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I have no idea what is good/bad in/out anymore...

Me neither. The Diesel is Wavesport's latest creeker/river runner. It's a pretty nice boat. Quite easy to roll, easy to paddle. That's about all I can say about it, with my limited paddling experience. Fits very nicely, too. It's been getting very good reviews from experienced paddlers.

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Used to have an Ekstedt something or the other... All kevlar with carbon reinforcements here and there (mainly around the seat area). At the time all-carbon kayaks were coming out, but then they added a minimum weight rule in order to eliminate them, as they were quite expensive and also quite fragile.

Sounds like a slightly different purpose. I think they're still doing stuff like that for racing kayaks, but all the basic whitewater kayaks I've seen around are 40 pounds of injection moulded plastic. There's a new line of boats from Jackson that's trimmed that weight down a few pounds, but it's still all plastic. I certainly wouldn't trust myself to paddle a carbon boat in whitewater, yet. My obstacle avoidance still isn't the best.

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75% of it's off limits during the summer due to wildlife preserve / bird protection.

I can see putting a limit on the put-in/take-out points, but totally shutting it down? Is one allowed to hike in the area? I'm surprised they don't have some sort of limited float license, or something like that -- "this year we'll allow 200 people to run the river."