About 9 AM on a sunny weekend with tides running in the right direction, you can find us at a put-in point, assembling a complicated-looking apparatus covered in heavy canvas from two suitcase-sized bags. We start with a layout of gear, no piece of which weighs more than 10 pounds—most are in the single pound-range.
Fifteen minutes of organized flurry, and voila! A kayak!
A two-person Folbot® Greenland II kayak geared for ocean expeditions, to be precise. For weekend paddlers in relatively calm water, we're ridiculous "over-boated" with the expedition gear, but the dream is that someday, we will be ready to explore the open ocean.
This is our windfall kayak, purchased when we came into enough money to fulfill our dream of having a folding boat. One of the beauties of Folbot is their practice of selling direct to the consumer. The standard craft today in this two-person model is under $2500. With a discount for buying in July (offered every year), we got it with the $300 expedition add-on for substantially less.
Commercial folding boats designed like the Inuit kayak have been around longer than hardshell sport kayaks, with a 100th anniversary coming up in 2006. The earliest models featured frames of wood and a skin of rubber-coated cotton canvas; present-day craft use aluminum, high-tensile plastics and waterproof rip-stop Dacron canvas with a synthetic rubber coating.
Kayaks are usually reviewed on five qualities: Stability, Handling (including speed), Durability, Portability, and Equipment Detail. For folding kayaks, an additional parameter must be considered: Ease of Assembly.
Ease of Assembly: Most folding kayaks take 15 to 20 minutes to assemble, with practice. Critical differences hinge on whether one needs to learn a specific sequence of assembly, with a scale of forgiveness that ranges from 1 (most parts can be assembled in any order, sequences that do exist are obvious to the beginner) to 5 (rigid sequence, deviation makes it impossible to complete assembly).
Assembly of a Folbot is a 2 on this scale. The frame is partially-assembled in two segments outside the skin, then shoe-horned into the skin and locked into place with the remaining frame members. Aluminum coaming strips slide onto the edge of the opening and lock onto the frame with T-bolts. Frame members are labeled to indicate which position they fit on the base of the frame, but it's easy to mistakenly rotate them all—in which case, the coaming doesn't fit.
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Article comments
1 - Phil Cotton
Pat... thanks for the very well done review and for sharing it with us, not to
mention permission to use it. We may well include it on our web site for
others to read. Glad you are enjoying the GII. Let us know if we can ever help
in any way.
Phil Cotton
Pres., Folbot, Inc.
2 - Roger Tompkins
You nailed it Dude. The best kayak ever built.