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For the unitiated, there are a slew of boats from which to choose when outfitting your whitewater rafting fleet. Inflatable technology has been a model of punctuated equilibrium, i.e, innovations that truly change how we look at inflatables happen every so often, but for the most part the models we see every year represent tweaks to standard models.
Probably the last great inflatable innovation was the self-bailing floor. Basically, you have an inflatable floor that sits up a little higher than the surface of the water and there are holes (or grommets in laced-in floor construction) along the gunwales where the water drains. Before the advent of the self bailing rafts, if you were running a lengthy, beefy stretch, your boat would fill up with water making it harder to control. You would often have to catch an eddy in between drops, unhook your buckets and bail to lighten the load. Self-bailing rafts obviated the need for buckets, opening up more technical whitewater to inflatable navigation.
But I digress. We are looking at buying some new boats from NRS. We’ve gone with the standard 16-foot Expedition series from NRS for the past five years, but we are looking at a diminishing tube model with four thwarts. We’re trying to work out the dimensions as I write this. We should be seeing these boats sometime in late June or early July, which would be great so we can test drive them on the New River before running the Gauley River in the fall. As we find out more about the performance of these, I’ll keep you posted.
