WAVEWALK KAYAKS

Kayak fishing hype is everywhere, but the truth has a value of its own, since it can be demonstrated and proven in real life:

Kayak stability without comfort and safety is a misnomer, and so is kayak fishing standing and stand up paddling without comfort and safety.
It is not reasonable to expect a paddler or angler to rise up from the L position to a standing position, and it is reckless to expect that they’ll sit down from a standing position in case they lose balance, which always happens when you stand up in or on top a kayak.
This is where the 14 inches high W kayak saddle shines…

Marketing hype is everywhere, but reality is there too, and you can see it with your own eyes:

This is the first movie in a new series proving the absolute technical superiority of the W500 in all aspects of kayak paddling and fishing, starting from dry and easy launching.
BTW, can people who use other kayaks even imagine what we’re talking about?…

You don’t have to run towards the kayak and hop into it as this movie shows – You can simply walk in, and settle inside comfortably, taking your time.
In any case, your feet will stay dry, and you’ll enjoy a 100% hassle free launching.

The movie shows some pretty energetic stand up kayak paddling, but you can do the same in a perfectly relaxed manner, paddling on both sides of your kayak, or on one side with a canoe style J stroke.

As for beaching, you just slide to the back of the kayak’s cockpit and by that raise its bow, so you can easily slide it up and land on firm ground, step out with no problem, and keep your feet dry, as usual with W kayak paddlers and anglers.




It’s not often that a major, mainstream fishing magazine reports the fact we offer something new, useful and exciting to the fishing world.

Mike Genoun, the editor of Florida Sport Fishing magazine published this short news story in the New Products section of the magazine’s March issue (paper):

Thanks Mike!

Most people think that paddling a kayak in flat water isn’t very interesting. They are right, when sit-in and SOT kayaks are considered, but flat wrong when W kayaks are:

This movie is one of my favorites. It shows the W300 performing like no other paddle craft before, and highlights some of the W important advantages for paddling, touring and kayak fishing.

The reason I chose to post it again on this blog is because I recently discovered how to add annotations to YouTube videos

Yoav

Norm Craig, a from Rhode Island, had serious back surgery only months ago, and realized he couldn’t go fishing in a canoe or a regular kayak. He became the first fisherman to use our new W500 for kayak fishing. He wrote this fishing kayak ‘mini review’ immediately after taking it on water for the first time, and today he sent us his second impression:

-”Beautiful morning with the big W:

A customer from Florida once told me he wished he had a fishing kayak that would enable him to relax and take a short nap while kayak fishing in the Everglades, knowing there are alligators around him…

I don’t know if I’d be able to fall asleep knowing there were alligators around my kayak, but I nearly did – knowing the Charles river is still pretty cold this time of the year:

The W fishing kayak’s superior stability is not just proven – it is spectacular, and anyone who watches our demo movies is amazed by what they see.

In a nutshell, our patented stabilization technology consists of a number of unique factors working together to assure maximal stability – far more than any other fishing kayak can offer, including the widest sit-in and SOT fishing kayaks, and even fishing kayaks featuring outriggers (stabilizers).

These key stability factors are:

1. Maximum use of the kayak’s buoyancy: All the W fishing kayak’s buoyancy is located as far as possible from the kayak’s center line, where it’s the most effective in stability terms. This W kayak’s ‘catamaran’ feature gives it a powerful stability advantage. In contrast, in a monohull sit-in or SOT fishing kayak most of the buoyancy’s stabilizing capability is wasted by the fact that it’s located mainly along the kayak’s center line.
2. Maximum effective leverage: In the W fishing kayak you stand up with your feet ‘planted’ on the bottom of the hulls, that is below waterline. For example, a 200 lb W kayak fisherman stands or rides his W kayak’s saddle with his feet as low as 5.5″ below waterline. In contrast, a SOT kayak fisherman who tries to stand up on the deck of his SOT kayak has his feet at least 2 to 3 inches above waterline, with little or nothing to support and hold them in place when the kayak is tilting. This poor initial stability coupled with poor stabilization capability makes it extremely hard to stand confidently on other kayaks.
3. Maximum resistance to rolling: The W kayak features twin hulls that act as double ‘hard chines’. A chine is the area where the hull’s side meets its bottom. If a boat’s chines are rounded the boat would ‘roll’ more easily than if its chines were angular. Kayak designers would give a kayak hard chines when they try to improve its resistance to rolling, or in other words when they try to increase that kayak’s ‘secondary stability’. This design principle is utilized to the maximum in the W-kayak’s twin hulls that offer twice the resistance to rolling and maximal angularity.
4. Max response time: Stabilizing yourself in a small watercraft such as a kayak is easier if you have some extra time to respond to the destabilizing event. Much of the overall instability in mono-hull sit-in and SOT fishing kayaks is caused by their poor initial (primary) stability. Those kayaks’ low effective (side) buoyancy causes them to tilt faster than stabler boats such as the W-kayak. A sudden, ultra-fast and strong change can leave you too little response time. In contrast, the superior initial stability provided by each of W-kayak hulls’ position and buoyancy makes them tilt less in terms of time and distance (depth). Therefore, each time you get destabilized in a W-kayak you benefit from some extra split seconds, as well as from a better body position, so you can react more effectively and regain control more easily.
5. Maximum ‘grip’ and safety: The W fishing kayak’s patented, 14″ high saddle adds two important things when stability is concerned, especially in the Riding position, which is the most effective paddling and fishing position in kayaks. First, the saddle gives you perfect grip through your legs, without using any straps. Second, the saddle offers you good safety in case you lose balance while standing up, because you can instantly and effortlessly ‘drop’ on it, and ‘grab’ it with your thighs and knees in the riding position. Other fishing kayaks are unsafe because they offer you no such ‘plan B’ in case you lose balance while standing up.
6. Stand up paddling capability: The W fishing kayak is designed specifically for stand up paddling and fishing, while other sit-in and SOT fishing kayaks are simply too wide, which makes them ineffective for stand up paddling due to bio-mechanical problems and poor tracking.

More about stability in fishing kayaks.

And what’s a kayak fishing blog nowadays without a movie? This movie is played in 4X slow motion in order to enable the spectator to appreciate how the kayak doesn’t tip over while a large size guy is jumping up and down and from one leg to another in it:

If you want to read more on these subjects, we recommend this article about stability in kayak design

Your fishing kayak’s stability is key to your success and fun in kayak fishing, and the outriggers may help in achieving better stability, but at a price.

By effective we mean how much stability can a pair of outriggers add to your fishing kayak’s initial lateral stability, and what are the drawbacks for using outriggers or that purpose, if any.

First, you need to understand what makes your fishing kayak stable (or unstable), and here is the skinny:

The kayak’s total amount of buoyancy, or roughly its volume is what defines its overall load capacity, or in other words, what weight it can carry without sinking.

All kayaks are symmetrical, which means that every kayak has a longitudinal axis, or center line – It’s the line that divides it in two identical parts: left and right. Each part is buoyant, obviously, and its characteristics are what defines that kayak’s lateral stability. These characteristics are:

1. Buoyancy (roughly the volume of each half), and

2. The distance of that kayak-half’s center of buoyancy from the kayak’s center line.

For this purpose it’s enough to say that the half-kayak’s center of buoyancy is the point at the center of that half-kayak’s mass.  If this definition isn’t clear enough, let’s just say that the center of buoyancy is the point that best represents what that half-kayak can do in terms of keeping that side of the kayak from sinking in the water.

To make a long story short, a kayak’s stability can be simply defined by a number that’s the result of multiplying each half’s buoyancy times the distance of its center of buoyancy from the kayak’s center line.

That number would give us a relative answer as to a kayak’s initial stability: The more buoyancy on each side, and the further apart the kayak sides’ centers of buoyancy are – the stabler it is. It’s something that’s easy to understand intuitively, and reading this article about kayak stability will explain to you what makes the W fishing kayak stabler than the widest fishing kayak out there.

Going back to outriggers, what each outrigger does is two things:

1. Increase the buoyancy of each of that kayak’s halves, and

2. Displace the half-kayak’s center of buoyancy further away from the kayak’s center line.

This is why outriggers can increase your fishing kayak’s stability, and the bigger they are, and the more remote from your kayak’s center line – the stabler you’ll be.

And here are the drawbacks of using outriggers in fishing kayaks:

Extra cost – A good pair of outriggers doesn’t come cheap

Lack of efficiency – In order to properly stabilize your fishing kayak, outriggers would have to be attached to its middle section. This is impossible because doing that would prevent you from both paddling and fishing. This is why outriggers are mounted in the back of fishing kayaks, where they cause less disturbance to paddling and fishing, but at a price of offering no extra stability towards the kayak’s bow, and considerably less stability in the area where you sit, paddle and fish (or stand up, if you’re an over optimistic person…)

Extra weight – With its attachment bars a pair or outriggers can weigh a lot, and that comes on top of your fishing kayak, fishing gear and tackle you need to get tom and from the beach.

Extra complexity – In many case you’d have to attach the outriggers before launching, and detach them after beaching. It can take precious time.

Reduced speed – Outriggers generate quite a bit of resistance, especially since their hull speed is much smaller than the main hull’s speed (I.E. they are much shorter than the kayak itself).  In addition, outriggers create a windage problem, which can be a nasty experience for you when the wind picks up, and for some reason it tends to do it almost every time you go out fishing…

Advertisers often cross the line between fact and fiction, and sometimes they cross the line between true and false.

For example, a well known kayak fishing store has recently advertised on its website that one of the brands it offers* for sale is (quote): “The only kayak to truly let you stand & fish with 100% confidence”.

By doing so that store made a number of significant mistakes:

First, they openly admitted that all the other brands they have advertised for years as being suitable for stand up fishing in fact do not offer to stand and fish with 100% confidence. This is exactly what what Wavewalk has been saying all the time.

Second, that store is misleading the public to think that particular kayak is safe, while it is far from being so since its outriggers are positioned at the stern, and therefore leave the standing kayak fisherman with no extra buoyancy at all to support him on the sides of his kayak’s middle and front parts, where he’s likely to tilt his boat when fishing. Anyone can see that.

Third, if a kayak fisherman standing on that SOT loses balance, as he’s expected to do sooner or later, he has a metal frame to hold on to, but nothing to fall down on – Assuming that fisherman is holding his fishing rod with both hands (common practice…) he’s likely to fall overboard, as he would from any other SOT or sit-in kayak. In fact, holding on to the metal frame increases leverage on the hull and makes it easier to tilt sideways and overturn.

And last but not least, that store’s statement is obviously false since the only fishing kayak that really offers fishermen to stand up and fish with 100% confidence and safety is the Wavewalk, as anyone can see by watching these movies at the bottom of the article discussing stability in kayaks.

* a sit-on-top kayak equipped with folding outriggers



Here’s another one of those spectacular (goofy?) demo movies we produce from time to time. It shows a rather special stand up paddling technique involving hopping while paddling…
Totally useless in terms of kayaking or fishing, but it’s the best workout I can imagine.