Volume of cargo area in a kayak

Question

What is the approximate volume in cubic feet or inches of cargo space in the average sit in kayak?

Answer 1

As noah says, there's no useful definition of an "average kayak". Different boats suit different purposes. You can't expect all of these boats to have similar capacity:

(Image from Softback Travel).

You'll need to decide what kind of boat you're interested in, and read some manufacturer specs and user reviews. Some examples:

• P&H Scorpio review: "The Scorpio has four hatches. The front and rear hatch both have about 60 litres of volume each. The day hatch has 29, and the mini hatch has only a few litres."
• Romany Classic retailer: "front hatch volume: 57.5 litres, [...], day hatch volume: 37.5 litres, rear hatch volume: 41.6 litres"

Answer 2

I think the problem with your question is defining what the "average" sit in kayak is. How do you average across the many types of sit in kayaks while still maintaining meaning to the number. A playboat (ex. Jackson Rockstar) and an touring/expedition kayak (ex. Dagger Stratos) are both sit in kayaks, but have vastly different cargo capacities. A playboat holds maybe a small day bag of emergency gear, while a touring kayak can hold weeks worth of supplies. The limiting storage factor in kayaks is generally weight, not volume, which is why kayak manufacturers generally give a cargo capacity in weight for touring oriented models.

So the answer to your question is basically "it depends", which is why you've probably been unable to find a numerical answer.

Answer 3

You can look up volumes by models (or you ought to be able to anyway) - see Toby's answer. However, I will give a different perspective from having done several multiday camping trips in a 17' sea kayak.

• There is plenty of space compared to cycling tours or backpacking trips. While I couldn't look up volumes for the Current Design model I had, a similar one is rated at 475 pounds of weight: 56 for boat, say 200 for you, would leave you with 200 pounds of gear capacity!

• A constraint you may not realize is how narrow the hatches to the cargo compartments can be. For example, putting in a - suitably waterproofed - 15" laptop turned out almost a very tight fit. There's no margin here, things either fit. Or not.

• Proper loading of a kayak means that you should have very little with you, in the cockpit/passenger area. That's because of safety considerations (you don't want to be tangled up in gear if the kayak flips and you have to exit it). Maybe a 10L dry bag, that kind of stuff. The rest can be tied on the deck, but it will compete with your spare paddle, self-rescue floater and bilge pump (heavy stuff may also be bad for the center of gravity, now that I think of it).

• The end result is that you have very limited capacity of stuff you can access while being on the water.

Answer 4

One way to calculate the volume inside a kayak is to put it on a (large) scale and weight it. Leaving it on the scale, pour in water until it's completely full, then take that weight and subtract the original weight.

Water has a (mostly) fairly constant weight to volume ratio, so you should be able to use a basic calculator to determine the results knowing this information. I've found that 1 liter of water is 1 kilogram and that 1 gallon equals 8.345 pounds. (Unless you have an unrealistic amount of minerals in the water, or you include a bunch of silt and rocks from a river, these numbers will be close enough that any variance won't significantly matter.)

You can change that calculation to remove your volume from the equation by getting into the water filled kayak to displace your volume from the available space. Take the weight of the kayak once you've exited the kayak to get a more realistic number for available volume.

Or weigh yourself before weighting the kayak and weigh the kayak with you still sitting in the water and then subtract the empty weight of the kayak and your weight from the full weight of the kayak. This avoids having to worry about if the water absorbed by any clothing is changing the volume calculation when you get out in the calculation from the previous paragraph.

Here's an image that might help, at least a little. Images sourced from here and here. (Holstein for scale, and because it was part of the original image of the scale.)

There's still a problem with this, since there's little likelihood that you can actually use all that volume. If you are going to fill it full of liquid again, it might be possible to use all that volume, but it's also possible to swamp the kayak to the point where it doesn't really act like a kayak anymore. Also, are you going to pack stuff in so tight around your knees and butt that you can't move or it chafes?