Your chosen boat must have:
- All round perimeter deck-lines. Most skip the cockpit area as the coaming is a good substitute. Ideally the deck-lines should be at least 6mm in diameter and retro-reflective. Narrow deck-lines are very hard on the hands and can be hard to grip when your hands are cold and going numb. These are essential for hanging onto your boat in surf or rough water; controlling boats during rescues
and for holding boats together when rafted up. Be prepared to retro-fit decent deck-lines as even some excellent boats come as standard with narrow ones. This may relate to colder climates where paddlers wear gloves as a matter of course. - The deck-lines and bungees should be fastened with good quality (preferably recessed) deck fittings. The last thing you want is to have deck fittings ripping out of a boat during a rescue. All of a sudden you have a heavy, pointed missile thrashing around over which you have little or no control. Valley deck fittings are high quality and strong and used on many good brands of kayak. Deck fittings that are not recessed will cost you many square inches of skin during rescues and many scratches and gouges in the gel coat of your front deck. (Or your paddling mates front decks). Do not try to carry a boat by the deck lines, this is not what they are for.
- Water-tight bulkheads front and rear. These form water-tight compartments and add flotation making the kayak virtually unsinkable as long as the structural integrity of the compartments isn’t compromised by damage or hatch cover removal. It is good practice to fill any free space in the hatches with inflated dry bags to minimize flooding in the event of structural damage or the loss of a hatch cover. Most serious touring boats also have a day hatch that offers a third water-tight compartment and some boats, such as the Paddling Perfection Polar Bear, have four. There’s also a trend to small glove boxes in front of the cockpit. These are nice but don’t really count as a watertight compartment.
- The boat should be strong. Light is nice, if you can afford a boat that is strong and light, that’s great, but you are not likely to find one that is strong and light and cheap. If you’re on a budget then get the strong boat even if it weighs an extra couple of kilos.
The boat needs to be fairly rigid. Composite materials are generally stiffer than plastic ones but may be less impact resistant. Boats designed for flat water often lack the strength required for sea kayaks. Picture sitting in the cockpit of a plastic flat water boat and imagine what will happen to your legs if it folds in half at the cockpit in the surf. (This has happened.) Triple layer foam core plastics are quite rigid and good designs may have welded plastic bulkheads that stiffen them further. Foam bulkheads will provide buoyancy but do less for the structural strength of a boat. Single layer plastic boats often have metal tubing fitted in the cockpit area to stiffen the hull and may have a vertical tube at the forward bulkhead to stiffen the deck. Watch out for excessive flexing of the deck when you sit behind the cockpit. The deck in front of the cockpit also needs to be strong as this area takes a lot of strain during rescues when draining water from fully loaded expedition boats that are often moving violently up and down in rough water. - A good network of bungee lines and or deck netting to secure things on the deck while you have breaks and so on. Don’t expect these to secure anything to your kayak when punching out through the surf. Put it in the hatches or have it tethered if you want to keep it.
- There are lots of bells and whistles offered by some brands, many of them are no more than gimmicks. A few nice ones to have are:
- Hands free bailing system, this may be a foot-pump fitted to a custom bulkhead tailored to your leg length or it may be an electric bilge pump operated by a twelve volt battery system in the day hatch. In Australia these are considered standard equipment by most experienced sea kayakers. There are also some brands that offer a deck mounted hand pump. These have higher flow rates than a foot pump but make it impossible to pump the boat out and paddle yourself out of trouble, bracing as required.
- Tow-point, this may be a fitting behind the cockpit or a loop of webbing beside the cockpit, or even a fairlead and cleat on the back deck. In our part of the world these are often consider safer than waist mounted systems due to the enormous energy stored in the long-period swells that occur in the Southern Ocean.
- Deck mounted compass. Make sure that you can read it in the location designed to mount it on the boat. An LED light is nice to have built into the compass when it gets dark.
- Seat adjustment to allow trimming with different loads and different paddlers. Cockpit fit out that facilitates custom fitting the boat to the paddler. Thigh braces are good to have but should fit you.
- Good quality hatch covers. Valley and Kayak sport hatch covers are very good. For my money, Valley hatches are the best around. Some designs also use neoprene covers with a fibreglass cover over the neoprene seal. Some boats use screw in hatch covers, these are a bad idea as they quickly jam as soon as some find sand and grit gets into the threads.
- Good quality foot-pegs. These should be robust, as they are an integral part of controlling the kayak. If they break or are prone to slipping then they can compromise your safety in rough water. They should be easy to adjust on the water without having to get out of the boat.
