Do you like shallow water fishing, and in particular flats fishing? Many fishermen in Texas do, and if you’re one of them, or just interested in this type of fishing, you know that some boats and kayaks are more suitable than others for it, and some less.
The purpose of this website is to expose new types of kayaks and boats that work particularly well in this context, and deliver the most comprehensive solutions both motorized and human powered, namely paddled.
The W720 Kayak Skiff »
This category of small fishing boats is not particularly well defined, but generally speaking, it includes small-size, relatively lightweight, flat-bottomed motorboats designed for fishing in shallow water, flats, protected bays, and estuaries. An important attribute of any microskiff is being sufficiently stable to allow a fisherman to fish standing up in it.
Some anglers use push-poling to advance through areas of thick vegetation and/or skinny water, where an outboard motor’s propeller drafts too much. This mode of human powered propulsion is slow and hard to practice, and therefore not convenient for covering longer distances.
Paddling works better, of course, but most microskiffs are too wide to be paddled, and those who do offer such option are still too wide and heavy to enable traveling over meaningful distances, or paddling in adverse conditions, such as wind, current, waves, etc.
At 85 lbs (without a motor), the new W720 from Wavewalk’s 700 series is the most lightweight kayak skiff on the market. In fact, the W720 weighs just a little over half of the paddleboard style, one-person skiff, dubbed a kayak on steroids, which weighs 150 lbs without the motor. This makes the W720 is the most practical cartop kayak-skiff out there.
The W720 features an integrated (built-in) wooden motor mount for a outboard motor up the 3 HP.
Thanks to its patented twinhull form (catamaran), the W720 is extremely stable, although it’s just 31 inches wide, which makes it the narrowest kayak-skiff and a high-performance paddle craft, namely kayak. Note that it works perfectly as a fishing canoe as well, that is paddled with single-blade paddles, both with a crew of one or two (plus a child…)
Microskiffs are considerably heavier than kayaks, and they cannot be be car topped. Some of the smallest microskiffs are not even designed to take a second passenger or angler on board.
The W720 is lightweight enough for one person to car-top, and with its total recommended load capacity of 400 lbs and the super-stability to back it, the W720 works as a full tandem motorized kayak-skiff (I.E. motorized) and tandem fishing kayak / canoe (I.E. human powered addled).
It offers all the advantages of a regular size micro skiff without imposing any of the inconveniences associated with boats, and it offers all the advantages of a fishing kayak, and some more, without any of the problems that plague fishing kayaks, which are instability, wetness, discomfort, poor tracking, and lack of sufficient storage on board.
