Liberty station yak shake down

My son sold his house and moved to Arizona so he gave me back my old Hobie outback. I'm bummed about that but happy that he got out. I have also had a skiff in the shop since end of December which means I haven't fished since November so getting the Yak back sounded great to me. Last week I read another post about mellow areas to paddle board and was reminded by DJ of the NTC channel and since I didn't know much about this Hobie I decided to launch there in case something didn't work out. Good thing I did as the rudder on it kept slowly lifting out of the water as I was paddling so the steering was not good to start and eventually the Kayak would whip a hard left "U" turn the faster I went. As you can imagine this made a very long trip to get anywhere as I had to use the oars and the foot peddle to fight each other but chalked it up to much needed exercise and put fishing on the back burner. I wanted to post this as a reminder of how bad things go south because I really wanted to go launch at La Jolla(imagine trying to get in through the surf like that, all my gear would have been dumped) but luckily I decided to keep it mellow for the shake down. Fishing was slow, I got 1 8" SBB on a Z man Diesel, 1 12-13" on a camo jerk and a 10" on Nuclear chicken jerk.

 

I'll either fix it or be the guy in the middle of south bay just doing left turns.

 

This model is the Hank Parker and it was before the locking mechanism came around (one of my other Hobies had that string lock and it worked great. this one is a handle much like the steering handle and either its rolled up and flat or dropped down.

 

Funny you ask, when I got there around 8ish I backed my truck down to the water to unload but when I came in around 11:00 it was packed with everybody and there brother on anything that floated! I had to haul it all through the parking lot due to all the kids running around and not wanting to back over them