Brian Henry of Current Designs in Victoria: working on a new cedar strip plug; test pad- dling the first Current Designs kayak, the Pisces, in 1982. photos Brian Henry collection.


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


“I remember seeing Dan in an unemployment line. Not too many years later I bought a kayak from him.”–Matt Broze


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 produc- tion 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 pro-


duce 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 exis- tence 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 charac- ters—impossible to reach for a magazine interview, but vari- ously 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 aver- age 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 better- known 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 dare- devil stunt.”


32 Summer 2004


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