The wave of motorised kayak builds aimed at river anglers has another flagship rig in the works, with Jason Reardon Kayaking unboxing the Newport NK180HD trolling motor as the powerplant for his ongoing Bonafide RVR119 build series.
Reardon, fresh out of eye surgery and filming with sunglasses on, drove up to Big Adventures in Fletcher, North Carolina with his daughter behind the wheel to pick up the motor, a Wizard steering wheel and a custom stern plate that ties the whole package onto the kayak. "Hey, what's going on all you cool and groovy kayakers? This is Jason with Jason Reardon Kayaking," he opened from the showroom, motor crate in shot.
The NK180HD is the heart of the build. Newport's heavy-duty kayak motor pulls 24 volts and is being paired with a LiTime 24 V 50 Ah lithium battery - a partnership Reardon flagged at the start of the video. "You guys know I recently partnered with LiTime Batteries," he said. "On that partnership, they were able to send me out a 24-volt 50 amp battery. It's going to work with this Newport motor."
Around the motor he is layering the rest of the rig. The Wizard steering wheel - chosen over a tiller-style setup for finer control while casting - was picked up from the same Big Adventures showroom, and the stern plate that mates the NK180HD to the RVR119's rear deck came courtesy of fellow YouTuber Mark Bivvens. "A good buddy of mine, Mark Bivvens, picked that up," Reardon said. "If you guys aren't familiar with Mark, he's got a really great YouTube channel called Mark Bivvens Outdoor. He's catching some big freaking donkeys on that channel."
The kayak underneath all of it - the Bonafide RVR119 - is one of the newer river-focused hulls on the US market, designed for moving water more than open lakes. Reardon's channel has already documented a full hull build for it, including a custom trailer, before this latest motor-and-battery phase. The current build is aimed squarely at extending range and giving the angler a hands-free troll while working structure on rivers like the Catawba.
"This new build series is going to be adding motor and battery to the kayak," Reardon told viewers as he walked through the layout on the workshop floor. "So I've laid everything out here today to kind of give you an overview of what we're going to be installing here, including this stern plate."
For the kayak fishing audience watching from Australia, the relevance is twofold. The NK180HD's combination of 24 V power and lithium pairing puts it in the same conversation as the Newport NK300 and Watersnake-derived motors that have started turning up on bass kayak rigs in Queensland and northern New South Wales, where impoundments and slow rivers make a trolling motor genuinely useful. And the Wizard-style wheel steering is the kind of setup that converts a fishing kayak into something close to a micro skiff for anglers chasing flathead on a calm Bay morning or jacks up tight in mangrove country.
Reardon framed the unboxing as the kickoff to an install series, with the Newport stern plate mount, wheel linkage, lithium battery wiring and on-water shakedown all to come on his channel. For anyone weighing up a motorised kayak build, the parts list he confirmed is now the most current public template: Newport NK180HD, LiTime 24 V 50 Ah lithium, Wizard steering wheel, and a custom stern plate mating it all to the Bonafide RVR119.