Complete Folding Kayaker

Here's the complete guide to choosing, using, and enjoying life with the ultimate portable, human-powered boat.

Why a folding kayak?

Compared with conventional kayaks, foldables are more stable and forgiving, more seaworthy, and more easily repaired and modified. They have proved their worth in difficult, rugged service--carrying ashore commandos, making at least two transatlantic crossings, voyaging the length of the Nile, rounding Cape Horn, and touring the South Pacific.

Folding kayaks are the only seaworthy boats you can store in a corner of a small closet and carry to bay or lake on a bicycle, the subway, or an airliner. Here is the first complete guide to choosing, using, and enjoying life with the only seagoing craft that qualifies as check-through luggage.

Through his newsletter, Folding Kayaker, Ralph Diaz has heard what nearly 1,000 folding-kayak owners have learned about their boats, and how they use and enjoy them. He's lived closely enough with all of the major folding kayaks to knwo how best to use them and to overcome any shortcomings an individual model may have. He's learned from the manufacturers all the intricacies of how their various boats are constructed and how to take care of them. And he's visited with voyagers who embarked on epic journeys with foldable boats and shared how their boats performed under extreme stress, what they might have changed, and the techniques that ensured their comfort and survival.

And in the Complete Folding Kayaker, Ralph Diaz brings together this wealth of knowledge to help you discover the full range of possibilities in this most liberating of personal watercraft--the folding kayak.

"As a restless soul, not a practitioner of horizontal or sedentary vacations, I realized that one of the annoyances of traveling in remote places was the absence of reliable transportation. Many times, on the Scottish coast, in the Mediterranean, in Southeast Asia, or in the Pacific, I found myself standing on a beach and looking at an offshore island I wished to visit. There used to be a boat that took people out, I would be told. Nowadays no one goes there. But I wanted to go there. And maybe I wanted to stay there; carry enough food and equipment to last me a week or more. Perhaps I did not want to be pinned down by a hired boatman who would have said, 'Mister, what time do you want to go back?' I might never want to go back . . . I began to travel with a folding kayak and my life changed."--from the foreword by Paul Theroux