Review: Kokopelli Chasm-Lite Stand-Up Paddleboard

With most things I’ve acquired—Grandma’s dishes, batiks from Kenya—I can easily apply the Marie Kondo test: If it sparks joy, I keep it. If it leaves me ambivalent, I find it a new home. But this test fails me when it comes to my bikes, skis, tents, and other toys that bring immense joy when I’m playing outside. When I return home, my joy deflates like a leftover party balloon when I try to stuff it all back into the gear closet.

That’s why Kokopelli’s Chasm-Lite Stand-Up Paddleboard caught my attention. The company claims it’s the lightest, most packable SUP on the market—and that feels right. I haven’t encountered a more lightweight or manageable one. Most paddleboards are about 9 to 12 feet long and 30 to 36 inches wide, and they typically weigh between 15 and 40 pounds. At 10 feet long, 30 inches wide, and 6 inches thick, this board weighs a hair under 13 pounds (12.9) and rolls into the size of a three-season sleeping bag. Add the pump, four-piece carbon paddle, 9-inch plastic fin, leash, and repair kit, all of which squeezes into an included roll-top backpack, and you’ve got a 17.5-pound package, roughly the same weight as a large watermelon.

The Chasm-Lite all rolled up for land travel.

Photograph: Kokopelli

While I loved the thought of throwing this water toy in the back of my Prius rather than having to strap it down on an overhead rack, I was also skeptical: Lightweight often doesn’t equate to durable, and the northern Minnesota lakes where I generally paddle are filled with sharp rocks. Plus, how would such a featherweight and relatively short SUP track in wind or waves? With a rounded, planing hull, and 290 liters of board volume, it’s spec’d to be buoyant and stable for anyone up to 250 pounds, which is more than 100 pounds heavier than me.

A large crew, including my partner, relatives, and friends, had a few long weekends to test it on 61-square-mile Lake Vermilion. This Minnesota lake adjacent to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area and just south of the Canadian border is known for its variable water conditions, from sunrise glass to whitecaps kicked up by 25-mph winds in the afternoon. It also contains the muskie, a toothy, prehistoric fish that grows to almost 5 feet in length and has occasionally been known to bite humans—which gives paddlers incentive to stay on their boards.

Photograph: Kokopelli

When I rolled out the Chasm-Lite, I was thrilled to see how beefy the 500-denier PVC board felt to the touch. (“Denier” is a unit of measure that essentially describes the thickness of a fiber used in creating a fabric. In this case the “fabric” is PVC, or polyvinyl chloride, a very durable plastic.) Double layers on the rails (sides) increase the board’s stiffness and lateral rigidity; single layers on the deck and bottom help reduce its weight, and the seams are glued to ensure nothing pops open. With a storage bungee up front and two parallel traction pads in the middle, the deck looked like a comfortable place to while away a few hours on the water—standing, sitting, or lying down.

The fin slid with a click into a groove in the board's tail easily enough, but I couldn’t find the directions to blow up the deck. I was too impatient to do a Google search, but how hard could it be? It turns out, it was a challenge. The accompanying plastic Nano Barrel Pump feels like a kid’s toy, because it’s so light (less than 2 pounds). But it’s a sophisticated gadget, with a pressure gauge and a switch that can toggle between high-volume mode and high-pressure mode. For a pack raft, which Kokopelli also sells, the lever should be on High Volume. For a smaller SUP, however, it should be on High Pressure, because that helps you dial in the psi (pounds per square inch) more accurately. The Chasm-Lite should be inflated to between 12 and 15 psi.

Photograph: Kokopelli

After 20 minutes of pumping, the gauge still wasn’t registering the psi, perhaps because I was unknowingly using the pump in High Volume mode. But the board felt firm, so I set out on a test paddle, just in time to absorb the wakes of about six power boats. I hadn’t been on an SUP since last summer, but I felt wobbly, like I was standing on top of a blow-up pool toy as I tried to balance over the waves. Before long, I was headlong into the water.

So I returned to the dock for round two of pumping. After a few minutes more of fiddling with the gauge, it finally registered that the board was pumped to only 10 psi, way too low. When it hit 15 psi, I paddled back out, and the difference was night and day: The wobble was gone and the board felt solid underfoot. On flat water, tracking was impressive, and I tried a few fancy draw strokes, which felt light and natural, especially with the height-adjustable carbon paddle. When I took the SUP out again that afternoon in windy chop, it was harder to manage, especially when bigger boats and their trailing wakes rolled through. But the board was fully inflated this time, making it stable enough to stay upright.

By the end of the weekend, I was doing laps around the island a half mile into the lake, but I still felt hesitant to paddle much farther, because on a lake the size of Vermilion, wind and waves kick up in an instant. And while the board felt sturdy, I wasn’t confident it would do well in rough water.

When I returned to our shallow dock area, I tried it out as a floating yoga studio and was able to execute a few downward dogs. True yoginis would probably feel comfortable practicing tree pose on the board, but it felt too tippy and narrow for me to try.

Photograph: Kokopelli

For context, I asked a few friends who own their own SUPs to spend some quality time on it on Lake Vermilion over the following weekends. One reported that it was way less stable than her own 12-foot solid board. Two others, however, felt it was on par, in terms of tracking and stability, with their own longer inflatable SUPs. Everyone gave it high marks for its solid design.

In building an ultralight inflatable SUP, however, Kokopelli has presented me with a unique quandary: While it’s beautifully built and easy to haul and store, does it bring me enough joy (and stability) on the water to pass the Marie Kondo test?