Hiking is definitely way down in the Benson Branch environmental Area next to my house, but destination hiking areas like the Adirondacks are continuing to deal with crowding and overuse on many trails. So much so that for some trails they have started to required reservations, eliminated roadside parking, reduced the size of parking lots, ect. much to the chagrin of locals and longtime hikers.
In some cases busloads of 40 or more hikers are being brought in from Canada and in state and out of state cities and being dumped at trailheads. There are stories that many of these hikers are new or simply unaware of basic trail etiquette.
Well, I cannot argue against kayakers aging. I just bought a high end 'yak a couple months ago, and I will be 80 in a few months. Most of the people I paddle with are older people, but younger than I am, many are retired. We are the ones who can call a few friends and do a day paddle in the middle of the week.
There are younger people in the club, but they mostly do day trips on weekends. Work is necessary for most who have young families. We see a lot of them in low end boats on flat water. As they age, they move up to more expensive boats. the new sea kayak people I see are mostly in their forties or fifties. Quite a few paddled recā boats when they were younger, and looked forward to better boats when they had fewer obligations. With relative like Uncle Emil, who bicycled all over the City of Chicago until he was 96, I expect to be paddling at least another ten years.
My grandson is thrilled that I am giving him my older boat.
I started with a 9ā6" long x 30" wide Perception rec boat. That was what I wanted at the time. I upgraded four times before I got what I needed all boats are good as long as you use them for the purpose as designed. That first boat was $236 on sale. It was a great boat, for 3 months, until my first upgrade.
I think some clarification as to my intent with this video might be helpful. We, as a community have this discussion every winter. It is exhausting! This is the equivalent of repeating something until it becomes truth. It sets a tone of discussion and makes the sport less attractive to a new paddler. Why does this discussion keep happening every year.
I am not having any trouble finding customers for our kayaks. As a paddler building kayaks for paddlers, I have focused on quality and providing the best possible kayaks for the money. Itās expensive, and exhausting. The reward for me is getting out with my customers and seeing them get turned on to paddling in a way they have not experienced before.
The manufacturing side is difficult for sure. The business is changing and the brick and mortar paddle shops are disappearing. They are being replaced by small boutique dealers operating out of their homes. The downside is they are difficult to find due to small budgets with little room to afford the necessary digital marketing to be found by customers. The upside is the paddler now gets super personalized service and the ability to buy exactly what they want, instead of settling for a kayak that may or may not be the color or construction that is their first choice. What we are seeing is manufacturers either pivoting to meet the new marketplace demands or they perish.
We have an influx of new manufacturers entering the US market in the last year or two. Things I am seeing in my repair shop and through the grapevine are not good. The marketing/pricing is not adding up and paddlers are not getting what they think they are. Chopped strand mat and super cheap resins still are sadly king in the sea kayak world. If the price is low, there is a reason. In the composites world, there is no such thing as cheap. I know the prices of all the materials on a wholesale level and things just donāt add up. So, yeah it is about survival, but it also about being honest about some disturbing stuff I see from the back side of the business.
Now, here is what I gauge as the health of the sport.
Chasing Waters Symposium- Sold out
Kipopeake Sea Kayak Symposium- Sold out
Bay of Fundy Symposium- Sold out
Mid Coast Rendevous- Sold out
Autumn Gales- Sold out
Schoodic Sea Kayak Retreat- Sold out
All of these events had waiting lists to get in and just a small sampling of the events this fall. This is what keeps me going when things get tough. So, market trends and participation studies donāt tell the whole story.
Thank you for watching the video and having something to contribute to the discussion.
Toward the end if my career, I worked part-time in a high end custom furniture shop owned and operated by a friend. When I retired, I went to work full-time. Since all I wanted to do was augment my salary, I worked for less, so he could keep the few primary craftsmen employed. He eventually had to let everyone go and continues on his own. I still help occasionally, but mostly do my own projects or his personal projects, but I wonāt take a salary, because my social security annuity was penalized due to collecting a civil service pension. The total social security deductions they would withhold annually if I worked full time would exceed what I get for my current annuity. The polititicians who decided to limit my assets on the other hand work a few years, develop contacts, collect a lucrative retirement . . .
There is a following for quality priducts. People still value quality furniture and quality boats. Thereās no guarantee that we will be able to make a living doing something we enjoy. For me it was less of a job and more like an education that I got paid for learning rather than paying to receive it.
I now value my time more than working to make things for people who want to get something for nothing. Support the shops.
Another sign of the enduring allure of sea kayaking is that the annual QajaqUSA skills camps, which teach Greenland style techniques for open and rough water (strokes, bracing, rolling, self and assisted rescue (as well as building skin on frame kayaks and Greenland style paddles) are consistently booked 100% early with waiting lists. There were at least 80 participants at the DelMarVa camp at Rehoboth Bay two weeks ago and more than half the attendees had conventional sea kayaks, mostly higher end and a number of impressive custom builds.
Looks like other parts of the continent have a bigger, more active kayaker population. I envy you.
From yesterdayās paddle: Three rowing shell folk (they always start very early and finish as I arrive, when the wind typically picks up), one canoe guy who used SPONSONS, one rec kayak, a bunch of SUP paddlers, all of them staying near the launch. Oh, and lots of powerboats, including two or three of those goddmn gigantic wakeboats. Big fish in small pond.
Sometimes I see a couple of people in sea kayaks. Iām almost always the only one with a surf ski. The few I have seen in years past obviously were passing through, on their way to some other destination. Never saw any of them around again.
Sea kayaking has never been the biggest kayaking community. Surfskis grabbed a portion of that market and it is mostly those folk, who were younger, that have migrated to SUPs and dragged many of the other young water people with them.
The big kayak companies saw that and tried to kill sea kayaking by removing them from their lines of products.
That allowed more small companies to gain foot space in the market. They also made much better boats than the mass producers. That kept the market running as at always has, but the community is getting older, so it is shrinking because of attrition.
It has been about ten years since SUPs hit the scene and many of the original paddlers are starting to get bored with their SUPs. They are slow and cumbersome, so I think sea kayaking will see an uptick of new, but still older, paddlers join in.
SUPs have become some kind of kids fantasy now and the people that started the phenomenon are being pushed to the edges, and they arenāt the kind of people to just take that.
My first kayak tryout with my brotherās white water kayak turned me away from kayaking. I couldnāt stay upright. Rolling upright was eady enough, but I kept on going around. Paddling straight was nearly impossible. I now understand it came down to technique, but our canoe didnāt require such a learning curve. I had no fear of bring trapped or hanging upside down, because I could easily get my head out of the water to breath. I just got tired of hanging upside down while trying to figure out how to stay upright. I felt like the boat needed SCUBA gear and a crash helmet.
Years later, Dicks Sport set up a portable test pool in the parking lot, and I went to the location to test two canoes. I saw kids skooting around in a stubby little Perception Swifty. I tried it and marveled at how it stayed upright and tracked straight. I upgraded at least four times to different recreation style boats, avoiding the confined space and narrow width that supposedly made the sea kayak hard to use. That notion persists in the kayak world, with avid kayakers pushing performance boats, when most people just want to go out and drift. Iām glad I took the chance and gave the 125 Tsunami a chance. Getting into it the first tomevwas comical, but once I figure out how to slide into it, the 26 inch width was too wide and the 12ā 9" length was too short. Just go out out and test one.
One fearure I like about the Wilderness System boats is how the models from recreation style through performance boats share features that transition from stable to playful. I take my mid-level Tsunamis out in some fairly stiff conditions and feel perfectly at ease with the stability, how they handle moderate conditions, price is reasonable for the durability and the comfort, and the reasonable performance.
SUPs lured people from all kinds of boats or no boats at all. I think most in CO either āmigratedā from heavier plastic rec kayaks, or they never had a boat of any kind.
Iām not under the impression that SUPers migrated from surf skis much, anywhere.
Talking midcoast Maine, the place I go in has always been inbetween the bigger destinations for groups of paddlers, even in the summer. I personally think my bay is the best, but it seems that most groups from outside want to go to Casco or Penobscot bays. So I see less evidence of any ebb and flow. I suspect there are lobster boat operators where there has been mutual waving while I wait for them to pull their pots for a couple of decades. Many of the boats are the same.
For many many years everyone took groups out of Stonington because of a lovely and large campground that yielded easy access to that archipelago. That location was sold a year or so ago and is likely on its way to becoming seaside McMansions. There is no other nearby launch point with equivalent capability for large groups. My guess is that those groups have shifted further south towards the Popham area and are staying in motels now.
But there is another archipelago on the very edge of that by, a smaller one and generally under-regarded, that has good parking for a day launch if you arrive before the lot fills with families out for the day in the park. I think that parking lot was more loaded up the last couple of years, but I could also be remembering a hot spell.
Or those Stonington folks discovered Lobster Buoy campground.
Personally I will get into a boat and make it out on the water to have terns and shering petrels (sp?) hit the water to fish near me as long as I can. But I paddle way way more conservatively these days, and am not likely to fill out a weekend of challenging paddling somewhere in āinterestingā conditions because I have little interest in having to keep up with a group. Those who do these events are pretty much guaranteed to be more competitive and faster than I am these days.
But yes, those events like the MidCoast Rendezvous and a few others mentioned, are filling up. But to throw a small wrench in that, those events are somewhat limited by the number of coaches they can assemble. The very large events like Sweetwater or Maine Seakayaking Symposium had a very large number of coaches hence a very large range of classes etc. The events of the traditional sea kayaking calibre these days are usually running with a smaller number of coaches hence a more limited participant count.
I think that any discussion of sea kayaking being ādeadā is a bridge too far. But there is a generational thing that has been happening with everything from nurses to people who work for the IRS to leisure activities involving a certain amount of money and physicality. We have tended to attribute the broad swath of these issues to CoVid but it was coming anyway. A huge generation of boomers with fairly similar interests in outdoor activities and public service are retired, or as I read the obits of my peers have gone to the next stage. Changes like this stink for someone who has invested their career in the way it was. But it doesnāt change it.
Biggest collapse is yet to come with all the turmoil around the world. Problems in Middle East will drive oil prices through the roof in the next month. Less disposable income for most all families. Higher prices for everything you touch A-Z including all materials to build boats. Inflation will return to higher monthly increases and interest rates going higher. People with flexible rates will be I bad shape. Stocks will take a big hit with economy crashing.
Weāre here until weāre not. Just need to do things in the meantime.
Before ordering a lot of kayak parts online, i drove two hours to Blue Mountain Outfitters and bought $600 worth of stuff. Most of it was cheaper than online. Pleasant drive and nice to talk to people in person. I had a chance to measure parts to make sure they fit.
Paddle for grand daughter, several fixed foot peg assemblies to replace the sliding rudders pedals from on the used kayaks I bought. Several back and bottom seat covers, a pelican phone box, maps of the Susquehanna from Harrisburg to The Pennsylvania/Maryland line, assorted fixture screws, bolts, washers . . .
Joey, I think you are on track. I think one has to buy and own several āaffordableā boats before one realizes that quality of design and construction are worth paying for. You are building boats that will literally last more than one lifetime and can be passed down to the next generation. Not many manufacturers can make that claim and I think it is a point lost on many. In a world where plastic boats are now approaching the $1600-1800 (and north) mark, the math for quality composites is changing.
