WAVEWALK KAYAKS

Sometime you feel like trolling – just dragging your fishing lines in the water along a known or new course, and you don’t feel like doing it paddling.
In such case it’s really easy to outfit your W kayak with an electric trolling motor. If you choose a basic model it could cost less than $100, with the deep cycle marine battery and charger you could reach $250.

A weaker motor would drain your battery more slowly. Make sure the battery you’re planning to buy fits at the bottom of the hull, where it would not destabilize your W kayak.

Attaching the motor to your W kayak is quite easy:
You can make a transom style preparation for a mount from a simple wooden board and four bolts, as shown in this illustration. Just drill, attach the board and fix the motor to it using the standard transom mount that comes with your motor.

Some activities like sailing and fast motorized boating require extra stability.
Products called ‘kayak sail’ are of little practical use because you can’t use them to go upwind, which is your main reason for using a sail in the first place.
Therefore, if you’re thinking about W kayak sailing you’d need a canoe or dinghy sailing rig that can take you upwind and is powerful enough to make sailing fun. Because it’s powerful, such rig requires a stable boat, and that’s where the outrigger/s solution can be applied.

Similarly, you can outfit your W kayak with a small electric motor, in which case it would not necessarily require extra stability.
However, if you’re planning to motorize your W kayak with a powerful gas engine (1.5 horsepower and up) you’d need to consider increasing your boat’s stability because when going at high speed it would become unstable.

Generally speaking, adding a pair of outriggers provides more stability, but a single outrigger can offer sufficient stability while being more practical in other ways.
The first problem with having an outrigger on each side of the boat is that in certain cases it limits the passengers’ access to and from the cockpit, for example when docking.
The second problem is that if you’re fishing an outrigger can come in the way of your fishing lines, and in case you have outriggers on both sides your freedom to cast all around the boat will be limited.
For these reasons we recommend using a single, large size outrigger rather than two small ones.
Such outrigger should be as long as possible so as to add minimal drag. It should also be voluminous enough to provide the buoyancy your W kayak needs to be stable even in extreme cases. Being heavy enough and placed away from the main hull/s will make it useful when the boat leans to the other side. The outrigger’s hull should not be as high as the hull in order to prevent the boat from leaning on its side.
The distance between the outrigger and the boat should allow you to paddle comfortably – we recommend at least 4 feet (120 cm).
This illustration represents a good single outrigger solution:

Yoav