pushy !!!

what is the pushiest place you have been to when looking at kayaks or canoes? The pushiest place I’ve ever been is JAX of ft. collins. They have an outdoor area behind the store with boats. And since you have to ask “could I take a look at your kayaks outside?”, They say " yeah, we’ll send someone out to show them to you". So they will send a salesman out with you and then they ask you what your looking for, and I just said what kind of kayaks I like, And they start telling you all this info, even though I knew everything he told us, like flater bottoms are more stable and worse at tracking. And they guide you through all the boats telling you prices and info. I just wanted to look at some kayaks I really liked, But I couldn’t spend time at a particular yak because he was showing us so many yaks. when I just got to enjoy seeing a yak, like a beautiful loon 138, he moved on. You don’t ask for prices, they just give them to you.

Did the salesman say,
what’s harder, single kayaking, or canoeing with 2 people?

Little Falls of the Potomac
Little Falls is the pushiest place I have been looking at canoes. The whole Potomac is throttled into a 30-yard wide throat of rock and makes a hard right turn into a rock wall on the Virginia side. Real pushy.



~~Chip

But WAY cool. I squirted a 78 gal…
…creek boat there.



Flipped at the bottom hole, rolled upright and I

was still 6’ under water.


That IS way cool!!

I have the opposite problem
I can’t find salespeople that seem to know what they are talking about.

or my favorite
is that the sales person treats you like you have just seen a kayak for the first time in your life. It happens at bike shops too.

Try Canoesport in Houston. These guys
know everything about canoes and kayaks and claim to have invented fishing from sit on top kayaks. Woe unto the neophyte.

Thats what happened to me!

– Last Updated: Jun-15-06 3:38 PM EST –

they told me absolutly everything I already knew.

flatter bottoms = more satbility, less tracking

wider= more satbility, less tracking

narower = less stability, more tracking

curve bottoms = less stability, more tracking

the salseman told me that
I already knew that!

what
about the grey thing in the front of the boat?



Paul

I second Canoesport
Their expert recomendations usually revolve around what they’re trying to move out of stock.

Everybody I’ve talked to that shopped there had the same experience. Woe unto the neophyte.

Wait just a cotton-pickin’ minute!
Why, I SWEAR that you said just a few weeks ago that the PAMLICO 140 is, and always will be, the only boat you’ll ever paddle.



Just what the heck are you doing eyeballing other kayaks???



Men… we’re so unfaithful.

Salesmans Job
I work at a Paddle Sports Shop as, amongst other things, a salesman. We are always very gracious about folks who say “just looking” but we try to ask if there are any questions they might have or could we tell them a little about the product they are looking at. Our number one priority is not to sell a boat but to inform the client. Most folks with limited paddling experience have a number of misconceptions about particualar boats and their usage.



A good example was a recent client who wanted a spray skirt for a Pungo 120. The easy sale would have been to get the skirt and ring it up. I generally chat up the clients and ask nicely what their hopes, dreams, and aspirations are for a particular piece of gear. It was through this exchange that the client told me she intended, for her second paddling outing, to go on a section of river that I knew to contain numerous class II and one strong class III rapid. She was at first taken back and then thankful for the information that hers was not a good choice of boat for the conditions and that it was not a good run for a solo novice paddler.



The other thing to consider is that as a boat guy my favorite thing to do is show off our hulls. It doesn’t bother me at all to spend time with a client who does not buy a boat. It often holds true that if they continue to shop around that they will return to our shop because we took the time to ask good questions and impart good information.



P.S. Its generally bad internet etiquette to dis a company by name…especially when their only crime was re-iterating general information.