At 60 years of age, I am as old as Ralph!! I have been paddling about a dozen years. First kayak, which I still have, was a double Klepper. My wife and I have paddled it a lot mainly in waters within 150 miles or so of the Big Apple but also in Maine and places south of us including the Bahamas. I also have a Nautiraid Raid 1 and a Feathercraft K-Light. When I first started, I did a lot of paddling in single hardshells, which I borrowed or rented from a local club. I guess that sounds sacrilegious given my current reputation as a folding kayak guru. But I did so on the mistaken belief that only hardshells were worthy singles and that folding ones were just too slow and cumbersome. Or at least that was what I was told. I spent a lot of time with one eye looking to choose which hardshell single I wanted, road testing various ones at symposia and local shops. But I also had another eye out for where to put the darn thing in New York City. There was simply no storage space available at the time in Manhattan. One day, I happened to be leading a 12 mile trip on the Hudson in which winds and seas picked up viciously against us. A woman in a single Klepper seemed to be slowing whatever progress we were making. So I decided to switch boats to put her in the hardshell I was paddling so she wouldn’t be so encumbered and, being the good leader that I am, suffering in the Klepper single. I discovered two things: 1) The Klepper single wasn’t slow at all! I was able to easily catch up to the fastest paddlers to ask them to slow down for the group and double back to encourage the slower paddlers to keep fighting the adverse wind. I probably paddled twice as far as the others in my scurrying up and down the line of kayakers. The Klepper did just fine. 2) The woman was just a slow paddler. Even with the boat switch, she still was in back of the pack. At the point it hit me. Why bother worrying about where to store a boat in Manhattan? Why bother learning how to roll (which I was working on)? Why bother with all of that when a folding single would do just fine. So, within a few months I bought a single Klepper. I also got to thinking about folding kayaks. I knew firsthand that they were a lot better than people gave them credit for. But little had been written about them; that little might as well have been nothing at all because existing books and publications tended to say that folding kayaks were either no good or a poor second choice to a “real” kayak. I decided to do something about that. Since I have a background in writing and running newsletters (international business ones for over 20 years) doing a newsletter was a natural. Folding Kayaker started in 1991. When I announced my plans to some paddling friends, they wondered what in the world could you say about folding kayaks that would continue to fill a newsletter. But I knew from my newsletter experiences that story ideas always come, that every article leads to three others. Plus, there is nothing like having to regularly fill the pages of a publication to make you become savvy on a subject. It was quite a lonely world in the beginning and an uphill battle to raise the profile of folding kayaks to a level I thought they deserved. But little by little, things began to happen. Getting a chance to write a book for a major publisher helped. I had met the author of one popular sea kayaking book, asked him why he wrote negative things about folding kayaks and found out that he had never even been in one and was just repeating “what people say about them.”!! I got pissed off, approached the publisher with the idea for a folding kayak book and wrote it. Paul Theroux in his foreword to the book says that I am “a solitary and resourceful evangelist.” Maybe I am. But I think I am more just a guy who couldn’t find a place to store a boat and got a little carried away! :-) ralph diaz -- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Ralph Diaz . . . Folding Kayaker newsletter PO Box 0754, New York, NY 10024 Tel: 212-724-5069; E-mail: rdiaz_at_ix.netcom.com "Where's your sea kayak?"----"It's in the bag." ----------------------------------------------------------------------- *************************************************************************** PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List Submissions: paddlewise_at_lists.intelenet.net Subscriptions: paddlewise-request_at_lists.intelenet.net Website: http://www.gasp-seakayak.net/paddlewise/ ***************************************************************************
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