Boats

If you go online, you can find a good deal of kayak snobbery. If you are going fishing in the ocean, or white-water, then yes, you could justify a better boat. But if you are just going on calm inland water, you really can’t beat Lifetime boats for price, handling, and features. And they are indestructible. Lifetime also makes Emotion kayaks.

One more note: if you are going inland, then yellow is a great color for a kayak – it makes you easy to see and hopefully harder to run over by drunken motorboats. But if you are going in the ocean, yellow has a major drawback: Sharks are fascinated by yellow. In World War II, the Navy found out that yellow life jackets were a very bad idea. Online, you can find multiple videos of sharks harassing kayaks, and in every case it is a yellow hull. I even have personal experience: Once on a dive I got into a school of spiny dogfish, and they took turns trying to steal any yellow gear I had. Fortunately, dogfish are small and harmless, and the whole thing was kind of comical.




This is a cable-lock I made, about 12 feet long. It is just 3/16″ coated steel cable from the hardware store, with crimp ferrules, and a big steel ring in one end. The ferrules fit through the scupper holes on the boat, but the steel ring does not. Together with any padlock, this will secure the boat (or several) to your truck, roof rack, a tree, or anything else that is handy. You can take this cable with you, it will give you peace of mind if you leave the boat unattended to go exploring on land.

The object is not to stop a determined thief – you can’t do that. It is to stop someone from casually taking your boat with their bare hands. Don’t lock the boat by the handles – they are easily cut with a pocket knife and cheap to replace. Run the cable through a scupper hole, and a thief would have to destroy the boat to steal it. If your boat doesn’t have scupper holes, you can probably find someplace to thread the cable though, or make a suitable hole in the seat.

You can find a cable like this all set to go on Amazon for under 20 bucks. Where I used a steel ring, you could use a second padlock.

Printed from njkayak.net