As part of our preparations for an extended Whitsunday’s island hop we are planning for later in the year we recently loaded up our Tandem for an overnight camping trip.
I was keen to see just how much gear we could carry and how the kayak would handle fully loaded.
The Tandem Oasis has three internal storage hatches but only limited deck storage at the rear.
To add extra storage space and to allow us to take a couple of camping chairs I fitted two 25mm tube clips to the front deck.
The chairs when clipped in act like a rack providing a level framework on the sloping deck.
A 40 litre dry bag fits nicely between the chair legs and is secured by a bungee attached to the front handle pad-eye and tied off to the front hatch. This proved stable and didn’t move despite some very windy and choppy conditions during our 40km trip.
The front bag contains our stove, cooking ware and anything else too big to fit through the internal hatches.
The large 60 litre rear bag contains our tent, thermarests, sleeping bags, inner bags and pillows.
Some hints we learned from this trip:
-The front hatch is ideal for storage of water. We took six two litre bottles, two 1 litre Thermos’s and even had room for a bottle of red wine. The weight upfront counter balanced the rear and levelled the kayak.
-It is better to have lots of smaller drybags to fit inside the hatches for all the other gear needed. Any bags larger than 20 litres are difficult to fit in.
-Tie some cord through the drybag handles to make retrieval from inside easier.
- Having most of the camp gear in the two large bags made set-up easy.
Fully loaded we were very pleased with the performance of the kayak. With the extra weight we sat lower in the water but the stability was still excellent. Our cruising speed remained unchanged and varied from 6 to 10 km/h (GPS) depending on the current.
After doing this trip we are confident that the Tandem could be packed for an extended camping trip of a week or so.
Its bad enough pedaling and arriving at your destination fresher than everyone else.