: I'm going to assume you know about the safety issues with
: strainers. For kayaks, bring the wood kayaks. They're kayaks and
: you're suppose to scratch the bottoms.

Yep, I'm very familiar with the dangers with strainers and deadfall and respect moving water. The river with the deadfall is very slow moving so minimum risk of entanglement. I've negotiated many cross river deadfall situations with my royalex canoe but not using a wood kayak so my real questions were around using wood boats for the trip. I think the general view is use 'em. Since I built them and can deal with scratches, scrapes and even worse, I think I'm convinced to paddle the wood boats on this trip. They are gonna get scratched up anyway so might as well break them in on a week long journey!

Bob Beaullieu