P A D D L E R P R O F I L E
From paduan to Jedi. PHOTO NEIL ETIENNE
GREAT MINDS
PURE GENIUS AND GOOD OLD-COUNTRY FANATICISM BREED SHAGGY DESIGNS By 1998 both had graduated and were making their forays into the real world.
OSCAR WILDE HAD IT RIGHT when he said “genius is born, not paid,” if he was talking about the quiet success of Shaggy Designs, a rags-to-less-ragged story of two intellects torn between being river rats and paying the bills. Physics student Gwyn Ashcroft and engineering student Martin Du Toit met at
the U.K.’s Durham University Canoe and Kayak Club in the mid-‘90s. They were penniless, but these two accomplished C1 slalom paddlers thought with some slight alterations to their race boats, they could create an animal that could surf and maybe even throw an end or two. “We were just a couple of slalom boys who wanted a playboat, and a playboat at that time meant boats like the Pyranha Blade,” Du Toit says. They first took an old slalom Fanatic, cut the ends off and rounded it up to give
it rocker, creating what they say was a very light, flat-hulled C1 that was fast and easy to surf and toss around. It worked so well, their natural progression was to make one from scratch. “We took foam insulation—the one thing we could afford enough of—and carved
it with a bent hacksaw. Our design was simple,” remembers Du Toit. “Gwyn had a bit of a legendary-sized tongue in university and we shaped it like that.” They covered the foam with a thin layer of fibreglass and tested the plug. “It was so thin you could feel the waves going under your knees and it leaked
like a sieve, but wave wheeling was a huge thing at the time and boy could this boat do it,” Du Toit recalls. Not for long, however. Their nameless prototype quickly broke apart. But as
they say, the damage was done. From the shore, other club members had seen what the two were up to and were in awe. They began in earnest creating their first marketable mould, one that still leads their catalog of four designs.
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Ashcroft found himself with a prestigious position with U.K.’s National Physical Laboratory, Du Toit became a full-time professional engineer and soon their C1 Jedi design was making its way to the river from their factory in Du Toit’s subur- ban Durham backyard. Shaggy Designs was born when a few other students started requesting Jedis of their own. Hungry for a bit of adventure, in 2001 Du Toit and Shaggy’s newest C1 de-
sign, the Sith, set off to tour North America Du Toit made his way from California to a raft guiding job at RiverRun on the Ottawa River. Wherever the Sith went, heads turned and orders rolled in. Now producing about four or five boats a year, Ashcroft felt the lure of the Ottawa and a possible boat-designing career. “So Gwyn basically quit an incredible job with the laboratory—he’s purely ge- nius—to become a full-time raft guide and river bum, and I did everything I could to stay on the water,” Du Toit says. They set up shop at RiverRun and to this day still spend their summers build-
ing their orders from a small shed just up from the river. In the winter months, while Ashcroft river guides in New Zealand, Du Toit pays the bills as an engineer for a pharmacy company near Toronto. At night his stuffy townhouse garage serves as Shaggy Designs’ headquarters. Neither thinks Shaggy would have come this far had it not been a joint effort. “Martin, being a trained engineer, is very good at thinking about the whole
design process from beginning to end,” Ashcroft says. “If I was left to my own devices I would still be sanding the plug for our first boat. Having a good friend to argue with is incredibly useful, and makes the long drives to and from the river much more entertaining.”—Neil Etienne
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