Another pointer if your in shallows a lot. The rudders on most of the Hobies with the twist and stow rudder system, ( ie... revo,outback,oasis,etc), what we did with all of our kayaks is replace the rudder with the larger sailing rudder, (available from Hobie, not expensiive) and installed on all of our kayaks. We then sawed off the bottom 4-5 inches of the large rudder. The sawed off rudder actually works better than the stock rudder, ( we even used the cut off rudders for kayak sailing). With the sawed off rudder you can navigate water down to around 8 inches without needing to raise the rudder. Once you master shallow peddling, you can pedal thru that 8” water. Oh by the way, especially the shorter hobies, don’t paddle worth a hoot, (tracking) with the rudder up, ( lets just say you will be using the whole river, lol). The longer kayaks like the TI kayak, and probably the revo 16, track and glide great, (because of their length mostly). On our older boats we were able to shove a rag under the steering handle to lock the rudder straight when paddling, it helps, (not sure about the newer boats steering handle though). Actually every kayak we ever bought we bought the sailing kit with the kayak, we kept the kayak sail furled on the side of the boat, ( where the paddle normally goes), just in case we found wind. Actually I don’t recall ever launching a hobie without a sail strapped to the side of the boat, (not even once). The reason I’m mentioning that is we had all the sail rigging ropes always on every boat. When having problems tracking when paddling, we tossed that sail control rope out the back of the boat and drug it behind the boat, ( about 10-15 ft long 1/4” rope), it helped tracking when paddling. Just tryin to help with suggestions, that’s all FE
Edit: BTW re-reading your original post, all of us are describing all these fancy tricks and cool techniques), but nobody addressed your original question. The answer is the mirage drives are held down with two levers, ( called click and go), it takes only one to two seconds to remove or insert the mirage drive, when inserting, it automatically aligns and clicks in place, (easy peazy).
|