The Outdoor Adventure Giving you tips, tricks & recommendations to help make adventuring in the Outdoors fun, safe & exciting for you and your kids.
When it comes to backpacking, there’s one thing I hate, and that is stuff that gets wet in my backpack… Especially if it isn’t supposed to be wet. Stuff Sacks are good and drysacks are better. Sea to Summit‘s line of Ultra-sil Nano drysacks is not only good or great, it’s excellent.
When you see drysacks, they usually fall into one of two categories: DWR or silnylon. DWR stands for Durable Water Resistant. It’s a water resistant finish that is sprayed onto nylon and which results in a temporary and limited water resistance. Depending on the brand and quality that resistance could be enough for you, but it’s not guaranteed to keep your stuff dry. Also, It does wear off over time. Silnylon on the other hand is completely waterproof. They take silicon and they impregnate the nylon with it resulting in something completely weatherproof and much longer lasting than the cheaper DWR coated fabrics.
Usually, this would make the silnylon a heavier choice, but because of their choice of fabrics, the Ultra-sil drysack from Sea to Summit is SUPER lightweight. I mean really really lightweight. You have the benefits of silnyon, but without the weight. To give you an example, the 13 liter bag that I have weighs in at only 1 ounce. That’s much lighter than the DWR bags I’ve purchased in the past. Now obviously it will be a bit more delicate, but not much: and so far, it seems like a worthwhile compromise.
Sea To Summit carries a full range of sizes for their ultrasil nano drysacks, ranging from 1 liter (at 0.5 ounces) all the way to 35 liters (at only 1.5 ounces). If you like to keep your stuff organized and dry, but don’t want to carry extra weight, this is definitely something you should check out.
As time goes on I’ll be letting you know how the bag holds out to normal backpacking use, but it’s definitely making it into my pack for this summer’s excursions!
Oh and it’s so light weight, it can double as a beachball when you’re bored at basecamp!
Have you tried out Sea to Summit gear before? Can you recommend any other sea to summit gear that’s worth adding to our pack?
