>>2541761It took you months to scrape up the money to buy a packraft, and you know nothing about boating. Par for the course on this board, really.
If you Google "ocean packraft" or "UL Alaska packraft fatalities" you'll see that it's a terrible idea, for many reasons, but one of those reasons is that packrafts are slow as fuck, several times slower than a kayak and harder to maneuver as well, nor suited to cutting through waves (and if you're not cutting into them, they're smacking into you). It's actually not a great idea to use a packraft for anything at all, but sometimes they're the only thing you can lug to where you're going.
If you thought that a $700 pocket boat was your ticket to boat literally everywhere, think again. Sitting at home in your $3,000/mo. San Francisco efficiency pod in California it all seems to work fine I'm sure, but reality is a different animal. In a good kayak paddling hellbent for leather against a stiff breeze in even a small lake, it will seem to take forever to creep to the far shoreline. The ocean is way, way more energetic and vast than that.
Get a kayak first, say a nice, stable sit-on-top fishing kayak, do some lakes and easy stretches of rivers. Avoid whitewater.
