At 10:03 PM 5/3/02 -0700, Sid Taylor wrote: > >How many people actually tour kayak as opposed to day trip? Are they >competent, equiped paddlers or inexperienced and ill-equiped? > >Are some of these 24.8 million arm chair paddlers, kind of like the Round >Table Pizza Guy? > >I'm thinking alot of these boats go nowhere, like those well-polished 4 >wheelers nose-to-nose in rush hour. I suppose in the broadest sense of the word, 24 million isn't far off -- but much depends on how you define paddlers. I live in a largely rural county with a couple medium sized cities. Population about 100,000. I know of one other guy in the county besides myself that owns a fiberglass kayak (actually two, since his wife goes out with him occasionally.) I might have missed someone, but I'm not missing many. My regular paddling lake is a no-wake place, and is frequented by paddlers, so I figure sooner or later most everybody in the county that paddles a kayak is going to show up there, and I'll hear about them or meet them. It doesn't happen often. I can think of at the most half a dozen people with rec. boats from this county that have showed up there the last several years, although some of them several times. I occasionally paddle on a lake with about 700 summer homes, cottages, and the like. Usually I see no other kayaks, period. Once in a while, a rec. boat. Three times in four years, other sea kayaks, one plastic, one wood, one fiberglass. (Untold g.d. jetskis, etc.) Canoes, I see frequently -- but usually Grummans or other old boom-alums, some of which have been sitting around cottages for years. Presumably their owners can be considered paddlers, but I'll bet most of these boats don't get moved from one year to the next. Plastic canoes, rarely, and then usually Colemans. High-end canoes, by which I mean like Wenonah or Mad River, virtually never. I can't back it up with actual figures, but my gut feeling is that higher-end kayakers and canoeists are a pretty rare breed, at least in this neck of the woods. 24.8 million is about 8% of the US population -- and the figure seems high now that I think aobut it, unless you call anyone who has ever set foot in a canoe or kayak a paddler. Which is wishful thinking. I'd guess maybe a tenth of that many people actually get in a canoe or kayak once or twice a year. I suspect less than a tenth of that figure participate in paddlesports as an active recreational activity. In other words, about 250,000. And that figure feels about right, I think. -- Wes --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Wes Boyd's Kayak Place http://www2.dmci.net/wesboyd/kayak.htm Kayaks for Big Guys (And Gals) | Trip Reports | Places To Go | Boats & Gear --------------------------------------------------------------------------- *************************************************************************** PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List - Any opinions or suggestions expressed here are solely those of the writer(s). You must assume the entire responsibility for reliance upon them. All postings copyright the author. Submissions: PaddleWise_at_PaddleWise.net Subscriptions: PaddleWise-request_at_PaddleWise.net Website: http://www.paddlewise.net/ ***************************************************************************Received on Mon May 06 2002 - 08:26:18 PDT
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