Paddling Life caught a few minutes with Clay Wright, of Jackson Kayaks, while he was in Steamboat Springs CO. for the 2022 Yampa River Festival. Between giving play boat clinics and winning the kayak rodeo event, Clay walked us though the Rockstar V. He tells us what improvements the latest play boat form Jackson received and what features it retains from the previous Rockstar kayaks.
The video also features Jacob Mcconnell and Dylan Grauer
In His Own Words: Clay Wright on Jackson’s New Play Machine, the RockStar
Wright: “The Rockstar V by Jackson Kayak is our fifth in the Rockstar series and definitely our best ever. Changes for this year: We really exaggerated this first rail and then we actually added a second rail as well. So when you’re surfing on a wave, you’ve actually got lift kicking you up and making the boat feel looser than ever. It makes it feel lighter than ever when you go into those spins and other moves, and the water is not going to be able to wrap around your deck. Every piece of water that’s on your deck, that’s weight that you have to throw around, so we’ve eliminated that. Lots of water flying around, but not much water on the deck.
“Then we took our favorite parts of old Jackson kayaks and added them in, giving it a big thick middle , flat, wide hull, and nice progressive rocker. Then we kicked it up at the ends a little bit like the 14 and made these ends nice and slicy the like the 16. So the 16 was people’s favorite when they were lightweight, but the 14 was people’s favorite when they were on certain types of waves and the four was people’s favorite when they were bigger. So we tried to put all those aspects into one boat. It’s a bigger middle, It’s a smaller ends and it’s a really awesome wave boat on the hull.”
Related Content
Yampa River Festival 2022 – PL Catches up with Clay Wright of Jackson Kayaks