These days sea kayaking in North America is in danger of being dumbed down by the emphasis on selling the largest number of cheap boats to the largest number of people. Some big companies have discovered that the money is in beach-toy “rec boats” rather than the more complex sea kayak. And sea kayaking is the loser.

Sea kayaking has been around in North America for about 100 years, but it was not until enthusiast paddlers got their business acts together in the late ’70s and early ’80s that it emerged from the clubs and became an industry profitable enough to employ people. The result was a dramatic increase in the quality and availability (and price) of kayaks and kayak accessories. There was a flourishing of books and magazines that spread the word and raised the level of the information pool—sea kayaking is after all an information-based activity.

During the ’90s some of the most successful companies were bought out by large corporations that attempted to manufacture and market kayaks like they were plastic garbage cans—cheap and nasty little boats with a minimum of finicky features such as bulkheads, hatches and deck lines. At first the specialty kayak retailers welcomed these rec boats, believing that it would be good to get more “bums in boats” and everything would grow from there.

But that has not happened.

Instead, many customers are being diverted into dead end boats unsuitable for more than mucking about off the beach. They do not learn about the sea or how to self rescue; they don’t do courses or buy the accessories which are a big part of the specialty retailer’s business. Meanwhile, the production and sale of well-made sea kayaks has fallen, and specialty stores are feeling the pressure from discount no-service sporting goods stores and big box stores.

What to do? We can learn something from the experience of paddlers on the other side of that big kayaking pond. The Japanese went about sea kayaking from quite a different direction. They started with the large corporations whose executives identified kayaking as the new trend in North America during the late ’80s. Companies whose real business was steel or carpets raced to buy up all the spare production they could find around the world. Glossy catalogues displayed pages of sea kayaks and department stores carried some of the best boats available.

Pretty soon the bubble burst in Japan and, disillusioned by the lack of profitability and the slow penetration of the activity into the general population, most of the big players got out of sea kayaking as fast as they got into it. During those initial years, however, some very determined paddlers got into the sport. A small number of specialty stores sprang up. When the boom faded away, they were there to pick up the pieces and nurture sea kayaking in much the same way that it grew in North America during the ’80s.

On a recent trip to Japan, I saw many causes for optimism. First, there was not a rec boat to be seen. There was a hunger for knowledge, particularly the details of seamanship. Many of the local paddlers had long international kayak trips to their credit and many were highly skilled. Small specialty stores offer lessons and tours to beginners. Local manufacturers are producing boats suited to the need of the customers. Sea kayaking in Japan has been reclaimed from big business by the kayakers and the future looks bright. In North America, we could take a lesson from the Japanese to get sea kayaking back on course. The best way to do this is to support full-service specialty stores since these are the resource centres for training the next generation of paddlers. Another way is to encourage our friends who show an interest in sea kayaking to pay the extra money to get a seaworthy kayak, then learn the seamanship skills relevant to the trips they dream of.

I’m not suggesting that there is no place for rec boats, only that this is a different activity entirely. Sea kayaking is based upon knowledge and the seaworthiness of both our skills and our equipment.

John Dowd is one of the founders of the sea kayaking industry and the author of the book Sea Kayaking.

This article originally appeared in Adventure Kayak, Fall 2006. Download our free iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch App or Android App or read it here.

Bill Joy, the cofounder of Sun Microsystems and writer of much of today’s UNIX (the operating system behind the Apple laptop I’m typing on), logged 10,000 hours of programming at the University of Michigan Computer Centre.

“Bill Joy was brilliant. He wanted to learn. That was a big part of it. But before he could become an expert, someone had to give him the opportunity to learn how to be an expert,” writes Malcolm Gladwell. Learning how to be an expert takes time. According to Gladwell’s latest best-selling book about success, Outliers, 10,000 hours is pretty much what it takes to be really, really, really good at anything.

Bill Gates logged 10,000 hours’ programming time long before anyone else had a computer. The Mother’s Club in his Seattle private school raised money and purchased a time-sharing computer terminal for his school’s computer club. Big deal, you say? For a nerdy eighth grader in 1968, it was a big deal.

While still in high school the Beatles gigged strip clubs in Hamburg where they played non-stop seven-hour shows, seven days a week.

In total they played 270 shows in a year and a half—more than most bands in their entire rock and roll careers. The youngsters from Liverpool had played 10,000 hours of live shows before they walked onto The Ed Sullivan Show.

There is a certain amount of talent required to be good at something, but at the highest levels the ones at the very top are the ones who worked much, much harder than everyone else. It doesn’t matter if we are talking about computer programmers, pop musicians or even whitewater paddlers.

In the rafting staff cabin next to mine lived a young and athletic paddler named Billy Harris. It was the summer of the Perception Whip-it; we think it was ’93, but neither of us can remember for sure.

Billy spent the next six years chasing swimmers down the Ottawa and guiding and teaching kayaking in Nepal, Taiwan, New Zealand, Costa Rica and Ecuador. He’s trained winters in Australia and travelled the U.S. freestyle circuit. These days Billy spends 300 days a year on the water and is training for the 2009 World Freestyle Championships. Now in his mid-thirties, he still paddles two to four hours a day, five to six days a week, not to mention five days a week at the gym. He is unquestionably one of freestyle paddling’s most elite athletes. He’s talented for sure, but Gladwell’s 10,000 Hour Rule would suggest that his real greatness has come because Billy has worked harder than everyone else.

Ten thousand hours of paddling to a guy with an office job looks like this. At an average of two eight-hour paddling days every weekend for the four summer months—so 32 days, 256 hours per year—it would take 39 years to complete a 10,000-hour paddling log. If you started paddling at 20 years old, like me, you’ll be as good as Billy Harris when you’re 59.

Humbling.

And so, a little over halfway to being really good, I sit at my UNIX-based MacBook typing into Gates’ Microsoft Word listening to The White Album, paying tribute to my friend and the man who taught me to surf, Billy Harris. To you boys I drink from a bottle of The Balvenie single malt scotch that, like you, took the time to become the very best.  

This article originally appeared in Rapid, Summer/Fall, 2009. Download our free iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch App or Android App or read it here.

Why is kayaking so compelling? If I were to offer one reason, perhaps it’s because kayaking thrusts us directly into the forces of the natural world, serving up crux points of life in a primal form.

Merely paddling a boat down a river is exquisitely symbolic of grappling with life decisions. The river is a path that can have many possible outcomes, where the entire range of human experience can rise up in pure form—disaster and success, terror and ecstasy, chaos and calm.

Take the horizonline as one example.

When we come to even a small rapid, the river drops away and we can’t see where it goes. The river’s flow is literally the current of time into the future. At the horizonline we confront a fact about life in simple physical form—the unknown and threatening future just over brink. We can’t see it, but we must make a decision and commit to it.

Not knowing what is there, fear and doubt rise as our imagination spins out possibilities: flipping and swimming, broaching, washing into a hole or sieve, or just a simple thrashing. The horizonline presents us with a simple but universal life question: What lies ahead?

Everything about our next decision is important. Are we careful? Flippant? Aggressive? Experience teaches us skills for handling that critical moment, whether scouting, quickly seeing eddies and nabbing them, sensing the nature of the river from the geology, or heading into the unknown and weathering what’s there.

Throughout kayaking there are plenty more such situations, all of them ready metaphors for fundamental life decisions. A short list of what they teach us includes mindfulness of choice and action, flexibility under stress, dealing with challenge and fear, and flowing with what comes. Every one of these is a life lesson. Rivers teach them as fast as we can learn.

Consider mindfulness. A river moves ahead no matter what we do, jostling us constantly off balance, pushing us toward hazards and out of control. We have to be aware at each moment, because any lapse is instantly taken over by the river’s action. Safety comes from staying mindful.

One lesson always leads to another: as we get more skillful we find that mindfulness creates an acute sense of awareness and flow. While schools of meditation take years to teach this to devotees, the river shows it to everybody who enters. Zen is nothing esoteric. It is a simple experience that appears as the river teaches us how to flow with the water.

We progress from class I, grade after grade, until we realize there is no limit except our own appetite and ability to control the boat. Rivers continue far past anything we can do, so they provide endless stair stepping upward. Confronting each step is a new horizonline of challenge, commitment and resolution.

For all the kick ass fun, clawing romping rapids, and sun-shimmering days on the water, we are learning more than we know. I encourage you to think about the things that linger much deeper after you’ve put your paddle down.

Doug Ammons is the author of The Laugh of the Water Nymph and Whitewater Philosophy. He holds a PhD in psychology and has been confronting horizonlines for over 25 years.

This article originally appeared in Rapid, Spring 2012. Download our free iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch App or Android App or read it here.