The team at Level Six were sitting around the office, mulling over an infamous issue for an essential piece of whitewater kayaking gear when CEO Stig Larsson found inspiration in his morning coffee.
In whitewater kayaking, it’s not uncommon for athletes pushing the boundaries of the sport, running towering drops, to have the sprayskirt detach from the cockpit on impact. After years of roundtable talks and reviewing footage with team athletes, Level Six made an interesting discovery. These skirts were not necessarily imploding inward on drops due to the force of water hitting the exterior, but instead pushing outward from inside.
“We noticed some of their skirts were actually exploding off the boats when they would land—displaced by the air in their cockpit,” Alex Lowman, marketing manager at Level Six explained in an interview introducing the Class 6 skirt.
The exploding sprayskirt problem
Imagine for a moment you have an empty milk jug lying on its side, closed at the top with one of those snap-on plastic caps. Now, take your fist or a large mallet and slam it into the milk jug. The snap-on cap likely flew across the room. When a paddler plummets off a 100-foot waterfall and their kayak makes impact with the frothing, boiling base of the drop, the same force can occur. Your boat is the milk jug, the river a sledging mallet.
A sprayskirt blowing off like a bottle cap is, to understate it, not ideal in the middle of a river gorge. Level Six believes though, after years of R&D discourse and the morning coffee moment of enlightenment, they’ve finally found the solution.
A eureka moment for the Class 6
Stig Larsson was brewing up a pot of coffee in one of their design meetings on the topic when he took note of the bag in front of him. On it’s outside was a one-way degassing valve which allows carbon dioxide emitting from the roasted beans out without letting oxygen in. According to Alex Lowman, Larsson pointed it out to the team and said, “Why don’t we put a relief valve on there similar to a coffee bag?”
The coffee bag idea led to a more advanced built-out relief valve inserted on the deck of the Class 6 Sprayskirt. The valve is a medical-grade surgical valve screwed on to a silicone patch and reinforced with additional neoprene. According to Lowman, it is also serviceable. If you get sand in the valve you can take it out and clean it.
Additional features from Level Six
The innovative sturdiness of the Class 6 sprayskirt doesn’t stop with the relief valve to prevent skirt explosions. Level Six also included a memory rand made with a stiff rubber compound, which once broken-in takes the shape of a kayak’s cockpit rim. The skirt is also made with a limestone-based neoprene and includes markings to trim the tunnel to your desired length.
The Class 6 is built for the highest demands of whitewater kayaking. However, as with most gear innovations, Lowman and the team at Level Six see the Class 6 as just the beginning of where the new relief valve can be implemented on sprayskirt designs.
The Class 6 is available in two cockpit sizes and five tunnel sizes. The Class 6 can be found now at Backcountry and other Level Six retailers.
Feature Photo: Brenna Kelly
