Thoughts on the Waka Skuxx

I’m usually quite cynical about the latest and greatest kayaks, but I recently took a Waka Skuxx out for a spin. Let’s see what I thought of it.

Now, anyone who knows me will be aware that I can be quite cynical about ‘kayaks of the month’ and the Kool Aid that surrounds them. Pyranha boats tend to be the worst offenders, with a boat being raved about until the next one comes out. Then all the drawbacks with the previous model finally get aired by people who really should have mentioned them to begin with!

Nothing against Pyranha as a company. It’s great that we have a company that is still doing solid business based mostly around producing cutting edge white water kayak designs, which is a rarity. In fact, Pyranha is one of the few dedicated white water kayak companies that doesn’t have to side hustle with making cooler boxes or traffic cones or some such thing to keep things ticking over.

I just wish that the hype that surrounds a release would be tempered by more real world reviews rather than sponsored paddlers. It’s actually pretty difficult to find useful and informative reviews of boats outside of Wade Harrison’s YouTube channel. Which brings me onto my Ripper 2.

I bought my Ripper 2 for a few reasons. One of them was that the grab handle arrangement on my previous Party Rexy wasn’t great for boat rescues. An issue that was highlighted when my boat decided to go down a rather sizeable and pushy river in Norway on its own. The other reason was that I mostly paddle playboats, so each and every time I got into the Rexy I had to relearn how to paddle it. It just wasn’t intuitive any more for me.

Years ago I seemed to be able to adapt to different boats much more quickly, but I find it harder now because I’m simply not getting the water time in a river runner like I used to. I needed a boat that had much more of a playboat ethos with the hull design, and the medium Ripper 2 fitted that bill. Or so I thought.

I did test a Firecracker when it was released, and I really liked it. But, I didn’t get one because the Ripper 2 seemed fine to me. Yet now, I find myself in a similar position to the one I was in with my Rexy. The Ripper 2 just feels big. I am light on its recommended weight range, but I can still tailie it very easily. However, it isn’t feeling intuitive for me to paddle when I’m used to the fast reactions of a playboat. I end up spending a day or more getting back used to it, and then I don’t paddle it again for a month, which places me back to square one when I finally use it again.

Don’t get me wrong, I still like the Ripper 2. There’s nothing inherently wrong with it that I dislike. It tailies nicely and on the right wave it’s an absolute carving machine. The problem is that when I’m going through the phase of having to get used to it again after a while of not using it, with an already flaky head game and anxiety on the river it’s not a great combination. I’m unsure about making moves, so I either mess them up or I hold back from trying them.

Kool Aid and mindset

I think also that with the Kool Aid that surrounds new boats, there can be some influence on mindset when you paddle them. You think you should really like the boat because everyone else is raving about it. Sometimes, flaws with the boat can get pushed to the back of your mind. After all, if everyone else loves it what am I missing if I find fault with it?

Until the Firecracker was released, literally everyone was raving about how good the Ripper 2 was, as well as how forgiving it was for newer paddlers too. But, as soon as the Firecracker came out the Ripper 2 seemed to get forgotten. Nowadays the feedback on the Ripper 2 I hear is that it’s not a bad boat, but that the tail engages too easily along with a host of other gripes that, strangely, never seemed to surface before the next best thing came along!

Enter the Waka Skuxx

The other day I took a trip up to the Tryweryn, but I made a point of not taking my Ripper 2 with me. I’d heard about the Waka Skuxx and I thought that for a change I’d give it a go, just to see what it was like. I just liked the look of it, but I didn’t really go with the intention of looking to purchase one. I was simply curious. I’ve always had a soft spot for Waka because I see the company as what Bliss Stick should have become. The boats still use the Bliss Stick style outfitting complete with the large Pelicase cutout in front of the seat, which is great.

I learnt to kayak in a Bliss Stick Mac 1 and then eventually paddled the Mystic extensively and then owned a Mini Mystic. I also had a Bliss Stick RAD playboat, which was great. Waka’s heritage connection to Bliss Stick is a strong one. The Tutea is still currently in Waka’s lineup for the simple reason that it’s an awesome boat. The Tutea is a smaller version of the Tuna 1, which younger paddlers might forget was in fact a Bliss Stick design until Sam Sutton took over the mould and started producing it under the Waka name.

Moving on to the present day, I wasn’t a fan of the Steeze when I tried one, so I was a little bit suspicious about what the Skuxx would be like, given that it takes a lot of cues from that boat.

After some messing around with foam from the spares box at Radical Rider I was generally fitted into the boat, and from dry land at least it felt pretty good. Up to the get-in I went. I slipped into the water and gave the boat some light manoeuvring around on a tiny surf wave at the top of the run. It felt nice. I had been told that the rails were really sharp, but nothing felt trippy to me. We moved down the river a bit and down the first drop.

Auto-Boof aktivieren!

The first surprise was doing a lazy ferry over to the first weir drop. Not only did the Skuxx respond quickly to small input strokes but it just glided over the drop really nicely despite a less than perfect boof stroke. I then did some fast crosses on the flow below, and before I knew it I was doing cross-bow eddy entries and hand swaps on the paddle shaft. The Skuxx just made me want to play! I had a couple of goes at getting the tail down, and although I hadn’t got it dialled in to go vertical I knew it had potential. It wasn’t as easy to tailie as a Firecracker or a Ripper 2, but it will certainly go when asked.

With most new boats that I haven’t been in before, there’s usually a period where everything feels odd. The way the bow stretches out in front, how the boat responds to strokes, how it feels edge to edge etc. Yet, I’d only been paddling the Skuxx a few minutes, and unlike any other kayak I’ve been in for the first time, I felt like I’d been using it for years. It was totally intuitive, and I’d literally only travelled 100 yards down river!

From there on in I was going for moves that I had lost confidence attempting in my Ripper 2, and I was nailing them. Even when I did mess up the Skuxx didn’t trip me up. Drop off a surf wave sideways into a large wave below? No problem, it just sailed through with complete predicability. At each turn, the Skuxx did exactly what I expected it to do. I was finding that I could easily shift my weight around to load and unload the bow and stern depending on what I wanted to do just like I would in my freestyle boat. It was the kind of familiarity I had with my Veloc, another boat I used to be totally dialled into.

The net effect of this was that because I had full confidence in the boat and was having so much fun as a result, I had absolutely zero head games at all. I felt like the version of me from 2014 had been transported to 2025. Even with a less than perfect entry to go past the first big stopper on Fingers just after Cafe Wave, the Skuxx just sailed through without so much as a twitch. It was as if the stopper wasn’t there. I didn’t get to try it on NRA wave, which I most definitely would like to do the next time.

On International Wave, once I was on it the Skuxx felt like a surf machine. You could really feel the drive of the rails when carving, possibly more so than I’ve felt in any other plastic river boat. A look at the hull design shows the primary rail to be very defined. Yet because the side-wall and parting line have been design so well, the rails aren’t trippy in the slightest while generally paddling down river, even if you mess up your line or angle.

It’s rare to find a boat that feels as intuitive and as dialled in as I found the Skuxx. Until now, I have been a little bit cynical about the short half slice trend. With the release of the ReactR and other similar boats I had wondered if the half-slice phase had passed. Yet the design of short half-slices continues to improve. Previously the Antix 2.0 was a boat that almost everyone who paddled one could agree was a quiver killer. A friend of mine has used his on some very big pushy water and it hasn’t missed a beat. I know a few people who seem to use their Firecrackers for pretty much everything. I also know someone who absolutely rocks their Liquid Logic Hot Whip on everything, too. The Skuxx, it seems, continues that trend and perhaps advances it even more.

Although in the past there have been phases where kayakers used playboats to do everything, including creeking, the people who used them like that would readily admit that the boats weren’t really suited to the task. It was just a way for boaters to challenge themselves. However, now we’re seeing short playful half-slice kayaks being specifically designed such that they can take on the types of river that would traditionally be reserved for a full volume creek-boat. And, not just go on those rivers, but excel at them.

Most advanced kayakers I speak to now tell me that they’ll use a sporty half slice for the majority of rivers they paddle, particularly in the UK, and they’ll only dig out the creek-boat when things get very spicy or they need the safety features and design attributes for very committing class V steep creeks.

I have now decided to purchase a Skuxx. Whether or not I feel the same way about it in a year or so is another matter, but the feedback I’m hearing about the boat from pretty much everyone is that a lot of people have had a similar experience to me. Now, how much of that is just the Kool Aid coming into play again is another question. But, for now I can certainly agree that the Skuxx is an extremely impressive design.