If you have a long walk from your car to the water, a cart can take a lot of strain off your back. Unfortunately, if you have to cover a stretch of soft sand, the wheels are likely to dig in, leaving you with a couple of tough rows to hoe to get to and from the water. There are carts with larger wheels and tires that work better on soft surfaces, but they aren’t easy to stow in a kayak. Wheeleez has developed a new small wheel with a low-pressure tire. Their 22 cm balloon wheel has a tire that takes only two to three pounds per square inch, so it almost appears to be flat when it’s carrying a load. But because it brings a lot of tire in contact with the sand, the tire sits very lightly, just as a snowshoe floats on snow.

We used the cart to haul a 65-pound kayak laden with 45 pounds of rocks. When in tow, the cart moved smoothly over the sand without digging in. We put the same kayak and load on a different cart that had narrow wheels and hard tires—it dug deep into the sand, slipped sideways when traversing a gentle slope and was, in general, a hard pull. A third cart with 10-inch pneumatic tires that had a 3-inch-wide tread did better, but didn’t match the Wheeleez wheels for easy pulling and compact size.