The Seda Revenge I bought had a rudder. It was worthless to me because my legs wouldn’t fit with my feet on the foot braces.Took the rails and foot braces out.
I was playing with edging to determine break point, turned the boat over,and the rudder fell out.It sits on a pin in the stern.
Anyway, a skeg would be good sometimes. Shouldn’t a rudder fixed in the right position make a good skeg?I would only have to deploy it.Right now it is in my paddling O and E box.
Other alternatives?
Sure
I think Necky actually did that on one of their models.
rudder/skeg…
a fixed rudder would serve as a skeg until ya gotta back up in shallow water , then it’ll get hung up for sure. better to just leave it off.
alternatives to what?
I’m not sure I get the just of your post, it is not very clear. Are you suggesting that you leave the rudder in place, or somehow move the blade under the hull where a skeg would be? A skeg at the rear end would not be a very effective skeg. For one it would come out of the water in waves. For two unless you can control the amount of deployment it will just be useless drag when you probably don’t need it, like going upwind, or going cross wind when you only need partial skeg. If your question was more clear I could reply better-what exactly is it you are proposing to do?
Can’t answer your question, but it seems
mighty odd that your rudder fell out when you rolled over.
There must be a part missing !
Jack L
Yes
Yes. If you fix the rudder so that it is straight but can still be deployed as before, it would work very much like a skeg. Sure it is a little further back than the skegs of most kayaks but a skeg is used to keep the back of the boat in position and is not the same as a keel fin or center board of a sailboat.
Most kayak skegs can be partially deployed to allow for more control over the effectiveness of it but you might not have that level of control with a rudder-turned-skeg because of the way it is deployed with a rope on deck.
Don’t some kayaks have skegs that look a lot like rudders? I think that one of the Looksha kayaks from Necky has a skeg that looks a lot like a rudder according to this forum post: http://tinyurl.com/4ycwekx
Dave
clarify?
sounds like you had two issues. The first being the foot pegs couldn’t handle you longer legs and so you removed them. If I got that right do you put your feet up against the bulkhead (ideally with some foam between your feet and the bulkhead)? Your second issue is that the rudder had some problem when the boat flips. It wasn’t clear if you meant the whole rudder assembly sort of fell off the boat or if it just did sort of an auto-deploy.
Anyway if you indeed had a good reason to remove the foot pegs then I can see fixing the rudder as a skeg to be a good idea. Yes it’s not as easy to vary the amount like a skeg, but still would do a good job when you really need a skeg with some rear quartering winds.
finding a way to deploy it
reminded me of something Canunut rigged up on his kayak where he used a 10 speed bicycle deraileur to raise and lower his rudder. If nothing else, it’s a great conversation piece!
Yes, the whole rudder assembly
fell off.It can still be deployed in the original fashion and the amount of deployment can be controlled. I could have used it on my little adventure a couple of weeks ago.
Is the cotter pin missing? NM
I’ll have to do a very closwe inspetion
when I reassemble it. I don’t think there was a cotter pin.