rockybu:
That all really depends on where you live, we live in far south Florida, where the water is always warm, so it's not a problem for us to just jump out in waste deep water and slide the scupper kart into the scupper holes under the boat before coming in. We then roll out of the water and up to the car (very handy). Also all the beaches are beautiful sugar white sand and always very clean.
Now if your living where the water is a little colder (or muddy and rocky), and actually need to wear weather gear, it's a totally different story.
What we do then is drive the boat up to shore, I then get out, lift the front of the boat bow and pull onto shore. I then flip the boat onto it's side (at the waters edge), and place the scupper cart into the holes, then tip back down, (this is also when I pull the mirage drive) I then roll up to the car (still very handy). As a kayaker you should have everything in the kayak tied down anyway so when tipping it up on it's side nothing spills out. We learned our lesson one time running rapids on our tandem kayak, we hit a rock and went over, everything that was not tied down went shooting down stream, we never found half our stuff (ie... life jackets, water bottles, paddles, cameras, hats and shoes, basically all the stuff you wouldn't think about. My wife had the hatch open getting her camera out when we went over, the hull also filled up with water. She was trying to take a picture of her sister who went over in front of us (hitting the same damn rock), so we went over her and her boat, she lost all her stuff also. Honestly even with all that we had one of the most fun times we ever had that day, we also learned a lot about tying thing down, I'm sure all the locals enjoyed all our stuff. To be honest this was not the first time we tipped over and lost everything, and probably won't be the last.
If your worried about scratching your hull, it's soft plastic, your not going to hurt it, most people don't worry about scratching the bottom of their hull a little (think of the scratches as a badge of honor, and fun times LOL). I used to put a layer of 3M packing tape on the bottom of my hull to keep the scratches down in the high wear areas (mostly bow, stern, and the side I roll the kayak up on when putting the scupper cart in). I would replace the tape every couple trips, but I gave up after a while, now we just use the boat and don't worry about a few small scratches.
If you read through this forum, you will see many ways to fix and clean up scratches in the hull, it's pretty easy, and your not going to wear through it, they are very thick.
Hope this helps you.
Bob
|
