P A D D L E R P R O F I L E
One funky chicken. PHOTO JAMES SNEERINGER
LIVING ON L’EDGE CRAIG SMERDA IS AN OPEN BOATER WITH AN OPEN MIND
CRAIG SMERDA IS PLAYING HUMBLE. “I have a face made for radio,” he jokes in an interview with Rapid this spring when the subject of photos to ac- company this profile comes up. “I don’t want to be the best at one thing,” says the lifelong open boater, “I just want to be very capable in every aspect.” Smerda might as well be talking about his new
creation, the long awaited, genre-bending Esquif L’Edge. Given this highly anticipated canoe’s near-decade-long evolution from idea to drawing table to production, Smerda and the L’Edge are a lot alike—in a word: versatile. “I’m a phase person; in the spring I focus on
creeking and bigger water, then in early summer I move into freestyle and slalom or performance paddling,” says the Wausau, Wisconsin-based auto parts and service veteran and former U.S. national open canoe team member. Smerda says the seed for the L’Edge was planted in 2002 when he started thinking about a design that could “do it all” with equal alacrity. A huge fan of the versatile, but distinctly non- traditional, Spanish Fly, Smerda began tinkering
with a design that performed very much like the Fly but looked like a traditional open canoe. “I knew that there were a lot of people—some of my friends included—who wouldn’t paddle the Span- ish Fly because it didn’t look like a canoe, didn’t have open, full-volume ends and so on,” he says. As if the challenge of merging design ideals
and physical realities wasn’t enough, Smerda had another hurdle—the L’Edge would be his very first canoe design. Although lacking in personal ex- perience, Smerda learned a lot by studying the designs he enjoys paddling. “When I had time to be around designers like John Kazimierczyk and Frankie Hubbard, I asked a lot of questions about how and why things worked and what the premise was of their designs,” he says. In 2006, Smerda showed his friend and Esquif
owner Jacques Chasse some initial renderings of his design. Smerda says Chasse’s willingness to try new ideas and embrace the creative process gave him the confidence to share and develop his design. “Jacques basically told me to keep working on it, and if it seemed like something
that would fit the marketplace, we’d go ahead and do it.” The first prototype, tested in June 2009, turned
more than a few heads and started the wheels of anticipation spinning on forums like BoaterTalk. com and
Cboats.net. The latter recorded a re- markable 43,000 views of Smerda’s introductory note on the L’Edge in the seven months follow- ing his post. Then yet another month passed with still no sign of the boat and fickle attention spans began to wander. But in the background, Smerda was working as hard as ever. “Initially we were going to do the L’Edge in
thermo-form plastic like the Taureau,” he explains. As the prototype was set to move into production, however, Esquif acquired a roto-moulding oven and a wellspring of design possibilities opened up. Despite the inevitable delays of such a last- minute change, Smerda felt roto-moulded plastic was a better material for the L’Edge. “It’s a more versatile medium—you can do any shape you want,” he says. Versatile. Smerda’s one-word motto, embodied
in a canoe that can be ordered up with moulded- in decks or standard open ends and gunwales (or half-and-half), is wooing even stoic traditionalists to look over the edge, er…L’Edge. But it’s a daring creation of another kind—Smer-
da’s three-year-old daughter, Henna—that is inspi- ration for the freshman designer’s next project, a canoe for children. “Hopefully my daughter won’t have kids of her
own by the time I’m finished!” Smerda says, only half kidding. —Virginia Marshall
www.rapidmag.com 21
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