Running a kayak touring business in Manhattan is a bit like driving a yellow cab in Boothbay, Maine. You’ll get fares but making a living ain’t easy.
For the past dozen years, Eric Stiller, the founder of Manhattan Kayak Company, has done the nearly impossible—selling kayaking in the city that never sleeps but hardly paddles. stiller calls this unlikely career choice his “destiny.” His father, Dieter, operated the Klepper Kayak Shop in downtown Manhattan for 35 years. Eric wasn’t actually born in a kayak, as he sometimes jokes, but he was virtually raised in one. At the age of three, he paddled alone around an island in a lake in the Poconos.
Thirty years later, he’d try to paddle around a continent. He was working at the Klepper store in 1992 when a fashion model named tony brown walked in and announced that he was looking for a folding kayak to paddle around his native Australia. There are many reasons Australia had been successfully circumnavigated by kayak only once, and the duo experienced them all in the 5,600 harrowing kilometres they completed, including a five-day, nonstop, sleepless crossing of the 640-kilometre Gulf of Carpentaria.
While the muscular, ultra-energetic New Jersey native has trained U.S. Navy seals, paddled with Olympic gold medalist Greg Barton and whitewater legends Eric Jackson and Steve Fisher, served as instructor for John F. Kennedy Jr. and rocker David Lee Roth, and penned Keep Australia On Your Left (named one of the all-time best adventure paddling books by Canoe & Kayak magazine), Stiller’s biggest accomplishment has been to survive on a high-priced island where the paddling season is only half a year and storing a kayak is half-impossible. Ever philosophical, Stiller says passion, planning and mental toughness are essential. Quoting Goethe, he says, “That the moment one definitely commits oneself, Providence moves, too.”
IN OTHER WORDS:
Keep it real
“You have to stick around and you have to be authentic. As soon as the leaves change this city is quick to turn away from paddling and move on to other out- door activities; so you have to persevere and mean it. I’ve tried to be a good ambassador for my sport—no smoke and mirrors and no over-the-top PR. I just try to be as genuine and enthusiastic as possible.”
Know that you know little
“When people ask me what’s my favorite place to go kayaking, I say, ‘in my boat.’ For me, at this stage of the game, the boat, water, paddle, air—it’s all a circuit that I plug in to. To be the master of what you do is an endless pursuit. Once you achieve early mastery you start to understand the commitment required to take it further. The more I know about this amazing sport, the more I need to know.”
Live where you paddle, paddle where you live
“It’s important that the place that you intend to hang your hat is a place that resonates in your soul. In other words, the body of water you guide has to keep you engaged, mentally, spiritually, physically. If you have to leave it to get your paddling kicks you’re probably in the wrong place.”
This article first appeared in the Spring 2007 issue of Adventure Kayak Magazine. For more great content, subscribe to Adventure Kayak’s print and digital editions here.
