Folding In Sydney

I ordered my boat directly from Feathercraft in December 2005 for delivery to Illinois in January when I was in St. Charles on business. I opted to buy the boat in this manner rather that support my local businesses as after dealer mark-up, import duty, and the various charges just made the proposition of buying the boat in Australia too expensive.

So I eagerly unpacked my boat in my hotel room in St. Charles and after studying the instruction manual managed to put the boat together in a little under an hour and a half. A little different from the 20 minutes quoted on the website. There were a few factors at work here, firstly assembling the boat in a room just wide enough for the boat to fit with the bed and with just about 6 inches extra in length between door and window, secondly I was taking my time and reading the manual again at each stage, and thirdly I still made a couple of mistakes and had to undo a few steps to correct.

The kayak looked sturdy once assembled and I could not wait to take it out for a bit of a paddle. I repacked it again the following night, after getting a confused query from the cleaners who could not get into the room to clean as the majority of the rooms space was taken over by the boat. I made sure that the 4-piece paddle blades were protected by inserting them into the centre of the rolled skin and packed the frame to the side of the skin. I wrapped a towel round the tubes to protect them from the roughhousing of the baggage handlers before closing the bag and praying that the boat would make it to Australia in the same number of pieces as when I packed it.

I arrived back in Australia there the Quarantine inspection agents were eagerly curious about my boat and seemed very impressed that a boat would fit in a bag and that it was not in fact a tent. After then transferring to a budget domestic airline, paying a stiff surcharge for excess baggage and then another hour's drive finally made it to my holiday destination of Mission Beach in the Far North of Queensland.

After checking the boat and watching the assembly video, they really need to offer a DVD option BTW, I managed to bring the assembly time down to a little over an hour. The issue this time was that the poles were not sliding together very easily and I managed to build up a bit of a sweat getting it all together.

So it was time for the maiden voyage. I did not have a PFD with me, was not wearing a stinger suit, which is all rather silly especially considering the abundance of Box Jellyfish in the water at the time.

So the trip was very short and I was back on the beach with in a couple of minutes of having broken through the light surf and turned around. I had a big smile on my face and a relieved looking girlfriend.