The best kayak stabilizers and outriggers

Read this before you buy any of them

Stabilizers are the most-searched accessory on this site that most buyers should not buy, and a page that opened with a ranking would be doing you a disservice.

“My kayak feels tippy” has four common causes. Only one of them is fixed by outriggers, and the other three are free.

• Your weight is too high. An aftermarket seat that raised you two inches, or a cushion on top of a seat pan, moves your center of gravity up and makes a stable hull feel nervous. Sit on the bare pan for one trip and see. This is the single most common cause on a boat that was fine when you bought it, and it is the reason we put the seat height warning on the seat upgrade roundup.
• Your load is in the wrong place. A full crate and a cooler behind the seat lift the bow and make the boat skittish. Move weight low and toward the middle before you move money.
• You are fighting primary stability. Most recreational hulls feel twitchy for the first few hours and then stop, because you have learned to let your hips move independently of your shoulders. That is not a boat problem and no hardware fixes it.
• The boat is genuinely too narrow for what you are asking of it. Standing to cast on a 28-inch hull, fishing with a dog aboard, a nervous passenger, a recovering injury, photography with both hands off the paddle. This is what stabilizers are for.

If you are in the fourth group, the rest of this page is for you. If you are in the first three, you will spend real money to make your boat slower and wider and still have the original problem.

How we ranked these

Four criteria, weighted equally and published on how we pick: flotation (what the maker actually publishes, not what the photo suggests), mounting (what the installation costs a hull you may want to resell), stowage (whether it packs down or lives in the garage forever), and value.

Flotation is the criterion this category fails hardest, and it is worth being blunt about why. Of the three systems here, exactly one publishes a buoyancy figure. The other two publish float dimensions or nothing at all, which means you cannot compare what any of them will actually hold up. We have scored that honestly rather than pretending a bigger photograph means more flotation.

The one published number in the whole category

Scotty publishes over 30 pounds of extra buoyancy for the 302 system. That is the only flotation figure any manufacturer on this page prints.

VEVOR publishes float dimensions — 35.4 by 14.2 inches each — and no buoyancy. YakGear publishes a weight guidance figure (best under 350 pounds total) and no float dimensions at all. Neither is a flotation number, and neither can be converted into one without knowing the float’s volume and how deep it is designed to sit.

What 30 pounds means in practice is worth understanding, because it is less than people assume. Thirty pounds of buoyancy per side is not enough to let you stand on the float, and it is not a substitute for a life jacket. It is enough to resist the last few degrees of a lean — to make a tippy boat stop feeling like it is about to go, and to hold a boat upright while you land a fish one-handed. That is the whole promise, and it is a real one.

What outriggers cost you

Everything on this page is a trade. Stated plainly so you can decide whether you want it:

The width point is the one people underestimate, and it is the one figure in this table you can check against a published spec: YakGear states a float base sitting roughly 22 inches out from each side, which is where the four-foot number comes from. A kayak that wide will not fit between the pilings you used to slip through, and on a narrow creek you will be lifting an arm every few minutes — which is exactly why the ability to raise one arm independently is a feature worth paying for rather than a gimmick.

Inflatable or rigid

This is the decision that actually separates the products, and it is mostly about where the thing lives when it is not on the boat.

Inflatable floats — the VEVOR and the Scotty pontoons — deflate and roll into a hatch. On a boat that already has a crate, a cooler and a paddle competing for deck space, that is a genuine advantage, and it is the reason the cheap inflatable set is the honest way to find out whether you want stabilizers at all. The cost is punctures: on a rocky launch or an oyster bar, an inflatable is a failure mode a solid float does not have.

Rigid floats — the YakGear — are ready the moment you clip them on and cannot go flat. They also do not pack down. Rigid arms and floats take up the same garage space whether you used them that weekend or not, which on a used boat that is already competing for space with a rack and a cart is a real consideration.

One thing neither type fixes: an inflatable float still needs a pump. VEVOR does not include one, and the listing does not flag it. If you buy inflatables, budget a pump on the same order or your first trip is a lung exercise.

The mounting is the part that lasts

The floats come off. The fittings do not, and on a second-hand hull that is the decision you are really making.

Clamped across the hull. VEVOR’s connecting rod spans the boat, adjustable from 81.5 to 94 inches, with screws and expansion pipes supplied. The advantage is that a clamped rod is the least permanent arrangement here. The disadvantage is that a rod crossing your deck is a rod crossing your deck — it sits where your legs, your rod tips and your paddle want to be.

On a track or socket fitting. YakGear mounts on a RAILBLAZA StarPort HD, which is included. If your boat already carries StarPort sockets from a rod holder, the outriggers drop onto fittings you already own and cost you nothing new. If it does not, the base still has to be bolted down, and the honest way to think about that is on the gear track and accessory rail roundup — the same logic applies, because the fitting outlives the accessory.

Four bolted deck mounts. Scotty’s kit includes four 241L locking side deck mounts. That is the most permanent installation on this page. It is also the most reusable: a 241L later takes a rod holder, a light or a camera arm from the same range, so the holes keep earning after the outriggers come off.

Whatever you fit, seal every fastener and back it properly. Polyethylene is soft and an outrigger loads a fitting sideways, hard, which is exactly the direction that pulls hardware out — the method is on the deck rigging guide.

Where they go on the boat

Position changes how they behave more than brand does.

Behind the seat is the standard position and the right one for most people. It keeps the arms out of your paddle stroke and puts the flotation where the boat actually rolls.

Forward of the seat gives a standing angler something to brace against and puts the arms straight through the paddle stroke. Workable if you are fishing rather than travelling; irritating if you are covering distance.

Height above the water is the setting people get wrong. Floats set so they touch the water at rest are permanently dragging and permanently slowing you down. Set them a couple of inches clear so the boat sits on its own hull and the floats only engage when you lean. A stabilizer that is always in the water is a stabilizer that has turned your kayak into a slow trimaran.

What stabilizers are not

Three things worth stating because the listings imply otherwise.

They are not a flotation device. Thirty pounds a side is not a life jacket and is not intended to be. The legally required gear does not change because you bolted floats on — that list is on whether life jackets are required on kayaks.

They are not for moving water. YakGear states plainly that its outriggers are not intended for use in surf. In current, an outrigger catches, and a caught outrigger is a lever applying a capsizing force rather than resisting one. The same reasoning that says never anchor a kayak from the side applies here, and it is on the anchor trolley guide.

They do not make a kayak a standing platform on their own. Standing is a function of hull width and deck traction as much as flotation. If the plan is to stand and cast, deck grip is the cheaper half of that purchase.

What this costs against the boat

Worth saying out loud on a site about second-hand kayaks: the spread in this category is wider than in any other accessory we cover. The cheapest inflatable set here is in the same bracket as a low-end paddle. The Scotty kit is a meaningful fraction of what a lot of people paid for the whole boat.

That is not an argument against the expensive one. You are buying two rod holders, four reusable deck mounts and the only published buoyancy figure in the category, and each of those is a real thing you can point at. It is an argument about the order you buy in. On a boat that still needs a paddle worth using, a life jacket that actually fits and a way of getting to the water, outriggers are not the next purchase — they are the purchase you make once the boat is doing its job and one specific limitation is still in the way. The arithmetic for the rest of it is on what kayak accessories you actually need.

The homemade option, honestly

PVC pipe and two pool noodles is a real thing people build, it costs almost nothing, and on flat water it floats. We are not going to pretend otherwise in order to sell you hardware.

What it does not solve is the half that matters. The float is the easy part of an outrigger. The hard part is a mount that takes a sideways load, repeatedly, without working loose or tearing out of soft polyethylene — and a homemade arm bolted through a deck with no backing fails the same way every time, at the moment you are leaning on it. If you build your own, spend what you saved on stainless hardware, large backing washers and sealant. The commercial kits here are mostly selling you the mounting, and that is the correct thing for them to be selling.

What we would buy

If you are not sure you want stabilizers at all, the VEVOR set. It is the cheapest way to answer the question, it deflates when the answer turns out to be no, and the published 35.4-inch floats are a real amount of displacement. Buy a pump at the same time.

If you fish, and you want the one system that publishes a flotation figure, the Scotty 302 — accepting that you are also buying two rod holders and committing to four bolted mounts per side. Those mounts take the rest of the Scotty range later, which is the part that makes the price defensible.

If your boat already has StarPort fittings, the YakGear. The arms lift independently, which on a real day out is the feature you will use most, and the mounting costs you nothing you have not already paid for.

And if you got here because the boat feels tippy, go back to the top of this page and try the free fixes first. A lowered seat and a redistributed load has solved this for more people than every product on this page combined.