Sweet paddling little tandem. Mine is royalex. The boat is surprisingly stable for its size. It tracks very nicely and has good speed. I use it mostly solo for fishing small lakes and rivers. It is designed with fairly little rocker, I think it is advertised as 1" bow and stern and this is evident in its good tracking and straight ahead speed.
I've tandem paddled it a fair amount with a teenager in the bow and often with a 75lb retriever in the center as added fun. It does very well at this also. We have never used it for camping, but I think it would do fine for a weekend trip for two average sized paddlers with reasonable gear. It does fine on moving water due to good fullness and some flair in the bow, but I think if you are mainly doing rivers you may want something with more rocker. I've only had it out in mild whitecaps and it tracks well and handles that kind of chop fine, and seems likely to handle bigger waves fine too. Mad River now makes the Reflection 15 so the boat is still available and well worth your consideration if you want a small tandem that can be solo paddled.
I was lucky enough to find one of these for sale a few weeks ago, and snapped it up. After a 2 hour solo paddle on flat water, I'm pretty happy with it, although I'd regard it as a moving water boat primarily.
I was using a bent canoe paddle, but can see that a kayak paddle could work well, esp for speed. I wasn't carrying gear, so the wind tended to knock it around a bit. It should be perfect for an overnight trip down a stream or creek.
I've had my Dagger Reflection 15 for about 5 years. I like the fact that I can put it on the roof of my Expedition by myself - especially since I often go solo. I've done a good bit of II and III whitewater, larger flowing rivers, and still water and it's a great compromise for all these uses but doesn't excel at any of them. But that's just what I wanted.
Mine is getting beat-up from all the whitewater. Anybody know where any are since I think they are out of production now? I'd like to get a new or not very used one.
This review is from a relative newcomer to the sport, so take it for what it is worth.I just bought a Dagger Reflection 15 after renting various canoes. I tried big aluminum Grummans and a 17'4" Old Towne. These canoes from the outfitters always seemed very heavy and stabile, because they were! I actually went looking for a bigger boat, but the salesman convinced me that for what I wanted to do with it, a smaller boat was better for maneuvering. He was right.
My wife and I decided to buy a canoe so we could launch when we wanted, since our main interest in a canoe is wildlife photography. We want to launch at sunrise and the outfitters usually aren't open that early. The first thing I noticed about the Royalex Reflection 15, is the weight. It is only 55 pounds so it is a breeze to put it up on the roof rack.
We took the canoe out to a slow moving river and noticed quickly that the primary stability isn't as good as the heavy canoes we rented. That isn't a problem since we quickly adjusted to it and also found that the secondary stability was excellent. We intentionally rolled the canoe sideways to test it and it is very solid when leaning a few degrees to either side.
It doesn't track as well as a 17' canoe, but that is to be expected. It didn't take long for me to adjust my J stroke to keep it straight. By the time we'd been paddling an hour, we found that it is an excellent boat for our purposes. It turns quite well which is nice for exploring the marshy areas. We moved into an area we never would have tried with a 17' boat and saw a rare bird that we would have otherwise missed.
The boat moved quite well both upstream and downstream. There is no whitewater around here, but we did ride over some power boat wakes and it handled them effortlessly. In fact, we enjoyed it enough that we were deliberately crossing over the wakes. I'm delighted with the Reflection 15. Primary stability and tracking could be better, but it would certainly degrade performance in another area.