My son is fairly new to kayaking. He’s paddled on a lake and a river, all in a couple of whitewater boats. Two of the boats are mine, and one is a friend’s kid-sized boat. Rather than continue to beg boats from friends, and continue to let him wear my sprayskirt or my wife’s, neither of which fit him and made me worry that he wouldn’t be able to get them off the boat when it flipped over, we recently went to the local Outdoors, Inc store and got a sprayskirt with a tunnel that fit him and a bungee rand for easy on-and-off the boat. So, here’s my son’s first product review for
LEVEL 6 EASY-PEASY SPRAY SKIRT
Let me start off by saying I love kayakaing and to enjoy it right you have to have appropriate materials: boat, paddle, sprayskirt, helmet and life vest. In order to have fun you have to have the stuff in good condition and it fits.
I’m here to say the new spray skirt I got is perfect! It keeps out water, it comes off easy, it’s adjustable. Compared to my mother’s rubber-randed small-tunnel, kinda leaky spray skirt, it’s pretty good.
This one is made by a company I like “Level 6”. It’s pretty secure on water, comfortable, adjustable, two easy ways to get it off, and a bungee band which is much easier than rubber and can come off and go on easy wet or not.
Yet this beautiful thing has its downsides, too. When trying to put it on the boat, the back sometimes slips off. It did not let out heat. The boat was like an oven on the water. All in all, I give this a 9 out of 10 rating.
Like the sound of it? Shop an Easy Peasy for you or your kids. Click on the skirt:
Could it be modified, with some PVC or ABS pipe to ‘let the heat out’? Maybe a few inches in front of the tunnel, and attached via a rubber grommet. (have a professional sew a circle just slightly smaller than the pipe, with a rubber grommet that holds the ‘heat pipe’, but allows it to be inserted easily?
Nah, the problem wasn’t the skirt. The problem was that the kid was in a boat on a lake in full sun and 102 degree weather. Normal use of these skirts is on whitewater, where the boat’s being cooled all the time by the river. It’ll work.