Re: [Paddlewise] Fatal Accidents Involving Folding Kayaks?

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Matt Broze" <mkayaks_at_oz.net>
> what it was about those folding kayaks that made them so dangerous. I
think
> he speculated that it might be that the Kleppers were so wide they were
> impossible to right again once they had capsized (and maybe that, unlike
> narrow kayaks with tiny cockpits, they couldn't be Eskimo rolled).

 Interesting thought but not true.  The doubles can be righted fairly easily
either by going over the upside down boat and pulling or by ducking under
and into the cockpit where you will find an airpocket to catch your breath
and then flip the boat back rightside up.

> I'm sure there have been other fatalities in folding kayaks but I'm not
> recalling any at the moment. One well known instructor around here had an
> old Foldboat's frame coming apart early in his kayaking career when he was
> out in rough seas. His girlfriend, in the back seat, later told me that
boat
> had gotten so flexible

Such a situation does happen very occasionally.  I had a friend who was out
in a double Klepper when the block of the horseshoe and block connection at
the keel part of the frame broke off.  So the boat got quite floppy but
Kleppers (and Folbots) have some redundancy of connections built in: there
is a similar horseshoe and block connection up at the gunwales on both sides
of the boat plus there are stringers or longerons lower down at the chine
plus the rigidity of the coaming itself that overlaps the connection of
frame halves.  It doesn't feel nice when any one of such components break
but you can get to shoe because of redundancy of frame components locking
the halves together.

> A bear had obviously chewed on the folding kayak that Will Nordby

> parts of the missing kayaker. It has been reported by some that bears
really
> like to chew on the rubber in folding kayaks. Well, maybe that was just
> another red herring put out by the OKABC, I don't remember where I heard
or
> read it first.

Actually this is true.  Bears are known to have a speech impediment in
pronouncing the letter "r".  It comes out with a "bl" sound; one bear
mistakenly heard another say that there was some blubber over there and the
foldable suffered the consequences.  You might think that that this "bl"
point is a lot of "bs" and you would be right but old wives tales about
folding kayaks are a lot of bs anyway.  :-)

ralph diaz
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