their adult children, who are average in size or a little less have yakked for decades and never had a problem unless they got into rapids/waves they shouldn't have been in.
Their new SIL a gifted athlete in football, basketball, baseball and any sport he tried came close to drowning one summer with them. He consistantly turned over the yaks and had to be rescued two times. Fortunately, he had his king sized PDF on.
He is over 6'6" inches tall, about 260 pounds of hard muscle and his upper body and head have larger % porportions of his total body. His parents joke about he and his brother's 30 pound heads.
His wife and MIL are small but athletic women, his BILS are smaller than average but well built guys in the normal weight areas, and their wives are like his wife/MIL re size builds. His FIL is a little over average and still in good shape. He was a small college quarterback. As mentioned above, his in laws never turn a yak over unless they have done something on the stupid size
So are there some guidelines/studies/good observations on the impact or lack of it re the height, weight and body build of the yakker on the stability of some yaks and not other yaks.
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For the first half hour I felt really out of my element, and tippy as all hell, I had forgotten (temporarily) my sense of balance which before was second nature.