We have been thinking about buying a folding kayak since our current boat is very long and heavy and awkward to load and carry on top of our truck. Leo found a used Klepper kayak advertised on Kijiji so we made a spontaneous trip to the Island to check it out.
We managed to fit in a short visit and epic sushi feed with our friends Ken and Sue in Vancouver, and the next day we took the ferry from Horseshoe Bay to Nanaimo.
We stayed with former Williams Lakers John and Janice in Comox and had a great visit. Leo got to go for a trail run in the Cumberland Hills with John and the local running club.
The kayak turned out to be just 10 minutes down the road from where we were staying. We decided to buy it and had immediate buyers remorse. It's very old, from the early sixties we think and it has a natural rubber bottom that is showing its age.
But when we took it home and assembled it, it was in better shape than we thought. There's a few tears in the canvas we can easily repair. The main job to be done is to restitch the seams attaching the sponsons to the canvas. The sponsons are two long inflatable tubes that run along the side of the kayak. After the frame is inserted into the skin you blow up the sponsons to make the kayak rigid. The seller was given a quote of $600 by an upholsterer to do the job, but I'm not prepared to spend that kind of money, so I will be hand stitching it on with a sailmaker's awl. That's 2 x the 17 foot length and some of it will involve crawling inside the skin at either end to do the stitching. Which seems appropriate, using 100+ year-old technology to repair a 100+ year old design of kayak.
It comes complete with a sail we'll probably never use and the original (rotting) blow up rubber seat cushions (imagine if you were still using the air mattress you had in 1965). The frame is in perfect shape and we can always order a replacement skin.
Leo enjoying the Cumberland trails.
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