above: Eddyline’s first sea kayak, the WT-500 designed by Werner Furrer, c. 1975. left: Lisa Derrer trying out the Eddyline Orca, 1979. photos Werner Furrer collection.
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 fibre- glass 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 busi-
ness. 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 did- n’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-popu- lar 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
“Will the last person to leave Seattle please turn out the lights.”
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 pro- duction 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 whitewa- ter 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.
30 Summer 2004
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