I will take it under advisement that tensioning it may take a couple of tries to get it right, easy enough to leave a extra bungie beyond the knot. But I may not care as much as you do on it fully retracting. The rope skegs in the old NDK boats seem to last better if you leave the skeg a smidge proud. That is not as true with the Valley boat, I assume there is a small diff in the angles somewhere that causes the difference. But I am having more trouble with it dropping freely than coming up, so I suspected I needed a thinner shock cord. Just didn’t want to redo the whole thing more than once.
I paddled true BCU style with this boat last summer, no operating skeg, so it is not fatal to have it out of commission. But it would be nice to be a bit less tired coming in from a windier day than I was.
Thanks for double checking. I suppose the population of paddlers out there who would take one look at this boat and know it was from MITA is aging out of things…
What did you end up using, and how has it been working? I need to redo my bungee and rope and possibly make other mods. I want to go with a thinner bungee. I’m wondering if the plastic fitting where the lines enter from above has shrunk. Its only 15 mm in diameter, and with two 6mm cords plus the rope things are rather crowded.
Unfortunately l am incredibly lazy. I have been doing the BCU thing and paddling without a working skeg. Because the 10mm bungie is in there still which is way too thick to move. I got a long run of quartering winds Thursday coming back from Killock and l might find my 6mm stuff in the bottom of my gear bag and do the fix this week.
I was told the thickest should use is 6 mm. If l didn’t already have the 6 somewhere in the bottom of the bag, l would probably pick up both 6 and 4 to try. You don’t need a lot of length.
I think 6 is too thick for mine. I’m going to try 4, which should be adequate if everything else is tuned properly. My rope has also worn a groove into the plastic fitting because of the force required to lift the skeg so I’m going to have to smooth that out or patch it somehow.
Should you need it here are a couple articles on how to fix a rope skeg. I couldn’t find the bungie size listed on either of them but I believe I used a 1/8th inch the last time I replaced the rigging in mine (same size as the deck bungies across the deck of my Greenlander Pro). http://www.stnphotography.com/yaktips.html
Depending on how old your Valley skegs. Here’s info on how to fix them: http://www.sherrikayaks.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/skeg-diagram.pdf
Yeah that first article is one I’ve been referring to as I work on this
Also a neat trick a friend showed me: If an NDK style skeg wants to slide out of the recessed slots where the “axle” fits in the skeg box, a spring clamp placed on that pivot point inside the rear hatch can secure it.
I went to 3 different places, no, 4, looking for shock cord by the foot. Nothing except 3/8 inch. So when I got home I took the 3mm bungee from a toggle ball and tried that. It works 100% better now. It probably won’t have the power to dislodge even a small pebble now but I’ll take that in exchange for easy skeg retraction.
Of course the on-water test remains to be done, but this looks very promising.
I regard these rope skegs as being inventions of the devil. A few years ago my wife bought a Romany LV that was fitted with a rope skeg. Before it hit the water I replaced it with the superb Kari-Tek wire operated skeg system. Using a bungee to operate against the rope was a system commonly used years ago for the rudder on small sail boats. The bungee would change its elasticity over time, and if you went fast enough the blade would stretch the bungee, with a predictable swim on the way. YMMV. https://www.karitek.co.uk/shop/kayak-skeg-systems
Nick.
I have had both kinds of skegs and preferred the wire skeg in action. I’m trying to remain open minded about the rope skeg this time around (since its there!!), which does offer some advantages. I was able to fix mine with nothing more than a knife, for example. On the other hand I never needed to fix my wire skeg but if it gets kinked on a trip you’re kinda screwed. Nevertheless, given the choice I’d choose wire.
My main gripe with the rope skeg is its harder to dislodge jammed pebbles underway. What we really need is a thin sliding skeg cover that retracts forward out of the way when the skeg is deployed, and prevents anything from getting jammed in there when it isn’t. One of you get to work on that, K?
Qajaqman, the Kari-Tek system uses 7 x 7 strand flexible wire, which has never kinked in any of my kayaks. If a stone jams the blade then the wire will bend happily within the box. Other brands of kayak I’ve bought have all used 1 x 19 strand stiff wire, which is liable to kink permanently.
To prevent stone problems, particularly with centreboard slots in small sailboats, a standard technique is to glue a strip of fairly stiff sailcloth over the entire slot, and then run a craft knife down the center of the slot.
Professional coaches I know avoid the stone problem by launching stern first though surf. That impresses me, but doesn’t inspire me to emulate them.
Nick
qajaqman - I prefer a wire skeg too, but if you kink it on a trip you need not be screwed. Pre-cut a cable to the proper length. Coil it & tape it to the bulkhead inside a hatch. My repair kit contains a multi tool, a 2.5mm hex wrench, & spare skeg knob. All set. Swapping a skeg cable is easy. Proper prior preparation prevents…you know the rest.
@Seadddict said:
qajaqman - I prefer a wire skeg too, but if you kink it on a trip you need not be screwed. Pre-cut a cable to the proper length. Coil it & tape it to the bulkhead inside a hatch. My repair kit contains a multi tool, a 2.5mm hex wrench, & spare skeg knob. All set. Swapping a skeg cable is easy. Proper prior preparation prevents…you know the rest.
OK but if you forget to bring or lose or bend or break the spare cable, or multitool, or 2.5mm hex wrench or spare skeg knob… There are too many possible failure points and only one needs to fail in order for you to be screwed. I’ve never had a problem with a wire skeg either, but I know they happen.
The beauty of the rope skeg according to their proponents (again, I’m trying to appreciate them because its what I have at the moment!), is you can effect just about any repair with very little. Until a few weeks agao when I got one again, I’ve only had a rope skeg for 2.5 months out of my 26 years paddling and that was 20 years ago. I remember not liking it primarily because of the pebble jam issue. I would get out in the surf and voila! no skeg! But I’m going to give this skeg another try with an open mind.
@nickcrowhurst said:
Qajaqman, the Kari-Tek system uses 7 x 7 strand flexible wire, which has never kinked in any of my kayaks. If a stone jams the blade then the wire will bend happily within the box. Other brands of kayak I’ve bought have all used 1 x 19 strand stiff wire, which is liable to kink permanently.
To prevent stone problems, particularly with centreboard slots in small sailboats, a standard technique is to glue a strip of fairly stiff sailcloth over the entire slot, and then run a craft knife down the center of the slot.
Professional coaches I know avoid the stone problem by launching stern first though surf. That impresses me, but doesn’t inspire me to emulate them.
Nick
Professional coaches aren’t people I would generally emulate anyway. B) There are many good ones for sure but many of the one’s I’ve been exposed to have had a much higher estimation of their own smarts than I did. I think if you have to launch backwards into surf you have a problem elsewhere that needs to be fixed.
I’m intrigued by the sailcloth idea. Has anyone tried that on a kayak? I wonder if it would help or make matters worse by trapping debri. I might do some testing, using fel-cro rather than glue. I don’t have any sailcloth laying around but I’m sure I can find something similar enough
Googling “sailcloth centerboard slot” and going to the “images” tab will show some useful photos, and there is a good description here: https://gunningdory.wordpress.com/2015/05/31/centerboard-slot-gasket/
The trick will be to get the correct flexibility of the fabric. Too rigid and it will be difficult to lower the skeg. Too flexible and it will not prevent the ingress of stones.
Nick.
Yeah, I looked at some of those and don’t think they will work so hot with a kayak. Fabric sliding across sand and stone just sounds like a recipe for bad things.
I’m thinking slotted plastic cover rather than fabric, something where the skeg and shroud combine to provide no room for easy ingress of rocks but you can get em out if you need to. Maybe some stiff, heavy HDPE would do the trick.
It’s very common to drill a small hole at the lowest reaches of the skeg and attach a small loop of cord, to allow a partner to free your jammed skeg, but of course, that requires a willing partner. I think some kind of plastic or fabric cover, attached with a string, would also work, solo. A simple strip of duct tape would also work (if you have a partner to remove).
I’ve considered the cord but can’t fathom loops of anything dragging behind me where it can get caught on something. And much of my paddling is solo anyway. My idea is for a slotted plastic cover that would remain in place, rather than a solid one that would be removed by someone else once underway. But I’m not sure it will work and haven’t found the right material to test the idea yet.
Qujagman, the cord gstamer mentions is just a single thin length of cord about 3 to maybe 4 inches under the boat. I and my husband put them on all the boats, and my recall is that some skeg also come with a predrilled hole for that. You are imagining something far more extensive that what is needed for pulling down a sticky skeg.
I can’t say l ever needed to use it on my older p&h boat with a cable skeg. But it gets used a decent bit with the rope skegs. The and the nicest part is that a partner can come by and pull it down if you forgot to confirm that the skeg was clearing before launching.
Yeah if paddling solo not useful once on the water. But l find that even then, it makes it easy to confirm that the skeg is moving freely before launch. Since l launch stern first, so l can just go to the back and check it.
Launching backwards can be useful. I can’t say l have ever launched backwards into surf bigger than three feet, of course less at the actual launch point. But there have been a couple of times where that was the only way a launch was going to happen because of how the waves were breaking and the slope of the beach. Going out backwards was working because my body and a partially attached skirt were keeping things dry enough to get out beyond, bow first was an argument with the water l didn’t need to have.
Greg actually said “loop”, which is how I’ve seen them described many times before. A loop that you can slip a finger or more into. A loop gives you more pulling power. But alas, neither will help a solo paddler much.