How do folks clean their hulls post-paddle? My Wood Duck tends to pick up a yellow-brown pond scuzz from our local reservoir. Sponging the hull with water alone I find, isn’t enough to defeat pond scum, not to mention tiny nasty clinging bits of potentially invasive water plants I wouldn’t want to transport to the next pond. But I am leery of putting soap grey water into a reservoir. Are there biodegradable, non-hurtful soaps or detergents?
I take it home dirty, dump it onto the lawn and then use the garden hose & a sponge. So far everything's come off fine and the lawn eats the nutrients.
Laszlo
I take it home dirty and then put it on a rack and let my girlfriend wash it using a car wash soap from Wally World. Hasn't hurt the grass in 4 years.
Kev
Ah-but "home" for me is an apartment. No lawn. No garden hose. And no bikini-clad girlfriend willing to soap it down. So I am hoping to find an eco-soap I can use on-site.
So where are you going to get a hose on site? With clean water? Any camping dish soap, or camping shampoo will work for your needs.
Trust me, you dont want to see MY girlfriend in a bikini!!! Love her dearly, but Barbie she isn't.
Kev
By odd coincidence this morning I went to walk the dog and walked right into an "Eco-fair" here in Charlottesville, Va. In between tofu based Greek salad, and solar panels, I got by asking at various booths two eco-answers to my eco-question about kayak detergent: "No," and "Okay, Only If". For leave-no-tracer campers, the answer is No. Make that NO! They clean cookware with water and sand, or with a paste of hardwood ashes and grease; they clean themseves with just water. No soap, no shampoo, no detergent in the woods. Period. But for more moderate sorts who are not in the deep woods, a bucket, a biodegradable detergent (zero phosphate) and microfiber rag is okay, only if—administered to the kayak at least 200 feet from the water so the grey water runoff gets filtered by the soil.
My buddy Al has mud from 2008 on his yak. It doesn’t seem to bother him.
Because I have a coat of wax on the hulls of my boats, a sponge and plain water takes the brown stuff off. A little buffing takes most of the scratches out, too. Jer (aka mtsailor)