While you folks are putting hatches on your coffee tables --- er, kayaks --- remember one important thing: flush, proud, VCP or PDQ, these things sometimes come off. Not regularly, maybe because you forgot to secure it --- not that I would have any personal knowledge of an event like that, myself --- but they will occasionally try to file a float plan of their own.

That's why they've gotta be tethered somehow --- pretty solution is a tether inside the hull, but a practical solution is a strap secured to a solid fitting or line on the deck. In addition to keeping them with you, it also makes it difficult to inadvertently turn hatches over, which, as everyone knows who knows a waterman, is a sentence to ten years of extremely bad luck.

Jack