Much to my surprise (arrogantly presuming I knew so much about folding boats) I caught this for sale ad posted from Windsor, Ontario, for a vintage tough skin-on-frame folding 12’ solo canoe that looks just like a scaled down PakBoat PakCanoe.
A little digging reveals that in 1995 when Pakboat started up, they produced their first canoes under the Mad River brand, called the “Escape” series, before switching to their own brand in 1998. I found a 15’ Escape listed at 41 pounds so this 12 footer must be in the 30 pounds range. The current owner has flown with it to paddle in the UK, much as I took my 24 pound 12’ Pakboat Puffin kayak across “the pond” some years ago.
The more I look at it, I realize that my Puffin is just this canoe with a velcro-ed on deck., which means this canoe is probably closer to 20 pounds. Anybody looking for a budget friendly ultralight solo that you can check as airline baggage??
Coleman sells one as well. The problem is gettingbto unfold it from thectree, but its a lot easier thsn unfolding an aluminum canoe. They tale a permanent set.
Couldn’t find anything about Coleman offering a folding boat, maybe some inflatables at some point. Do you have a source for that? I always like to add to my trivia knowledge on the history of foldable boats>
As to “wrapping trees”, there are plenty of backcountry hunting and fishing guides who have used Ally and Pakboat folding canoes on up to Class 3 rivers from Alaska to Patagonia to Finland to Siberia. Canoe of choice for many “fly-in only” and research expeditions to remote locations.
I had gotten on the Pakboat mailing list in the 1990’s (back when there was a print newsletter) and from what I remember when Alv had announced that Mad River would be selling Pakboats as their Escape series he wrote that Pakboats would also still be available directly through his company with the Pakcanoe label. A couple of years later when Mad River dropped the line, the Pakboat newsletter listed some remaining inventory with the Escape label at a discounted price which is when I bought an Escape 14. A subsequent newsletter listed a couple of demo Escape 12s still available at a clearance price so I added an Escape 12 to my collection. IIRC the Escape 12 was listed as 12.5 ft. Although it has a pack boat sit-on-the-bottom style seat, I think the Escape 12 is more similar to the larger Pakcanoes than to the Puffins. It has more longitudinal rods giving it a more solid structure. It handles nicely, though a bit cramped and tippy, with a regular Pakcanoe seat. Sometime back I called Pakcanoe to ask about repairing some abrasion along the keel of my Escape 12 and was commenting on how I like the boat and that I was sorry it was discontinued. The shop guy I talked to (not Alv) commented that the Escape 12 model was “overbuilt”. I’ll have to dig through my old catalogs and Pakboat newsletters and find the specs on the Escape 12.
P.S. Note for anyone considering purchasing - the Mad River Escape models were made before Pakboats switched to using anodized aluminum frame parts. If you don’t wear gloves during assembly your hands will end up covered with gray aluminum. It helps to keep a pair of cotton garden gloves in the duffel bag with the boat.
Thanks for all the additional history on the early canoes!
Based on the weight I saw for the longer Escape, I am guessing the Escape 12 is probably closer to 30 pounds, which is 10 more than my Puffin 12 without the deck. So I figured that it must be a more rugged and heavier material in the hull. The Puffin deck adds about another 4 pounds, though I did replace the original deck with a surplus Pakboat Arrow deck that was more sturdily built and had options like velcro paddle holders and rubber grab handles – I did have to cut it and add a 3" gusset because it was shorter than the boat. One maddening aspect of Pakboat is that they change the dimensions on every model revision so parts become obsolete quickly.
The puffy seat in the Escape for sale is identical to the ones in my Puffin and in the two Swift 14s I acquired cheap from a craigslist ad 10 years ago. I don’t care for it – I prefer lumbar backbands, so the more recent two piece sling type seat in the Pakboats is fine with me and does not hamper my paddling technique.
I know what you mean about the “black hands”. The 2004 Puffin has that raw aluminum (I always Boeshield the assembly joints even more diligently than with my other folders due to the vulnerability to corrosion).
But the pair of 2007 Swifts i picked up have beautiful gold anodized frames. I need to get around to making those boats usable. The hulls and frames are like new. I gather the couple that got them as a gift rarely used them before the defective inflatable sponsons and seats failed. Pakboat had one batch of sponsons and seats that year from their Asian subcontractor that had used defectively coated fabric – the vinyl coating delaminated catastrophically after less than a year. When I submerged one of the boats in my bathtub to try to detect what I thought was the usual pinhole or tiny seam leak, the entire surface of the submerged sponson was shedding streams of hundreds of tiny bubble through the fabric weave. And the failure of the vinyl coating also meant that the heat sealed seams between the tube sections blew out when both sides of the coating peeled away from the fabric. Same issue with the inflatable seats. The original owners failed to get the free warranty replacements Pakboat offered to everyone affected by the failures. So it became my problem when I obliviously bought them, but $300 a piece was too tempting and they did stay inflated when I set them up to test them. But just for about 4 hours. Oh well, caveat emptor.
I was able to buy one used Puffin/Swift seat in good shape from a fellow folder freak on foldingkayaks.org and do have all the valves and material to make 2 pairs of the twinned sponson tubes. So I could salvage one and maybe rig something for the other from an aftermarket seat.
I’m interested to eventually see how the Swift 14s compare to the Quest – 6 inches longer, more complex frame being a transition between the XT kayaks (which were based on the more rigid adder style gunwale design of the newer Pakcanoes) and the Feathercraft-like Quests.
I was mistaken about the early boats being available with a Pakcanoe label. Looking at some old newsletters, you are correct that they were initially sold as the Mad River Escape series. In a column dated March, 1996 Alv Elvestad wrote “1995 was by far our most eventful and exciting year. For the first time we had canoes of our own design and manufacture available for sale. … Mad River Canoe contacted us last spring. They wanted to distribute the new PakCanoes as part of an expanded Mad River line. The outcome was that our PakCanoes became the Escape Series from Mad River.” One could buy the canoes either directly from Pakboats or through a Mad River dealer but it sounds like either way they were labeled Mad River.
From a 1997 Mad River catalog the Escape 12 specs are:
Weight 28 lbs
Length 12’6"
Gunwale Width 27"
4" Waterline Width 25"
Depth at Center 12"
Bow (and stern) Height 13"
The Escape series is not listed in the 1998 Mad River catalog and it was in a 1998 Pakboat newsletter that I saw the closeout deals on Escapes.
