Outdoors: Sailing/Boating

Kayaks are becoming as common as bait tanks at fishing-tackle shops throughout southern New England, and there will be a fleet of the little boats on display at the Providence Boat Show. A new kayak from Hobie is revolutionary, says Elaine McGrew of McGrew's Boats in Charlestown.

The Hobie Adventure Island is a 16-foot trimaran "sail/yak."

It's part of Hobie's Mirage Drive series of boats. They are propelled by foot pedals that drive a pair of penguin-like fins beneath the boat. Without the outriggers, or "amas," the boat can be customized for fishing. With the amas and sail, the boat is a blast, says McGrew, who took a test drive in southern California recently.

Like Carl Slack, a striper fisherman from Jackson, N.H., more kayak fishermen are using sails to get them to and from their fishing grounds quickly.

"Originally, I was thinking of buying a dinghy that I could put on the roof on my motor home and power it with a two-horsepower motor," says Slack.

He was shopping for the motor at McGrew's when he spotted a Hobie kayak equipped with a Mirage Drive system. "The more I looked at it, the more I thought that it was right up my alley," he recalls. "Somebody thought out this boat real good. It's got four rod holders, a place to bungee the paddle, and the reason why I like it is that it lets me get into the shallow-water, out-of-the-way places. I can get into places where I don't have to worry about launch ramps or anything else, and it catches fish."

Last year, Slack carried his kayak atop a motor home on a 5,000-mile road trip, from Maine to Louisiana to Oklahoma, in search of trophy striped bass. The largest striper he has landed in the kayak was a 42-pounder, taken on the Meadows River in Maine.

Dennis Spike and his clients at Coastal Kayak Service in Malibu, Calif., have caught everything from bull dorado to sailfish in kayaks. "With a kayak," he says, "you can whip a big fish in half the time it would take with just a rod." His production, The Kayak Fishing Video, has sold 6,000 copies through the Internet (at www.kayakfishing.com) and nearly 200 dealers across the country.

Spike was a pioneer in coastal kayak fishing, having published a magazine story on the sport in 1995. Since then, he has seen kayak manufacturers progress from modifying cruising kayaks for fishing to designing boats specifically for the needs of anglers. Today, most fishing magazines routinely carry kayak stories, there are scores of Web sites about kayak fishing, and kayak-fishing tournaments and "rodeos" are attracting hundreds of contestants on all three coasts.

Kayak sales in the U.S. have been level since 2001 when Americans bought 357,100 kayaks worth $176.8 million, according to the National Marine Manufacturers Association. In 2005, the trade association reports, Americans bought 349,400 kayaks, worth $167 million, at an average price of $478.

Anglers generally prefer sit-on-top models over sit-inside kayaks.

Brands such as Wilderness Systems, Liquid Logic, Heritage, and Macski -- a new entry from South Africa -- are introducing new models specifically for fishermen. For good reason.

"We don't give out figures but we can say that sales to anglers is our fastest-growing segment," says Ruth Triglia, Hobie's vice president of sales. "By all accounts, we appear to be growing more aggressively than the industry as a whole, which is largely attributable to the unique attributes of the Hobie Mirage Drive."

She predicts that the trend will continue. "We expect this to be a long-term shift in the way fishermen choose to get out on the water," she says "because of the accessibility factor, the simplicity, low-cost, and low-maintenance aspects of kayak fishing."

And once they own kayaks, says Spike, anglers tend to fish more often than they would with larger boats that require fuel, dockage or a launching ramp.