Camping can be a real blast with some buddies and cold brews, but tugging along a boat with you can be a real bitch, especially if you don’t have a trailer hitch on your car. Thankfully, the 21st century has given way to the Backpack Inflatable Pontoon Boat. In under 15 minutes, you can assemble a full pontoon boat for you and your posse to ride downstream.

Weighing only 42 pounds, this sturdily built backpack won’t kill you (if they can do it in the Army, you can sure as hell do it for a vacation.) Each pontoon clocks in at a full 8′ long and can hold up to 350 pounds together. At $237, this is fun you and your friends can afford by giving up beer pong for a week.

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You can’t say the Earth doesn’t contain enough water. Nope there is more than enough of that for sure. So why are we not using it more? Especially for sea-going vessels. The Suntory Mermaid II is a boat that uses something waves to provide it the energy it needs to move.

Being touted as the greenest nautical power source since the sail, the Mermaid II uses two fins side-by-side along the bow which are moved by the waves to produce a dolphin-like kicking propulsion movement. The only drawback is that the Suntory will move at around five knots, which is 2-3 times slower than your average diesel ship. — Andrew Dobrow

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The Marion Hyper-Sub Submersible Powerboat is not your average sea bearing vessel. The Hyper-Sub can operate as both a boat and a submarine, both equally well. And it can look pretty sweet while doing it too.

Creator Reynolds Marion enlisted the help of his mechanical engineer neighbor to help create the schematics for the Hyper-Sub, and as it turns out, the schematics allowed for an awesome design as well. Kinda like the Batmobile on water skis. (more…)

There haven’t been many posts, if any, on boat-related topics, so here is something for you techies who love boats but miss all of your gadgets. The Minn Kota RipTide Wireless CoPilot is a remote that allows you to control the boat without having to sit behind the steering wheel. With the remote you can steer left or right, speed up or slow down, and turn the prop on or off. The RipTide Wireless CoPilot is small enough to wear on your wrist or a belt, and what do you know, it’s waterproof AND floats. Man the guys at Minn Kota probably had to think long and hard about whether or not to add those features; once they remembered this was for a boat in water, they decided to add them.

The only drawback to this ingenious remote is that it only works with specific Minn Kota motors, meaning that if you’re one of the few who actually has a Minn Kota motor, you have to hope that your motor is compatible. If you have one of the motors that can use this, spending $170 on the Minn Kota RipTide Wireless CoPilot might make your boating experience a whole lot more interesting (steering from the water?). — Nick Rice

Minn Kota RipTide Wireless CoPilot [via Uber-Review]