After several years on the water, my warm-weather fishing clothes have become a system built around sun, water, and the peculiar discomforts of spending hours in a kayak seat.
Three women in bikinis paddled over to me on the Fox River one afternoon, looked me over, and started laughing. I could see their point. They were dressed for a hot summer day on the river. I looked prepared to cross a desert without allowing sunlight to touch my skin. Long pants covered my legs to the ankles. A hood covered my neck and ears beneath a baseball cap. Fingerless gloves overlapped the sleeves of my shirt. On the brightest days, a fabric panel came up over my nose and disappeared beneath polarized glasses. There wasn't much left exposed except my fingertips.
We talked for a while, they paddled on, and I continued fishing in an outfit that probably looked ridiculous from twenty feet away but has become remarkably difficult for me to improve. That is what several years of kayak fishing have done to the way I dress. The individual pieces aren't particularly interesting, and most aren't particularly expensive. What has changed is my understanding of what clothing has to do during three or four hours in a fishing kayak. Sun exposure is the obvious problem, but it isn't the only one. Feet go into the water at launches. Spray finds its way aboard. A belt that feels fine while standing can become irritating after hours against a seat. Anything loose in a pocket has to survive an unexpected swim. A hat that blows off isn't lying ten feet behind you on a trail; it is floating downstream. Eventually those small lessons begin to dictate the wardrobe.
Mine is built for days when the afternoon high will land somewhere between about 70 and 90 degrees. Below that, I move into a different system rather than trying to make summer clothing do cold-weather work. Above 90, I change the schedule instead of the clothes, getting on the water early and leaving before the worst afternoon heat arrives. Within that range, I dress for the hottest part of the day and carry what I need for everything else.
Covering Up Without Cooking
The foundation is almost embarrassingly ordinary: lightweight technical pants and a hooded sun shirt worn directly against my skin. My pants are Eddie Bauer convertibles I originally found at Costco. I bought them partly because I imagined myself zipping the legs off as the day warmed. Years later, I have yet to do it. The feature I thought would matter doesn't. Full-length coverage does. What I did eventually do was buy a second pair because I liked the first pair enough that I didn't want to replace them with something else. Eddie Bauer no longer sells them, although pairs still turn up on eBay for around $30 or less.
Other details have proved more important with time. The pants dry quickly, which matters when water comes aboard or a launch gets wetter than expected, and they have a built-in fabric belt. That seemed like a minor feature until I spent enough hours sitting in a kayak chair to appreciate it. A conventional belt and buckle can become surprisingly uncomfortable when trapped between your waist and the seat for several hours. The soft fabric belt gives me the adjustment I need without adding another hard pressure point. When these eventually disappear from the secondhand market, I won't be looking for an exact replacement. I'll be looking for the same characteristics: lightweight quick-drying fabric, full-length coverage and a soft built-in belt that remains comfortable while seated.
The pockets, meanwhile, stay empty. Fishing clothing is often sold on its ability to carry things, but I don't want my clothing carrying anything important. If I unexpectedly end up in the water, the contents of my pockets are either getting wet or potentially becoming the river's property. My kayak and PFD have secure places for the equipment I need. My pants don't need to become another tackle box.
The shirt is where my preference for sun coverage becomes considerably more obvious. I wear a hooded AFTCO sun shirt directly against my skin, without a T-shirt or other base layer underneath it. The particular model has been discontinued. I liked it enough that when I discovered it was disappearing, I bought the last three I could find on clearance. The nearest current equivalent is AFTCO's Adapt Tactical Phase Change Performance Shirt, and that is what I would look at when my small stockpile eventually wears out.
What matters isn't the AFTCO name so much as the combination of features. The hood stays up whenever I am fishing, covering the back of my neck and adding protection around my ears. A baseball cap handles my head and shades my face. The shirt also has an integrated face gaiter that I can pull up when the sun becomes particularly intense. With the gaiter raised, hood up, cap on and polarized glasses in place, the women on the Fox River had an even stronger case for finding the whole arrangement amusing. There really isn't much of me left to see.
That degree of coverage is deliberate. I don't use sunscreen when I kayak fish. I would rather put on cool, lightweight clothing that keeps the sun off my skin than spend several hours coated in sunscreen. That is a preference rather than a universal prescription. Someone perfectly happy using sunscreen may choose shorts, leave the gaiter down or expose considerably more skin. The important lesson from my own system is less about how much skin everyone ought to cover than how well the pieces work together when physical coverage is the objective.
The thumb holes in the shirt are probably the best example. On a clothing rack they look like a minor feature. On the water, I put my thumbs through them and pull the sleeves across the backs of my hands, then put a pair of Glacier Glove Ascension Bay Sun Gloves over the sleeves. The gloves are fingerless, leaving the dexterity I want for tying knots and handling tackle, while the overlap between glove and shirt eliminates the exposed strip around the wrist. I primarily want sun protection from the gloves and enough reinforcement in the palm that they survive repeated use. They were inexpensive enough when I found them that I bought three pairs.
It is a small arrangement, but it captures much of what I have learned about clothing for the kayak. The useful feature isn't necessarily the one that sounds impressive in a product description. The pants have removable legs I never remove. The shirt has thumb holes I now wouldn't willingly give up. Experience has a way of sorting the marketing features from the ones that actually matter.
Dressing for the Water Under the Kayak
My footwear has followed a similar evolution, although I have spent considerably less money on it until recently. For three or four years I wore inexpensive barefoot-style water shoes with a little traction molded into the soles. There was nothing particularly sophisticated about them, and that was fine. They protected my feet, tolerated being submerged at a launch and didn't turn into waterlogged sneakers afterward. For someone beginning to kayak fish in warm weather, a basic closed water shoe still strikes me as a perfectly sensible place to start.
I have no interest in fishing barefoot or in footwear that leaves much of my foot exposed. Launch areas are not beaches. They can involve slippery rocks, soft shoreline muck, goose droppings and whatever else has accumulated along the water's edge. Then I bring an assortment of sharp fishing hooks into the same environment. A closed shoe creates a useful barrier between my feet and all of it. Better traction is welcome, but simple protection is reason enough for me to wear one.
I eventually added calf-height Sealskinz waterproof socks inside those shoes. That let me step into the water during a launch without automatically spending the next several hours with wet feet. The arrangement worked well enough that I used it for years, but waterproofing brought its own compromise. The Sealskinz were very waterproof, and in summer my feet could become sweaty inside them. By the time I decided to replace the system, the socks were beginning to degrade, get crunchy and develop an odor, while the water shoes themselves were worn and had acquired a permanent smell of their own. Nothing about that strikes me as a failure after several seasons of use. They had simply reached retirement together.
Their replacements are a pair of DexShell Waterproof Knee High Socks and Korkers All Axis shoes. This is an important place to separate experience from expectation: I haven't fished in either yet. The DexShell socks are my attempt to find a different version of the waterproof-sock idea, and the Korkers are a substantial step up from the inexpensive water shoes they replace. I am comfortable taking that chance with Korkers because I have used the company's Darkhorse boots for wet-wading while fly fishing and have found them excellent. That gives me confidence in the brand and its approach to wet footwear, but it doesn't give me experience I don't yet have with the All Axis.
The progression is useful because it shows how little equipment is actually required. A closed water shoe solves the fundamental problem. A waterproof sock is an optional addition for someone who would rather keep a wet launch outside the shoe. A purpose-built shoe such as the Korkers is an upgrade I have chosen after years with the inexpensive solution, not an admission price for getting onto the river.
The Things That Stay Attached
The rest of what I wear is mostly ordinary gear with a few accommodations for being surrounded by water. My baseball cap, for example, doesn't need any special fishing technology. It does need to stay with me. Wind can take a hat surprisingly quickly, and retrieving one from moving water is an unnecessary interruption, so mine is clipped to my sun shirt with a simple Dr. Slick hat clip. It is a tiny addition to the system, but after enough time in a kayak I have become suspicious of anything important that isn't attached to something else.
That includes my glasses. I wear polarized prescription Maui Jims, although Maui Jim isn't the recommendation. Polarization is. Cutting surface glare makes it easier to see what is happening beneath the water, and that matters far more to fishing than the logo on the frame. Because mine are prescription glasses, losing them would also be substantially more consequential than losing an inexpensive pair of sunglasses. I therefore fish in a backup pair rather than my primary glasses and keep them on a Frogg Toggs retainer around my neck. The combination doesn't make them impossible to lose or break, but it reduces the opportunity.
Weather protection is similarly uncomplicated. The sun shirt is my warm-weather base, and anything else goes over it. If a morning is cool enough to want some insulation, I add an ordinary hoodie. If wind or rain moves in, I use a Helly Hansen Loke Jacket. There isn't anything specifically kayak-oriented about the Loke, nor do I think there needs to be. It is a lightweight waterproof shell that I can carry without much penalty and pull over the rest of the system when conditions require it.
What I Actually Use
Once I'm on the water, I don't think much about any of it. That may be the best measure of whether the system works. Nothing is pinching at my waist, my feet can get wet at the launch without creating a problem, the things I can't afford to lose are attached, and I don't spend the day thinking about where the sun is hitting me. None of those lessons arrived as a grand theory of how to dress for kayak fishing. They accumulated a few hours at a time, usually because something either bothered me or didn't.
The result may look like a lot of clothing on a sunny Fox River afternoon. The women in bikinis certainly thought so. But after they paddled away, I didn't change a thing.