I have a Wilderness Systems Recon 120 HD fishing kayak. I've never fished from a kayak (yet 🙂): I bought it mostly to do 360° nature photography. So I know next to nothing about fishing kayak gear.
My kayak came with two side rails to mount accessories. From what I could read, there isn't really a proper standard for those rails. Mine have the following dimensions:
I found 7mm rails for sale on Alibaba. So at least some kayaks use rails that are different from mine.
I looked around on the internet for camera mounts that would be compatible with my rails. I found a few manufacturers (Yakattack, Yakgadget, Cajo...) and none of them seem to indicate what kayaks their products are compatible with - implying that they universally mount on any kind of rails.
My questions are these:
- Are those rails standardized - formally or de-facto? What are the standards?
- Do the accessory manufacturers supply different bolts, or adapter plates, so their products can be mounted on all kayaks?
In the end though I ended up making my own camera mount. 360° cameras have special requirements for their mounts anyway, so mine will work better than anything on the market. And It's trivially easy to modify a 12mm hex head bolt in the lathe to make the head thinner and put a 3/8-16 UNC photo tripod thread on it instead. It costs nothing, and more importantly, I'll have it tomorrow when I go out on the water instead of waiting 2 weeks for a commercial product to arrive.
This is what my homebrew camera mount looks like:
