Re: [Paddlewise] Costco selling kayaks

>Has anyone seen the kayaks that are being carried by Costco?
> I am worried that this might lead to problems
>with total novices buying an advanced kayak with no instruction or
>practical information. When we buy kayaks from kayak stores, the
>salespeople always give out information on required sagety gear and stress
>the importance of instruction. There is a lot of basic knowledge that we
>take for granted that the average Costco buyer would never know, nor be
>able to learn from the salepeople at Costco. Am I wrong to think that
>Costco could be directly biasing the kayaking fatality statistics in the
>wrong direction?
        It's not just Costco.  BJ's is another such club in the NJ area and
they're selling a small sit-on-top called a "Jazz" which comes with one of
those sevylor plastic paddles.  They do sell pfds also, but they're way over
in another part of the store.   You can probably find all kinds of stores
selling such boats.  Fishing tackle stores sell canoes, nowadays some keowee
type kayaks; so does Sear, Sports Authority, and so on.  I don't think that
any of these will have given any safety info.  --And they've been doing it
for years.
        So no, I don't think that this will skew the fatality rates to any
degree.
        It is true, though, that there are many paddling fatalities caused
by lack of knowledge.  How many times have you read of a sea kayaker
drowning?   The news article always reports the stunned survivors saying
they couldn't understand it, he was an expert paddler, been doing it for ten
years.  Or,  he was an expert swimmer, we can't understand what went wrong.
And yet, it's also true that these same people are unknown to paddling clubs
or organized paddlers.  They did something that we all know better about.
        Here in NJ we had a spate of drownings due to such things as running
low head dams;  not wearing a pfd;  not knowing what to do with a strainer;
inadequate cold weather protection. .. and so on.   It was just invincible
ignorance.  About the only thing I can think of to offset this is to get the
message across...   but how?




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