Gimme some water

Kayaking in Central Florida during the summer can get hot and water bottles just simply don't stay cold very long. Here is a low tech solution that works for me. I am sure others have already figured this out a long time ago, but it took me a few years to think about it. Essentially it is just a quality soft-sided cooler with flexible ice sheets and two 70 oz Camelbak water reservoirs. They make larger reservoirs, but those would have been too big for my cooler. I keep the cooler right behind the kayak seat and route the water lines with bite valves essentially down by my hip within easy reach. I wish the lines were a tad bit longer, but they work for me as is. The flexible ice sheets can be cut to whatever size and shape you desire. I use 3 pieces. One for the bottom of the cooler and two for the sides. Stays nice and cold all day even in hot climates. I also fill the Camelbak reservoirs with water and refrigerate them the night before. And finally one other tip from the Camelbak website that works great. If you want to avoid that warm initial drink of water (that got hot sitting in the tube outside the cooler) simply blow the water back into the reservoir after drinking so that the tube is empty when not drinking.

Here are the links to the products I used followed by a couple of photos of my finished product.

Cooler: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000YB5KYG

Ice Sheets: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001PTGO5A

Camelbak reservoirs: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00437WWMA

why not just frezze the water thats what i do and it works fine

We freeze one camel back and one that is half full, the night before. Then we top of the unfilled one with cold water before we head out.

Also, we freeze bottled water in their plastic bottles to keep the contents cold inside of our coolers. As the food disappears and the ice in the bottles melts, we have more cold water to drink.

Here in N California, the air temp around many of our inland rivers in the sun can often be well over a hundred. An old fly fishing trick is to have cold cans of soup in your coolers or back packs and cold cubed melon/fruit for food and snacks. These cold items offer a great way to eat and battle the heat. We keep coolers in our trucks/suv/boats/kayaks with more cold soup/fruit and we use the frozen water bottles to keep the food cold and to have something cold to drink on the way home. For protein, we toss a few zip lock bags of frozen pre cooked shrimp or chilled pouches of tuna/salmon into our vehicle/boat coolers.

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2009 Oasis
2012 Freedom Hawk Pathfinder