Paddler Profile 1967
BrianCreer B.C.’s Godfather of Canoeing
If whitewater skills were copy-
righted, most western Canadian paddlers would be paying royalties to Brian Creer every time they spun into an eddy or cleaned a gate. Born in 1915, B.C.’s “godfather of canoeing” figures his accumulated experience as a competitor, instruc- tor and examiner totals about 385 years, and he has taught literally several thousand paddlers. While working as a high school teacher in Vancouver, Creer moonlighted in the ‘70s as one of the few top instruc- tors who knew both canoeing and kayaking. He was a lead developer of teaching standards in B.C. and also competed, paddling K1 and C2 in national competitions. After his retirement in 1979,
while most of his cohorts hit the links or piloted RVs to Arizona, Brian taught beginner kayak cours- es for two more decades and put many of B.C.’s top paddlers through their instructor exams. At age 88, he still performs seal launches—”an essential skill which all kayakers should have in their repertoire”—off the diving board at Lord Byng pool where he’s taught for almost 25 years.
1973
1985 1985
2001
the first awarding of the Brian Creer Cup 2001
photos and clippings provided by Mark Creer & Brian Creer.
Before the Great Depression It all started back in 1930 when Brian first picked up a paddle, on Howe Sound outside Vancouver. Back before the Depression hit hard, Brian made a wise investment decision and bought a cedar strip canoe, which he ran down the class II rapids of Marble Creek on northern Vancouver Island.
“My canoe, which was 25 years old when I bought it and not a scratch on it, quickly aged by another 25 years,” he recalled. “My first flotation was a four-pound jam tin in
both the bow and stern. I soon realized that this amount of flotation was practically useless.”
He switched to kayaking because he got into bigger rapids and got tired of swamping his canoe, but that wasn’t until he was 50 years old. A light turned on when was strolling the beach in Vancouver and saw a kayak sitting on the shore. He looked around and saw nobody. So he grabbed the paddle and slipped into the cockpit…and immediately capsized. “Then I saw this guy onshore laughing and it was his boat,” he said. Within a couple of years he’d figured it out and was teaching B.C.’s whitewater up-and-comers.
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