Chicken & Egg
Published July 27, 2010 | 
My neighbor… wants what he sees
My neighbor!! My neighbor!!
My neighbor… thinks he wants to be me
But he’ll never be – gnarls barkley
When I recently wrote a quick overview of SeakayakingUK’s Romany, someone (who shall remain nameless to protect the innocent) shared with me the thought that the Romany was at least in part based the Shore Line kayak produced by another UK company called North Shore. North Shore was founded in 1982. According to informants, the Shore Line (Now the Atlantic LV) was in production pre-Romany. Continue reading
Posted in Kayaks, Paddling | 
aled williams, Atlantic LV, Mike Nelson, ndk, North Shore Sea Kayaks, romany, seakayakinguk, Shore Line, Valley Sea KayaksSea Kayaking UK (NDK) Romany. In Review.
Published July 7, 2010 | 
We can never know about the days to come
But we think about them anyway, yay
And I wonder if I’m really with you now
Or just chasin’ after some finer day
– carly simon
I’ve had the old white Romany for some time, but as I said it was not “my” boat so I rarely paddled it. In fact until recently the only time I paddled the Romany was when the local river was in flood. At those times I’d take the boat out to play in the currents and surf since I was not worried about banging it up. Now that I’ve repaired the hull and have it seaworthy again, I’ve been paddling it quite a bit which offers a great opportunity to share some fresh thoughts about the Romany in general. Continue reading
Posted in Kayaks, Paddling, Reviews | aled williams, ndk, Nigel Dennis, Reviews, rockpool, romany, seakayakinguk, TideraceLendal: Song For The Dumped
Published October 28, 2009 | 
I wish I hadn’t bought you dinner
right before you
dumped me on your front porch
– Ben Folds
Have you heard all the stories? The mill says Johnson Outdoors is looking to unload LENDAL. Didn’t they just buy them? The mill also suggests the most likely buyer could be Nigel Dennis of SeaKayakingUK or possibly EPIC. Hmmm. Now the thing is, LENDAL used to be a premiere brand. Holding a LENDAL in your hand was something akin to holding Excalibur. Then Johnson took over. Our friendly reps went away and QC went into the dumper as well. Yeah, they got it under control eventually but by then everything the brand had stood for in the eyes of sea kayakers never really came back. Now I can’t help wonder if LENDAL is about to be saved or on its way to getting tossed around like a _________ , ___________. (Creatively fill in the blanks.)
glitterati
Published June 20, 2009 | 
How’d you like a nice glittery pink kayak? This one is from SeaKayakingUK. I was amazed at the number of glittery kayaks here at the ISS symposium. These days you can find glitter pretty commonly on SeaKayakingUK & P&H kayaks. It was only a couple years ago when glitter was one of the things that made Rockpool Kayaks unique. At least Rockpool still has the mighty stars! Continue reading
Old man take a look at my life / I’m a lot like you
I need someone to love me / the whole day through
Ah, one look in my eyes / and you can tell that’s true.
– Neil Young
I was sitting here working on an article about a couple new kayak models on their way to market and in the midst of a sentence, a bit of rational, clarity came to mind. Old is fine too. Just as we would expect in our consumer driven society, companies become hard pressed to find something new and exciting to rabbit on about in order to sell their products. Regular business cycles and short attention spans make it challenging to keep churning out “awesome, game changing, amazing, paradigm shifting” wonders. Most of it is BS of course. There’s nothing wrong with selling products.. but let’s be honest here, new is rarely all that much different from old other than there is a bit more shine. A shine that will go away in 6 months when today’s “new” becomes tomorrow’s “old”.
Continue reading →