Water. Bags.
My number one rule is that if I take it on the river, it will eventually get wet. I suppose that in the end, there is nothing outside of human skin that water will not eventually penetrate. Water will find its sneaky little way in to the best laid plans of mice and men.
But my crap spends lots of time in and under the water. I test my gear on every trip: day trips, overnighters, two-nighters: I’ve always got something I’m working out and I’m always in the water (especially when the sun is up and the water warm and canoeing is “in yee-haw season”).
I’ve used an assortment of bags through a small insignificant handful of unremarkable years and only had one bag fail catastrophically (a big yellow Mall*Wart bag that failed at the corners of the floor), though I’ve borne witness to countless failures, most of which were probably user error. I find most bags will let you know when they need maintenance or replacement, and a damp sleeping bag is a pretty important clue. My leaky bags become repositories for my dirty shoes or wet tarps and I’ll use them inside my big gear bags to keep other stuff dry and clean.
Big Watershed duffles, that is. Wow. Lots of features that help keep water out. And duffles with big wide openings! I’ll never dig to the bottom of a barrel again. (I am checking out the Westwater Watershed backpack, no duffel and a lot like MEC’s Slogg though without the heavy duty backstraps--the one with the ZipDry closure, not the zipper--only because it fits a particular space in my boat really well. I lash everything very carefully in my boat because of my tendency toward bottom feeding. Alas, it feels a lot like the traditional “bucket bags” in which the very thing you are searching for tunnels to the bottom.
If you’re really looking for time spent in the water experiments, I’d check out what the oar guides use on big rafting trips. Flipping a raft piled with several weeks ‘o gear will certainly force your bags under water and it’s not unusual for the raft to be upsidedown for an hour before they can muscle it to shore and get the requisite dozen people needed to flip it back upright. I watched The Old Man flip an 18’ Cataraft in Pillow Rapid on WV’s Gauley (spectacular, by the way) and, piled with the gear of 8 hardboaters for a few nights on the river, I watched it drag over Volkswagen Rock upsidedown. The bag at the very top of the gear pile (to keep it from being crushing in the middle of the gear pile) ripped completely open. Inside was a nearly brand new banjo. See number one rule at the top.
