How to outfit your surf kayak

Team Surfer Mathew Lamont, sharing his thoughts on setting up his surf kayaks

Mathew in the Prodigy at the European Championships 2025

In my eyes, there are 4 main areas to get right when it comes to outfitting a kayak. 

The first one is the seat, which needs to be in the right position front to back and needs to be the right height. When I get a new kayak, I typically don't adjust the front to back position until I've paddled the boat, but I will add some foam underneath the seat to raise it up. This will make the boat more reactive to your weight transfer, and can make it more unstable. I have around 3" of foam under my seat in the prodigy and 2" in my blade, I found that it gave me more grip on the bottom turn and a looser top turn, but when I went too high I struggled to flatten the hull when hitting the lip. It's also more unstable to paddle, but with some experimentation you should be able to get the right balance. 

Once I've sorted out my seat position, I'll move onto the hip pads, these want to be snug, but not painful. Unlike foot blocks, they don't change much over time but changing from board shorts to a wetsuit can be quite noticeable. I aim to be able to get my fingers in-between the pad and my hip and then fine tune it looser or tighter over time, it's easier to cut foam than add it, so it's also worth keeping it a little snug until you sort out the foot blocks. Recently I tried making my hip pads longer for better connection to the boat. It felt better on land but in the water it pushed my legs too narrow which made the boat too unstable for me, so I chose to remove them.

Step 3 is to sort out the foot blocks, again, I start with the standard foot blocks, see how they feel and trim or add foam as necessary. I like to have my heels on the base of the kayak, toes pointing out to the sides and up, around 10 and 2 on a clock face is comfortable for me. A lot of people also cut the centre pillar away in this area for more comfort, but this is quite dependant on the boat and final angle of the foot. 

Last but not least is the knees, if the first three steps have gone well, I usually don't need to do much other than add a thin strip of foam to protect my knees and use the standard t piece or thigh braces, but if these areas feel loose I'll glue some extra foam to the t piece or thigh braces to get a snug but not uncomfortable fit. 

Once this is all done, and you've gone for a surf. I'll think about whether I feel too tight or too loose in the boat. There's a trade off with being too tight and not being able to surf for a whole hour, and being too loose and surfing for three hours but struggling to control the boat. 

Everyone will have different preferences, but I like to be pretty snug with enough small movements possible to avoid cramping up or any dead spots. I'll also think about if I like my final seat position, with my prodigy I found I wanted to have slightly more drive on smaller waves without making the fins too stiff to turn the kayak. To increase this I added a 0.5" shim beginning at the back back pushing me further forwards over the front of the boat, this made it easier to initiate bottom turns as slower speeds for me without making the kayak too stiff.

Mathew in the Blade, European Championships 2025