Catarafts

For quality cataraft tubes, we recommend our bestsellers: AIRE and Rocky Mountain. The Rocky Mountain cat tubes offer the lowest cost per year to own of any tube out there, and with AIRE you get unmatched life spans, air retention, and handling with their continuous curve design. AIRE gives you eleven choices of tube size and models, including the high capacity Lions, and the Rocky Mountain (a.k.a. "RMR") line comes in the popular 14' and 16' sizes. We also carry the economical Maxxon cataraft pontoons, though we want you to understand the limitations of glued pvc products - a category which the Maxxons fall into.

This year, AIRE brought back the huge 18 foot Lion tubes, and a couple years back they expanded the Wave Destroyer series to a total of four models. More about these below. All models & brands we carry feature frame chafe pads on the tube tops. In the case of the AIRE's it is not actually a separate piece of material, but rather a section of thicker gray fabric cut & welded into the tube top. This does help keep discoloration and staining from your rowing frame to a minimum. Both zinc-galvanized steel and aluminum will leave black marks, unless the metal is powder coated.

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We stock a few sizes of the imported tubes from Maxxon. These offer great strength and stiffness at less than half the cost of any domestic tubes, although the trade off is that they are assembled with glue. This means that even though their price is lower than the Rocky Mountain tubes, they won't last quite as long. That said, for smaller sizes like the Maxxon ten footer's, there is no equivalent in either the Rocky Mountain or the AIRE line-up. The 10' Maxxon tubes are often sold to fly fishermen, but they are just as worthy of whitewater as the bigger 14's and 16's. Maxxon's in-between 12' size has sold poorly so we don't usually stock them anymore. It normally only takes an extra day or two to procure them though. If you are in a hurry, in many cases we may have the twelve footers drop-shipped direct to you.

The Wave Destroyers from AIRE are a highly rockered tube intended for crashing through big hydraulics, but not for running rivers that tend to have extended flat sections. Originally the Wave Destroyers only came in 14' and 15' sizes, but in 2011 a 12' and 13' size became available. The 12' size has by far the shortest waterline of any whitewater tube AIRE makes, and with a simple day frame this small size makes a superb choice for steep technical class V rivers. This section of our site was updated in March of 2013.

Remember that the prices and weights here are for TUBES ONLY (frames are on a separate page) and that the widths given are dependent somewhat on whose frame you buy.

For information about multiple cataraft discounts, and discounts on accessories that are purchased with your cataraft, please see the F.A.Q. page of our website.