There’s an inverse relationship between the amount of hassle that it takes to get a boat to the water and how often you actually go boating, and it’s this truth drives my obsession with simplicity and light weight.
Likely because of medical issues that I deal with relating to metabolism, I’ve always found the normal processes of setting up small boats to be exhausting and annoying. Friends would show up with heavy fiberglass sea kayaks and tubs full of gear, and maybe an hour later and multiple trips down the beach we might actually go boating. Ultimately this led me to become mostly a solo boater where I could throw a skin boat in the back of a beat up old pick up at 5pm, throw in a fishing pole, drive to the beach, zip my dry suit over my sawdust-covered work clothes, paddle out through the surf, kill a fish, catch a few waves, carry the boat and the fish back to the truck, drive home at 8pm, eat the fish, go to bed, start building boats again in the morning. I just never saw why things need to be much more complicated than that and wherever possible I try to build easy deployment into the boat designs themselves.
Whenever I launch a new boat I start a list in my head of everything that annoys me between wanting to go boating and actually getting on the water and then later try to find ways that I can design around it. The nesting canoes are an absolute coup for convenience of transport. I’m also just really starting to enjoy the whole process of canoeing because it’s a lot less gear-intensive than kayaking in general. Of course I’m not gonna be taking a canoe out through the surf anytime soon and there are big trade-offs with seaworthiness and speed, but in the context that canoes work well there’s just a beautiful minimalism that I think is really well-suited to skin on frame.
Of course I still use float bags on river trips, practice rescues, and wear dry suits when necessary but I also strongly believe that it’s good judgment more than anything that keeps you safe.
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