Lifetime Tamarack Pro 103 Comprehensive Review On & Off The Water

hey kayak cliff here it's a fall day in october actually october 31st 2020 halloween and uh i got an orange kayak here it's got some high halloween accents on it but i want to talk to you today today about the lifetime tamarack pro 103 kayak and first of all i want to thank you sent a big thank you to the people at lifetime for sending me this kayak for my unbiased review and what i'm going to do today i'm just going to talk about the features of this kayak and then we're going to take it out on the lake right behind you right behind the camera and take it out there and see how it does i have not had it on the water yet it shipped to me via ltl freight came in great [Music] this kayak is going to be available at your big box retailers like walmart like dicks like amazon um not totally confident at all i know it's going to be at walmart one of the things about entry-level kayaks in the past is that they were barren of features there were not many features in them very poor seating just not the highest quality kayaks and i i get asked questions by people all the time hey kayak cliff what what kind of kayak should i get and my first question is well what do you want to do do you want to fish do you want to camp do you want to go out on open water do you want to go down rivers um but the biggest things that people want to do is just get out of their houses and get out for a couple hours on the water to cast a line for fishing to go camping to just spend time with their family the big problem that they run into is if you're going to buy kayaks for your whole family you're shelling out thousands and thousands of dollars that you may not want to shell out you want to buy a budget minded kayak and that's what lifetime is and in my opinion with what i see already lifetime just blows the doors off many of the other entry-level kayaks because this kayak is feature rich and let me show you one thing that's really neat about it is they put raised seating in and they had a bungee on there this is an aluminum frame i mean it is super heavy duty i've had raised seats in professional kayaks before that are the same quality as this i'm really impressed with the thickness of the um of the seating um i put my magnet on my phone to it and the magnet on back my phone it doesn't stick it's aluminum so it's never going to rust on you and if you're ever camping you just put this on the on the ground and you have a chair that's automatically in your kayak so there's a small little gear storage tray here not a lot of space but the this raised seating gets you up off the kayak it keeps your bottom dry and it gives you a much more comfortable paddling experience and it just goes in like that and you're done um it has dry storage so right here there's a gasket around the lid and you have a bucket here and the bucket can be removed like so but this can hold some of your your phone and car keys and things like that you have a lot of storage up underneath that you can put things like towels or anything that you want to keep dry but that just closes up got a bungee cord that locks it down tight another thing that's nice is they have adjustable foot pegs and these adjustable foot pegs will adjust to your leg length for me i'm six foot and i need them all the way out um i think that this would go to six foot two no problem uh six foot three no problem you're gonna have a little bit more bend in your legs um it has gear tracks built into it gear tracks have been reserved for much more higher priced models of boats and to go in the gear track what comes with this boat you got the seat you got the dry storage but you can use the gear track with the provided rod holder that they have if you're a fisherman now i'm not a fisherman but a lot of people are and that's what this boat's made for one of the things in the gear track this actually fits inside here and you turn the little dial and you have a place that your rod's going to be secure if you're going to do any trolling now in the back there's two rod holders built in to the hall of the boat to hold rods as well or an american flag or whatever you want to put in there but one of the things i'm going to be using when i'm on the water today is my ram uh camera holder and again gear tracks not only take rod holders but they take camera gear boom arms and things like that so i'm going to be filming with this you can put cup holders in here there's all types of gear track gear that you can get to go into the gear tracks now one of the other things that comes with the boat big shout out to lifetime i mean they give you a paddle so you know when you buy your first kayak uh you gotta get a life jacket you gotta get a paddle you got to get all the things that you want to take out one less thing you have to worry about now the kayak is built far better than the paddle is this is an entry level paddle you're going to use it a couple times and you're probably going to go out and get a more expensive uh you know carbon fiber blade or fiberglass uh shaft paddle with you know better plastic blades but this is a great paddle to start off with you don't you're not pressured to get a new paddle to go with your kayak because it all comes with it big plus and i'm glad the engineers had a lifetime thought of that coming up to the bow we have ample uh bungee cords so you can put two dry bags here easily stuffed with your towels and your camping gear and things like that and uh put them down tied down with the um bungee cords real thick bungee cords as well they have positive handles in the bow and the stern of the kayak for carrying the kayak this is a 31 inch wide kayak so with that 31 inches comes great stability the kayak is 57 and a half pounds so it's a little on the heavier side but but not bad but not bad at all coming back to the stern of the kayak you have the same bungee cords as you do in the bowel but here you have a big tank well that you can put your cooler for the day uh this is a real tall cooler so but it's big enough where i could lay this cooler down in here and bungee it down no problem the other thing i like about the big tank well if you're not putting a cooler or anything else one of the things that's near and dear to my heart is when you're out paddling let's keep our waterways clean my motto is pick and paddle so do you want to fill this up with garbage bags great way to clean the shoreline and a place to put garbage bags to bring them back to keep our environment clean if you want pick and paddle stickers they're available five or ten dollars at the kayak cliff.com website check it out spread the spread the message around to your fellow paddlers this is your drain plug should you get water down in the hall sometimes you do you just need to drain it leave it open leave your center hatch open so it'll dry out and not be all funky when you go camping they're kayaking the next time okay one of the things on kayaks that's a real simple feature but not all kayak manufacturers put it in is a paddle keeper because when you stop to take some photography or cast a line or do something where you don't want the paddle in your hands that's what this is there's a little groove here and there's a bungee cord and that bungee cord wraps around the paddle and keeps it for you so it's not going to fall and float away and you don't have the paddle when you need it hey let's flip the kayak over look underneath the hood so to speak see what we have underneath i'm real excited to get this out i've had 10 foot kayaks before that every time you paddle it the bow or the front of the kayak is like you lose a lot of your paddling efficiency because that's a problem with shorter kayaks is it doesn't track well i think i'm going to find and we'll know when we get out that this tracks a lot better than other 10-foot kayaks i've passed in the past i've paddled in the past you have a real nice sharp entry point here at the bow of the kayak this looks like it's going to cut through the water a little bit better but they take this chine or this rail all the way down the hall of the kayak out the back i think that this is going to serve as a nice tracking rudder to keep this kayak going straight and doing a lot less of this when you're paddling you have these channels on either side that are going to give stability it almost is like a catamaran haul you have a hall here a hall here in a hall here and these are going to give stability in this 31 inch kayak and because it's 31 inch depending on how in shape you are or you know whatever you should be able to stand up in this kayak to do some fishing out of most of your stand up kayaks are going to be 33 inches or wider but i think it's going to give tremendous stability now these holes these are supposed to be here these are called scupper holes and what they do is when you get into a sit-on-top kayak when you hit waves and things like that you're going to see water start coming up through the holes no problem it's just a self baling feature so if you have a wave that comes over the front you can completely fill this up with water it's just going to start draining out like your bathtub with a little circular drain of your water going out so the scupper holes are good you can buy scupper plugs to fill them up if you're on calm water in the winter and you don't want any water in your hall or in your cockpit you can get scupper plugs to put over those so one of the things i really like about the tamarac pro is they put the carrying handles straight up on the top of the gunnels a lot of times the carrying handles are recessed into the sides and that's a problem because when you pick it up like this your knuckles are just driven into the gunnel and you're breaking your knuckles but the way they've designed 57 and it half pounds a lot of sit on top kayaks i can't do this because my knuckles are just buried into the gunnels so if i pick up the seat separately and the kayak i can carry it really easily we're going to go out here in the sun where you can see it better again real easy to manage and again once you get down that's all you have to do to put your seat in i would call this kayak camping ready fishing ready adventure ready as my buddy doug says it's a grab-and-go kayak it's ten foot three inches long 31 inches wide 57.5 pounds so again i'm six feet actually i could pull these levers back a little bit more i think this will go up to a six foot three six foot four person no problem i'm 185 pounds my buddy doug is a little heavier than that we're going to show you with two of us how this kayak performs it's got a 300 pound uh loading capacity so what that means is if i'm a 185 i could load it with 75 pounds of camping gear and go out for the weekend if i'm 250 pounds i can put 20 or 30 pounds in and be under that 300 pound load limit that's real important don't exceed the 300 pound load limit it's going to function perfectly up to that limit but you don't want to get too close to it or definitely don't want to go beyond well that's enough of this on land review let's get it out on the water and see how it performs [Music] [Music] [Music] okay we're out on the water initial impression when i get in this thing i don't think i've ever turned a kayak this easily it's extremely maneuverable i mean it just turns on a dime so if you're going up rivers you're going around lots of turns you want to be able to maneuver um great for that let's uh put it through the paces with some paddling there's about a 12 mile an hour wind right now and i'm going into the wind and yeah it paddles just about like any other 10-foot kayak that i've paddled in the past it those chines and the v in the hall i do think that it is tracking better than other 10-foot kayaks that i've paddled it uh it's a nice ride and boy i mean it is stable one thing that was nice is getting up to my camera you know a lot of kayaks you can't come out of your seat and move forward and still have stability and even here sitting in the middle you know i can with this 31 inch width it's real nice i think my set on tops i've had in the past have been have been um 28 inches wide so this is three inches wider and considerably more stable than other kayaks that i've had in this size range that were actually narrower so again poor tracking it's just part of being an eight or a 10 foot boat but i think they've maximized the amount of performance in terms of tracking that you can get out of a 10-foot boat with this tamarack pro 103 it's not gonna be a boat that you take out in in heavy open water where there's you know one or two foot waves um you're gonna be taking water over the bow real easily but light chop like i'm gonna like i'm in right now in protected waters uh this is a great boat for that with kayak you have two types of stability you have primary stability and secondary stability primary stability is when you just get in the kayak and those initial feelings that you get with stability that's primary stability secondary stability is really taking it and leaning and it's on its edge and you know with this kayak no problem at all um it's october 31st the water's cold i don't want to take it to the extreme right now because i don't want to go in the drink but uh my impressions are that secondary stability is excellent as well the thing with secondary stability when you take it to its max boom it'll go without any warning it'll flip you over but you know i'm i'm really leaning on this without any problem at all but one of the things i wish i would have put my boots on i'm going to try to keep my feet dry here if you want to get anything out of the back if i had boots i would dangle them in the water you can sit side saddle and this boat gives you plenty of stability to sit side saddle and reach and get the beer out of the cooler or whatever you have in the back of the kayak and then you know again turn around yeah i mean look at the stability i have i'm 185 pounds and it's i mean it's it's rock solid [Music] you

Channel: Kayak Cliff

Views: 16,713

Rating: 4.9610391 out of 5

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Id: DUk_j3VTDDE

Length: 18min 37sec (1117 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 04 2020