The Kayaking Popularity Explosion

kayaking/prostate problems
Kudzu,



Lighten up!



I started kayaking (while continuing canoeing) 25 years before I developed prostate problems.



Dave

You made a good choice with the Osprey.
Don’t let your wife paddle it, or you might have to buy another.

Don’t call yourself a Nazi. You’re only
trying to improve the Forum experience, in your own way.

Osprey Choice
I did something worse than letting my wife try the Carbon fusion Osprey. I let my grandchildren try it. Now they want a black solo canoe just like Papa’s.

I only have one wife but I have 2 grandchildren!!!

DUUJ has not said one word since
starting this mess. But it has been a great chance for many to increase their grasp on the obvious.



Smell a troll odor?

So it goes.

Still no DUUJ.

Holiday weekend
Some people do go away for a week or two

around the holiday, so it’s no biggie…

GREAT discussion in my opinion.



Wish the ACA or Outdoor Industry Association

actually HAD real stats on current usage in the USA.

“DUUJ” hasn’t posted in the entire
thread. Probably a marketing parasite trolling for ideas.



There hasn’t been one new idea in this entire thread, and it all belongs on the Discussion Forum.

Waiting for the spate of similar posts
In the past, posts like the OP’s often accompanied a slough of other suspiciously troll-like posts in a spell of a couple weeks. Always posted by a no-profile or brand-new profile poster of unknown background.



I remember at least one other thread by DUUJ in which I thought a marketing troller was sniffing out the premises. Gonna do an archive search now…

But didn’t canoeing popularity explode
after the movie “Deliverance” came out in the 70’s??? (You can’t simply attribute it’s rise back then, to the way Ned Beatty took it in the behind…Squeal!WWWeee-ee!)



Fads come, fads go. All I know is all the amateurs are gone after Labor Day–And most will take the SUP crowd with them.

No, it didn’t. I lived nearby back then
and the main “explosion” was in cheap rafts and garbage paddles. The growth in whitewater canoeing around Atlanta was already underway. I never saw any indication that the moderate growth in canoeing was related to Deliverance.



Claude Terry and Doug Woodward were in our club. They were kayakers as much as canoeists. Payson and Aurelia Kennedy, and Horace Holden, were club members, and founded NOC on the Nantahala.



All the new ww canoeists I knew, back in the 70s, were well aware of how much skill had to be developed to paddle the Chattooga, or even the Nantahala. While we considered Deliverance a good book and a good movie, we thought Burt Reynolds et al were greenhorns who were taking stupid chances.

I believe Spiritboat is correct

– Last Updated: Jul-07-13 7:33 PM EST –

I have often read that the biggest canoe-sales volume that the Grumman company ever had in their history, by far, occurred right after that movie came out. I think the boom lasted a couple of years, but was most pronounced shortly after the movie first started playing. I can't say what other long-time canoe "standards" experienced, such as companies like Old Town, but that's what happened for Grumman.

I think what you saw is attributable to the fact that rank amateurs getting started with their brand-new canoe aren't likely to show up at the same places as the hard-core whitewater folks that you hung out with. That said, I think it was Bob (thebob.com) who once quoted some source that talked about several amateur canoers dying in difficult rapids shortly after the movie came out, with those rapids being the type where paddlers of such a skill level were normally not ever seen.

It is true.
I got into a Grumman for the first time myself back then. Age=16. Two week trip down the Delaware. The explosion I cited was in general canoe sales and popularity. NOT necessarily whitewater.



…And by the way, g2d: The name-dropping of your so-called legends impresses absolutely NOBODY.



Now squeal, wwweeee-wwweee-wwweee!!!

It’s not a matter of your being
impressed. It’s a matter of helping you to not repeat suburban legends. In this case, guideboat’s imagining notwithstanding, Deliverance pumped up the cheap raft industry, but not canoeing.



You think I didn’t know those guys personally? Seriously?

DUUJ still not back.
Maybe drowned in the floods. All that marketing research down the tubes.

Suburban legend?

– Last Updated: Jul-09-13 7:56 PM EST –

I'm not a suburban guy--But here's a reference from the book, "The Grumman Story"...Please note next to last sentence in paragraph below, referencing how many sold in 1974...

"Hoffman and Achilich influenced canoeing in the last half of the twentieth century like few others, by introducing light, rugged boats at an easily affordable price," the magazine wrote. A Grumman canoe, Paddler publisher and editor Eugene Buchanan said recently, could take a beating. "You could put the wife and kids and kitchen sink in the thing and ram it into rocks," he said. The public bought thousands. A 1975 brochure cited sales of more than 300,000 Grumman canoes in 30 years. Demand peaked in 1974 with sales of 33,000, propelled by the 1972 movie "Deliverance" and concerns about fuel consumption during the mid-'70s energy crisis."

And I don't care who you knew, or what anybody else paddles for that matter...And now if you'll excuse me, I have to get back to banjo practice.

Well…I just asked the question…
…And you never thought it had relavance.:slight_smile:

I was wrong about the year,…
… but that sounds a lot like what I’ve read a couple of other places. My older brother bought a Grumman in 1974, and during a very short time period right about then, it seemed like all manner of small stores were stocking Grummans. I’m sure that was never the case a few years earlier, and I know for a fact that it was never the case later on. Those were good years for Grumman, “despite g2d’s imaginings”.



My brother bought his Grumman from a little neighborhood hardware store in 1974, a place that had no history whatsoever selling boats of any kind before that time. They actually stocked quite a few, and my brother chose one that had a little scratch on it already and was therefore discounted. Interestingly, it was Grumman’s heavy-duty model with extra ribs and a shoe keel, a style that’s a bit rare overall, and I can’t help but wonder if the little hardware store was catering to people who had visions of doing whitewater since it would make no sense to stock anything other than the standard model 99 percent of the time.

Fishing
I bike with the manager of a local sporting goods store. Today he told me that he’s selling many, many fishing kayaks and hardly any touring boats. Apparently word has gotten around how great it is to fish from a kayak.