: a bit off topic, but does anyone have experience, good or bad, with towing a
: kayak or multiple kayaks behind a fishing or houseboat which could serve
: as a mothership? I searched the archives - "towing kayak" and
: didn't come up with anything.

It's not clear whether you are asking about towing kayaks empty or loaded,
or with/without people in them. At sane speeds, loaded boats with paddlers
in them, able to do stern rudder, tow quite well. You can see this being done
in one of Justine Curvengen's "This is the Sea" series of DVDs (not the first,
but I can't remember which one), where two kayaks are being towed by a boat
with an outboard, probably at not much more than kayak paddling speed.

I've had experience of towing an unloaded and unpiloted open boat (15' canoe)
from the back of a big dugout canoe with an outboard. This is much like
towing a kayak with no (or a disabled) paddler in it - it tends to weave
about horribly from side to side. This causes a lot of extra drag and makes
the towing boat harder to control. In any waves, it would most likely
capsize the boat (my experience was on a fairly flat river in Ecuador,
with a towing speed of six or eight knots, I guess). As soon as a reasonably
straight-tracking boat (like a kayak, not a dinghy) is aimed off to one
side it keeps going until the towing angle is quite high, when it then
starts to turn back into the wake of the towing boat, but obviously it then
goes tearing off to the other side until the force pulling sideways on the
bow is enough to turn it back again ... This still applies to loaded boats,
even with a paddler in, unless the paddler is actively steering. Dropping a
skeg, or towing a sea anchor or drogue may help, but the latter, especially,
would add yet more drag.

With multiple boats, you might do OK with them tied in a long line (I've
towed sea kayaks up a shallow river this way, wading...) - only the last one
weaves badly in that situation (and the last one could have a drogue). But if
you have them side-by-side they will all swerve about, and probably bash each
other quite damagingly, especially with higher towing speeds.

In the Galapagos, where we were required to store kayaks on the water (rather
than on the beach) overnight, the group had some long beams and tapes to
secure the boats parallel to each other with a foot or so gap between each.
Although this was intended to stop the boats bashing against each other in
the Pacific swell, it might well also work for towed boats, at least to stop
them bashing. The resultant wider raft of kayaks could also be towed with two
lines, to the bows of the two outer boats. If these lines were secured to the
two furthest apart points of the stern of the towing boat (or even to an even
wider beam secured to the stern), it might do a lot to stop the weaving ?
Sorry, I didn't take a photo of this arrangement, but imagine an outrigger
with a very long ama and more kayaks rather than outriggers...

Andy