About Myself

First off, I am tall and skinny, so it is difficult for me to find boats that fit both my hight and weight requirements. I am a green, but solid, class IV boater.

About the test environment

I borrowed this boat from a friend to run the Bottom Moose River (IV+, V, V+) at low and medium levels. The river has a wide variety of features from a 45' 60 degree slide to narrow, technical, hole-ridden rapids.

Reviews

Over all, I think this boat handles very well. I learned to paddle in a Necky Jive, which is a very fast flat bottomed river runner, and I found that the Salto was very similar, but with more volume. It is very fast and rather edgy, which was comfortable for me.

What was not comfortable for me was the outfitting. Again I am tall and skinny, so take that into consideration. I did not quite max out the seat or foot strechers, but was close. To get it to fit properly, I ended up weighting the back a little more than the front, wich I think affected it's performence. The seat is poorly padded and I had too pull my knees out on all of the flats to keep my legs from falling asleep. The theigh braces were particularly dissapointing. Often when rolling, the first thing I had to do was push my knees back into place, which slowed me down considerably. The back band uses a strap system much like car tiedowns. They were easy to pull tight, but loosened up often. I ended up tieing knots in them to keep them tight.

The last complaint I have sounds petty, but is quite annoying. the drain plug is not in a good location. There was always about a gallon of water left that I had to dump out after draining the boat. Like I said: petty, but annoying.

Conclusions

Again, I stress that alot of the comfort problems probably could be attributed to my lanky perportions, and I over all enjoyed the boat. It is the only creeker that I have paddled, so I don't have anything to compare it to, but from what I gather, it is a well respected hull.