Ciaran1957 : We discovered that using the TI as a mother ship you can easily tow multiple kayaks. We also have a 4 person inflatable boat that we tow behind our TI, when it is full of gear (scuba tanks, BC's, coolers, etc you can hardly tell it's behind the boat (about 15-20 ft straight back behind the TI seems to work the best as it doesn't interfere with your steering). When we also have kayaks to tow I usually have them hang onto the raft. One thing we discovered (the hard way) is kayaks need to have people on them, not just gear, the first wave or boat wake that comes along tips kayaks over when they just have gear on them. We often have 3-4 adults on our TI (with the tramps), along with towing the inflatable, and sometimes extra people on kayaks. We actually have two inflatable single person kayaks that we just blow up if they are needed, and have some people ride on those. (party barge)....
The easiest to tow are mirage boats where if there is no or little wind, everyone pedals (4 mirage drives in the water), and the whole group moves along pretty nicely (especially if they have the Hobie kayak sail), we switch out people once it a while to get fresh legs, we call it the party barge.
With my motor and wing sails I have also towed other tandem islands several times now. What works best there is to have 25-30 ft of anchor line tied to my right rear aka bar, then to the front left aka bar on the towed boat. I then tow them behind and to the right of me at about a 45 degree angle from my rear. With both boats sailing full out and a little motor assist, plus pedal assist even in very light winds we can do 7-8 mph (basically I only seem to lose about 1 mph of speed), vs them sailing by themselves at 4-5 mph in low winds. We only do this when trying to catch up with a larger group of TI's out for the day (bringing up stragglers).
One thing we discovered is if you have people wanting to drift dive, you can't tow them behind the TI with one on each side (hanging on ropes tied to the AMA's). You simply cannot steer at all. Now if they want to hang onto the sides of the raft 20 ft behind, that works fine. But anyone in the water trying to hang onto the TI itself turns into a disaster because I can't steer the TI at all. PS dragging people in the water is much harder that pulling a raft or kayak. Hope this helps Bob
Last edited by fusioneng on Mon May 19, 2014 6:51 am, edited 2 times in total.
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