Adventure Kayak magazine Summer '04

The early years—
A history of the North American sea kayak industry
About the time of the first light sabres, the big kayak companies were building boats in garages, chicken coops and rainforests. After a while they thought they should make sea kayaking popular. So they did.

Hey, dude, can I borrow your mould?

Picture this: The year is 1972. You’re a swingin’ flower child,
and you want to go kayaking with your sweetheart, feel the
groove and sway of the ocean, get in touch with Mama Earth,
and find a beach on which to make love, not war.

It’s not much different than today, except you have to go
build your own boat.

Someone in your paddling community has a fibreglass kayak
mould—probably at the local paddling club. You pay 10 or 20
bucks for the rights to borrow it and go buy some fibreglassing
supplies from someone who’s ordered them in bulk. You get a
few pointers from the last builder, and so take on the unwritten
responsibility to pass your knowledge along to the next.

Or if you’re lucky you can find someone
with a bit of experience to build you a boat
for a few hundred bucks. But more likely they’ll just give you
two halves, a deck and a hull, and leave you to do the dirty
work—a lot of hours with your head in the cockpit getting high
off resin fumes (it is the ‘70s) and mucking around with fibreglass
seam tape.

That’s pretty much how it was in the early years of sea
kayaking. Boatbuilding was the hazing you went through if
you wanted to be a paddler—not a good recipe for a sport’s
popularity.

Then, some young kayakers turned their hobby into a business.
They started the companies whose names appear on most
of the boats we’re paddling today, and between 1974 and 1984,
our sport took off.

Here’s how it went down.

The Seattle scene pre–1974

Folding-kayak touring has its own illustrious history
throughout the 1900s, but today’s version of sea kayaking didn’t
take off until the advent of fibreglass.

It’s only logical that the earliest fibreglass sea kayaks
appeared in Seattle, where the Washington Kayak Club already
had hundreds of members. Wolf Bauer started up the
Washington Fold-Boat Club, the WKC’s forerunner, in the mid-
‘50s. WKC members in their German Kleppers or locally built
Whalecraft folding kayaks pioneered trips to many now-popular
destinations on the West Coast of Vancouver Island and
Alaska, often under the guidance of Bob Miller—the WKCs
tireless tripping patriarch, who in his lifetime logged nearly 100
trips of a week or longer.

In 1959, WKC member Ted Houk designed the club’s first
fibreglass kayak. Called the Gulf Islander, Houk’s kayak was
homebuilt in small numbers by WKC members who passed
around the mould. Many WKCers were also soon paddling the
Tyee I and II, designed by Linc Hales in 1961 and 1964 and sold
at area shops well into the ‘70s. Others had homebuilt boats
whose hulls resembled European downriver racing kayaks or
traditional fold-boats, so that by 1974 when commercial production
was just getting going, most Seattle-area kayakers were
already paddling fibreglass.

The first commercial builders

Whitewater kayaking was big in the early ‘70s, first appearing
in the Olympics in 1972 at Munich, and many boat builders
came to sea kayaking after being drawn to the glitz of whitewater
first—skipping the venerable folding kayak tradition entirely.
Around this time, a trio of whitewater boat builders sprang up
who would eventually make touring kayaks their core business.

Eddyline Kayaks was started by Tom and Lisa Derrer in
1971 out of a tiny shop in Boulder, Colorado. Eddyline only
built whitewater boats, and had no interest in sea kayaks until
the Derrers moved to Seattle in 1974.

There, they met Werner Furrer—the name that’s stamped on
many of our paddles today. Furrer, a design engineer from
Austria who had toured in folding kayaks since the 1940s, built
his first fibreglass kayak in 1965—a slender Greenland-style
boat he called the Eskimo.

In 1975, before turning his full attention to the paddle business,
Furrer designed the WT-500 (Werner Touring, 500 centimetres
long). Like most early hardshells, the WT-500 had a
rudder, but no hatches or bulkheads; gear was stowed in canvas
duffels waterproofed with garbage bags.

The WT-500 became Eddyline’s first sea kayak. Eddyline
came out with its first in-house touring design, the Orca, in
about 1978. It was the sort of enormous, high-volume, flat-bottomed
cruiser that came to typify the West Coast boat.

A wave of layoffs at Boeing had left a lot of unemployed engineers
floating around Seattle in 1972. People were joking, “Will
the last person to leave Seattle please turn out the lights.” And
this was a time when the environmental movement and the outdoor
sports craze were taking off. Companies including Jansport
and Cascade Designs (of Thermarest fame) were founded by
Boeing castaways, as were two more of the first commercial
kayak builders: Pacific Water Sports and Easy Rider.

Lee Moyer took his first sea kayak trip with the WKC’s Bob
Morris in 1970—“going north out of Tofino”—at a time when the
dirt road across Vancouver Island was so new you needed to duct
tape your car doors shut to keep the dust out and pack extra spare
tires. And Long Beach was home to more back-to-the-land squatters
than kayakers.

Most backyard boat builders were using pirated designs,
Moyer said, so he and a buddy set out to buy the rights to a legal
mould. Pacific Water Sports was the name they made up so they
could pass themselves off as a legitimate business when they
approached the British builder of a championship whitewater
slalom hull. They printed up some official-looking company letterhead
and inked a deal.

Their new boat
building business
soon evolved into a
paddling retail store
and full-time jobs for
Lee and Judy Moyer.
In 1974, they designed and built their first sea kayak, the Sea
Otter. “Sea kayaking was the biggest part of our business from
then on,” said Lee.

The third company in the Seattle early ‘70s trio was Easy
Rider, started by Peter Kaupat as a whitewater boat builder in
1970. The first Easy Rider sea kayak, circa 1975, was the
Dolphin, designed by Dan Ruuska—another ex-Boeing engineer
who went from moulding ultra-sleek engine intakes to
hydrodynamic hulls.

“I remember seeing [Dan] in an unemployment line probably
in about 1972,” recalled Matt Broze of Mariner Kayaks.
“Not too many years later I bought a kayak from him.”

Meanwhile, in the Canadian chicken coop

In Canada there were a few early fibreglass builders, including
a B.C. company that bought Ted Houk’s Gulf Islander
design. There was Frontiersman Fiberglas Products of Mission,
B.C., building sea kayaks in 1976. And Walter’s Ski Shack in
North Vancouver, a shop run by Walter Buchmueller, which
built and sold a German-imported design called the Eskie and
one of his own designs called the Osprey.

None of Canada’s big players were on the scene yet when
Nimbus kayaks was born. Liberal arts student Steve Schleicher
and microbiology instructor Joe Matuska were just a couple
more semi-employed whitewater paddlers building paddles
and boats for their friends in a converted chicken coop behind
Schleicher’s parents’ house near Vancouver. Schleicher recalls
that they built their first touring kayak around 1974 and that it
actually had hatches and a rudder. The boat sat on display for a
whole summer at the Mountain Equipment Coop, back when
the fledgling MEC was just a single shop in Vancouver, but
found no buyers. Yet Nimbus became a full-time business by
around 1976—“starving to death in the winter.”

Schleicher pegs 1978 as the year the sea kayaking industry
came out of the garage. It was for Nimbus, anyway. That was
the year they moved out of the chicken coop to a real production
facility in Port Coquitlam. By 1982, Nimbus had come up
with its flagship Seafarer design, which is still produced.
Matuska later left to start up one of today’s dominant paddle
companies, Aqua-Bound.

Meanwhile, in the Garibaldi Highlands just south of Whistler
Village, a gruff Czech immigrant and whitewater champion
named Mike Neckar was also moulding whitewater boats on an
informal basis in a falling-down shop in the rainforest.

“Kayakers would tell him what he wanted and he would produce
them under the cover of all the trees and secrecy,” is how
Allen Slade described the mythic origins of Necky Kayaks. Slade
operated Striders sport store at Fourth and Burrard in Vancouver
and became Neckar’s first dealer, long before the formal existence
of Necky. “This was just Mike Neckar, care of somewhere
in Garibaldi Park. You put in an order when you saw him.”

Mike Neckar is one of the industry’s most legendary characters—
impossible to reach for a magazine interview, but variously
described by others as “kayaking’s 8,000-pound gorilla,”
an engineering genius, a magician, and the last person you’d
ever expect to see climb into a kayak and make it dance.

Slade had started out by importing Derek Hutchinson
Baidarka Explorers from Britain:
“When Neckar saw these he thought
they were crap,” which seems to have
been a typical North American
response to the British designs. So
together they strived to develop a
design that was stable, roomy and comfortable, that the average
paddler could take out on the ocean. Neckar came up with
a design based on a high-volume whitewater boat, but longer,
wider, with a large cockpit.

In what fading memories recall was spring of 1975, Neckar
delivered the newly minted boats to Striders himself, showing
up with eight of them tied onto the roof of his Plymouth with
ropes strapped through the windows. Neckar pulled the
kayaks off the car then tossed them on the sidewalk in front of
the shop. Slade worried they’d get scratched, and Neckar
retorted, “The first time people use them they’re going to get
scratched.” He thought gel coat was for “poofters.”

The intractable designer called his first sea kayaks Turkey
Boats because he couldn’t think of a better name, or maybe it’s
an indication of what he thought of the people who would be
paddling them. Nonetheless, he went on to design betterknown
early Necky models such as the Phoenix, the Gannet
and the President by the early ‘80s, and later built some of the
world’s finest sea kayaks.

Spreading the gospel

Industry veterans remember the late 1970s and early ‘80s as
a time when, if you had a kayak on your car, heads would turn.

“People thought I was nuts,” remembers Moyer. “‘You go
out in the ocean in a kayak?’ They thought that was a big daredevil
stunt.”

In 1975, Ken Fink, an oceanographer in Maine, started paddling
his whitewater slalom boat on the Atlantic Ocean—a notuncommon
way for whitewater kayakers of the day to discover
touring. Fink kept at it until he saw an ad for the Nordkapp by
Valley Kayaks in 1978. He contacted Frank Goodman to order
two boats—one for himself and one for Maine’s attorney general—
and received an invitation to become the North American
distributor.

Fink became a self-described evangelist for his new lowimpact
sport. Well into the ‘80s, if Fink saw a kayak on the
highway it was probably one he’d sold. Passing a car with a
kayak on top, he’d always look at the boat first to find out who
was driving. “And if we saw each other on the interstate in
enough time, we’d stop…run over to the median strip and
talk.” If he parked, he’d invariably return to his car to find
someone waiting for him or a note on his windshield from a
potential buyer.

As if the Pacific Northwest didn’t already have its share of
the action, a few other Seattle companies entered the business
in the early ‘80s. Brothers Matt and Cam Broze started Mariner
Kayaks in their basement in 1980. And Dan Ruuska of Natural
Designs and John Abbenhouse of Northwest Kayaks crossed
over from whitewater and began building touring kayaks.

“I can recall in 1980 or ‘81 going up to Vancouver
Island…and counting 100 windsurfers on cars to one kayak,”
said Matt Broze. “I thought, ‘We started building the wrong
kind of boats.’” The industry was still in its infancy, but companies
saw that touring had a potential mass appeal that whitewater
didn’t. The companies were up and running with viable
boat designs, and looking for somewhere to grow.

Inventing the kayak store

There were no exclusively sea kayaking shops until John
Dowd opened Ecomarine in 1980 on Vancouver’s artsy Granville
Island. Dowd brought in folding kayaks from Europe and sold
many of the new North American designs including Eddyline’s
Orca, Pacific Water Sports’ Sea Otter, and Nimbus’ kayaks.

Dowd is also credited with coining the term “sea kayaking”
with the publication of his book of that title in 1981. “It wasn’t
called sea kayaking until my book came out,” he said. “It was
called kayak touring or sea canoeing or canoe touring, bluewater
paddling, coastal paddling, all those things.”

Over on Vancouver Island, Brian Henry was a sheet metal
mechanic working long overtime during mill shutdowns so he
could have maximum time off for skiing and whitewater paddling.

Around 1979, he went on a month-long paddling trip to the
Queen Charlottes, a rare thing at the time. “I decided when I
came back I wasn’t going to be a construction
worker anymore. I was going to
be in the kayak business,” he said. Henry
opened Ocean River Sports in Victoria in
November 1981.

“I just wanted to have a little kayak
store that I could run for a few months of the year and I could
paddle and I could ski. I used to put a little notice on my
door—‘Gone product testing’—and we’d go to the river.”

Henry started designing boats, beginning with a large hatchless
sea kayak called the Pisces, which he took to Mike Neckar
to get built. After about a year he started his own production of
Current Designs kayaks on Vancouver Island.

In 1982, Bob Licht followed the Ecomarine example and
opened Sea Trek Ocean Kayak Center in Sausalito, California.
The Southwest had its own kayak builder too: Josef Sedivec at SEDA Products had been making whitewater racing kayaks
and canoes since 1969 and came out with his first sea kayak,
the Vagabond, in 1975.

Licht remains a key promoter of kayaking in the American
Southwest. Other specialty kayak shops across the continent were
not far behind Ecomarine, Ocean River Sports and Sea Trek.

The meeting in Werner’s rumpus room

The sea kayaking industry as we know it did not happen by
accident. Sometime in 1981 or 1982, a group of would-be career
kayakers met in Werner Furrer’s basement in Seattle and deliberately
created it. John Dowd organized the meeting. Attending
were Tom Derrer of Eddyline Kayaks, John Abbenhouse of
Northwest Kayaks, Lee Moyer of Pacific Water Sports, Brian
Henry of Ocean River Sports and others.

They formed the Trade Association of Sea Kayaking
(TASK)—now the Trade Association of Paddlesports (TAPS)—
and studied the successes and failures of other outdoor industries
to put together a plan for theirs.

“That was when we realized that we could be an industry
rather than a bunch of guys in their backyards,” said Henry.

“Everybody was in it because it was their favourite hobby,”
recalled Moyer. “I think TASK did a pretty good job of helping a
bunch of amateur businesspeople act a little more professional.”

One of TASK’s most important discoveries was of the need
for boat pricing that would include a healthy profit margin for
builders, retailers and, eventually, distributors.

“The biggest single thing that happened in our industry to
make it become what it is was to get the pricing right,” said
Dowd. “So suddenly everybody was able to make a living at it.”

The East Coast catches up

Things got off to a slow start in the East. There were a few
early builders, including Bart Hathaway who in 1975 licensed a
fibreglass touring design to Old Town Canoe. Ken Fink was
distributing British boats through his Poseidon Kayak Imports
from 1978 on. But there were no prominent kayak builders until
Tieken Kayaks.

Harrie Tieken started building flatwater racing kayaks and
Derek Hutchinson sea kayaks in Holland in the early 1970s. His
business trajectory paralleled that of the West Coast companies,
with sales taking off in the early 1980s.

Fast forward to 1987: Tieken brings his business to North
America, settling in Musquodoboit Harbour, Nova Scotia.
There were “absolutely no more than 10 people” paddling open
water in the East at the time, he guesses. “People said the ocean
is too dangerous for a kayak. People were laughing at me basically.”

Eventually Tieken provided boats for Scott Cunningham of
the Nova Scotia outfitting company Coastal Adventures, which
became a key educator and promoter for sea kayaking, and
Tieken’s designs, on the East Coast.

Like the other manufacturers, Tieken saw the need for a distinct
North American design that was beginner-friendly, so he
came up with his flagship, the Sealution, introduced at the L.L.
Bean’s Maine symposium in 1988.

Andy Zimmerman of Wilderness Systems (a North Carolina
whitewater boat company founded in 1986) purchased rights to
produce the Sealution for the U.S. market and went on to make
the boat’s plastic version one of the world’s bestselling kayaks.

Big Brother is kayaking

If you had to pick one year for the start of the modern sea
kayak industry, you’d have to shortlist 1984. It was the year
that two of TASK’s key promotional visions were realized: a
magazine and a symposium. John Dowd founded Sea Kayaker
in 1984, supported by the advertising revenue of a growing
industry. And TASK hosted the first annual West Coast Sea
Kayak Symposium in Port Townsend, Washington—modelled
after the highly successful Maine Sea Kayak Symposium started
in 1982 by Ken Fink with the support of retailer L.L. Bean
and Canoe magazine.

The economy had pulled out of the early ‘80s recession and
entrepreneurs who had been struggling along since the ‘70s
found themselves with viable businesses. Companies like
Current Designs began to reap the support of the big-box U.S.
outdoor stores like L.L. Bean in the East and REI in the West.
And kayaks entered mainstream media and mainstream consciousness.

Nineteen eighty-four was also the year that plastic kayaks
came out, with the introduction of the Aquaterra Chinook,
made by whitewater boat giant Perception. Plastic kayaks cut
boat prices in half. Where fibreglass moulding took at least a
day, plastic mould could produce a kayak in about two hours.
“Tupperware boats” propelled the industry into the 1990s
decade of double-digit annual growth.

Many of the original manufacturers—Necky, Current
Designs, Tieken—sold to larger American companies. But others,
like Steve Schleicher and Tom Derrer, are still at the helm of
the businesses they started three decades ago.

Now it’s a heck of a lot simpler to get a sea kayak and the
road to Tofino is much smoother than it was in the days of the
hippie squatters, but the down-to-earth soul of kayaking is as
real as it was back in the day.

“The goal was always to have a really neat way to travel in
the wilderness, self-propelled,” said Schleicher, reflecting on
where his early vision has led him. “And that seems to be what
most of our boats are actually geared to doing.”

Peace out.

Tim Shuff loves to think that it all began on his birthday in 1972, but he’s still trying to get his facts
straight. He can be reached at tim@adventurekayakmag.ca.

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