My wife and I were sitting on a bench near a local lake, having a picnic dinner. On a little grassy spot nearby I noticed a young woman put down a large bag, and then slide out some large, odd-looking plastic pieces. Then she unfolded something, and, oh my goodness, she had brought a fold-up kayak in that bag:

A friend joined her with sliding some joiner tubular pieces over the seams on top to zip these seams together:

The whole assembly took less than ten minutes. The resulting kayak was very light to carry:

And away she paddled:

I had drifted over to talk to her as she was assembling the kayak, and she said she just stored the boat in its bag in a closet in her apartment. Also, that it was great  fun to use.

This was one of a selection of foldable kayaks sole by ORU. They make smaller, lighter, cheaper models for paddling on still water, and heavier-duty kayaks for ocean waves and white-water rivers. These kayaks get generally very high reviews. They are a bit pricy, and may not stand up for long scraping over rocks. But they are  clearly  full-blown, worth-paddling kayaks with rigid sides and clean lines.

This resonated with me, because maybe twenty years ago, I got a pair of inflatable kayaks that we could store in the basement and pull out and inflate at the lake. Paddling them was an awful experience. Although we inflated them to spec, they sagged in the middle, with the two ends sticking up in the air and catching the wind. It was like paddling a bathtub which was being constantly carried downwind.

I also found through that experience that kayaking was very uncomfortable for me. But I do like canoeing. So, after seeing how great the folding kayak was, I looked online and found a similar collapsible canoe, made by MyCanoe.  The design is a little harder to execute, because with a canoe you have an open top, whereas with a kayak you can seal up the top and get the whole boat to be something of a nice structural tubular structure. But the MyCanoe seems to work OK, and has the same advantages of being lightweight (19 lb for one-person Solo, 43lb for two-person Duo) and of folding into a small package for transport and storage. There is an oar-lock accessory so you can row it with two oars, as an alternative to paddling. The Solo is pretty short and wide, so it is very maneuverable , but I would be surprised if it tracks well in a straight line when you just want to paddle from point A to point B using one paddle.

You can find plenty of demos and reviews on YouTube for these folding kayaks and canoes. And there are other collapsible kayaks out there, per this review, but some of them are heavier and more involved to assemble.

Anyway, these folding craft are a pretty classy, free-enterprise technology solution for folks who like to get out on the water, but don’t have a garage or backyard to store a regular kayak or canoe, much less a trailer for a motorboat or a sailboat.