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Independent Playak Review: Dragorossi Mafia.

First impressions

What I expected on first glance from this boat was not what I got out of it. I expected it to excel in technical situations, turn on a dime, but (looking at that rocker) suffer in the speed department. Looking at the roundness, I was concerned about the prospect of being hole-bait. I expected it to track like… well, like a short, highly-rockered boat- that is to say, not at all. …and finally, given who designed it, I expected it to trade performance for ease of use. To my delight, I was pleasantly surprised on all counts.

For full details, see the Kayak Database.

A first look at the boat reveals a lot of thoughtful attention to detail: external screws are recessed, grab loops are webbing with elastic inside, which means that when not being held, they snug down to the boat. It is stylish, in an Italian-looking sort of way. The seat looks like art.

Features

• Bulkhead/separate hatch
• The bulkhead is a transverse 2” block of minicell formed to separate the cockpit section from the stern, and is sealed all ‘round with black goo.
• The hatch seals with an included neoprene ‘skirt', and is covered by a plastic hatch-cover that fixes in four places using buckles.
• Emergency breathing tube, which has a one-way valve at the mouth end, comes out the front of the seat and extends back through the bulkhead. It is designed to be pulled out and handed up to the surface. This may one day come in useful, but I didn't test this feature.
• Triple-redundant grab loops- to fail, the grab loops would need to fail at 3 separate points.
• Molded seat with twin rails for impressive hull support and rigidity
• Flashy Italian styling
  • This boat looks and acts like it's expensive. Heck, it is expensive...

The testing ground for this boat was to be the North Fork of the Payette - a high-volume, continuous series of bigwater V rapids, some opportunity boofs, tons of weird water, big holes, and lots of less-than-friendly rocks. Not my forte, but hey, it was August of a dry year, I'd never done this river, might as well, right?

Upon a visual survey, the boat looks like it's got some interesting things going on: lots of rocker, (the sort of thing that makes for a veer-prone, turny boat) along with a sort of V-hull at the bow and stern- something that gives this boat a tracking quality and which provides a sensation of lift-and-climb whenever this boat runs into water that's going a different speed- sort of the same ‘lift' sensation I'm used to getting out of a V-hulled speedboat as it planes up. Similarly, when heeled over, the rocker and V give this boat a nice carving character.

Primary stability is nominal- you can wiggle around quite a bit before feeling support- this boat is mostly about secondary stability. Rolling was fast- explosively fast- give this boat a decent hip-snap and you could go up and over the other side. The depth of the cockpit felt a bit funny, however- as I set up for a regular sweep roll, my PFD came in contact with the cockpit rim and by the end of the hip snap, I was all the way against the other rim. The deep cockpit doesn't interfere with a back-deck roll, but if you've got a short torso, you may want to pad up your seat or consider getting the seat designed for you shorter folks.

Handling

This boat drives like a pair of stiff slalom skis- give it some edge, a bit of speed, and something to bite into, vrooooom! It's off on a carve. Sit back, the stern tracks while the bow climbs up onto anything- sit forward, the stern skids as you turn. Try to drive too quickly in a straight line, it gets squirrelly- you'll want to have an active blade in the water, as the carving aspect of the boat comes out. This boat is designed to turn and exploit features more than it is intended for flatwater sprinting- that said, it's surprisingly fast for its length.

I found that the ideal strategy for driving this boat through just about anything was to paddle it relatively slowly (just enough forward speed relative to the water I was on to give me some tracking) and play off of any feature in my path- clip the edge of a hole, use that to get 20 feet across current on a single stroke- the feeling was very dynamic and confidence-inspiring.

This ‘carve' rocker can also be used to advantage when busting over squirrelly interfaces- boof the bow up, the boat loves to scream into eddies with speed.

The boat resurfaces with aplomb- 72 gallons is a lot of float- it likes to glide forward underwater and doesn't have any suctiony/wandering feeling under the hull- every time I went underwater, I surfaced upright and accelerating forward, still on my stroke.

As with any Addison design, this boat rewards an aggressive, forward stance- it feels stablest when sitting forward and indeed it's widest point is even with the front of the seat. That said, this boat is pretty automatic in most other respects- not by any means a boat that will demand anything extraordinary from its paddler. With this boat we can put to rest the myth that performance means the boat is tough to paddle. In fact, my experience of the NF Payette was surprisingly quite relaxed. I didn't want to tell anybody this- let them think it's tough to drive and that I'm just an awesome paddler- but I will say that the boat made me look good. J

As one might expect from the look of it, the Mafia boofs like a champ, climbs up on top of anything- even weird, 3' tall eddylines- so long as you've got the speed. You can activate the rocker in this boat without taking a stroke- just use a bit of body English and you're in business.

Outfitting

The seat is a marvel- a molded butt-comforter with a remarkable backband system that actually snugs you down and forward. It is mounted on rails that makes fore-aft adjustment a matter of unscrewing two finger-bolts, loosing two more, and sliding the whole assembly forward, then finger-tightening the whole lot. Conspicuously missing for me were hip pads- I found that adding hip pads turned the ride from pretty good to incredibly good, and this appears to be what they had in mind: the boat comes with foam blocks for you to make your own hip pads out of.

The seat comes in two sizes; the sample I had to work with was the large seat, which is physically the smaller of the two. The ‘medium' seat is for ‘medium'-sized paddlers and takes up more space in the boat. The downside to the seat is that it covers most of the bottom of the boat- making sponge-bailing pretty awkward.

The backband is ratchet-adjustable via ratchets that adjust from the front of the seat, and is mounted on a flexible metal piece that is fixed to the seat. This limits access to the space between the seat and the bulkhead.

The footrest is similarly easy to adjust- it's a pair of ratchet-bands seemingly stolen from somebody's snowboard binding, which attach to the seat and adjust relative to the seat. This system is designed to shear under extreme load, (think: ankle-breaking loads) and comes with a solid aluminum replacement member that you won't need tools to replace- simply unscrew and replace in the field.

In the bow, the boat I paddled had a standard foam pillar, which (according to Dragorossi) will be replaced in future versions by a bow-ring that supports the hull and deck in the manner of an internal bulkhead you put your legs through. I anticipate that this will provide the paddler with more space to get in and out, as well as a spot to put a full-sized throwbag. This will be available as a retro-fit option in the near future, according to DR.

The stern hatch, for those of us who have never owned a boat with a stern hatch, is an ‘almost-dry' compartment- the seal is provided by a small neoprene skirt for the opening, with a hatch cover provided only for implosion protection. The Mafia's hatch cover is secured by what appeared to be four lightweight ski-boot buckles, which I'm certain (again, I didn't test this theory) could break the plastic of the cockpit cover if I tried to put the latch on ‘tighter'. Also, the hatch cover is not fixed to the boat- meaning that one extended solo excursion in the beat-down hole and it's theoretically possible to lose your hatch cover.

When I told Corran I'd like to see the latches more ‘stupid-proof', he had already realized it and showed me the redesigned remedy: all subsequent Mafias will be shipped with a simpler means of closing the hatch, and will come with the hatch cover attached to the boat by a webbing strap.

The cockpit is slightly smaller than a-standard large keyhole-size: my first run with the boat using a standard (almost-snug) skirt got me a bit of boat-slosh. The next day I replaced it with a slightly smaller skirt and finished the day (which included some hole-time and combat action) with my shoes dry- impressive.

No review of any DragoRossi boat would be complete without dealing with the price tag- with a MSRP of $1400, these are premium boats at a premium price. You'll have to do your own calculus to figure what a boat is worth to you, and to be frank I probably wouldn't have considered paddling one - after all, boats these days are pretty much the same, right? Heh. Demo this boat first, then sort out how to pay for it.

Summary

Pros

• It drives remarkably well.
• Outfitting is solid and innovative.
• It is fun.

Cons

• There's no spot to stow a full-sized throwbag. (Again, this is remedied by the removal of the foam pillar in the bow and replacing it with a ‘ring' bulkhead.)
• Getting in and out is… well, it could be easier. The grippy material in the backband that served so well to keep my butt in the boat gave me the biggest wedgie of my life when I tried getting in without unlatching the backband.

All told, I like this boat in ways I didn't expect to. It made tough moves easy.

About the reviewer

I'm 6'1”, tip the scales at ~185lbs (convert to metric) with a 32” inseam and size 9 feet, and am primarily a creek boater, but have been seen from time to time on the wave. I favor low-volume steep technical paddling. I'm a solid class V paddler, with several first descents to my name. I live in Washington State.

Chris Joosse
North American Playak Editor

[PS I wasn't accompanied by a photographer during the tests, so I used some action shots courtesy of Dragorossi]