Submitted: 06-11-2008 by T.Glacy
My wife and I just spent our first day on the water with the 2 person version of this boat....7 hours and 13 miles down the lower Saco River here in Maine.
Pros: Boat inflated quickly and easily, looked fantastic, and handled the 2 of us plus a days worth of gear with no problem. Boat was stable, comfortable (I was impressed that even after a whole day in the boat my back felt fine... even in my Dagger kayak I need to take breaks every couple hours due to back issues). It is also quite portable, we had to portage around 1 dam, and we were also able to deflate it and load it into our Toyota Matrix at the end of the trip (something we cannot do with our hard-hull kayaks and one of the big reasons we purchased this inflatable. Overall very good bang for the $.
Cons: Did not track well at all on this body of water...even with the 4 mini-skegs on the bottom the boat tended to drift all over the place. Being an inflatable it also was quite slow in the water compared to our other kayaks and canoe. Took a lot of paddle power to keep it moving with any decent speed. As the day wore on we noticed that the bladders seemed to be losing a bit of pressure... it wasn't terrible but definitely noticeable. We concluded it was due to the drop in temperature and loss of direct sunlight hitting the boat as we neared the end of our trip at dusk. Finally, as we were breaking down after taking out of the water I noticed there was a spot on the underside of the boat where the seam-tape had pulled apart. There was a bit of water in the boat at the end of our trip, and I would attribute most of that to water that came in off our paddles etc... but this spot makes me nervous and I will need to figure out a way to re-seal this portion of it. |