What gear is necessary for kayaking? The essentials for kayaking include kayak, helmet, life jacket, spray skirt, and paddles. The absolute necessary gear is a kayak appropriate to the water you'll be paddling...
The absolute necessary gear is a kayak appropriate to the water you'll be paddling in. Second you need a helmet. Let's say it's summer and we are going to be white water kayaking. You'll need a current white water river kayak, not one of the models that's 20 years old. I say this because so many improvements have been made and the newer ones are much safer.
The boats used for white water are typically shorter and flatter on the bottom to help maneuver around obstacles. For lake kayaking or recreational kayaking those boats tend can actually be anywhere from say 6 feet to 17 feet long. These boats tend to be wider and have what we call a keel, which is a fin underneath the boat all the way down the center to help you stay straight and fight wind currents and things like that. It also helps give the boat stability and speed.
Then you'll need a helmet specific to white water kayaking. Next, you'll need a kayak specific lifejacket. There are lots of different kinds of life jackets. A life jacket you'd use for jet skiing or white water rafting won't work. The kayaking life jackets are cut to give you a lot of shoulder movement to paddle with. There is also more floatation in the front of the jacket than the back - it's what we call a 60/40 jacket. 60% of the foam is in the front. The other thing is that the jackets are cut short-waisted so you can keep your legs straight up and in front of you without the jacket cutting into your torso.
These white water kayaking jackets are also different from the ones you would use on the lake to accommodate for the fact that white water is less buoyant than lake water because it's mixed with air. So you need to have more foam in your white water jacket to float you higher in the water when you are swimming out of your kayak.
The next thing you need is a spray skirt, which sits on your waist. It's made out of neoprene, like wet suit material, and it sits around your waist and around the cockpit of the kayak. It's called a spray skirt because it kind of looks like a skirt when you are wearing it. It keeps the spray out of the boat, so the boat doesn't fill up with water.
The last essential item is a paddle and it needs to be a specific paddle to white water. The white water paddles are the shortest of all the paddles and the most durable because you are going to be hitting rocks and things like that.
Those are the essentials as far as equipment goes - kayak, helmet, life jacket, spray skirt, and paddles. From there you get into clothing and that just depends on the weather and the situation you are paddling in. You may need cold water gear that keeps you warm or a suit that keeps water out of your neck and wrists. You may need to wear layers. There are some high-tech fabrics out there designed specifically for different water conditions.
If it's hot, you'll need to protect yourself from the sun with sunscreen and sunglasses.
