Reviews > Personal Hygiene > Towels > Britanne Aquis Adventure Towel > Roger Caffin > Field Report

Field Report - Brittane Aquis Adventure Towel
Roger Caffin

Product Information

Initial Impression

The initial impressions this towel gave are recorded in the Initial Report: they were good. The size was large and the surface felt pretty good too.

Impressions from the Field Test period

In the Initial Report I listed some things I would be monitoring for this Report. The list is reproduced here with comments from my experience.

I will use it after a shower at home.
I used the towel after a shower for many nights. I found that the towel absorbed just over 50 g (about 1.8 oz) of water per person each time - off very wet hot-washed skin. This did not seem to make it very wet, but I was testing the Large size. I had reported that a completely wet towel held 264 g (9.3 oz) of water after being wrung out, while still being able to absorb a lot of water off my skin. This is over five times as much as I put on the towel after a shower. Clearly, drying one or two people after a hot shower is well within its scope. I believe that a smaller towel would still work well, but was not able to test this.

It should be noted here that my skin seems to hold a lot more water after a hot shower with soap than after jumping in a cold creek without soap. This means that the towel should cope even better on a walk.

How fast and well can it dry us?

This was a little more difficult to measure. I did find that the microfiber towel was harder to use than an ordinary cotton one, and this was curious. Imagine I'm holding the two ends of the towel like a rope and drying my back after a hot shower. The same can be done with the towel pulled around my legs. When I do this with a cotton towel it slides across my back or my legs quite easily, even if I pull the towel fairly tightly against my body or wrap it some way around my legs. But I found it much harder to pull the microfiber towel across my back or around my legs: it would not slide. There was a huge amount of drag with the microfibre towel, but very little with a cotton one. Of course, once I got rid of most of the hot water the rest just evaporated from the heat of my body, and the towel slid easily.

I puzzled a bit about this, and my explanation (or guess) is as follows. We know creatures like geckoes can run up walls and across ceilings. They can do this because their feet are covered in thousands (millions?) of tiny fibres, and the end of each fibre clings to the surface with a small force. The force per fibre is very small, but there are so many of these fibres that the total force is significant: enough to hold a gecko upside down. The fibres in a cotton towel are large, and the loops in terry towelling are floppy. There are not a lot of them in contact with my skin at any time. But the fibres in this towel are very fine and are presented much more coherently on the surface, and so there are many, many more of them in contact with my skin. When my skin is really wet and all the pores open (after a hot shower), each little fibre sticks to my skin through the surface tension of the water on my skin. The total drag ends up significant. Well, that's my explanation anyhow.

I was able to deal with this drag somewhat by holding the towel much more lightly against my back, or by wrapping it much less around my leg. That is, I had to reduce the amount of towel in contact with my skin. Alternately, if I rolled the towel across my skin or patted my skin with a loose handful of towel there was little or no drag. The only problem was remembering to do this each time. Once I had got the bulk of the water off my skin, the amount of drag went right down. This is at least consistent with the idea that the source of the drag is the surface tension between the fibres and the water on my skin.

A more serious question for a walker is how quickly can one get dry after jumping into a cold river. One does not want to have to spend ages fighting a 'draggy' towel while shivering. I found that my skin did not get as wet from a short swim in a fairly cold river: the pores of my skin did not open up and I had not stripped the normal body grease off my skin. This meant there was less water to get off my skin, less surface tension between the water and skin, and (I assume) less opportunity for the drag to happen. So it dried both me and my wife fast enough in practice. In fact, most times on walking trips neither my wife nor I noticed the drag at all. We were able to get dry quickly. Whether the quick jump in the river got us as clean as a long hot shower with soap: well, that's another question.

Summarising that I would have to say the towel does dry us pretty well and pretty fast on trips. If I am right about the mechanism for the drag, most any microfiber towel would have the same 'drag' behaviour.

'Especially gentle on hair and skin'?

A strange claim to make for a towel, but after using it for some time I can see why they claim it. I have to use the towel very lightly to avoid the drag. So it seems the word 'gentle' may apply, but not quite in the manner expected.

Hair drying

The web site shows lots of towels and turbans for hair. I found that the microfibers did dry my hair very well: better than a conventional cotton towel and much better than the other outdoors towels I have tried. This is useful, as a wet head in cold weather is not great. With some of the other towels I found enough water was left in my hair that drips would still form some time later. With this towel that never happened.

Grease Pickup

One of the problems we had encountered on very long trips was that our older towel picked up body grease and became almost waterproof. This Aquis towel is made of closely spaced microfibers which should be very good at absorbing body grease. On the other hand, the surface area of the microfibers is huge, so the grease should be more spread out. On short trips (under a week) the effect has not been noticeable. Testing the behaviour of the towel on very long trips is something which has not yet been possible. I could try leaving the towel unwashed over many trips - but my wife won't let me. This will have to wait for a longer trip.

How easy it is to dry the towel.

The towel dried out reasonably quickly at home overnight. We could not sling it across the pack every day on every trip as we were often going through rough scrub, but those times when we were on a track it was possible and it dried out within a few hours. We also tried hanging it up inside the tent during the night. Results from this were a bit mixed - some nights were still and others windy; some nights were cold and others warm, some nights were humid while others were dry. In general, a bit of sun and wind worked better.

How well does it last and wash?

Unlike one towel I tried, this towel handle use and washing fairly well. It did not seem to change its shape, but the size shrank a little after a couple of washes, down to 19" x 38.5" (48.5 x 98 cm). After that it stayed about the same size. It was hand washed separately the first time, and a small amount of dye came out as expected. Other than that it has been very simple to look after.

Towel colour

On one hard trip we had both the dark towel and a white face washer or flannel. It was very depressing to see how dirty the washer became, and how quickly it happened. The dark towel may have picked up a similar amount of dirt, but we couldn't see it!

Towel size

The length of the Large size towel (39" or 99 cm) was very good. It is long enough that I can make a rope of it and dry my back with it in the conventional manner. The width (19" or 48 cm) was wider than we needed, and in fact is probably all of twice as wide as we need. The large area means it is heavier than we would like, but the smaller size towels are not as long. My solution to this will be to cut the towel in half lengthwise. This will give two towels for the price of one(!), cut the weight down to an acceptable level, but give enough towel volume that it will still dry the two of us well enough for a day or two before it has to be dried out.

Likes
Basically, the towel works reasonable well
It does not seem to pick up grease as badly as our older towel
The safety clip is essential if drying the towel on my pack
The fabric seems to last well
The dark colour is a good idea!

Dislikes (minor)
The drag experienced after a hot shower - but this was not experienced in the bush
The Large size was twice as big (heavy) as needed for walking - but that's what I asked for!

Would I buy it?
Yes, I probably would. And I would probably get the Large size again so I could cut it down lengthwise to make two long towels again.

Reviewer Details

Reviewer:	Roger Caffin
Age:	57
Gender:	M
Email address:	r dot caffin at acm dot org
City, State, Country:	Sydney, NSW, Australia

Backpacking Background

I started bushwalking (the Australian term) when I was about 14 yrs old, took up rock climbing and remote exploration walking at University, later on took up ski touring and canyoning. These days I do all my trips with just my wife. Our preferred walking trips in Australia are long ones: about a week in the general Blue Mts (east coast of Australia) and Snowy Mts (alpine region), and up to two months long in Europe and the UK. Ski touring trips would also typically last up to a week. We favour fairly hard trips of some length and prefer to travel fast and light. Many of our trips are exploratory in wild country which sees few other walkers. In between these long trips we do some day walks, often exploring the start of longer trips. On average, we would spend at least two days per week walking or ski touring. Over the last year or two I have become converted to the concept of ultra-lightweight walking, and have been cutting my total pack weight down from 18 - 20 kg (40 - 45 lb) to about 12 kg (26 lb) for week-long trips. I have been designing and making our own ultralightweight gear for our own use and maybe for sale as well. We have been using a PackTowl for the two of us for some years, but had not been completely happy with it.

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