John Dowd - Sea Kayaking: The Classic Manual for Touring, from Day Trips to Major Expeditions

British Columbia is ideal kayaking country. Tofino Expeditions

I had been expecting some dropoff in interest in serious sea kayaking. An increasing focus on standards and certifications had already begun to change the nature of the sport from an escapist activity for adventurers to a regulated activity for recreational groups and clubs, but something else was surely going on. I checked with my friends in the industry. People are still buying kayaks, but they seem to be more interested in day trips. According to Marlin Bayes at Western Canoeing & Kayaking, sales of long kayaks made of composite materials and suited for distance touring are down almost 50 per cent, as are sales of canoes. Some suggest this is the result of our societys addiction to being constantly plugged in to the Internet. If turning off technology from time to time is no longer an option, it is a worrisome trend since any disconnection between modern civilization and the wilderness is surely a loss to both. And if it is the case, it may also explain the current craze for stand-up paddleboardsI mean, how far from Wi-Fi can you go on a stand-up board?

Another casualty of the digital tsunami has been Sea Kayaker, the magazine that Bea and I founded with Michael Collins in 1984. We started it with touring kayakers in mind, but later embraced the British style of kayaking with its reverence for certification and adopting a range of skills and attitudes from whitewater paddling, flat-water racing and surfing that narrowed its appeal to our original audience. In those latter years, each time I saw a cover shot of a paddler hanging upside down in a kayak with bubbles streaming from his nostrils, or executing a dashing (but useless) whitewater stroke, I groaned. That image had probably just turned off a family of new paddlers. By the time the magazine folded, only 18 per cent of its readers considered themselves novice paddlers, and this book no longer sold through Sea Kayakers pages, though it continues to be a top seller on Amazon.

The bureaucratization of sea kayaking that concerned me even as I moved to Vargas is proceeding apace. Paddle Canada (PC!), the British Canoe Union (BCU), the American Canoe Association (ACA) as well as various professional guiding organizations continue to set up overlapping networks of certification levels for instructors and paddlers alike, structures that appeal to a very different (and much smaller) segment of the population than what dominated the activity during the eighties and nineties. Now a newcomer to a kayaking club is likely to be greeted with the question, What level [of certification] are you? I address this subject at length in .