An interview with Reed Rudasill

by Jude Theriot

After the ribbon-cutting ceremony for St. Martin Parish’s first kayak kiosk, I spoke with Reed Rudasill about Wanderlust Rentals, a business bringing a big-city bike-share concept to Southern Louisiana waterways. As I learned from our conversation, the kayaks are pieces of a larger puzzle. The entrepreneur explained how the kayak kiosk, situated as it is on the grounds of the Old Castillo Hotel, is part of a plan to bring the two-hundred-year-old St. Martinville landmark back to life again this fall.

Tell me about yourself and how you came into this unique business.

I was born and raised in Lafayette, went to school at University of Louisiana, got my degree in civil engineering, then I decided that I didn’t want to work for somebody else for the rest of my life. I didn’t want to work forty hours a week for somebody else at a desk. Now the joke is that I work eighty to a hundred hours a week for myself. Majority of the time, I’m behind a desk.

You’re calling the shots though . . .

Exactly. So my sister, Rachel Rudasill, and I, we created Wanderlust Rentals, self-service kayak rentals. My sister and I also own a property management company, called Experience Louisiana. We have Airbnbs that we manage around the state of Louisiana, a lot of them near or on bodies of water, like Bayou Vermilion, Toledo Bend, Cypremort Point. We wanted to be able to give our guests kayak rentals. We also saw that in Lafayette, for instance, nobody was really renting out kayaks anymore. So we’re like, “Okay, maybe we’re on to something. But instead of it being a manned operation, paying an employee or one of ourselves to be on site, how can we figure out to do it to be a self-service?”

I knew that the concept existed for bikes and scooters in larger cities, where you just pull up to a bike or a scooter, you download the app, you scan the QR code, and you take off on it. So I said, “Okay, how can I do this for kayaks?” And I tried to do it by myself at first. Probably could have done it myself, but I ended up finding other companies in the US and out of Europe that were implementing self-service technology for kayaks, canoes, bikes, scooters, all kinds of things. So we ended up going with a company out of Sweden. We purchased their smart locks, and we utilized their software to install the smart locks on our kayaks. So that’s how it got started. We saw a need in Lafayette and nobody was really doing it.

Your first kayak kiosk was in Lafayette?

Our first location was at Vermilionville. And now we have four on Bayou Vermilion. Bayou Vermilion is our northernmost point, and then Southside Park is our southernmost point. We have kiosks in downtown New Iberia, Cypremort State Park and Palmetto Island State Park. And then now, St. Martin Parish.

We’re standing here today on a floating kayak dock that was put here by the TECHE Project and the city of St. Martinville and other entities. And we saw that potential. We saw all the floating docks that are up and down Bayou Teche, from Port Barre, all the way down to Franklin, and even further, Baldwin. So we said, “Okay, they have the infrastructure to make getting in and out of kayaks and canoes easy. What about if we start setting up where those kayak docks are located?” So now we’re here in St. Martinville, our first one in St. Martin Parish.

And tell me about the relationship with the Old Castillo Hotel.

We’re standing on property owned by Ms. Peggy Hulin, owner of the Old Castillo Hotel Bed and Breakfast. We have a partnership with her to operate the kayaks on her property, and then also, luckily, with our property management company, we’re excited to be renovating and opening up the Old Castillo Hotel in the fall of 2026.

What other plans do you have for St. Martin Parish?

So, on top of the self-service kayak rentals, which is kind of what started Wanderlust, we also do guided tours. We bring kayaks to groups for group paddles. They reserve them ahead of time, and if you have a large group, we recommend that. But we go out to Lake Martin almost every other week either for a guided tour or we’ll just go deliver kayaks and people will do a free roam on their own in Lake Martin. So we’re always out there. Long term I would love to be able to get a self-service kiosk at Lake Martin. It’s such a hot spot. It’s such a beauty. People from around the world go out there and tour it. So that’s a goal of ours. Also, downtown Breaux Bridge has a kayak launch at Parc des Ponts. There’ a launch at Poche Bridge. And then on the edge of St. Martin and St. Landry Parish they have one over there in Arnaudville. Long term it would be great to have one at all of the docks that the Teche Project has up and down Bayou Teche.

Tell me a little bit about the structure of your kiosk. That’s a unique piece of architecture. Did you build it yourself?

Trial and error, really. I like to build and design things. I just built a wood fire pizza oven out of a fifty-five gallon metal barrel. I like tinkering. I like working with my hands, but yeah, we build all of the kayak kiosks, as we call them. This is probably like our fifth concept for a design. It’s just basically what works best for the kayaks, what works best for building it in the same secure manner, but also stacking them to keep them out of the weather and off of the ground. We built a little roof on it to keep the water and the sun from getting on them. And we wanted to make it easy for an individual who rents with us to be able to take it off the kiosk and bring it to the body of water, ideally just a few feet away from them.

Can you walk me through the process of renting a kayak?

Everything’s gonna be done through the app. You can either download it ahead of time—the name of the app is called Share Kayak—but if, for whatever reason, you don’t, you can just come to our kiosk out here in St. Martinville, or any of our locations, and at each location, there’s gonna be a sign with instructions on what you need to do.

So you’ll start off by downloading the Share Kayak app. From there, each of the kayaks has a smart lock on it with a QR code. So you’ll go on the Share Kayak app. There’s a camera function, you scan the QR code, and that tells the app what kayak you want to use. We have single sit-on-top kayaks as well as tandem kayaks. So two, or actually three seats, you can fit an adult and another adult, or an adult and two kids if you have a family. You scan the QR code. You submit your payment. Everything’s done from your phone, so you’ll use your credit card or your Apple wallet. And once you make a payment, you’ll sign a waiver, you’ll upload your ID, and once all of that is said and done, the kayak unlocks, and you have access to the kayak. We have paddles and life jackets on site as well. So you take one of those, and it’s based off an hourly rate for the kayaks. You can go as long as you want, and it’ll just charge you for the amount of hours, really the amount of minutes that you go out.

I was looking at the prices for these two. The single is, like, twenty dollars an hour?

The first hour is $20 for the single. The first hour for the tandem is going to be $30. So, no matter what, you’re paying that $20, you’re paying that $30. But then after that first hour it’s just $10 an hour. So if you go, let’s say, three hours on a single kayak, you’ll pay the $20, and then another $10, and another $10. So that’ll be about $40 plus a little bit of tax. But you can go, if you want to go one-and-a-half hours, it’ll just charge you by the minute after that first hour.

What’s been the most challenging part of all this?

I would say, not the most challenging, but the most time consuming, just working through the logistics and the contracts and the legal agreements with each different entity that we partner with. We have currently five or six partners, and that represents the amount of locations that we have. Some partners have multiple locations, but for each spot where we set up one of our kiosks and rent our kayaks we don’t own the land. Somebody owns the land, so we have to go and say, okay, who owns this land by this certain body of water in St. Martinville? Here that person is Peggy Hulin.

Is that how you met Peggy?

Actually, I got in contact with Peggy about four or five years ago, before Wanderlust was even a thing. It was actually me reaching out to her, sending her postcards, basically, introducing myself and my property management company. And then about a year ago, we had the opportunity to finally sign a lease. Wanderlust was rocking and rolling, and it worked out that her property’s on Bayou Teche, right next to the kayak dock. So we were able to work with her, and her experience managing the hotel, to lease it out and manage the hotel, and then also bring Wanderlust out here. Not only will we be able to host people from around the world and give them a place to stay. They can stay in a historic 200-year-old property in beautiful downtown St. Martinville. And now we can offer them kayaks.

Perfect.

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