What's up with the Walker Bays...

I actually quite like the Walker Bay hard dinghies... We used to have one of their eight footers but it was just that little bit too small to allow us to use it for the purpose of rowing and the ten footer would have been a better choice.

I always liked that the Walker Bays had a neat inflatable collar making for a neat niche between hard dinghy and inflatable that would actually row. I should add that while I gave a lot of thought to purchasing a ten footer the deciding factor was that the inflatable collar seemed to be somewhat excessive in price costing more than some dinghies.

In hind sight I'm glad that we never bought the ten footer with the collar as over the last couple of years we have seen many sad specimens of the collars looking much the worse for wear with leaking and with what appears to be excessive UV degradation (in comparison to hypalon dinghies made by Caribe and AB) and in fact they don't seem to keep up with the PVC dinghies by Plastimo in the UV area which were cheaper (for the whole dinghy) than the Walker Bay collars.

Anyway, for anyone considering the Walker Bays for sailing in the tropics you might want to think long and hard before buying the collar...