Sailing the Sea Kayaks

There are a few references on the web about sailing kayaks, and they all look unstable and risky. In San Francisco we get either dead calm or 20+ knots, and the water is rarely above 55 degrees. Most of the sailing rigs I've seen for kayaks look either completely underpowered or really unstable, and since we had two boats, we figured why not use both?

Sea trials were in Half Moon Bay outer harbor, with about 5 to 10 knots of wind.

The boats are lashed together with bamboo poles and nylon ratcheting straps, and the result is surprisingly stiff. You can stand on one gunwale (precariously) without worrying about capsize. The mast is from the Foamee, and unfortunately it's aluminum and is absurdly heavy, so it wouldn't be practical to bring the rig along while kayaking. (It will capsize the Foamee from its weight alone if nobody is in it). The sail is 59 square feet, from a Saboteer. I would have preferred a sprit rig, to get rid of the 15 foot mast, but a custom sail would be too expensive and I don't know of any sprit sails that are produced in quantity other than for the Optimist, which would probably be too small.

The boat tacks through about 140 degrees, and makes a lot of leeway. I am thinking of trying to cant the hulls outward to reduce leeway like a small Hobie cat. I did strap on a daggerboard but it didn't seem to do much, although by that time the mast had slipped slightly, as you can see in the later pictures, and tilted to leeward.

Steering can generally be accomplished by sail trim, up to the point where you're about to smack the derelict fishing boat in the harbor, when the leeward crew has to dip a paddle. Tacking is surprisingly easy with a few strokes on each paddle. I'd like to get the rig to the point where it can be stowed in one boat for the upwind leg, then deployed for the ride home. A sunfish rig might be stowable, but where to put the crossbeams? Anything small enough to stow will probably be far too flexible. It will be particularly useful on the north coast of California, where you can have a quiet paddle in the morning but the wind starts howling by afternoon. The whole rig is relatively compact and everything fit on top of my brother's Jeep. The straps probably create a lot of drag but I don't want to mar my kayaks with permanent mountings.

Another use might be for SCUBA diving. It's now very popular to dive from the plastic "sit on top" type of kayak, since you can paddle to your dive site without a motor. But after watching a diver flounder from one side of his boat to the other for 20 minutes I wondered why anybody would want to do it. With a central tramp for gear this boat would be the perfect solution.