The folks at Feathercraft loaned me one of their two-person lightweight BayLee inflatable dinghies, and I got a chance to check it out Saturday morning.

Daughter Arwen and I spent the night on Two Lucky Fish Friday, and after cleaning up the breakfast mess, we unpacked the BayLee and got to work.

I used a cheap 12-volt air pump from the sporting goods store. This is a low-pressure, but high-volume pump…not much more than a really noisy fan. But it inflated each of the BayLee’s two air chambers in less than a minute. Probably less than thirty seconds; it was fast. I topped them up by mouth.

Unrolled:

Half inflated:

Fully inflated, with seat cushions inflated as well, and skeg in place:
 

Oarlock tubing contraption (this must have a real name?) in place:

So far, so good. I intentionally kept the BayLee aboard Two Lucky Fish during this process, in order to simulate conditions you would encounter trying to deploy the boat while anchored. I even backed Two Lucky Fish out of the slip partway, so that I would have to get into and out of the BayLee without the benefit of the dock. I didn’t use the surrounding dock floats at all.

Except as platforms from which to take photographs, of course! Looks like the BayLee is ready to launch.

At this point, I handed the camera to 5-year-old Arwen. The rest of these pictures were taken by her.

I had a little trouble figuring out how to get my legs inside the boat, at first. I was much more graceful the second time. Of course, I have no photographic proof to back up that statement!

After I got that sorted out, I went paddling:

So how was the BayLee to row? It was much better than I anticipated it would be. It tracked in a straight line, which allowed me to devote my energy to propelling the boat forward rather than keeping it on course. I was amazed at how fast I was able to get it moving.

Bear in mind that this is an oval-shaped, flat-bottomed inflatable without any rigid floor, not even an inflatable floor. Nobody expects it to move through the water quickly. But I never realized, until this test, how much energy we waste trying to keep flat-bottomed inflatables going in a straight line.

Duh. I know, it’s obvious, but I hadn’t ever experienced it in such a definitive way as when I removed the skeg and went out a second time. That time, the BayLee wandered all over the place and required lots of attention to keep it lined up on a course. Every time you give a single stroke on one side to straighten it out, you allow the boat to decelerate a tiny bit. Each of these little gaps (in propulsive power delivery) add up, and the cumulative effect is that you go half as fast without the skeg. That’s a subjective assessment, to be clear, but even if it’s not statistically precise, the difference is dramatic.

I also tried rowing with the skeg mounted at the wrong end of the floor; near the front rather than the back. The BayLee allows you to mount it in either position to accommodate aft-facing rowing or forward-facing paddling, kayak-style.

With the skeg forward, the boat tries to track, but the boat ends up slightly off-axis, the skeg bites, and the boat pivots on the skeg, rotating to a skeg-aft orientation. This is another interesting way to demonstrate how effective the skeg is.

This simple and sturdy skeg arrangement is a wonder to behold, and the BayLee tracks better than other conventional inflatable dinghies I’ve rowed, even those with inflatable keels and molded-in skegs or chines. This won’t surprise sailors or kayakers a bit, but nothing beats a thin, deep “blade” that actually generates hydrodynamic lift. The fact that it does so even when mounted to a relatively floppy, single-layer fabric floor in a lightweight dinghy says a lot about the superiority of this design.

Alas, I had to return my review sample to Feathercraft, but that gave me a chance to spend some time sharing my experiences and recommendations with Rob and Ian, who were staffing the BayLee booth at the Seattle Boat Show during the second half of the show. They’ll have these boats on display at the upcoming Vancouver Boat Show, as well.