I bought a Pelican River Gorge 130xp on a lark as it was on clearance at REI and I wanted to add a “family” kayak for me, my wife, and our small child, but it’s a bear to maneuver and way less comfortable than our single Old Town kayaks.
To try to make lemonade out of lemons here, I was thinking of connecting a trolling motor I have to the kayak so we could use it for trips with the kid when we want to go long distances without necessarily paddling the whole way. Does anyone have any experience fitting a transom to this boat? If there is a particular model universal transom which worked for you please let me know.
If this is the same boat, at 156 inches (13 feet), the maximum capacity is 500 lbs meaning that a safe load is 300 to 350 lbs. A trolling motor probably weighs about 25 lbs so your safe weight capacity drops to between 275 and 325 lbs.
You can overload the boat by a few lbs, but the fastest you could go with a good trolling motor is about 5 mph before the boat started to get squirrelly. So at that point you have a boat that you need to hook up to a motor to puttter around, but you still need the paddles in case the motor quits.
With paddles, you should be able to reach at least 2.5 mph. So is it worth the investment to get where you’re going twice as fast, and what does the passenger do?
