Over the last couple months as parts have been coming in, I have been working on putting together a customer’s boat who had a crazy vision of what he wanted to do to his Native Titan 13.5. Now that all the parts have come and the build is done, I wanted to talk about what we did to it and how it performed on the water. This boat is not for everyone, but it gives you a great idea of what can be done to kayaks to make them more fishable to each individual person.

We will start at the bow of the kayak and work our way to the stern. At the front of this kayak, we mounted the Motor Guide Xi3 55lb thrust. Fantastic trolling motor for a kayak because the whole thing is controlled by the fob in your hand, this makes controlling your boat super easy and convenient while you stay fishing. The motor plugs right into the boat and the battery is mounted right in front of the peddle drive unit, which is charged from the outside of the kayak, so you never have to go in and remove your batteries for charging. This motor is pulled up from the seat with a paracord and kayak handle combo to easily cleat the locking mechanism and pull the motor up and onto the kayak.

Next, we should talk about the yak-power switch system. It is a distribution hub to connect all your electronics to a dial mounted to the side of your cockpit. You can turn off and, on your device’s, as needed, such as lights, USB’s, graphs and any other accessories attached to the kayak. The first thing to get power on this boat is the Nav lights witch any motorized kayak is required to have, red and green lights on the bow of the yak to show it as a motorized vessel to all other motorized vessels. From there we go to the fish finders which are Garmin UHD 93sv and 73sv. These two fish finders are tied together with an ethernet cable to share information with each other from different transducers. (one transducer on the trolling motor mounted with a transducer shield, the other is on a ram transducer arm).

USB ports are also given power by the yak-power system so the user can keep a phone charging (which is likely to track his fish hawk) or a camera, to keep it running all day without changing out batteries.

As we head toward the end of the boat, we have light strips on the left and right side of the cockpit to have enough illumination to tight hooks and find items but not enough to hurt your eyes and blind you. After the lights, our last electronics are found. One last power port to power the twin Micro Power poles. Working in unison these twin power poles keep you stationary where one would still let you sway in the breeze. If not using the shallow water anchors, they can easily be removed and replaced with twin Scotty Downriggers to make this a killer shallow water fishing beast as well as a trolling machine.

Finally, is the charging system. As I said earlier the batteries in the boat do not have to be removed to be charged. With power ports on the outside power can be fed in without ever opening the front hatch. Not only is it chargeable from the outside but it also can charge on the road from the trailer. We hooked up another power port to the trailer and hooked it into the trailers lighting system. Now on the road you can juice up your batteries and be ready to fish when you hit the water.

This boat has been super fun to work on and I am grateful to get to have taken it on the water for a test run. Bow mount trolling motors are the future and super fun and convenient to anyone fishing. I cannot wait to see what some of you come up with and hopefully bring to the shop for me to build out. Tight lines!