: . . .I know of the military one-man rafts, I practised with them in Service, but I
: haven't come across any in civilian use or in chandleries. . .
: Do you have a makers name of the ones you know of?

Sevylor, a French company with a US subsidiary has a one person inflatable, mad of PVC, Nylon and Polyurethane. Not sure if this is made just for the US market or whether it is available worldwide.

The moment when you get into trouble in a kayak is probably not an ideal time to start unpacking and pumping up an inflatable. A self-inflating boat would be much better. A recent trip to the hardware store (actually, a Lowes Home Center) exposed me to a new toy--er, tool This is a beltmounted CO2 (Carbon Dioxide) system made to feed the pressurized gas from containers used by paintball guns into a carpenter's nail gun. A nail gun doesn't use a large volume of gas for each nail that it drives, but it needs the pressure to be fairly high. That is ideal for the CO2 can. Wearing it on your belt means you don't need to drap around long lengths of air hose from a heavy, noisy compressor.

The device consists of a regulator which screws onto either 9 ounce or 20 ounce cans of CO2. The smaller can provides about 5 cu ft of air and the larger can provides about 12.5 cu ft. It seems to me that a dedicated person could feed the hose from one of these devices into an inflation valve on a small inflatable boat, and just turn the valve to rapidly fill the boat. YOu'ld probably want to go with the smallest container, and maybe bleed off a bit of the gass before hand to avoid overfilling the boat, or perhaps one could use a pressure relief valve, which could be put inline to keep from overinflating the boat.

Just a thought

PGJ