The Promoter
LAURA PRENDERGAST Port Townsend, Washington
“I have always wanted my work to be meaningful. I could never work for a company that I didn’t think was having a positive influence on people’s lives,” says Laura Prendergast of the values that lead her to Pygmy Boats. When Prendergast and her husband moved to the wooden boat mecca of Port Townsend, Washington, in 2011, she quickly put her talents in marketing and graphic design to work as marketing director for Pygmy. “I heard about Pygmy through the documentary Paddle to Seattle,
and I thought, ‘Now that is cool,’” she recalls. “Empowering people to build their own kayaks and then get outside on the water.” Here was a company that understood the feeling she had first experienced as a teenager backpacking in the Colorado Rockies—something profoundly fulfilling and very much in opposition to the predominating materialism of her profession. A native of the Texas Hill Country transplanted to the coast by way of
the mountains, Prendergast is relatively new to kayaking, but she’s driven by the healthy lifestyle paddling promotes. “It’s more of a sociological phenomenon that I feel I’m participating in,” she says of her work as a promoter of the sport. “We have become a culture that no longer builds anything. We buy large houses and then we buy pre-made stuff to fill them.” Through her work at Pygmy and her own life choices, Prendergast is bucking the trend. She and her husband are building their own 430-square-foot house in
Port Townsend. Although it’s not as close to the water as the tiny cabin she had been renting on the coast, from where she regularly kayaked the six miles to work—“It was difficult in the winter when it was dark, but I could paddle one way and take the bus home”—she’s still able to make a fossil fuel-free commute. “It’s a lovely walk,” she says, “but I do miss the porpoises.” —Virginia Marshall
www.adventurekayakmag.com | 47
PHOTO: JAIME SHARP
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