Kayak deck rigging on a used boat

Deck cord is a consumable, and yours is finished

Shock cord is rubber strands inside a woven sleeve. Ultraviolet light breaks down the rubber, salt accelerates it, and tension holds the strands stretched the whole time. Five summers on a driveway is enough to finish it.

You can tell without a test. New cord snaps back and holds a pump against the deck hard enough that you have to work to remove it. Dead cord is a slack gray loop that a chart, a water bottle or a bilge pump will lift straight out of on the first wave.

On a second-hand kayak this is close to guaranteed and it is the cheapest genuine fault on the boat to fix. It is also a safety item rather than a tidiness one, because deck rigging is where the things you need in a hurry live — a pump, a paddle float, a spare paddle. The full list of what should be within reach is on the safety kit checklist.

Soft rigging and hard points are two different jobs

Before you buy anything, split the deck into two kinds of attachment, because they fail differently and cost differently.

Soft rigging is shock cord under pad eyes: a lattice that traps things against the deck. It holds objects that are light, that you want fast, and that would be annoying rather than catastrophic to lose. A pump, a chart case, a water bottle, a jacket.

Hard points are tracks, sockets and padeyes bolted through the deck to take a real load in a known direction. A rod holder, a camera, a fish finder, a leash. Anything you would be upset to have leave the boat.

Confusing the two is the common mistake, and it usually runs in one direction: clipping a paddle leash to a bungee. Bungee stretches. A leash on a stretchy anchor gives the paddle a running start before it stops, which is how a cheap carabiner gate ends up bent. Leash to something structural — the argument in full is on the paddle leash guide.

If what you actually need is hard points rather than cord, the choice between a track and a socket is on the gear track roundup, and both options are among the picks below for that reason.

What to buy: cord, kit, or neither

Three situations, and only one of them needs the full kit.

The pad eyes are sound and only the cord has gone. Buy shock cord by the foot in the diameter you already have and nothing else. This is the cheapest outcome on the page and it is extremely common — the plastic fittings usually outlast the elastic by years.

Fittings are missing, cracked or pulled through. Buy a kit. YakGear publishes the Bungee Deck Kit as 10 feet of 1/4-inch nylon shock cord, six pad eyes, two J hooks and stainless steel installation hardware, with instructions. Ten feet covers a full foredeck lattice plus a stern loop on most recreational hulls.

You want to mount equipment, not trap objects. Then cord is the wrong purchase entirely and you want a track or a socket.

One thing the kit does not include, and YakGear says so plainly: waterproof silicone. It is recommended and sold separately, and skipping it is the single most reliable way to turn a tidy afternoon's rigging into a slow deck leak.

Fastening into a hull you cannot reach inside

This is the part that stops people, and it depends entirely on your boat.

Partial inside access — a sit-in with an open cockpit, or a sit-on-top with a large hatch you can get an arm through. Machine screws with washers and locknuts from behind. This is the strongest fixing available and it is what the YakGear kit's stainless hardware assumes.

No inside access — a sealed sit-on-top, or a fitting position miles from any hatch. Two options. Well nuts, which are a rubber sleeve with a threaded insert: they expand behind the deck as you tighten, spreading load and sealing the hole in one part. Or rivets, which YakGear sells as a separate Tri-Grip kit for exactly this case.

What you should not do is drive a self-tapping screw into bare polyethylene and call it done. Plastic is soft, the thread is shallow, and the fitting will pull out under the first real load — leaving a hole larger than the one you started with.

The five steps, in order

1. Lay it out with tape first. Put the cord where you think it goes, sit in the boat and reach for it. You will move at least one fitting, and moving tape is free.
2. Check what is behind. Foam, a bulkhead, a seat frame or nothing at all. Drilling into a bulkhead you cannot reach behind means committing to a well nut before you start.
3. Drill undersize, then open up. Polyethylene tears rather than cuts. A pilot hole and a step up gives a clean edge that seals; going straight in with the full-size bit gives you a ragged one that never quite does.
4. Seal every fastener, including reused holes. Silicone in the hole and under the fitting's base, both. A previous owner's hole is not sealed just because it is round.
5. Tension the cord before you cut it. Shock cord is sold slack and fitted stretched. Pull it to roughly the tension you want, mark, then cut — and expect to have cut it slightly too long the first time, which is recoverable, rather than slightly too short, which is not.

Melt the cut ends with a lighter so the sleeve does not fray. It takes two seconds and it is the difference between a knot that holds and one that unravels inside a fitting.

What diameter cord, and how much

Two numbers decide the whole shopping list, and neither is complicated.

Diameter: match what came off. YakGear publishes 1/4-inch nylon shock cord in its deck kit, and that is the common recreational size. The reason to match rather than upgrade is that the pad eye's hole and the cord have to suit each other — thicker cord in an existing fitting binds and chafes at the entry, and thinner cord runs slack through it and pulls out of a knot.

If nothing is left to measure, 1/4 inch is the safe default on a recreational hull. Sea kayaks frequently use thinner cord for perimeter deck lines and thicker for the bungee lattice, which is worth checking for before you buy one spool of one size.

Length: measure the run and add a third. Shock cord is sold slack and fitted stretched, so a ten-foot run does not take ten feet of cord — but knots, threading through fittings and the inevitable second attempt eat the difference. Ten feet, as the YakGear kit ships, covers a typical foredeck lattice plus a stern loop with enough to be wrong once.

Do not, incidentally, use the deck lattice and the perimeter line interchangeably. Perimeter lines — the taut line running around the edge of a sea kayak's deck — are a rescue handhold and want static rope, not stretch. Putting bungee where a perimeter line belongs gives you a handhold that lets go.

If the old holes are ragged

On a used boat you frequently find a hole that has been enlarged by a fitting working loose over years, or a crack radiating from one.

That is a repair, not a rigging job, and doing the rigging on top of it just hides it. Soft or cracked plastic around a fitting has to be dealt with before it takes any load, and the checks and the fixes are on what to fix on a used kayak.

The pragmatic alternative, and often the better one, is to move the fitting two inches and seal the old hole properly rather than trying to make a worn one work again.

What we would buy

For a boat whose fittings are intact, cord alone. Do not buy a kit to solve a problem you do not have.

For a boat that has been outside for years, the YakGear kit. Six pad eyes, ten feet of cord and stainless hardware is about one whole deck, and stainless matters because plated steel weeps rust into the hull by the second summer.

For anything you intend to mount rather than trap, a socket or a track. The StarPort HD lands on the four-bolt pattern a previous owner may already have left you; the GTSL90 gives you a slot that takes standard half-inch hardware and lets you move things later.