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 busi- ness, Furrer designed the WT-500 (Werner Touring, 500 cen-
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 let- terhead and inked a deal.
Their new boat
On his first sea kayak trip north of Tofino, the dirt road across Vancouver was so new you had to duct tape your car doors shut to keep the dust out.
timetres long). Like most early hardshells, the WT-500 had a rudder, but no hatches or bulkheads; gear was stowed in can- vas 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-bot- tomed cruiser that came to typify the West Coast boat. Awave of layoffs at Boeing had left a lot of unemployed engi-
neers 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 out- door 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 squat- ters than kayakers.
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 engi- neer who went from moulding ultra-sleek engine intakes to hydrodynamic hulls. “I remember seeing [Dan] in an unemployment line proba-
bly 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, includ-
ing 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.
Early wares on display at North America’s first specialty kayak shop, Ecomarine, opened by John Dowd on Granville Island, Vancouver, in 1980. photos John Dowd collection.
ADVENTUREkayakmag.com 31
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