Casey Walker, an active BASK member, was considering buying a folding kayak but didn’t know how to evaluate them. So he found an expert (Ralph Diaz who publishes a magazine about folding kayaks) and arranged to have a “Symposium” on folding kayaks. He presented this symposium idea to the BASK officers and convinced us that BASK should underwrite the event. Casey’s favorite local park is Samual P Talor State Park between San Rafael and Tomales Bay, so that is where the symposium took place.
We all showed up at the park for two days of talks under the trees in the group campground. The weather was terrible for a series of outdoor talks, with overcast skies and occasional heavy drizzle. But so many people were interested in folding kayaks that we packed the campground to the limit and all stood around in the rain to hear what Ralph Diaz had to say. BASK members who already had folding boats were encouraged to bring them so the rest of us could see them being put together. Folding boats have been very popular in Europe for decades and there are several popular European manufacturers. Folbot is a US manufacurer of similar boats and also the company that sold me the kit for my first kayak. But the most popular folding boats today come from FeatherCraft in Canada. As I saw all the different brands of boats demonstrated I was impressed that the FeatherCraft were the most like a “real kayak”. To quote Mark Muscat (a non objective FeatherCraft owner) “All those other boats are OK, if you like canoes”. It is true that all the traditional designs of folding boats have large cockpits, almost as large as the open deck of a canoe. Only the FeatherCraft have coamings and waterproof spray-skirts like a kayak. Many of the other manufacturers offer spraydecks that have coamings for attaching a spay-skirt, but these do not look good to me. They seem to be designed for keeping spray out of the boats, and are attached with snaps! If you used one of these in surf or even leaned the boat over for a turn on a placid river, the water would rush in the gaps between the snaps. I decided if I was to get a folding kayak, it would have to be a FeatherCraft.
On the second day of the symposium, there was supposed to be a demonstration of the various boats on the water. We were supposed to reconvene at Hearts Desire Beach on Tomales Bay. I figured that kayaking is a wet sport (despite what Derek Hutchinson says) and getting rained on is not a problem once we finally got on the water. But almost everyone else felt differently and the demonstration was postponed for a nicer day. (Which fell on a weekend when I was out of town). I went to the canceled demonstration anyway and found only three other hearty souls there. One reason I especially wanted to go paddling was because it was my first opportunity to actually paddle my shiny new Coaster kayak! The four of us got wet and paddled in the drizzle up the west side of Tomales Bay and back. Mark Muscat was one of those paddlers and he told me about an ad he had just seen on the bulletin board at a local camping store. “FeatherCraft Khatsalano for sale”.
The Khatsalano is not my first choice of folding kayaks, but it is an interesting one and the price was so low it sounded too good to be true. I called the number and arranged to look at the boat. In the process of putting it together I saw a bunch of confusing things that eventually crystallized in my mind. The details I had learned about the different boats at the symposium allowed me to figure out that this boat was not a Khatsalano, but a different FeatherCraft model called a K-Light! The K-Light is a smaller, less expensive model than the Khatsalano. When I pointed this out to the guy selling it I was able to talk the price down to an even more reasonable number. The K-Light is not my first choice in folding kayaks either, but I figured I could find uses for it. This one had been poorly treated and put away with sand and salt in the joints. Some of the aluminum parts had corroded and fused together and the boat could not be completely assembled until I had done a lot of cleaning and nearly destructive work freeing things up.
I told some friends of mine that my fleet of kayaks was now complete. I had a diving boat (a Frenzy), a touring boat (a Scupper Pro), a double (a Seda Explorer), a narrow Baidarka for racing, a rock gardening boat (a Coaster), a surfing boat (a Pirouette), and now a folding boat for taking with me traveling. They didn’t believe me. They think I’ll still be buying more boats in the future.