How to Choose & Buy a Kayak: Beginning Kayaking Lesson

Video Transcript

Hi, welcome to Expert Village. My name is Lloyd Reeves. I am a seven time national champ in the past when I was younger. I was with ACA and USCA. Right now we are going to discuss choosing a kayak and before you can choose a kayak you really need to know what you want to do with a kayak. You can’t have one boat magically do everything. You might be able to get away with it but that one boat is not going to do very well at everything along with being able to do it. If you are just going to play in the water and go look at birds and you are not interested in speed and all, something like one of these kiwi sit inside is great. They are dry and can have camera gear in them. They are made of plastic so they are pretty cheap. If you are going to be going on the open ocean I would not recommend a boat like this. I know people do it but they are not easy to rescue. I would start with a sit on top, something like one of the scupper pro’s. If you are into making a little more distance in traveling you want to look into a Sea Kayak. Make sure you have bolt heads in the front and the back and that you have your pump with you. Don’t go out on the ocean with your Sea Kayak until you have done a rescue in shallow water near the shore because it is not that easy and you want to make sure you can do it in rough conditions but a Sea Kayak will get you going on the furtherest. If you are into going distance on the open ocean, something along the lines of the Surf Skier is the way to go. If you want to race flat water, you need to pick up something like a Olympic Boat over here, they are 17 feet long, no minimum beam and they have to weigh at least 26 pounds. If you are doing marathons, the same boat except there is no weight limit so you can spend as much as $4,000 on a full carbon one that is extremely light. It’s sort of like racing a fast unicycle though you got to give yourself 50 to 100 hours of tipping over before you start feeling comfortable on a boat like that. Also if you have time on your hands but not a lot of money, you can build yourself a really nice good performing light weight wooden sea kayak. I’ve done two from Chesapeake Light Craft, they are great. Pygmy I know has a great raft but I have not built any of theirs but I have heard good things about them but just find a nice wooden kit and at the end of your winter time you will have a really nice boat. These are easy to repair the plastic ones. If you have someone with a little plastic weld kit is possible to repair them but they are also hard to damage. Fiberglass boats, those are easy to repair just like repairing a surf board. There is a Kevlar material, it is sort of in between glass and carbon fiber. It is real strong, you get a light boat like a graphite boat or carbon boat but the downside on that is that Kevlar will actually get fuzzy when you sand it but it is so strong that it is hard to sand it well enough to repair it. It takes someone with a very high speed disc grinder to repair that.

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