Storing Your Fishing Gear Onboard Your Kayak
It isn’t necessarily a simple problem.
First of all, your fishing gear and tackle need to be secure at all times, which means that come what may they won’t get lost. Rods, tackle box, fish tank, bait tank and cooler come if various sizes, and you need to reach and use them whenever you want.
Hatches may be relatively safe for storage but they are not very practical when it comes to accessing what you stored in them.
Sit on top (SOT) kayaks don’t have a real cockpit to speak of. They feature a shallow depression in the deck, and any object on it (including yourself) may fall overboard or get washed away in case you’re paddling through the surf.
You can secure your fishing equipment with bungees and ropes, but that may not always make them handy, and dipping your reels in saltwater could harm them.
Sit-in kayaks (SIK) feature either a close or open cockpit, but it’s usually rather small, and being low above the water it exposes your gear to spray.
Canoes offer limitless storage space – practically the whole boat, but this comes at a high price of being harder to paddle than kayaks, especially under wind and in the surf.
In contrast, the cockpit of the W fishing kayak is bigger and deeper than any kayak cockpit, yet the boat itself is small and easy to paddle in adverse conditions. In fact, you have ten cubic feet of internal, dry and accessible storage space in the cockpit itself and inside the boat’s four hull tips that you can always access from inside the cockpit.
There are numerous places you can attach gear to, and you can easily add more. On top of this you can use the top of the hulls outside the cockpit for attaching extra bulky equipment.
I chose this picture to show how much storage this kayak has to offer simply because nearly every cubic inch in it is available for storage:
Tags: bait tank, gear, kayak fishing, rods, storage, tackle, tackle box
January 22nd, 2008 at
How do you organize your stuff in there?
What’s the best way?
January 22nd, 2008 at
Good question…
It depends entirely on what type of gear you take for fishing, and on your fishing style.
The only general advices I can give is to store heavy stuff at the bottom of the hulls and give yourself plenty of legroom.
You can browse through the website. It shows many pictures of the inside of people’s W cockpit – maybe you could get some ideas.