How to Make a Super Kayak: Adding a Skeg

[Music] this catch 120 kayak from Pelican is the latest kayak that'll be rigging for fishing however I gotta say that right out of the factory it really does come very well prepared that's a very nice seat what's perfectly stable no reason for pontoons and as rod holders built in and of course did I say it's stable it seems a little bit like a barge well for me at least but I still wanted to add a few things so I took it over to my big boat and see my Bass radar there also from Pelican this kayaks not that heavy that I can't just lift it up onto the boat that's kind of nice and the first thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to add an anchor trolley this is just a store-bought one and the process has begun of course where I take a kayak and then make it my own customizing kayaks is a lot of fun I actually have a whole bunch of extra stickers like this so you can look in the description if you're interested in finding out how you can get one and in no time this universal kayak trolley I bought online is installed it even comes with a cleat that I just screwed on to the top and this boat also comes in two tracks that will accept like gear heads from Scotty you see there's a where they call that a rocket launcher style and a regular style rod holder Scotty's got all kinds of things you can attach to these so it's pretty much up to you as to how you want to rig it so it was almost ready to go not quite well you know me you know that I can't be content just doing simple modifications like that to a kayak I have to really get to the next level which is where this comes into play this is a skeg and the assembly from an old kayak it was a very very small orange kayak I was trying to push the limits to see how small a kayak I could actually fish from the whole project turned out to be a bit of a failure but there were still some parts that I could use from it so I'm going to put this gag on this kayak but first let me show you some old footage from me trying to fish from a very small tire one that I named the Menehune anything name is the name of an ancient people that supposedly lived on Hawaii they like eating bananas they were very small and seemed appropriate to call this little tiny kayak the many unit I'm not that big of a guy but I could still barely fitting it but it didn't stop me I added a skeg you can see me fashioning it in the shape of a leaf of banana leaf which is supposed to be the Menehune people's favorite food I made that as a piece of plexiglass and I strapped everything that I thought I would need down to it but I was exceeding the weight limit tremendously so I'd lose some strips of foam to the sides of it and then I took it out to see if it would work the kayak was barely supporting me but it was still just enough to catch a fish [Music] there was a few times where I thought if I had a big official he might have had the advantage and drugged me all over the place I was able to get this fish in just a little Jack it wasn't terribly comfortable out here on the flats so I thought I'd take this assembly and try a new experiment to fish we're earrings no no no no the fish have good hearing huh never mind since I knew that the kayak floated I took it to someplace a little more sheltered under the trains here I thought with all this racket would fish actually still bite or would they get all frightened away but it turned out for sure that the fish didn't care about the loud noises I kind of knew this already at least with cheap said it must be hard of hearing or something this was one of the last times that ever really took this kayak out it really was proving to be just not big enough for me I guess that's why you've never seen videos of this thing in the past that's pretty cool stuff huh well here now that I have a an adult sized kayak I'm going to try to put this on and the first thing I have to do is cut off the handle because there's no room so this is this will become the handle too so let's get to cutting [Music] although I said earlier that Skaggs don't pivot what I meant is horizontally here you can see these pivot points just by adding male and female threaded PVC parts that would allow me to raise and lower this keg but it still wouldn't turn left to right this was meant just to improve tracking not to steer the kayak obviously you've got to have some courage to drill big holes in your kayak but if you do you can use the same male ends with a cap as a bolt and a nut to hold the assembly in place once the hole is drilled you just circle email in through with a cap underneath you tighten it all down and now you have a place to add some PVC armatures this whole assembly is going to double as a new handle to compensate for the one that I cut off and then you can see I put it back together with a little silicone glue most of the PVC into it after everything is screwed down into the holes and now it was time to add the sched part and they didn't know how long to make it or what angles so I had to take the whole thing out onto the water to figure it out I do want to give the special thanks to McCain for sending me a few fishing rods it worked really great and they also look pretty cool too after having caught that fish you can see what I do there is that correct a little bit to straighten up the kayak and then it soon as soon as I cast it I have to correct again and then before I'm done retrieving I have to correct yet again this was the reason I'm adding a scag if any kind of wind or current a flat-bottomed stable kayak tends to turn here you see if I don't correct I'm now almost sideways to the wind or the current I think in this situation we'll turn you around and actually know you're fishing backwards when I'm trying to face the trees and this just wasn't going to work fortunately I already had a solution I had everything I needed with me to attach that scag but first I had to find a place to get up onto land and although Tampa has a lot of great mangrove lines where you can fish it's kind of short on the beach Department but I eventually found a little spot where I could pull the kayak up and do some work there's actually a really nice picturesque place the reason I didn't do this on the boat before I left is because you can't really tell what position the scag has to be in because little tiny micro adjustments will make it so that you're either pointing in one direction or the other if it was really quick that you would just go around in circles so I crammed it in there as best as I could and I took it out for a test run you can see it's up out of the water and then I reach back and pivot it down inside the water right away I could tell I was listening through port just a little bit I should say I was turning to port so I came back and I we adjusted it [Music] again this is an important part if you're going to build a skeg to get a dialed in so that you're going perfectly straight once I had it back out there I was realizing that if I stopped paddling the kayak would just keep going in a straight line I knew I had it dialed in just right it took myself a little sharpie marker and Mark where everything had to be later on I took it and I shortened it because I didn't want it so deep in the water and I added a little cotter pin I made this one out of an old fish stringer and that would keep it from falling out and from spinning while I was underway the first now to take it on a full test you can see me coming along this tree line here ideally I want to face forward so I can cast parallel to industries this is still sped up but you can tell that I'm not correcting it all I'm not even touching the paddle and the tire keeps going straight it's really awesome it makes fishing from a kayak so much nicer that little Skagen event they were was doing this job I on the other hand was having a lot of trouble finding fish but you can see here it's it's just going to keep going whatever direction you have it pointed in a little tiny adjustments is all you really need I just couldn't catch any fish at this point though it was time to head back and do the final cutting and aligning of the sched assembly well I'll tell you I'm not surprised at the results I had with this gig because I put them on kayaks before and the results were always phenomenal the increase in performance is amazing it really is anybody out there who has a kayak without a scale or a rudder I would strongly suggest giving this a shot and I'm going to put some links in the description below to show some simpler ways people have figured out - how to put Scaggs on a kayak and if you're out there and you haven't bought a kayak yet I would really suggest getting something very stable like the catch 120 here that has enough capacity to support you when your gear unlike the the little orange one which wasn't enough for me so get a kayak that's the right size for you because adding tracking is a piece of cake but adding stability can be a little bit tricky so this kayak is actually working out really great now that it's a good tracking kayak and it was already a good stable perfectly stable kayak it's now like a super kayak so leave a comment below if you want to share your videos or your suggestions as to how to add a skeg on a kayak and Senator just to tell me that I'm you know cool or awesome or something like that that'd be all sweet all right see you guys on the work [Music]

Channel: zoffinger

Views: 571,494

Rating: 4.848177 out of 5

Keywords: kayak, kayak fishing, fishing, saltwater, Florida, fish, how-to, zoffinger, Tampa, ocean, snook, Catch120, Pelican

Id: sRt54Fwicqc

Length: 14min 50sec (890 seconds)

Published: Tue May 09 2017