My better half has had an NDK Explorer LV for years, and has developed a problem with her back that doesn’t allow her to lean the boat to steer comfortably. She recently bought a surfski/sea kayak hybrid, and fell in love with the rudder, which allows her to steer pain-free. Problem is that she feels super confident in the explorer in seas, and wants to use it for that and also take it on vacation because it does handle most anything.
Question: Has anyone heard of how to mount one on an Explorer or similar boat, and if so, where to find info showing how to do it?
There are many add-on rudder kits available, but unless someone here has done this, you might want to contact Sea Kayak USA, the importer of NDK kayaks.
Thanks, I’ll drop them an email
I think I may have come across the answer - there’s a “Gudgeon” for mounting rudders on pointed sterns sold by Sea-Lect that you use as a mount for the rudder. The carrying handle hole on the stern of the boat I’m looking to do it on looks almost perfect to use as the horizontal attachment.
Quick phone call, and we’ll know.
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Hopefully one of the Sea-Lect rudder kits will work out for you. Sea-Lect and Smart Track are two of the first manufacturers of the “gas pedal” designed rudder systems. The Smart Track rudder came standard on the QCC 600 which my wife has. However the way the cables are routed at the pedals caused them to fail prematurely and the pedal system was aluminum which caused corrosion problems in salt water. We switched to a Sea-Lect pedal system several years ago, which are made of an injection molded polypropylene/fiberglass and have had no problems since. The Smart Track rudder was fine.
The only thing I’m not sure of is how they retrofit the control cables on a boat not designed for them. I assume the kit covers that.
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Talked to Sea-Lect yesterday, and they looked up the boat design. They said it will work just fine with the Gudgeon I thought was the right one. Yea!!!
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Called an outfitter who does boat repairs, and they said it likely wouldn’t work well because the stern is swept upward, and the rudder might not have enough blade in the water. They said that if we were really serious about putting a rudder on that particular design, cutting off the end of the stern and doing a new end pour of epoxy with a flat face to bolt the rudder to would be the way to go.
Not serious enough to do that - cheaper to buy a new boat.
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