ORU Lake, Inlet, Beach & Haven Open Cockpit Folding Kayaks

The ORU Lake, ORU Inlet, ORU Beach LT and ORU Haven are all open cockpit kayaks, with easy access and great stability. They are light, quick to fold, easy to store, and fun to paddle.

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The first thing most people notice about ORU kayaks is how light they are. The secret is their unique skin material, a twin-wall corrugated polypropylene. This is stiff enough to create a self-supporting “monocoque” hull, so there’s no need for a heavy (and complicated to assemble) internal frame.

The second thing they notice is how great they look when assembled; on first glance when we show them at exhibitions etc many people don’t even realise they fold up! And on further investigation, they discover how – once you learn the technique – they are probably the easiest folding kayaks to fold/unfold that have ever been invented.

Of course light weight, good looks and ease of assembly are not much use if the experience when you’re out on the water is disappointing… but ORU’s folding boats paddle really well too. Their light, stiff hulls are very responsive and efficient through the water, making them much faster to paddle than – or less effort to paddle at the same speed as – most inflatables and a lot of (usually much heavier) plastic “sit-on-tops”. This page is about ORU folding kayak – Open Cockpit – models, of which there are now four different models.
Click here if you’re after a closed cockpit model that can be fitted with a spraydeck (ORU Bay ST & Coast XT kayaks)

The 9ft 8” long ORU Inlet is a step up from the Lake, offering a little more capacity (up to 275-lb), stability and speed. Like the Lake, it almost falls together when you undo the straps! And it’s still exceptionally light, at just 9kg… an easy one-handed lift for almost anybody. The Inlet is still a relatively small, open kayak and thus best-suited to relatively calm waters.

However, if what you want is a really quick and easy way to get afloat on a nice sunny day – like thousands of others worldwide – an ORU Inlet would suit you well.

You could even keep one in the back of your car on a “just in case” basis, to fulfil those opportunities when you drive past a pretty stretch of water on a sunny day.

The 12ft ORU Beach LT steps up again from the Inlet, and those two extra feet make a lot of difference; it’s quite noticeably faster, and capable of making decent progress in less idyllic conditions. The Beach is an absolute delight to paddle, it skims along with barely any effort yet somehow also tracks incredibly well. It’s not “officially” recommended but the large cockpit opening, great stability, and 300-lb weight capacity make it possible to take a small child, or even a dog, on your adventures.

Based as we are around Christchurch and Poole harbours – enclosed, but fairly large stretches of open water with lots of other watercraft and some wind-driven waves – the ORU Beach LT is one of our favourite boats to go exploring in. The car parks round here are often busy, but at just over 11kg it’s not a problem to assemble the Beach, put it up on your shoulder and carry it a few hundred yards to the water (strangely it seems lighter assembled than folded, obviously it isn’t!).

At 16ft long, and 2ft 7” wide, the Haven is the largest of the ORU open cockpit folding kayaks. Effectively a scaled-up Beach, the Haven is capable of carrying two full-size adult paddlers, and fast with it. It’s also designed so that you can set the boat up for one person, with huge amounts of space for gear, several days worth of camping equipment for example. And plenty stable enough to fish from.

And just because it’s ORU’s biggest and heaviest boat, it’s not slow. Far from it. On an evening paddle to the pub with two 16 stone blokes on board, we were romping past our friends in their two-person sit-on-tops, and stayed much drier than them too. Adding insult to injury, at the end of the evening it took us less time to fold up our Haven than they did to secure their boats on their roof racks.

A lot of people worry about this, in particular the effect of folding and unfolding the plastic skin, but it really doesn’t seem to be an issue – and we’ve been selling ORU kayaks for over eight years. Nothing lasts forever, but ORU say the material should last 20,000 fold cycles… and as that’s the equivalent of once a day for 54 years, nobody has ever got anywhere near that limit!

We don’t recommend dragging them (or any other boat!) heavily laden over broken coral, but initial landing on sandy or stony beaches is not a problem – the material is a lot tougher than that used for an inflatable, for example. And the lightness of ORU kayaks has a further advantage in terms of long term durability, they are so easy to pick up and put on your shoulder that you won’t ever need to drag them up the shoreline.

One of the first ORU kayaks we brought into the UK has lived a very hard life fishing for sea bass in the rocky shoreline around the coast of Jersey. It’s been used and abused, far more than most customers ever would. At six years old (when we last saw it) it has to be said it did look pretty battered and scarred, but it was still fully functional as a boat.

Even if (and it’s extremely rare) you do manage to puncture the outer skin, we’ve never hear of anyone continuing that damage right through to puncture the inner skin. If you do puncture the outer skin, any water leaking in between the skins is naturally limited in spread by the vertical “walls” between the two skins, so your kayak will still remain very buoyant.

Lastly on this subject, yes the material can be repaired. As with any modern material you need to use the right glue, but if you do that then the repaired area will be as strong if not stronger than the original.