WAT E R L I NE S


MORE, BUT WE PADDLE LESS. PHOTO: VIRGINIA MARSHALL


JOHN DOWD: WE MAY KNOW


WE DON’T NEED NO EDUCATION


THE CRAZY, RECKLESS, COMMON SENSE SOLUTION TO OUR CHRONIC EXPERT-ITIS “It wasn’t a sudden shift,” he writes. “More and more we’d been seeing


Nineteen eighty-one was the dim pre-dawn of sea kayaking’s boom times. Just around the corner were the first coastal symposia, cheap plastic touring kayaks and sea kayaking magazines. Baby boomers settled into careers that paid for kayaks but clung to the hippie sensibilities that motivated them to keep taking their vacations in the wilderness. A couple decades of double-digit growth transformed kayaks on the roof rack from head-turners to ho-hum. The year 1981 also marked the release of one of the original sea


kayaking instructional books, John Dowd’s Sea Kayaking: The Classic Manual for Touring, from Day Trips to Major Expeditions. Thirty-four years and 60,000 copies later, in the introduction to the book’s sixth addition, Dowd laments the trends that have accompanied the sport’s recent reversal of fortune. Dowd had a unique perspective on kayaking during the early 2000s. For


a decade he and his wife Bea lived off the grid in a cedar-shake cabin on a surf-swept beach in Clayoquot Sound, a popular kayaking destination. At first the Dowds routinely saw 30 or 40 kayakers at a time camping on “their” beach—my wife and I were once among them. Ten years later, the only visitors on a long weekend were some campers dropped off by water taxi.


This article first appeared in the 2015 Summer/Fall issue of Adventure Kayak. 26 PADDLING MAGAZINE


26 PADDLING MAGAZINE


groups of wannabe guides, kayak instructors-in-training and occasional school parties replace the private groups.... An increasing focus on standards and certifications had already begun to change the nature of the sport from an escapist activity for adventurers to a regulated activity for recreational groups and clubs, but something else was surely going on.” Indeed, a lot has changed. Dowd’s Clayoquot tenure saw the onslaught of


the iPhone and the Great Recession. Times are tougher now and we’re all working two jobs to pay for granite countertops and smartphone data plans for the whole family. Boomers are getting too old to sleep on the ground. And personally, when I landed on Dowd’s beach my wife was pregnant and seasick; today, that baby is six years old and a lot harder to pack—ditto for her little brother. The next time we went to Tofino we skipped the kayaking and booked a hotel near town. Apparently we aren’t the only ones. According to Dowd, people are still


buying kayaks for day trips, but sales of full-length touring kayaks are down by 50 percent. Still, Dowd suggests that along with these social factors, his experiences


demonstrate how the “bureaucratization of sea kayaking” is at least part of what snuffed out its popularity. He posits that the push to professionalization


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