Good kayak, but is it a dinghy?
Issue 40 : Jan/Feb 2005
Our C&C 30 didn’t come with a dinghy when we purchased her. On a hunch, we bought a 17-foot rotomolded two-person kayak that we manage to shoehorn inside the port shrouds on deck. This boat is built with the same technology used in building high-quality garbage cans. It’s tough and easily paddled. The drawbacks are that it is not very easily towed and its 17 feet take up a lot of space on the port side of our 30-footer.
Still, we liked the idea of having a kayak for a dinghy so we decided to equip our C&C Mega 30 trailerable sailboat with a kayak also. But because the Mega would be towed with a truck more than sailed, we chose a Folbot, which, in collapsed mode, stows into two large bags, each light enough to be carried by one person and small enough to be stowed inside the Mega when we’re trailering her.
The “Mega project” is at two years and counting. We haven’t had her in the water yet, but we’ve had the use of the Folbot for most of those two years. At this point, we actually know more about the dinghy’s characteristics than we do about the sailboat’s.
The Folbot concept is very old and has some characteristics in common with Eskimo-style kayaks. The “skin” of a Folbot is a strong fabric material stretched over a structure made of aluminum tubes and glass-filled nylon frames.
Assembly time
The time needed to assemble and disassemble the boat varies with the number of times we’ve done it and how recently we’ve done it. We’re still at that stage where Karen reads the instructions to me one line at a time and ticks them off. It’s never taken us more than half an hour; I believe we could get it down to 15 minutes if we assembled it more frequently.
When we ordered the boat, I had no hope that it would be as fast or as maneuverable as the rotomolded plastic kayak that we dearly love. Wrong. The Folbot is lighter, easier to paddle, and more maneuverable. While the plastic kayak needs the rudder when two of us are in the boat, the Folbot does not.
We find the plastic kayak more comfortable to sit in, and I don’t believe that we would ever assemble or disassemble that Folbot on the deck of a sailboat — too complicated, too many pieces, too easy to lose something overboard. If we were to tow it, I would reinforce the bow eye for this purpose, but I don’t expect we’ll tow it, based on bad experiences we’ve had when towing the plastic kayak.
So far, the Folbot, named Seaflower, has been a wonderful dinghy for our truck, but I don’t know if she’s going to be the dinghy for the Mega. That remains to be seen.
Thank you to Sailrite Enterprises, Inc., for providing free access to back issues of Good Old Boat through intellectual property rights. Sailrite.com
