Defective Korkers Lurking In A Store Near You

You have to wear stream cleats of some kind to fish the Salmon River. Which is
a damned good idea if you don't want to put your ass on the line while wading.

Rather than renting Korkers again, I decided to invest in a pair.
Bought them locally, properly fitted by the dealer, all looked good.

And they gripped the stream bottom like a kitten on curtains - but just long
enough for me to get out to the far side of a hip-deep,
slipperier-than-puppy-poop freestone stream.

It was when I wanted to head back that the problem became apparent: I couldn't
keep my hold on the river bottom to save my ass from a soaking. I went down
twice before I got out of that spot. And later the same day I got into a
similar predicament that only a prompting by Paul to deploy my Folstaff kept
me from another dunking.

I thought I was just being careless, but later in the day, looking at the
bottom of the sandals, I realized I was missing 14 of the original 21 studs on
one boot, and 11 on the other. This from just a half day on the water. Then I
checked Paul's Korkers, and all but one of his studs were still present - and
that after many many days on the same river - and likely in the same spot.

When I got back home the local fly shop graciously refunded my money. Today I
called the folks at Korkers and found out exactly what I suspected: they had
made a design change to the soles and studs that proved to be a disaster,
causing the soles to shed studs with little provocation. Within two months
they had changed the design again to fix the problem, and the guy I spoke to
claimed they tried to get the defective stock returned, but achieved only
modest success.

So there's still a lot of these floating around in stores - and very likely at
distributors - waiting for some unsuspecting person to buy them and use them
to get into a tricky situation that they may not be able to get out of in a
dry, alive state.

I am 100% certain the defective sandals securely attached to my corpse would
have led to a whole supply chain being indicted with a very high likelihood of
conviction - or at least a healthy settlement (once again, another opportunity
for my spouse to obtain great wealth has slid by the board ;-)

Anyway...If you're considering a new pair of Korkers stream cleats, make sure
you buy model K1100 or K1100+ (the + has more cleats) or K5000 which use
threaded cleats that screw into metal receivers in the sole (although,
interestingly, the Korkers guy explained the K5000 requires much maintenance
to keep from corroding - I'd stay away from them based on what he told me...

Cheers - and safe wading...

/daytripper