Matt Broze has written quite a mouthful on this subject just now that I won't repeat. It confirms what I know directly and have heard from reliable witnesses. Namely that the nature of polyethylene makes it difficult to get things to adhere to it; that foam bulkheads in any kind of boat, fiberglass or plastic, are subject to breakdown over time, etc. I stick by my earlier statement: If paddling a plastic boat, do yourself the safety favor of keeping inflated air bags in the bulkheaded compartments. It is by way of wearing suspenders and a belt and good general advice for any thing. For example, I know that Feathercraft when it introduced sea socks didn't say anything in its literature about using airbags as well. Now it does say to use _both_. A friend of mine who has a small electric pump for his folding kayak, carries it in a bailing bucket so that, one way or another, he will be able to bail if he has to. BTW, please don't take this as knocking plastic kayaks. They are a lot better than people give them credit for. If it weren't for that first Chinook coming out in the mid-1980s, the sea kayaking phenomenon would have been a sliver of its current self. They paddle well enough for most people and some of the models, like the Sea Lion, are very fast. >From my point of view, the serious downside of the boats (other than weight) are two, one correctable the other not so. The correctable one is the question of bulkheads...use airbags. The non-correctable one is lack of a long life. The boats do get brittle with time and are not going to last anywhere as long as a fiberglass boat. You can extend the life by storing carefully and not dragging a plastic boat over rocks and logs, maybe even nourish the surface to keep it from drying out. Perhaps in our disposable society today, this weakness is not seen as one. ralph diaz -- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Ralph Diaz . . . Folding Kayaker newsletter PO Box 0754, New York, NY 10024 Tel: 212-724-5069; E-mail: rdiaz_at_ix.netcom.com "Where's your sea kayak?"----"It's in the bag." ----------------------------------------------------------------------- *************************************************************************** PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List - All postings copyright the author and not to be reproduced outside PaddleWise without author's permission Submissions: paddlewise_at_lists.intelenet.net Subscriptions: paddlewise-request_at_lists.intelenet.net Website: http://www.paddlewise.net/ ***************************************************************************Received on Thu Feb 03 2000 - 07:06:08 PST
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.4.0 : Thu Aug 21 2025 - 16:30:19 PDT