I’ll admit it – I’m a hat guy. Historically they’ve mostly been baseball cap-style hats, my two favorite being a ‘dad hat’ I picked up in Amsterdam and a Legacy brand one that I bought on Kauai – that one is so broken in you can barely see the chicken logo anymore. But having lived near the beach for most of my life, sunhats are also a necessity. Lately I’ve found that my Quiksilver floppy hat has become, well, too floppy. And my lifeguard style wicker hat just doesn’t hold up to hard water usage in Florida. Enter Instagram.
If you’re a guy and you’re reading this, I’ll bet you a box of ammo you’ve seen an ad for Shelta hats. Allegedly windproof and waterproof, I’m pretty sure that every time I opened Instagram I was seeing one of their ads. Intrigued, and needing to find a solution to the constant Florida sun, I looked into them a bit deeper.
Shelta currently had six models of hats with varying degrees of waterproofness and slightly different ‘headboxes’ (for lack of a better word) – some are more square, more round, or somewhere in between. I figured the boonie style would work best for me, and I’m not in or around the water every single day so I chose to go with the Landhawk hat in the light camo color. The magic to these hats is the built in plastic visor that sits in the front quarter of the hat – it keeps the visor from flopping down. If you believe their online videos you can stand in a hurricane or kitesurf with one of their hats, and the visor stays our of your eyes. Fortunately we haven’t had a hurricane hit southwest Florida hard this summer so I haven’t had a chance to put it to that kind of test.But you can see the outline of the visor here, which is also adjustable. 
A note on sizing: I don’t have a particularly large head, and I found that their sizing runs just a tick small. I did measure my head before initially ordering a S/M size, however when it arrived it was just too snug. Per their instructions, the hat does not stretch so they recommended up-sizing, which I did and found the M/L size to fit perfectly. You can snug the hat down with a drawstring, so if you’re borderline according to their size chart, I recommend sizing up.
So how does it perform? At the beach: great. West Florida is not exactly known for it’s surf so I’ve been unable to give it a good dunking, however it does work great for regular beach days. I also put it through some paces in a 2 day pistol class in August in central Florida, and in case you were wondering, no, we were not chilly. 90* with humidity about the same made for pretty warm days on a grass range. I wore the hat through 2 days of shooting and the best compliment I can pay is: I forgot I was wearing the hat. It’s very comfortable, and very cool (temperature-wise, not style-wise). It provided adequate shade, and best of all with the firm visor on the front, I could take the hat off and fan myself with it I needed a little breeze.
The drawstring is great – not intrusive, and there is a clip on the back of the visor where you can hang it out of the way (which is how I wear it most often).
Is this a hat I’d recommend or buy again? Yup, it is. Do I have a couple bones to pick? In fact I do…one is pricing – for 74 bucks, Bidenomics are clearly a factor here. This is a $50 hat in ‘normal’ times, and I’d happily pay it. The second is that this hat is made in China – again, charge me $75 and have it made by American hands and I’ll sing your praises all day long. But that’s just me not wanting to support Communism – you do you. Shelta gets a half point rating bump for at least shipping them from San Diego, my hometown. But it’s a well-built piece of equipment that I think will last a long time.
You can check out Shelta’s hats and other sunwear here: https://www.sheltahats.com/
