Alpinestars Sealed Sport Pack Cured My Hatred of Riding Motorcycles With a Backpack
I put the Alpinestars Sealed Sport Pack through its paces over 1,600 miles of rugged Irish coastline. Somewhere along the journey, I forgot that I ever hated riding with a backpack.
The connection between rider and motorcycle is what gives us that pure, almost meditative riding experience. When done correctly, you can’t distinguish yourself from the bike for minutes at a time. The quickest way to break that illusion is to invite a third party: one that has no intention of forming a connection. Swinging around my back, like a careless monkey, is how I’d describe riding with every non-motorcycle backpack I’d ever had, and I loathed them all.
But the Alpinestars Sealed Sport Pack is made for riders.
I spent 1,600 miles with an Alpinestars Sealed Sport Pack tackling Ireland’s rugged west coast—the Wild Atlantic Way—and the wet weather my homeland is famous for, and now I can’t go back. Well, I still hate riding with regular backpacks, but this bag is a different gravy.
Even after throwing the pack on and taking it off countless times, I still can’t get over the alleviation of weight once I clip the quick-release magnetic center buckle on the bag. That’s not down to the magnetic buckle as much as it is the straps, which take the weight off your shoulders and spread it across your chest. When you ride with a regular backpack, the weight is somewhat taken from your shoulders due to the fact that it sits on the pillion seat, but it’ll still strain you throughout the ride, particularly with lateral movement; that’s not the case with the Sealed Sport Pack.
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When I’m doing my best Marc Marquez impression through the corners, hanging off the side of the bike, it stays supported and in place. The pack doesn’t move around as a separate entity or add any movement that I need to brace for; it’s glued to me, but still somehow adds very little perceivable weight. The semi-rigid foam back also goes a long way in spreading the weight out across my back and keeping the bag’s contact patch large enough that I never get any aches during or after long spins.
But as much as the Sealed Sport Pack’s features lend themselves to earning the ‘sport’ moniker, without the bag’s waterproof qualities, I doubt I’d have used it even 20% as much as I do.
Growing up with rainy, windy Irish weather did nothing to help my hatred of riding with a backpack. If I ever had anything of remote importance in my bag, like my laptop, the regular stress of riding through Dublin city in the rain was compounded by the fact I knew it could get destroyed. After my first rainy ride with the Sealed Sport Pack, I saw the wet-weather backpack-laden riding through a new lens. But it did take a long ride in the rain to gain my confidence because if you know riding gear, you know ‘waterproof’ isn’t always 100% waterproof.
After years of riding with my Google Pixel in the wet as a navigation unit without issue, when I rode through days of such God-awful rain while tackling Ireland's Wild Atlantic Way, it finally succumbed. But the contents of my bag were drier than my mouth on a Saturday morning after a good Friday night. This bag is 100% waterproof, true to its description.
Quickly, the Sport Pack became my go-to storage for all my most important equipment throughout my Wild Atlantic Way trip. Think laptop, cameras, mics, lenses, and chargers—not just when it was raining, because the Sealed Sport Pack was the safest place for my gear in all conditions. I’d dread to think about my laptop and camera sensors rattling around my bike’s top box; in this backpack, things are snug.
The Sport Pack is roomy enough with its 23-liter storage capacity, but it's how the space is divvied up that gives me peace of mind. The Sport Pack is relatively narrow, so packing is more like stacking, as opposed to the Tetris we play with bigger bags. The fact that it doesn’t take much to fill the interior out to the edges and that you can almost completely roll the top down means that, almost regardless of how full the bag is, the contents stay secure while you ride.
The only time I felt something rattling around the Sport Pack was down to me not securing my laptop in the padded laptop pocket with the strap; this served to highlight how important a simple feature, like a strap, is. The only areas I’d like to see improved are the squeaky buckles that connect the top half of the shoulder strap to the lower half. This wasn’t something I noticed at the start, but as the Sport Pack gradually became my everyday bag, the squeak while I walked became hard to ignore, like a drip falling on my forehead.
The quick-release buckles have never come undone while the bag is on my back, but I have picked it up on a couple of occasions to find one of the buckles undone; I suspect I must’ve stood on the buckle or done something similar while the bag was on the floor. Thankfully, I don’t have any reason to believe that this would happen while wearing the bag, and the way I ride is proof of that and a testament to how this bag has changed the way I think about riding with a backpack.
As I type this, the Sealed Sport Pack sits beneath my feet on a plane. I’m on my way back from a media event, and I fit everything I needed in the bag: tops, jeans, a jacket, laptop, camera gear, toiletries, chargers/adapters, a notebook, and headphones. But the fact that this is the bag I chose for the trip isn’t because it can fit everything I need; I could’ve taken a regular backpack that had more capacity and separate compartments for things. It’s because if it was raining on the way home, I’d be screwed. Even so, my Tiger Sport 800 has a top box, so I could’ve popped my regular backpack in there and rode to the airport. But the Sealed Sport Pack feels so much better on my back than having added weight in the top box that, without thinking, I rode with the bag.
The subconscious decision to ride with a bag instead of putting it in a top box might seem small; however, it’s anything but. This pack hasn’t just changed the way I look at backpacks; it has changed the way I look at luggage systems.
Before trying this bag, I’d never been on the fence over whether to get a top box on my bike versus a motorcycle-specific backpack—I’d always gotten the top box. Now, unless the top box was specifically meant to hold my helmet while I leave the bike somewhere, I’d save the money and get a waterproof backpack, and for $219.99, the Alpinestars Sealed Sport Pack makes a fantastic argument for the model I’d spend my money on. When gear seamlessly slides into your life and changes the norm, you can’t ignore it.
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