Those of you who have taken a solo boat on a trip where the rest of your party was in tandems, how hard was it to keep up? Was it more enjoyable to put in extra work doing that than rotating a duffer?

I was always ahead of the tandems.

SunCatcher

totally depends on the paddlers ability and what you are paddling, once I was with a pair of aluminum, so it was pretty easy paddle for me. If the other paddlers are experienced and paddling decent boats, you could be the laggard, maybe a good idea to rotate paddlers

......and the people in the tandems were thankful for that.

Duffing is the toughest paddling assignment there is. As the other say, however, it depends completely on the experience levels of the other paddlers. A decent solo paddler would have no trouble staying ahead of two inexperienced paddlers waterbugging across a lake, whether they're in a kevlar racer or a rubber dinghy.

I have found that the tandems can't keep up with me, I can usually out distance them or easily keep pace... I do a sit & switch to pull away or just a j-stroke to keep pace.

+1 to shsylvester:

I always solo in a tandem. I often outpaddle 2 people in a tandem. I figure they're just taking their time.