Today Colin reflects on how sea kayaking was a formative activity in his outdoor adventure career and ponders what has happened to the paddling category since it's heyday in the 1990's.
Has it's popularity decreased?
Then Joe Potoczak, Digital Editor of Paddling Magazine, joins Colin and provides updates on paddling's growth, the effect of the Stand Up Paddle board boom and how user generated content has impacted the paddling media scene.
For all of Paddling Magazine's content (and to subscribe) click here!
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Episode Transcript
Colin (00:00):
Welcome to the Rock Fight where we speak out truth, slay sacred cows, and sometimes agree to disagree. This is an outdoor podcast that aims for the head. I'm Colin Tru, and today we're heading to the ocean, the river, the lake. We're checking in on paddling. Paddling used to be one of the outdoor sports, the adventure community talked about the most. So what's happening on the water? Well, we're about to find out. But before we get to that, look, you love rock fighting. We love rock fighting. Let's all get on the same rock fighting team, head to rock fight.co. Enjoy all the content we put up on our website. It's really good. Folks, check it out and sign up for our mailing list. Give this podcast five stars on whatever app you're listening to it on. And man, we would love it if you left us a written review. Thanks for supporting your rock fighting home team. And all right, let's start the show.
(00:52)I want to start today by taking a second and thinking back to the activities that drew me outside. I was in my twenties before I really committed to a life of adventure. I had landed in New Hampshire because, well, I just wanted to live in New Hampshire. Pretty early on I discovered the lore of the White Mountains, and for someone who grew up surrounded by Pennsylvania farmland, it was mind blowing. So hiking, of course, was instrumental in showing me that this was more than just a hobby, but a full on lifestyle that I had discovered. And that led to lots of firsts in the granite state. It's the place where I tried rock climbing, snowboarding, ice climbing, all for the first time. But living near the coast, sea kayaking is what really pulled me. In the 1990s was when things really started blowing up for outdoor adventure, and one of the cornerstones of the scene was boating.
(01:40)If you go dig around on YouTube, you'll find all sorts of videos from that time tutorials, MTV, sports clips, whitewater kayaking, sea kayaking, all the same stuff you'll find if you go looking for rock climbing or mountain bike videos from the same era. And in 1999, I had started working at Eastern Mountain Sports' Location in PBD Mass. The veteran staff in that shop were all paddlers with some serving double duty between EMS and guiding for Essex River Basin Adventures or Herba, a local kayaking guide service. And on one late summer evening, in early September of that same year, my wife and I took a tour with Herba, and for the first time, we got in the sea kayaks and cut our paddling chops with a spin around the tidal basin of the Essex River. Immediately falling in love with the activity we saw wildlife, we learned the pleasure of gliding through the water, and near the end I learned a valuable lesson as an errant paddle stroke led me to capsizing.
(02:32)The outdoors always has a way of teaching us. Also, it turns out that Herba closed their doors in 2021. And anyone listening to this who spent any time in the New England paddling scene in the past 30 years definitely has an herba story or acquaintance. I'm definitely glad that Herba played a small role in my personal adventure history. And after that first paddle, we got our own boats. And until we moved to the landlocked Intermountain West kayaking was a featured item on our menu of outdoor fun. When we eventually found our way to the Pacific Northwest, we again sought out sea kayaks for paddling on Puget Sound. But then we got caught up in the boom of standup paddleboarding, eventually passing our unused sea kayaks over to some friends. So what am I getting at here? Well, given the heritage of paddle sports and the outdoor adventure scene, I don't hear about kayaking anymore at all.
(03:17)Now, that may be because I live in surf obsessed California, I'm not working at a northeast coastal alto retailer, or I'm simply not surrounded by paddlers anymore. But it does seem that where most outdoor retailers used to carry a large share of boats, my experience anecdotally is that things have changed. Was it due to the boom of standup? Have these sports become less cool? Maybe we just hit a plateau and it all kind of stayed where it was and I just don't see it anymore. Like I used to find some answers on the state of one of the pillars that I built my personal adventure identity on. I connected with Joe Patek, who was the digital editor of Paddling Magazine and a long time paddler himself. Joe and I talked about the state of paddling current paddling trends and how paddling media has changed in the face of user generated content and why it is that I don't see as much about the category as I used to. Welcome back to the rock fight, where today we're talking all things paddling with Joe Patto check a paddling magazine. Alright, what we're hear today with Joe Potto check I say it right?
Joe (04:13):
Yeah, absolutely. Got it.
Colin (04:14):
Poto check. All right. Although I didn't, didn't hit the second o, I said, okay, we're here today with Joe Poto. Check. That's better. Joe is the digital editor at Paddling Magazine and he's here today to help me kind of get reacquainted with a category that used to be a big part of my life. But before we get to that, Joe, welcome to the show, man. Thanks for coming on. Yeah,
Joe (04:31):
Thank you for having me. Colin,
Colin (04:33):
What's going on up in Oregon right now? What's the state of the paddling? What's the paddling weather looking like in Oregon? Are we still in dry suits? What would you go out with right now to go paddling in Oregon on April 9th, 2024?
Joe (04:45):
Oh man, paddling wise, we're always in dry suits here in Oregon. There are rare opportunities to not be in a dry suit, but it's
Colin (04:52):
Worked here. Still warm up, even freshwater stuff. It doesn't, you can't get too
Joe (04:57):
Warm up. Yeah, big rivers like the Columbia and the Willamette, they'll definitely warm up in the summer. You can be out in board shorts and whatnot, but a lot of the rivers, the ocean Pacific up here, it's pretty cold.
Colin (05:08):
Well, anecdotally speaking, and I'm not coming into our conversation with hard numbers either by media coverage or retail sales. This is totally from my purview because when the adventure sports boom sort of started in the 1990s, I feel like paddling was a really important part of that. And some of that may have been where I was living in New England. I don't think it was though. I feel like this was part of the scene. I feel like the Mount Rushmore sports coming out of the era was probably climbing, snowboarding, mountain biking and kayaking and sea kayaking was a huge part of my entry into adventure sports, and it just doesn't seem like I hear about it as much anymore. We were talking about it before we hit record. I'm not sure if that's big outdoor media like leaving it behind for whatever reason, if that's the standup paddle board boom, that just sort of decimated the playing field. But I really was reflecting back on it and it was reflecting on the fact that we don't talk about paddling much on the show, which is a crime because it's such an awesome category. So that's why you're here. So how would you, today, as someone working at a paddling media company, how would you position the paddling category within the sort of larger world of outdoor adventure sports? Do I sound like a crazy person? Do you see some sort of truth in what I'm saying?
Joe (06:17):
Yeah, definitely to a certain degree. I mean, I think in the nineties and early two thousands there was a big push for a lot of these adventure sports. You think about Subaru throwing logos on cars and kayaks on the roof and
Colin (06:29):
The launch, the exter.
Joe (06:30):
Yeah, for sure. And the media paddling has never had as strong of a foothold in the media as some of the other skiing, surfing, stuff like that. But there are somewhere between 30 and 40 million people in the US going paddling. So tons of people out there going paddling. It's right behind the big ones like camping, hiking, running. It's behind those, it's not as big, but there are actually a ton of people interacting with paddle sports. I think a big thing we have to reframe or look at is how we define what paddling is and what it isn't. I think what it isn't as a great place to start, especially in whitewater kayaking. I came from a whitewater kayaking background and we always wanted to be the cool surfer lifestyle thing, and I'm sorry, but it is just not, we wear tons of these clothes. We were talking about dry suits before.
(07:24)We look super awkward while we're learning it, and I wear out in these middle nowhere environments, so it just doesn't have that lifestyle appeal and whitewater, we try to make it look sexy like surfing. I think the only people who have ever made it look sexy are Burt Reynolds and Meryl Streep. But other than that, yeah, whitewater is a very niche category, but with that said, there are a ton of people going kayaking and recreational kayaks in canoes, so people are going kayaking. We just need to be open to the fact of who is going kayaking and how they're interacting with the sport.
Colin (08:04):
You got to caught my attention with the whitewater comment because my co-host on a lot of episodes has mentioned that in the past that he kind of felt like there was a dorky element to whitewater. I've never seen whitewater kayaking as anything other than incredibly badass, partly due to the kit. I think you see a paddler with the dry suit on, with the dry top on, with the PFD on with the helmet on. I'm like, that looks sick. That person's going out to do something really cool today. So what is the self-perception about it's kind of a dorky thing or is that just you being humble and self-deprecating, or is that kind of a common commonly held view?
Joe (08:41):
I think running rivers, running hard rapids is an incredible thing to watch. I think the dorky factor comes in when we kind of have to explain the joke when we're doing these little maneuvers and stuff like that, and we have to tell people feel like what we are up to or what's going on. And then it's like, okay, so when you watch a sport surfing or skiing and somebody goes off of a ramp skiing or hucks a cliff, you don't have to explain that. So the river running aspect of kayaking, being in that kit, being out in that cold water, the energy of paddling a river, that stuff you don't have to explained that is extremely cool, but it's also not very accessible. I was watching Patty O'Connell's outside episode on learning how to whitewater kayak, and you see even just to get down a class two, three rapid, how difficult it is, you got to learn how to roll. You're in this contraption that's basically trying to drown you when you flip over. So it's a difficult thing for a lot of people to access, but people want to be on the water so they find a way to do that.
Colin (09:42):
Yeah, I guess you're right too. And as you're talking, I'm kind of picturing kind of the typical silhouette of all what's cleaner than a surfer in a wetsuit, and then even if you take it to a skier, just the kit that you're wearing kind of smooths everything out. Usually the kit looks good on a skier. I mean, there is a lot of interesting angles maybe to the way a white water kayaker is dressed and if you don't know and you kind took a look at it, I could see how that kind of perception would maybe get passed around a little bit.
Joe (10:12):
I'll never forget walking into a pizza shop in my paddling gear and people looking at me. I just jumped out of an airplane and landed there because you've got your helmet on and your skirt flapping around your waist, and people always ask what that thing is.
Colin (10:26):
Is there a military base around here? What's going on?
Joe (10:28):
Yeah, exactly.
Colin (10:30):
But back to what you said though about the kind of participation numbers, did the sit on top kayak kill, maybe the sea kayaking boot? Because I just immediately think of paddling, I think 17 foot sea kayak, but then obviously, which is not a bad thing by the way, to have sit on top kayaks way more easier, entryways into a sport is a good thing. But did that kind of proliferation of the more recreation level kayak kind of almost displace some of what was happening in paddling or at least overshadow
Joe (11:01):
The sit on top was huge? That's a great thing to mention. The category we're talking about, it's the term recreational kayak, and that includes both sit on tops and even sit inside kayaks as the ones that we see in sporting goods stores like Dick's Sporting goods chain stores, we call those recreational kayaks. I would say they had a huge impact, but probably not in the negative way that you would think. Going back to talking about whitewater and sea kayaking, those are two niche categories that have kind of a hard learning curve and not a lot of people want to go through the effort of, when we talk about recreational kayaking sit on top kayaks, when we talk about standup paddle boards, people just want to get out on the water. So they'll pull out of the car, go out for a few miles, come back to the car.
(11:48)It's less intensive to get into. So what if you paddled around in circles on the lake while you're figuring it out, or you just float down a slow moving river, like the closest river to your town? So I actually think that the reason, so if we look at those 30, 40 million people going paddling, those are mostly people in canoes and recreational kayaks, whitewater kayaks and sea kayaks. They're all the way down here. So for whatever reason, I think we have an odd way in the paddling industry of looking at who is a paddler. If I describe myself a whitewater kayaker or a sea kayaker like yourself, you had mentioned, you kind of say, man, why is nobody going paddling anymore? But what you're really saying is why doesn't anybody do what I do anymore? And people are figuring out ways to recreate, and they don't always want it to be a whole ordeal. It would be like, I'm trying to think of an example in another sport, if you were skateboarding and you were a freestyle skateboarder hitting halfpipes and whatnot, if you see that everybody's out on longboards, cruising around on town and whatnot, you wouldn't say, why is nobody skateboarding anymore? Why is nobody at a skate park? Or why is Alpine tourist saying why is nobody going skiing anymore when the resorts are full? So it's just reframing the idea of what paddling is. And I mean, tons of people are running battling,
Colin (13:08):
You're just opening my eyes because I'm the one who's kind of lobbying for so long to be like, look, the hardcore outdoors doesn't exist as much anymore, and the younger generation views anything as outside as outdoor. And I think I probably stopped, I mean, it's been a while since I've owned a sea kayak. It is been a while since I was kind of an important part of what I've done, and I must be a little stunted in that part of my brain of that's what kayaking is versus, and not really accepting probably how the entire category has evolved. Every other outdoor category has evolved. Right. It's a really good point. And so the health of the sport overall, you feel better than ever and obviously a lot of participation numbers right behind camping still, you feel like the paddling category as a category is doing pretty well. Oh
Joe (13:52):
Yeah, it's doing great. Continues to evolve, and that's a gateway. It's a gateway sport. You're never going to pick up everybody to get into a whitewater kai or a sea kike, but you're still picking up people getting into it. The idea is to open the opportunity. Pelican, pelican, kayaks, the outdoor that you see in all the shops, those recreational kayaks we talked about, they are now one of the largest manufacturers of kayaks in the world and they're grabbing other companies. They picked up a bunch of legacy brands like Dagger, like Wilderness Systems, perception, those are all owned by Pelican now. So you can see that they see a value and we make all these recreational kayaks and we see a value in having the next step for people, the people who do want to get into a dagger kayak or who do want to get into a wilderness systems. So I think that big brands that recognize that you create the gateway category that the most people can do, and then that opens opportunities for people to get into the next thing if they want to.
Colin (14:48):
Well, and observationally, it does seem like, and again correct if I'm wrong, but it seems like standup paddling kind of took over the category at least in the middle, like 20 teens for a while there. I mean, just again, anecdotally when I was kind of at the peak of outdoor retailer and there's a freaking just giant pavilion that seemed like it was entirely standup paddleboards, I had that time moved to a little town on Puget Sound, and I definitely had a fleet of paddleboards in the garage. That was kind of the thing to do, and for good reason, I mean, it's just frankly, a lot of times just more convenient just to be able to roll up with your paddleboard and toss it in and kind of go paddle around a little bit versus maybe hauling out the sea kayak. But kind of reflecting back on it, and I'm not sure where things sit today, but do you feel like the standup paddleboard revolution ultimately good for paddling?
Joe (15:33):
Yes, definitely. Alright, moving on. I've been paddling for a quarter of a century. You know what I mean? I want to do now is something so simplistic and entertaining as going standup paddling. It's a great activity to take part in, and you pull the board off of the roof, you put it on the water, you hop on it and you go, and there's nothing cooler than cruising around a base standing up five, six feet and looking down and clear water and seeing what's going on under you or just floating down a river or on a lake on your board. I mean, I've gone days and just taken a nap out on a board in the middle of a lake, stand up paddling. It's like taking a hard left turn and paddling when you think that you've done everything or found a certain way to enjoy the sport and it, it's still actually a small segment of paddling really. I think what's huge is the marketing factor and the growth factor. Every year it's growing. Standup paddleboarding just goes after year,
Colin (16:34):
And the resort side of it, I can't imagine the tourism side of it. It's just so much easier probably for folks to have that available in Oh, you, you're in little seaside town in Mexico. Yeah, we got paddleboards hop out there for an hour. Great. A lot easier than some of the other stuff.
Joe (16:47):
Oh yeah, definitely. People can just hop on the board and even if they're not getting it, they can just kind of float on the water and enjoy their time.
Colin (16:56):
No, but it's an interesting point coming out of the impact of Santa Paddleboarding, how it affects the community right now, from your lens sitting there working at Pad Paddler magazine, what is the ranking of the disciplines between canoe sea kayak? I mean, obviously recreation is going to be number one, but stand on paddleboard whitewater. Where are people spending their time on the water on personal watercraft like this?
Joe (17:20):
Well, canoes and those recreational kayaks we talked about, those are the two at the top. They're tied around the top amount of people who are getting out on the water paddling and then standup paddling. And another interesting one is kayak fishing. Those are kind of in the middle tier, and then whitewater kayaking and sea kayaking are kind of tied down at the bottom. They're the lowest number of users, and you're actually seeing currently some decline in the core participation group of those groups, whereas up at canoeing, the four other categories I mentioned, those continue to grow.
Colin (17:57):
Is that affecting brands? I mean in terms of are you seeing fewer boats being made for sea kayaks and whitewater kayaks and things like that? Or is that really getting to that point yet?
Joe (18:05):
If a Whitewater brand or a Sea Kayak brand, if that's their thing, they're still making those kinds of boats. I think what we're seeing more so, or we've continued to see our crossover type boats that are good on all kinds of moving rivers and aren't necessarily whitewater focused or companies even that were, let's say legacy sea kayak brands, they might be coming out some more rec boats, right? Because you want to get people in. If people are going to go on a rec boat, you want to figure out a way to get 'em in a well-built rec boat, capture that audience.
Colin (18:36):
So pivoting to what you do. So other adventure sports, I feel like Paddling had a pretty described it as a deep bench when it comes to you I media coverage that I recall from, again, going to outdoor retailer and shows and you'd see all the different magazines from the different categories of all the sports and paddling definitely had its fair share represented there. I have to imagine that's changed. Everything else has between what Outside's doing with their thing and just this sort of the decline of print and now print sort of coming back and it's in a different form. What has your experience been at Paddling Magazine when it comes to the media coverage of the category?
Joe (19:12):
So I've been at Paddling Magazine for two years now. This is my second year with Paddling Magazine as a staff editor. And we're pushing into a growth of making sure that we're connecting with the paddling community. We want to make sure that we are representing the authentic paddling audience. There are not a lot of print magazines for Paddle Sports left. We have our magazine, paddling magazine, and we also, there's another one, a Kayak session or the two that are, it's a whitewater focused magazine, and those are kind of the two big ones in North America. Canoe and Kayak used to be a great magazine. I wrote for them for a long time. I started writing for them back in 2014, had some great editors there who I still get to work with to this day. And they were bought by the company that now owns Men's Journal, so they're under that umbrella of lifestyle brands.
(20:10)I think Powder might be another one that they own, and maybe Surfer was another one. So that that's where Canoe and Kayak went. But there are other great media entities out there. For instance, Northwest River Supply NRS, if you're River Runner about NRS, they have kind of taken on this role that you see like Patagonia or REI fill with their film documentary type work and their writing works. So it's a pretty core group of media groups in the paddling realm, but I think the sport is well represented for the media footprint that we have. It would be awesome to see a larger media footprint in paddling, and I think it's the potential is there.
Colin (20:53):
I think the big wild card, Steve Reginald was on from Gear Junkie a couple weeks ago and he was talking about the rise of user generated content. And really when, it's funny you mentioned that, and sometimes things are right in front of you, you don't connect the dots, and it kind of occurred to me, that's a really good point. If I'm going to go do something now, I don't Google it or go to maybe an existing media company, I go to YouTube, let's go, oh, I'm going to go ride this trail. Or where's the Putin for? I'm going to go for a boat trip or a surf trip or whatever. Somebody probably made a video about this. Or you kind go looking for things on your own. Do you see that as sort of a positive, a negative? Is that ultimately going to be a good thing or is that really kind of leading to the demise of some of the titles that you were just talking about?
Joe (21:40):
Oh, I think it's one of those two sides of the coin deal. POV, like GoPros became a huge part of the user generate content landscape for paddling. YouTube videos are all over the place about kayaking, running Rivers, stuff like that. I would say that in a lot of ways, if there's a negative aspect to this, it's that POV killed the kayak film. The idea of that skateboard style cut movie. I remember when I was 19 or so, we would lug in these cameras to film set up our shots and whatnot, and that's not a thing anymore. Somebody slaps a GoPro on their head and they put a half an hour of uncut footage up on YouTube. And so there's that aspect to it. The other aspect that kind of ties into that is it makes it difficult as an editor to encourage voices to come and write for you.
(22:33)If somebody can put out their own work, have a YouTube channel, have a newsletter, a website, Instagram you want as an editor to get these great voices to contribute to a legacy media company like ours. And we have fantastic columnists, but we're always looking for new voices to add to the mix. But the flip side, the good side to the user generated content, number one, going back to that YouTube element and the uncut footage, I actually dive into that stuff as a reporter when you're trying to figure out what is going on, what happened out there, what a great resource it is to have this user generated content as same thing when I'm watching boat reviews and stuff like that. It's like, okay, I've got this kayak review or I've got this place to go check out. How do I get my base reporting and figure out where to start?
(23:24)Well, I look for what's out there. So when you have somebody making a YouTube video about a boat, it kind of gives you a great baseline on where to start, what's already been covered or, Ooh, that's a good question. Let me dive into that some more. But the reporting element is huge. The other aspect I would say is when we're in our little media bubbles, I see the world from my perspective, the perspective that I've built over a couple of decades. But when you watch user generated content and you're paying attention and read in between the lines, you can really hit into some subcategories and just questions, types of things that you wouldn't even thought of the way people are interacting with things. So I think that's a really interesting element. When you watch reels on TikTok or Instagram or on YouTube or reading somebody's newsletter, you just get keyed into these different elements that you wouldn't have, you wouldn't have otherwise. So that part of it's great.
Colin (24:23):
The last thing I want to talk about is definitely on the gear front. Like I mentioned at the beginning, I've always bet an affinity for the way the look of the whitewater kayaking, and I feel like I think paddling this has some of the best stuff when it comes to gear. One of my all time favorite gear purchases was my used Necky. Look Cha four, I don't even know if Nike exists anymore. Is Nikey exists? Nike still kicking?
Joe (24:41):
Oh man, I don't think so. I know the looks, I believe is Old Town has it. I believe the design still exists. It, yeah,
Colin (24:50):
That was a great boat. I got it used in 2001. I loved that boat. I was up in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and it was out sea kayaking every weekend. Loved that boat. But so looking around though, at the current landscape of paddling gear, I mean, there's tons of stuff, right? Between the standup paddleboards, you're talking about Pack Craft, kind of having their moment, and then obviously kayaks, canoes. What stands out to you today when it comes to, and not just on boats, but accessories, things like that. What does your passion lie with the gear in paddling these days?
Joe (25:20):
Man, the biggest thing from an observational point of view is are these boats that are being designed for ability? You mentioned pack graphs, that's a huge one. And once again, you can go paddle a white Water River, class three. Class four. Now they're even making pack graphs that can run waterfalls and it all rolls up into something like basically the size of Nalgene or a camp mat, right? And then you have
Colin (25:43):
That small
Joe (25:44):
A pack RAF from Alpaca or whatnot.
Colin (25:46):
Yeah, but that small,
Joe (25:49):
Like an Nalgene, maybe not an Nalgene, that might be an exaggeration, but we'll grab what I, but still
Colin (25:54):
That's okay. I get your point
Joe (25:55):
Point. But the point being that it is something that size frame of mine, a small right, a sleeping bag versus say a 17 foot fiberglass boat that you have to figure out where to keep
Colin (26:09):
Easy, super delicate with unless it's in the water. Yeah,
Joe (26:12):
Absolutely. Same thing with ORU kayaks. Have you heard about the origami folding kayaks, right? Yeah. So folding kayaks have been around forever is from a recreational standpoint, as long as people have been selling commercial kayaks, folding kayaks have been around. There was this company Klepper over in Europe that started sending boats to the states and stuff like that. But we look at these ORU origami kayaks that ended up on the cover of National Geographic and the reinvention of the folding kayak, and now we're seeing brands create more and more high performance boats. So that's neat. And while you look at all these different pack ability elements, it fits the modern lifestyle, right? Whether you have a fuel efficient vehicle because you are trying to be environmentally conscious, or you live out of your vehicle like your van and you need a place to roll something up and store it, or you just have an apartment.
(27:03)It goes back to the idea of the water's right there. You live in a city or any town, I mean, the water's there, but what do I do with this thing? I don't want to have this massive boat that I have to figure out where to keep. So I think the technology in the sense of gear, as we keep moving towards this pack ability aspect, we're going to see cooler things come out of that. And it just opens up. It has opened up a whole demographic of people I've seen. We had a story run about folding kayaks with somebody had their ORU kayak on the public trends with them in Queens. So you can take 'em anywhere. You could bring 'em on a bus or a subway or whatnot. The other interesting thing I'm just seeing, I'm just noticing at least coming out of gear right now, is the way composites are being marketed. I had always looked at a carbon boat as this high performance vehicle, this rigid, strong light material, like complete power transfer when you paddle a carbon boat. But now what I'm seeing are canoes and touring kayaks that the focus from a marketing perspective is that they're light and easy to transport. And when you see the sea kayaking demographic is shrinking and it's an older demographic. Most people in sea kayaking are people from a generation or two before me, and thank you.
Colin (28:32):
You're right, though, I can't argue with you.
Joe (28:35):
So it's interesting because I'm hearing them say, here's this sea kayak that's light and easy to carry, so you don't have to stop sea kayaking. You could put it on a cart, you can get it onto the car. It's not an issue. And I just thought like, wow. It's like the idea of looking at a full suspension mountain bike versus a rigid or hardtail mountain bike, right? It's like it's not just because the full suspension is a higher performance vehicle that's going to take you through a rock garden and when down steep drops. It's also because as your knees start to hurt and stuff like that, it absorbs the impact. It makes it easier to keep getting out there. So we're seeing the same movement with composites now is like, Hey, you can keep going if you buy this carbon boat versus that fiberglass boat that weighs almost twice as much.
Colin (29:15):
Right on, man. We can wrap it up there. Anything going on over at Paddling Magazine, you want to print anything coming out in the next couple of months that you want to make sure people know about?
Joe (29:23):
Our latest issue is at the printer right now, so it'll be mailing out soon and people can grab a copy at their retailer's bookshops
Colin (29:33):
Or subscribe.
Joe (29:34):
Yeah, absolutely subscribe paddling mag.com.
Colin (29:38):
I'll link that in the show notes, man. But Joe, thank you so much for coming on. You're now officially the paddling correspondent for the Rock Fight. Really appreciate you having you here.
Joe (29:46):
Awesome. Thanks Colin. It was a blast.
Colin (29:49):
Alright, that's the show for today. But before you leave us, please give us a five star rating wherever you're listening, and then head to rock fight.co and sign up to receive news from the front. The official newsletter of the Rock Fight. The Rock Fight is a production, a rock fight. LLC. I'm Colin. True. Thanks for listening. And here to take us out the other day, this girl came up to him and asked if she used to go to school with him, and he just kind of laughed. It's Krista Makes with the Rock Fight Fight song. We'll see you next time. Rock fighters. Rock,
Chris DeMakes (30:16):
Fight, rock, fight, rock. Go into the rock, fight where we speak our truth. Stay sacred cows and sometimes agree to disagree. We talk about human power, outdoor activities and big bikes about topics that we find interesting. Black culture, music, the latest movie reviews, ideas for the head. This is where we speak truth. This is where we speak our truth. Rock bike. Rock, bike. Welcome to.
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