Leon Sommé – The Body Boat Blade Story

In this episode, Dubside and Andrew catch up with renowned sea kayak coach Leon Sommé, co-founder of Body Boat Blade International on Orcas Island. Leon shares the journey from his first sea kayak in the Boundary Waters to building one of North America’s most respected kayak schools with his partner, Shawna Franklin. Along the way, he talks about memorable expeditions—including circumnavigating Iceland and Vancouver Island—the golden era of sea kayaking symposiums, Greenland paddling influences, and the enduring value of teaching risk assessment and seamanship. Now medically retired from professional coaching, Leon reflects on a lifetime on the water, the community he helped shape, and the adventures that still keep him moving.

Transcript

ANDREW:

Hello everyone, and welcome to The Dubcast with Dubside—the podcast devoted to the art of traditional kayaking, or what I like to call Greenland-style kayaking. 

For those who are new to the show, I'm going to take a moment to give you a quick overview of the kinds of topics we like to cover at the Dubcast. We talk about traditional kayaking techniques, especially the use of the Greenland paddle, and kayak rolling—not just as a self-rescue skill, but as a sport in its own right. 

We also discuss carving paddles, building skin-on-frame kayaks, and exploring Greenlandic culture. Greenlandic music is one of Dubside’s favorite subjects, 
and we often revisit the history of what I call the Greenland-style sea kayaking movement—basically reminiscing about “the good old days.”

I’ve been sea kayaking for over 20 years now. I started in 2003, but it took me a couple of years to discover traditional Greenland-style kayaking. 
I vividly remember my first experience rolling with a Greenland paddle at the West Coast Sea Kayak Symposium. I fell in love with it instantly—partly because I had struggled for so long to develop a reliable roll, and the Greenland paddle and rolling technique made it so much easier. 
It was a revelation, opening up a whole new world for me. 

These days, one of my favorite things is hearing how traditional kayaking has transformed other people’s lives as well.

Our guests on the Dubcast have included many well-known figures in traditional kayaking: including National Greenland Kayaking Champion Maligiaq Padilla, Qajaq USA founder Greg Stamer, renowned sea kayak instructor George Gronseth, and instructors such as Helen Wilson and James Manke, who have competed in the Greenland National Kayaking Championships.

More recently, Dubside has been following events in Greenland as the country moves toward independence and plans for a major expansion of its tourism industry. As the official Qajaq USA Ambassador to Greenland, Dubside has personal connections to the country’s representatives in the United States and often attends events at the  embassy in Washington, D.C.

Our mission here is to spread the knowledge of traditional kayaking to paddlers worldwide, to inspire people to learn how to roll, and to elevate the skill level across the community. 

The technology and design behind the Greenland paddle and skin-on-frame kayak are among Greenland’s greatest gifts to the world, and we respect and honor that tradition by striving to understand it deeply and accurately.

Today, I have a fantastic episode for you. We’re sharing an interview that Dubside and I recorded with former sea kayaking coach Leon Sommé. Along with his wife, Shawna Franklin, Leon was widely known in the Pacific Northwest for running Body Boat Blade International on picturesque Orcas Island in the heart of the San Juan Islands—a world-class sea kayaking destination.

Leon and Shawna were adored by their students and were featured in Justine Curgenven’s This Is the Sea DVD series, as well as Bryan Smith’s film Pacific Horizons about sea kayaking in the Pacific Northwest.

By the way, I highly recommend these DVDS if you can find them. Justine's video series is a classic!

I was fortunate to take several classes with Leon and Shawna, including training in the powerful currents of Deception Pass, a week-long kayaking camp in the San Juans, and a 4-star BCU training weekend at Neah Bay. Their depth of knowledge was so great that I always left feeling overwhelmed—in a good way—by how much I had learned. In fact, I enjoyed the 4-star course so much, I took it twice. 

One of those weekends even involved a serious medical emergency that ended with a Coast Guard helicopter evacuation to Harborview Medical Center in Seattle—but that’s a story for another time.

One of my favorite memories was at the West Coast Sea Kayak Symposium in Port Townsend, when Leon and Dubside teamed up for a rolling demonstration. Leon attempted every Greenland roll using a Euro blade, playing off the classic “Greenland paddle vs. Euro blade” rivalry—though as you’ll hear, Leon was in fact a great admirer of Greenland-style paddling.

We had hoped to record this interview in person while Dubside was in the Pacific Northwest for SSTIKS in June, but the timing didn’t work out. Instead, we spoke over the phone, so I’ll apologize in advance for the audio quality.

Without further ado, here’s our interview with Leon Sommé.

DUBSIDE:
So, when I think of Orcas Island, I think of Body Boat Blade, and I think of Leon and Shawna, and I remember for many, many years seeing you there and seeing you at the West Coast Sea Kayak Symposium. And so I understand you had to sort of give that up. 

LEON:
Yeah, I basically medically retired before we sold the business. Body Boat Blade still goes on over in Anacortes, run by a man named Alex LaLonde, who's a fantastic coach. But you know me, I've had this really long history of back issues and other, I have other neurological issues, and it's just got to the point where I couldn't do it anymore.

And Shawna kept the business going, running it with a couple other coaches on the water for a few years, and then we just had to let it go.

DUBSIDE:
Yeah. Well, the whole issue of having to give things up that you spent all your life on is interesting, but I'd like to, before that, go into how you started that business, how you started kayaking, how you chose that location, and just how you got started. Because from the outside, it looks incredibly fortunate to run a business successfully in such an exotic location like that, that I'm sure it costs a lot to do.

And I would imagine you could have gone under at any time if things had gone differently business-wise.

LEON:
Yeah, we felt really fortunate in how things ended up turning out. But we started really simply, and didn't spend a lot of money, and got a lot of support from a lot of people in the kayaking industry.

DUBSIDE:
Did you start right there in Orcas?

LEON:
No. So, way back in 1992, I lived in northern Minnesota. I used to go to Boundary Waters a lot, and then paddle on Lake Superior.

But the canoes I used in the Boundary Waters didn't transfer to the big lake very well, because it's more like a sea. So, I was always looking for a simple craft that I could travel on top of my car, not have to have a trailer and stuff. And one of the outfitters that I used to get access to the Boundary Waters Wilderness Area had a kayak sitting on his property.

And I was like, “Oh my God, what's that?” And he said, “A sea kayak”. And as soon as he said the word “sea”, because I originally come from the East Coast by the sea and in Florida, and I was like, “Oh God, tell me more about it.”

And he told me about how you can travel out on the sea and roll and go through surf and everything. And I was like, “Oh my God, you think I could rent that from you and try it out?” 
And so, I took a 14-day trip and paddled through the Boundary Waters with it and just fell in love with it.

And that was my entry into kayaking. And then I quickly went to a place in Minnesota, Midwest Mountaineering, that sold Valley Canoe Products. And I bought my first kayak.

DUBSIDE:
Were you thinking of it as a profession then, or just enjoying it?

LEON:
Oh God, no. I was in college, studying biology. I actually left college to be a biologist.

But I bought the kayak and I was a college student. I couldn't afford a spray deck, a PFD, or a paddle at the time. And I had seen this article in National Geographic, this guy making a Greenland boat.

And this is actually what I wrote in my journal I had at the time, with this photograph of this Greenlander making a skin-on-frame boat. It says in my journal, “My dream is (it's October 1992) I've become almost obsessed with the desire to build one of these crafts. I will get some lumber tomorrow and start my paddle. I must at least have a wooden paddle for Baja.” 

And Shawna and I were actually going to rent a van from the University of Minnesota to go down to Baja and do some paddling with our Euro boats. But my first paddle was a Greenland paddle that I carved myself.

ANDREW:
Wow. What was the first kayak that you bought?

LEON:
It was actually a Valley Selkie. It was a terrible design. It didn't stay around very long.

It was very maneuverable. It had the little tiny ocean cockpit, you know, and the hand pump behind you to pump the boat out. But, you know, it got me around.

Shawna bought a Nordkapp, which was a lot nicer boat, but much more tippy. My Selkie was more like a Romany design in its maneuverability and stuff like that. So it was actually a really fun boat. I loved it for several years.

DUBSIDE:
When you got those kayaks, did you have any benchmark as to what made a great kayak? Or you just assumed that was a cool kayak and you liked it? Or how did you evaluate it?

LEON:
Well, it was a kayak that Midwest Mountaineering carried along with some Current Design ones. One of the shop people, who was one of the buyers, talked to me about, you know, the safety features of the British boats with the deck lines and all of that stuff and the simplicity of not having a rudder and the hazards of those in certain types of conditions, especially in rescues and stuff. And it was more like the traditional Greenland boat that I was really attracted to. Just simpler lines, more of the upswept bow and stern and stuff like that. I don't know. It looks prettier and more traditional to me.

DUBSIDE:
Do you recall when you first learned to roll?

LEON:
Well, I first tried to teach myself to roll with another friend of mine and we had some successes. And we actually went up to the University of Minnesota at Duluth and they ran a kayak course and we took it. And those people tried to teach us a little bit about rolling, but there wasn't much time or emphasis on that, just the basics.

So, I didn't get it early on, but then actually Shawna and I met in a kayak rolling class in college. So, we signed up for this rolling class and we had both had the same length legs. The instructor said, find somebody that's got the same length leg as you do so you don't have to change your foot pegs all the time.

You can just jump back and forth in the boat you're sharing. So, Shawna walked in the room and I had two other friends with me that came with me, but they were both shorter. So, I got up and I went to Shawna and I said, how tall are you?

And she showed me and we compared our hip heights and we matched. So, we partnered up and she would learn to roll the first day. And it took me about four days trying before I got my first what I'd call a consistent roll.

That was way back in the University of Minnesota.

ANDREW:
Wow, and you've been together ever since and she's been a constant partner in the whole kayaking business.

LEON:
Yeah, yeah. I mean, she fell in love with going out on the... Well, first we started from the University of Minnesota's classes, the rolling class, the instructor there was really into whitewater. So, we got into some whitewater into Minnesota, but we both liked going out on Lake Superior and the idea of going out on the sea. 

I had been to the San Juan Islands. I was in the Navy. I was trained as a Navy diver, but stationed on a fast attack submarine. And when I left the Navy, I decided to become a commercial diver. So, I moved to Seattle to go to commercial dive school.

And a friend of mine from Minnesota had a place up in the San Juan Islands, which I had never been to, but I went from Seattle up to visit him. And I just fell in love with these islands. And at the same time, I was...

That's a really long story, but I was a runaway when I was 16 years old and I dropped out of high school and everything like that. But when I was in the Navy, I got my GED and I did some correspondent math classes and stuff. And I started reading books about biology because I was always interested in the natural world.

Anyways, when I went up to the San Juan Islands, I met this biologist and I kept asking questions about the natural world there. And he's like, God, you should become a biologist because of, I guess, the questions I was asking. And it just put a spark in me and I decided not to go to commercial dive school and instead to try to apply to the University of Minnesota and study biology.

So, that got me there. And that's how I discovered the San Juan Islands. 

And at one point, Shawna and I moved to the West Coast, to the Arcata, California area, way up north and first started paddling on the sea there, which was incredible.

But we did a road trip up to the San Juans to see what she thought of them in December. And we stayed a month and did a bunch of paddling, you know, in those short days. And it rained pretty much the whole time we were here, but she loved the islands.

And so, we decided as we were working biologists at the time, but we needed a home base because sometimes you'd go to work in Puerto Rico or something. And we had this little black truck we traveled around and had two sea kayaks, two whitewater boats and two mountain bikes on it and our cat. And we just needed a place that we could drop things and go and do field research somewhere for six months or so, let's say, and then come back to.

So, we found a place, a piece of property on Orcas. We built a 12 by 12 cabin without power, electricity. And we lived in that for our first 11 years.

And while we were on the islands, we thought, God, this would be an incredible place to teach natural history through kayaks. So, we kind of left biology behind and started teaching kayaking as a way to get people interested in the natural world and hopefully change how they voted or cared about this planet.

DUBSIDE:
So, when did Body Boat Blade International become part of it?

LEON:
Yeah, we first came to Orcas and started working for a kayak outfitter called Shearwater. And we helped set up a kayak school and a retail business with them. They were just a tour business at the time.

And we did that for about six years with them. And we actually ended up hosting a symposium over here. We got involved in the BCU and we're getting certifications.

And we had this big symposium up here and we brought over many British coaches, but we also brought in some local people and Nigel Foster, of course, is local, but he also is a British coach. And we brought in Greg Stamer. He was kind of the first person that I really learned a lot of Greenland skills and stuff from when we went down to teach at the Florida symposium.

So, Greg Stamer came up here and did Greenland classes. And we chose certain classes for people. So, some people would sign up and say the classes they wanted and we'd give them those classes.

But we also had classes we thought everybody should take. And one of those classes we kind of forced everybody to go through was a Greenland paddling class with Greg Stamer because we thought everybody should learn those skills and be introduced to where kayaking came from.

DUBSIDE:
Wow. As I recall, because I started paddling in ’98, ’99, there seemed to be this animosity that developed between Euro paddles and traditional paddles. One side bad-mouthing or discrediting the other side and the other side retaliating back and forth.

And so that people would show up at a BCU class and be told by the coach that you cannot use that traditional paddle. But it sounds like you weren't in that frame of mind at all.

LEON:
No, actually, I've always liked trying new things. And I like learning about different things and always have. One of my favorite memories of the whole period when kayaking was my profession was when you came up to Orcas and we went to the lake because we were going to do this thing at the West Coast Sea Kayak Symposium together on Greenland rolling.

DUBSIDE:
Yeah.

LEON:
And we just spent hours you know on the water. You showing me all these subtle little things to do. And I was going to do all these rolls with the Euro blade and you were going to do it the Greenland thing.

But you were teaching me all the ways that I could make it successful using the Euro blade. I also did stuff with the norsaq. And yeah, it was fun.
  
DUBSIDE:
Yeah, I'm starting to remember that now. Yeah. That's a lake on Orcas Island, right?

LEON:
Cascade Lake. Yeah.

ANDREW:
Those are some of the most interesting rolling demonstrations I've ever seen. And still to this day with you and Leon.

And then the next year with you, Leon, Shawna and somebody else in a...

LEON:
Kathy. Oh God, I'm blanking on their last name right now.

DUBSIDE:
We always had a good crowd watching too.

LEON:
Yeah. I remember actually her son, he was quite young, came and took the three star from us, three star to get his three star BCU award. And he had a Greenland paddle.

And, you know, we always tried to get people to use, try every thing, you know, if somebody came with a Greenland paddle, we'd try to get them to use the Euro. If they had a Euro, we'd try to get people to try Greenland and stuff. But in that three star, the syllabus, it said for the rolling part at three star that you could actually have the coach hold your paddle as you attempted the roll.

You didn't have to have it until—successfully without any help— until the four star. 

So he said to me, “So it says in the syllabus here that I can have the coach hold my paddle.”

I said, “Yeah, that's true.”

And so he hands me his Greenland stick and then he rolls over and comes up doing a hand roll.

DUBSIDE:
Good for him.

LEON:
But yeah, he, his dad, his mom and him were really into the Greenland paddle and Greenland rolling stuff. So that was pretty fun.

DUBSIDE:
Yeah. We did that demo like three years… two, three, four years. I can't remember.

LEON:
It was at least three years. I remember the first year I dropped your bowling ball, trying to roll with it and it sank. Lost your bowling ball.

DUBSIDE:
That was a bowling ball… See, my, my, my lesson from that was learning that not all bowling balls are created alike. Some of them actually float and some of them sink.

That one sank like a rock. We'd gotten that at some thrift shop or something. It wasn't, it wasn't a brand new bowling ball.

So losing it wasn't a big deal.

LEON:
Oh God. I remember the very first year. I think I, you know, I was in full Euro gear, I believe PFD and a helmet and stuff.

DUBSIDE:
Yeah.

LEON:
And you were in a tuiliq. And I don't remember how many rolls we had done, but I, my head was frozen, like the worst ice cream headache you could ever imagine. And I remember one time going under and just going, Oh my God, I don't even have a clue of where, which way I need to reach to find the surface of the water. It was just like, my brain was so frozen by the end of that thing.

And I was like, next year I'm getting a tuiliq. And that changed my life. I loved that.

And then Shawna and I built Greenland boats. Finally, after all these years, we got, Oh God, I'm going to blank on his name. Falcon kayaks.

DUBSIDE:
Brian Schulz.

LEON:
Brian Schulz. Yeah. So we got him to come up to Orcas and do a workshop and a bunch of students of ours and Shawna and I built Greenland kayaks up here for ourselves and then got tuiliqs that year and stuff.

And it was great. So, yeah.

DUBSIDE:
Well, I was really amazed that you as a very knowledgeable and skilled BCU coach had the humility to subject yourself to a rolling demonstration against somebody who had cool looking rolls and was probably getting more applause from the crowd.

LEON:
Well, you were very impressive. Shawna always says that, she kept going, I think you have a crush on him. How beautiful, you know, your movements and the ropes on the water and everything else like that.

And when you would teach me things, how, how it just opened up so many, you know, makes everything so fluid and easy and stuff. It was really nice.

DUBSIDE:
Well, thanks. I find that, you know, when, when you're riding high, you think that's how it is. And then later on, you realize those were the good old days and you never know the good old days while they're happening.

You only know them back. And so here we are, you know, the West Coast Sea Kayak Symposium hasn't been held for years. The East Coast Symposium at Charleston hasn't been held for years.

Things are changing all around us. And yeah, that was quite a high point of, of Greenland style things back then.

LEON:
Yeah. I remember the Greenland craze sweeping across the nation. And, you know, we met, we went over to Nigel Dennis’s symposium and he had Maligiaq there.

I don't know. It was just great. Everybody was getting in at the point at some point then, and just watching it sweep across the country for, and then, you know, even people started making the carbon graphite paddles and everything like which I, at first I thought was sacrilegious, but eventually I really actually liked them, so.

DUBSIDE:
Yeah. Well, I remember Greg Stamer making the point that every discipline can learn by being influenced from other disciplines. And so, yeah, yeah.

You can, you can take a high tech material like carbon fiber and make a Greenland paddle out of it. And I think likewise the idea with a Euro paddle that you put your hands in one position, you just hold the paddle there all the time, gets sort of influenced by the way you can slide your hand down the shaft a little bit to extend the blade a little bit more for wider sweeping, you know, that, that kind of thing.

LEON:
Yeah. People with the Euro tradition in the BCU or in particular, I think it's much more dogmatic than it is though. I didn't ever feel that way, with the coaches that I worked with, especially the high level coaches that I worked with.

I never got that feeling, like saying what you just said about your hands go in one place and they stay there.

DUBSIDE:
In my experience, when you're first learning something and then how to teach something, you don't have the wide range of experience of all these different things. So yeah, the rationales and the reasons for things are, are too complicated to get into immediately. 

So when you're teaching somebody, you say, well, this is how this is the proper way it's done. If they don't do that, I say, no, that's wrong. And you can't really explain why it's wrong. So if you don't really continue to learn, all you're doing is telling people, this is how it's supposed to be.

And so you get not too great coaches or inexperienced coaches that you get to perpetuate that kind of idea. But when you really have the broad range of knowledge, then you can say, well, you know, take your pick. This is why this is good or bad.

You can decide for yourself.

LEON:
That's actually the… the British Canoe Union eventually moved into in their coach level ones and twos, I believe, you know, they emphasize, you've got to put people in every kind of boat you can, from canoes to sit on tops, to kayaks, to whatever, so that the students can learn from all those different disciplines, but also that you go to somebody that's going to teach kayaking and you get on the kayak and you say, okay, this is how it's supposed to feel for me, but it doesn't feel that great for me. It hurts my back or this or that. But if you put them in a canoe, they can be completely comfortable and be much happier with it or sit on top or whatever, psychologically, it's better. And the more you can put people in and let them try different things, the better opportunity they can have to find the direction of the sport they'd prefer.

I used to not be a big fan of sit-on-tops. I just kind of thought, oh, you know, that's not a real kayak kind of thing. And then once I got in a sit-on-top and saw how damn fun they were and all the stuff you could do, you know, especially jumping on and pushing you back on and everything, I loved them.

And then you doing all the things you did in those big wide sit-on-tops. I was like, that's amazing.

DUBSIDE:
Then I suppose, what, like 10 years after that, the whole industry was looking at the stand-up paddle boards. And a lot of us older timer people were looking at, waiting this for this fad to go away and wishing people would stop interfering with our sport with these crazy little oversized surfboards. But we're waiting for them to go away.

It's never happened. Here they are.

LEON:
Yeah. And I'm actually really into them now. We have actually a group on the island that's big enough that we have a trailer and everything.

But when it gets really stormy, like blow through the night at 30 knots and the sea state gets good down any side of the island, we'll go out first in the morning, we call it Dawn Patrol. And we all go out and stand up paddle boards and surf them back down one of the sides of the islands, wherever the wind's blowing. And I just love it.

I love to be out in that storm. And it's so simple. You just got that board, your foot's attached to it and your paddle, and that's all you have really.

And you just are out on the sea having a great time.

DUBSIDE:
You're still on Orcas Island then, right? 

LEON: 
Yep, I am. 

And you're able to paddle stand-up boards then?

LEON:
I can do a stand-up paddle board. I suffer for it. I will have at least two good days of lots of pain, but it's worth it.

Since I've had to leave paddle sports for the most part, I took up windsurfing because I can stand and hang on to the boom, hook my hands around them. So I took up windsurfing. I really got into mountain biking, which I've already broke my knee, but I love.

And I've taken several classes and just recently learned how to do big jumps and everything. And I got back into skiing, which is actually another one that really is not great for my back, but I love to get up to the mountains, spend a really good day of skiing, maybe two. And then again, I'm down for a couple of days, but I enjoy it.

And my spine surgeon just says, keep moving and don't stop anything. At one point I said, should I not do one of these? Because I'm going to end up in a wheelchair?

And he goes, looking at your spine, you should be in a wheelchair. So whatever you're doing, just keep doing it.

ANDREW:
Wow. That's really impressive.

LEON:
If I sat at home and was in pain, it's miserable. But if I come home from being out on a stormy sea, or I just got launched in my windsurfer, tumbled on my mountain bike, and I'm in pain, I've got that day to think about of what I was doing and the fun I was having. And so it's great.

I miss camping. I miss doing big trips where I'm out camping every day for a month or more. And I really miss that.

ANDREW:
What were your most memorable kayak camping expeditions? I mean, you and Shawna have done some pretty big expeditions in the past, including circumnavigating Iceland.

LEON:
Yeah, well, that's one of the most memorable ones for sure. There's 2,000 foot cliffs that come straight out of the sea with the biggest breeding bird colonies in the world. You'd paddle underneath those.

It was such a strikingly different environment than when I lived here in the Pacific Northwest. And the people were fantastic. But that was one of the greatest memories.

Haida Gwaii, that trip with Justine [Curgenven] was really, really good. And then, you know, I've been around Vancouver [Island] twice now, once with Shawna. We did it in 44 days to just kind of take our time and give her time to do paintings and stuff.

And honestly, Vancouver's right here. But as far as wildlife, seeing bears and cougars and wolves and sea lions, orca whales, gray whales, whatever, it's the best I think there is for really getting to see a lot of wildlife on a trip.

ANDREW:
Didn't you hold the record for circumnavigating Vancouver Island for some time?

LEON:
Well, I think I went around like 1996. I went around Vancouver Island and I only had 30 days off. So I did it in 28 days.

But I did break the trip up. I came back to get a friend of mine to go back and finish the trip. So some people claim that was the fastest time and people wanted to beat that.

But I'm not sure it was ever a real record. There's probably somebody that had paddled around Vancouver before that and maybe done it quicker. I'm not sure.

But people used my 28 days as a record to beat.

DUBSIDE:
When you go around Vancouver Island, what is the most challenging section?

LEON:
It depends on how you go through the currents and stuff. You can go through Seymour Narrows. There's really big whirlpools and there's a lot of boat traffic and stuff like that.

But you can also go around the more easterly route and go through Okisollo and stuff. So there's really challenging currents and stuff there. But you can always pre-plan your trip to hit it so it's not going to be so bad in the timing of the day you do.

But kind of what I always thought was the worst was the part once you leave the Broken Group and then you're going to go into the Strait of Juan de Fuca and coming back. There's this really low rock shelf that comes out and just goes into the sea for miles. Where if it surfs up, it's just crashing surf over that rock shelf. And if it's low, it's just bashing into it. There's no real good place to land and stuff. And if things went wrong weather-wise for you there, be the most challenging.

But probably the biggest challenges that we ever had, because both times I went around was in August, which some people call “Fog-ust”. And it's navigating the sometimes really dense fog on the outer coast, anywhere from the Winter Harbor region up before the Brooks Peninsula all the way through to Ucluelet. You can get really foggy days and then you got surf landings and lots of rocks and stuff that create boomers.

I would say that's the most challenging.

DUBSIDE:
Did you have any major boat damage issues, like smashing up a kayak or something, having to patch it, things like that?

LEON:
Yeah, in Iceland we were there for, it was 1,600 nautical miles and we had to drag our boats up and down on the beaches enough that we wore a hole basically through the keel. And we had to patch those.

DUBSIDE:
That was a fiberglass or plastic kayak?

LEON:
Fiberglass.

DUBSIDE:
Yeah.

LEON:
And you know we'd never use kegs or rudders or anything else like that. We get, Nigel [Dennis] does pretty heavy layups and then we get keel strips and everything so they're pretty bomber.

DUBSIDE:
So you said not even a skeg?

LEON:
No skews.

DUBSIDE:
Wow.

LEON:
Don't have them in Greenland boats either.

DUBSIDE:
That's true.

LEON:
You know Nigel Foster is a person who doesn't use skegs really much. He was the first one to go around Iceland. You know we took classes from him and just learning to do the skills of maneuvering your boat and stuff really well.

I find you don't need them. My very first trip around Vancouver Island I actually had a boat that was very skeg dependent and I was solo. You know you'd go out through the beach, thing would get jammed and this is before I was wearing dry suits and stuff.

I had this fuzzy rubber suit I wore and I'd have to get out of my boat, go back there and clean that out and then get back in my boat and that was nerve-wracking. You know getting out of your boat on the sea on the west coast of Vancouver and then getting cold too. And so eventually I learned to spin around in the cockpit sitting and climb out there on my belly and clean it and then spin around and climb back into my cockpit and get into that.

It's something that I always thought was a fun skill to teach students when they did come and take classes and we kind of got known for those silly games of climbing around on the boats. But it was a practical skill but after that trip I was like I will never have a boat that I depend on any moving part. So I really focused on learning my skills and finding a boat that really fit me well balance-wise and learning how to pack a boat balance-wise so that you always have a neutrally balanced boat.

DUBSIDE:
So which kayak was that that you got to work that way?

LEON:
Well for expeditions it was Nigel Dennis Explorer and for my play boat it was the Romany.

DUBSIDE:
You would just have the the skegs in those covered over or just not use a skeg?

LEON:
Nigel didn't really, you kind of had to ask for and have a skeg put in because he mainly made them without skegs. Yeah we always got ours without skegs.

DUBSIDE:
I've seen more recent designs—you mentioned heavily skeg dependent design—where you have to have the skeg more than halfway down for the boat to perform at all and I'm I've paddled those and I've thought boy if this skeg stopped working yeah you're in big trouble.

LEON:
Yeah in a lot of ways I'm kind of a purist and a kind of a technique geek so you know I would just spend hours learning about that stuff, taking it out just trials and different winds and stuff like that. But yeah I am the same way with the new sports I've taken up. Wind surfing, one of the reasons I love it is there's just all this technical technique stuff you know from rigging your sails right for the winds that you have and the size of sail it goes to the size, so I have tons of boards and tons of sails and there's just all this kind of cool technical stuff that I just get into.

DUBSIDE:
Would you say that it requires more gear to do wind surfing than sea kayaking?

LEON:
Well you can just get a windsurf board and a sail make it all work just like you can get one kayak and do everything but if I have an Explorer and a Romany I can surf Skookumchuck and I can go around Iceland. But I could do both of those things in just one of those as well. It’s just they wouldn't perform as nicely.

ANDREW:
Do you go wind surfing in the San Juans or you go down to Hood River?

LEON:
Both. We take a five-day course every August with this group that comes in and just keep learning more stuff but we go to Hood River but mostly we're learning here in the San Juans. It's not great in some ways I wish I could go other places I can't travel anymore because of my spine, and I have a neurological movement disorder that I can't fly on planes or travel very far in a vehicle. Hood River is kind of almost the limit of how far I can go and we have a van that I can actually get up and move around in a bit. That helps. But traveling is not something I can really do anymore.

DUBSIDE:
Well that's an enviable place to be stuck on Orcas Island.

LEON:
It's not bad. I'm getting up into the mountains more you know before it was always… everything was associated with the coast and going to the coast and we lived here for you know a lot of years and we knew nothing about the eastern side of the state so you know we get over to Winthrop for mountain biking and go up to Stevens Pass for skiing and stuff like that Mount Baker and even up to Whistler so I get that far just like Hood River for windsurfing.

The one benefit is I don't want to fly anymore because of the impacts on the environment and it's really easy for me not to because I literally can't.

DUBSIDE:
Well you were talking about when you started the idea of educating people about the the environment was it through kayaking?

LEON:
Natural world, yeah.

DUBSIDE:
Yeah the natural world yeah. Well that seems like that concern has gotten more and more pronounced with all the climate change stuff people become more concerned about so it sounds like you're way ahead of the curve on that.

LEON:
Well yeah, people have known about all of this for a long time so I wasn't ahead of the curve but conservation biology is really what I went into and then I knew of climate change in college when I was there in the ‘80s, well even before that, in college we studied it and it's part of the reason I moved to the San Juans because of it's going to be one of the cooler places hopefully. Well, there's all kinds of benefits to live here because of climate change and we also came here to live in a 12 by 12 cabin and live without electricity and running water our idea was to have a small impact on the planet. We have a bigger one now of course. We actually got our first refrigerator. It was last year or the year before.

DUBSIDE:
How did you function without a refrigerator before that?

LEON:
Well we didn't keep things in the refrigerator. We had an ice box in our barn. We have our pump room, because we eventually took care of Shawna’s mom and sister who had Down Syndrome and actually went through hospice with the sister and then the mom started getting dementia and stuff. But we kind of cared for them for quite a few years while we even had the business. So when we brought them here, we had to get electricity in the house. Well, we built a bigger house and we had to get electricity in and stuff, but we still had just an ice box. And the pump house in the barn had electricity, so we had one of those small lift-top freezers in there, and we could make ice. In the house—not in the house but outside the back side of the house, the northern end—we had an ice box and we had that for years. But yeah, I never owned a refrigerator until my mid-60s I guess.

DUBSIDE:
I lived in an apartment in Philadelphia for 10 years without a refrigerator. I would go to the local food co-op often but yeah. You… it's surprising like what like tomatoes carrots you know you can you don't have to refrigerate those it'll last quite a while if you get like you know spinach or kale greens you have to eat those a little bit faster.

LEON:
Yeah, and we have a garden. Our garden produces a salad for us every day through the summer months. But yeah, we shop more often.

DUBSIDE:
So is the current Body Boat Blade still operating out of the storefront that you had?

LEON:
No. So Alex who owns it now bought it in conjunction with another company called Anacortes Kayak Tours, and Alex eventually bought them out and owns it outright for himself now. But they were based in Anacortes. All they did was buy the name and brand, the logo for the most part, and whatever curriculum we had and they wanted they could take with it. But they didn't buy the retail part of the business or take over the Nigel Dennis kayak distributorship or anything like that. And they just opened a shop this year, so they were just teaching. And they operate out of Anacortes. 

We actually many times thought of moving over there to just make it easier for us to get to the coast, to teach in Deception Pass and everything like that. But we just loved the lifestyle in Orcas, the fact that nothing's open 24 hours and if you need something in the middle of the night you have to wait until you can get off island and stuff like that. We just like the slower pace on the island. If you see somebody you know on the road you can stop your car and have a long conversation while cars pile up behind you.

DUBSIDE:
I remember your storefront with the retail shop there. You had the table in the front. Under the glass on the table, a chart of the area—all, you know, on the water. And you had this big high chairs. And you could sit at that table and look at and decide where you're going to go and which island you're going to go around.

LEON:
Yeah. But that shop came after years of running Body Boat Blade. Like I said, we started simple. We lived in that 12 by 12. We had a van and trailer. And we had an office that was 50 square feet. And Bryan Smith— I don't know if you know him…

DUBSIDE:
Yeah, I remember Brian.

LEON:
So he came into the business shortly after we started it. And the three of us would sit in that 50 square office, and we just had a van and trailer and a little shed on our property that kept our wet suits and dry suits and PFDs and stuff. We operated that way for quite a while. Then we had a little bit bigger shop where we actually started carrying some retail and then eventually grew into the one that you saw

DUBSIDE:
Were you doing more instruction and trips? Or how was the ratio of that?

LEON:
Yeah, we never did trips. We were trained as coaches. We were there to teach individuals skills and methods of paddling safe on the water and doing expeditions and stuff like that. So we were just coaches that taught. And you know our student/instructor ratio, we have maximum six students with typically always two coaches, so three to one ratio for instructors. It was mainly just Shawna and I. And some years we had other coaches that came in and helped us out. But usually just one or possibly two. 
We sometimes had a shop person. We oftentimes shut the shop to go teach the class and we just put a sign in the door that says “We're on the water and you should be too” or something like that.

DUBSIDE:
So how many days per week would you typically be out paddling?

LEON:
We were just talking about that today because we paddled over to Blakely Island to get ice cream. it's Shawna's 60th birthday today and Blakely Island has a little ice cream shop on it so it's the first time I paddled in two years. And I'm in a lot of pain right now because of it. But yeah we were just talking about how we did that pretty much almost every day on the water and it's so funny because whenever we got a break you know we'd always say oh let's not pack the schedule this year so that we have time to go and do this and that but anytime we did get a break we would go somewhere paddling usually up to Skookumchuck or out to the coast to go surfing at Tofino or whatever. We just, we love paddle sports—we’d go run whitewater, go canoeing, something like that. But we were on the water a lot. I couldn't tell you how many days a year, but most.

DUBSIDE:
Around Orcas Island where's your favorite place to go?

LEON:
Well there's a tidal race off the south end of Lopez and San Juan Island. That's water that comes up the Strait of Juan de Fuca, has to squeeze through this narrow gap called Cattle Pass. And there's some really nice tidal races in there. 

So I love those, but I also love to go to the outer islands. There's Matia, Sucia, and Patos off to the northern end of Orcas. And Patos sits way out to the kind of northwest and looks up the Strait of Georgia. And I love that island and I love to paddle around it. And there's strong currents that develop around it as well, but I like it on a calm day to stormy sea or whatever. I went there for over 20 some years every year for Christmas, and I would go out there and spend Christmas either alone or with sometimes Shawna, or I think I had as many as 11 friends came out one Christmas.

And then from there I had a friend that was a ranger on Sucia Island, and he and his wife were raising two girls while they lived there. And they turned one of the ranger sheds into their home. They had a wood stove. So on Christmas day I would paddle over to their place and they always had cinnamon rolls baking in the wood stove and the hot coffee. And I would sit on the couch and the two young girls would read me entries in their journal about their life living on Sucia Island which was great. And so I got to see those girls grow up over there, and now they've moved over here to Orcas now, so. But yeah I love Potos. It's a beautiful little island.

DUBSIDE:
So you have to really be aware of the weather to paddle out to those outer islands right?

LEON:
I think it's really smart because things change here and then that's what kind of what our school started. We had a good friend here when we first moved to Orcas Island —his name was Steve Braun—who died, basically paddled out to one of the outer islands and was coming back, and it was a stormy day. And he came out of his boat. You know, it's one of those boats with no deck lines or anything, hard to hang on to in rough conditions or get a hold of. And he had a wetsuit on that was down around his waist so he had pulled it up over his legs but didn't put it all the way on. And a whale watch boat actually found him still alive floating face down in the water. But they brought him to hospital but he didn't survive. Well there's a long story to it all, but we were like committed to make, trying to make it safer for paddlers by understanding how to do the current tables, and understand what the currents were doing in conjunction with getting a good weather forecast, and then doing a risk assessment. So that was a big part of our business, was teaching risk assessment so people could go on safe journeys anywhere in the world.

DUBSIDE:
Would you ever encounter you know had to put in somebody you know with a rec boat they just bought and ready to go out and conditions they had no idea were doing and what would you do then?

LEON:
Always. I mean we the North Beach was where we put in to go over to Sucia. It was classic. But people would show up, shorts and t-shirts, and you know, they just took their boats off their cars. And they're gonna head to Sucia. And you could see the tidal race out in the distance. It looked tiny from where we were, like we knew that if they got out there, you know, there were 3 ft breaking waves, and you would probably end up in the water. 

And we would tell them that it's not a good idea. And oftentimes we would tell them where a safe place would be to go on the island. But sometimes people would go. 

But we got lots of students because they had incidences in the area, and they barely survived. And they came to us and, yeah. 

“How many ways could we have killed ourselves?” I remember one of the students saying to his friends when we were teaching them after they had some incident down at Cattle Pass, where I said there's strong currents. And you know, it's over 5 knots, so you can't turn around and paddle away from it faster than they can suck you into it. And that's this group of guys from Seattle—severely hypothermic, but all of them survived. But they ended up coming and taking classes. And we had quite a few people that came to us like that.

We also have gotten many bottles of scotch as a gift from students who said that our trainings saved their necks when they did get in trouble. So that was always nice.

ANDREW: 
So what are your feelings about sea kayaking now, in terms of its dwindling popularity? Do you think there'll be a resurgence? 

LEON:
You know, we're so out of touch with the sport. When we sold Body Boat Blade we really kind of stepped out of it completely. But we noticed on our island, you know we used to see Romanys and Explorers and you know all kinds of British boats coming and going on the island, and now they're very few that we see. And usually when we do see them, we know the people. 

But it's mostly rec boats now. And you know people have no training or understanding about anything with what's going on in the water and weather and stuff like that. And I think that's the trend that's probably gonna go on. I don't think the style of sea kayaking that we in particular, because we were into doing expeditions and going, you know, interesting places to go and paddle. And there were lots of firsts that you could do back then. And I think that is gone and probably will never…well, i don't know. But likely not to come back.

I think there's just too many people on the planet now and everybody's kind of done stuff. 

And it's even harder to kill yourself now, because there's so many of us. Like you can go out throughout the San Juans, and there's boats out there that are gonna hopefully save you if you do get in trouble, if you're going out there without knowing what's going on and stuff like that. But I don't see the kind of paddle sports and the big symposiums and stuff coming back. 

Oh it sounds like SSTIKS was good. And and things like that is great, like the teaching the traditional rolling and stuff. I think those kind of skills people could get interested in and want to develop those. But I'm not sure about the the type of trainings we did, and the symposiums, the skill symposiums that were big. I'm not sure that there'll be a resurgence like there was. I think we were lucky to live through that period of time.

ANDREW:
In terms of traditional kayaking, the Greenland style kayaking, what do you think people find attractive about it? Why do you think it fascinates some people?

LEON:
I guess the building of a Greenland boat is an incredible experience. What Shawna and I kind of originally thought we would do, was we were going to have this school where, because I was actually one of these, you know I told you, I dropped out. I was this delinquent kid. And I was kind of a lost kid. And I was a pretty bad kid, you know, like I went to jail a lot.

We wanted to start this school where kids would come, and they'd build a boat themselves, the Greenland boat, and their paddle. And then we would pack them and everything and do these trips from like the San Juan Islands up to Alaska kind of thing. And they would, you know, it would take us a couple of months kind of thing. And during that journey we would have experts in different fields of biology and physics and historical stuff, and teach them about the natural world and how the universe works and stuff like that. Geology and all of that stuff. So these people would come in and teach segments while these kids who built their own boats and paddles all made their way up to Alaska. And then they'd have this great achievement.
Because for me, you know, I was a high school dropout. I ended up going into the Navy. I went to Navy dive school, so for the first time in my life I actually achieved something, and something I kind of felt proud of. 

And the thing I'm talking about with building kayaks and stuff, they could do this thing and feel this achievement of accomplishing something. And it really changes who you are when that happens in your life. And then I also think having a good understanding of, you know, how the world works makes it easier for you to work with others in the world, and be less likely to want to do things that are illegal like I did. 

But anyways, we actually had that thought at one point we're gonna teach people how to build kayaks and paddle to Alaska and learn about the world and the universe. 

And that's another thing too that happened to me when I was in the Navy. I was stationed on a fast attack submarine. I started reading. I read my first book cover to cover. It was “Of Wolves and Men” by Barry Lopez.  You know, once I started reading, it just opened up a whole new world to me. And you know, our submarine library was interesting. It had biology textbooks and stuff. And I to this day I still like to read textbooks on science and stuff like that. But it just changed the person I was in so many ways. 

So that was kind of the thought— it was to try to give these delinquent persons an opportunity to feel different in the world, and maybe change their lives. But yeah, of course we went down a different path.

ANDREW: 
Leon, what advice would you give to young people who are interested in getting into sea kayaking?

LEON: 
Well one is find somebody that can teach you the things that look interesting to you. You know, find someone that can teach you how to roll, so that right away you have this skill that allows you to get in a watercraft and have fun out on the water. And then if you see an environment that you'd like to go into, like surf a wave like Skookumchuck, or run a rapid on a river, be in the ocean surf or anything. Honestly— I say all those kind of high adrenaline things—but to just paddle on a glass calm lake in the morning when it's this misty rain coming down and there's an insect bloom and the sky is filled with violet green swallows, you know if that's what attracts you, I would say find a mentor that can make that possible for you, possible in a safe way where you feel confident you could do it on your own. That's what I guess I would say.

DUBSIDE:
Well, if I can be as presumptuous enough to speak on behalf of the paddling community, I would say thank you so much Leon for all you've given to the sport and for the whole Body Boat Blade legacy you've left behind. And i'm sure you've influenced a tremendous number of people in very positive ways.

LEON: 
Well thank you very much. That's nice to say. We feel like we've got lots of good friends through that community we still have to this day. So we're so grateful for it. We both were saying today as we did this paddle today, we used to do this every day for our living and it was like how lucky lucky lucky lucky we were to have that experience.

ANDREW:
Excellent. Well thanks for being on the podcast.

LEON:
It's so great to talk to you guys and hear your voices again. There’s a lot of people in the paddle sport community I still don't see that I, you know, saw on a regular basis. And I miss them a lot. So maybe the next time Dubside you're back over here, we can we can get together in person.

DUBSIDE:
Yeah probably about a year from now, the next SSTIKS I'll be up in the area, so we'll definitely have to hook up.