You ever get off the river, strip off your soaking gear and wonder what to do with it?  Everyone has their system- from  “Set it out flat on the ground and let it dry before we load up” to “Throw it all into the trunk and we’ll air out the car and the gear when we get back” to “Place it all neatly into the cage under the boat rack and the wind will dry it while we drive, then we can scrape the bugs off when we get home.”  Yes, there are many ways to deal with stinking, wet pfds and shorts and kayak skirts and dry tops and all the rest. Bottom line is that you DON’T EVER want someone’s wet polypro underwear going manky under the back seat of your Murano. There’s some serious biology that goes on in river-soaked, sweaty gear, and you don’t want it happening in places that can’t be neatly picked up and thrown out if worse comes to worst.

Here’s the trick I learned and stuck with at most opportunities:

The DrainBox- go get two of those stackable plastic containers, of a size that’s large enough to hold as much gear as possible and still fit into your vehicle (or someone else’s vehicle if they’re kind enough to let you bring your big fat box with you.)  Drill some holes in one of the plastic boxes.  Put the box with holes in it in the box without holes in it.  There’s an inch or two of space between the bottoms of the two boxes that’ll hold the water that drips off your gear. There you go.

I drive a Chevy Suburban, so I got a nice big box.  Lots of gear fits in it.  So when mine is the takeout vehicle for a kayak trip, I have the box ready- in fact, it’s usually pretty easy to just use the box as my gear bag on the way to the river, so my stuff comes out of it to begin with.  At the takeout, we all slime ourselves out of our sweaty stinky soaking gear (adore the alliterative approach, don’t you agree?) we pitch it all into the box, drive to the campground and empty the box onto clotheslines.  The bottom box can then be tipped over, draining away the river water that’s dripped off all the gear while we drove.  Nice.

It works pretty good for kids’ pool party toys, water balloon storage, laundry issues, or any number of other “this wet stuff has to be moved from here to there” applications. Make you one and see.

Another useful use is this:  You get home from your river trip, you take the box out of your truck, you dribble some OdoBan over the whole pile of stuff, turn the hose on it and use a paddle to mash it all around for a good twenty minutes.  Then lift the drain box out, dump the washwater from the other box, set it all somewhere that it can drain well, and hose the whole mess down until you can’t smell OdoBan any more.  Let the drainbox sit and drain for an hour or two, then hang all the gear in your storage building or over the spare tub or on your mom’s clothesline.  Once dry, you pile it all back into the drainbox for the next big adventure. Rock and repeat.