Christopher Cunningham: The Magazine That Shaped Sea Kayaking

For nearly three decades, Sea Kayaker magazine was the voice of the sea-kayaking community—shaping conversations about technique, safety, equipment, expedition travel, and traditional kayaking. Founded by John and Bea Dowd in 1984, the magazine was led by Christopher Cunningham as editor from 1989 until its final issue in 2014.

This long-anticipated interview offers a rare opportunity to hear the magazine’s story—and the evolution of the sport—from someone who witnessed both from the inside. Cunningham brings a breadth of experience few others can match. He discusses the 2,500-mile paper-canoe journey that led him to Sea Kayaker, the growth of traditional Greenland kayaking, his friendship with John Heath, and his first encounter with a young Maligiaq Padilla. He also takes us behind the magazine’s influential kayak reviews, landmark safety reporting, Deep Trouble series, and eventual closing.

More than a look back at an important publication, this conversation is an oral history of a formative era in sea kayaking, told by one of its most thoughtful observers and influential voices.

Transcript

[DUBSIDE]
I’m in the living room of the, noted in sea kayaking communities, Chris Cunningham. 

[CHRIS]
Good to have you here.

[DUBSIDE]
Pleasure to see you. The last time I saw you was at least 10 years ago. 

[CHRIS] 
Yeah, East Coast, at least a decade ago. 

[DUBSIDE]
Would that have been Delmarva at the time? 

[CHRIS] 
Probably a Delmarva event, yeah.

[DUBSIDE]
You were the editor of Sea Kayaker Magazine for how long?

[CHRIS] 
25 years. From ’89 to 2014.

[DUBSIDE]
Right now you are editing a publication? Tell me about that. 

[CHRIS] 
I'm working for Wooden Boat Magazine out of Brooklyn, Maine. And they started up an online monthly called Small Boats. And when Sea Kayaker closed because we just ran out of readers... 

[DUBSIDE]
We'll get into that. In detail later. 

[CHRIS] 
But yeah, I've been working at home for Wooden Boat. And working for Wooden Boat has kind of been my dream job. Because it combines kayaking and sailing and rowing and boat building. So it's been a good fit.

For the past year and a half I've been editor-at-large. So I retired as the main editor to get out from underneath deadlines after 35 years. And now I kind of get to do what I like and still write articles. So I get to keep most of the good parts of the job without the pressure. 

[DUBSIDE] 
So Wooden Boat Magazine would include some wooden kayaks? 

[CHRIS] 
Oh yeah. 

[DUBSIDE] 
And then you've got row boats and everything else? 

[CHRIS] 
Yeah, and Wooden Boat, their focus is on a lot of the larger boats, Maine coasting schooners and stuff all over the world.

And readers were asking for more small boat content. So in order to do that rather than start shrinking the large boats, they spun off the small boats online. And yeah, it's gathered pretty good following.

[ANDREW]
What’s your favorite small boat that you have? 

[CHRIS] 
Well, as I said, I have 26 boats or had 26 boats on the property. And when I started boat building in 1977, I had been doing a lot of backpacking and solo backpacking in the winter. And that just got to be a lot of work carrying a 70-pound pack on snowshoes.

And I finally had my fill of that. And then I turned to bicycle touring. And my best friend and I rode down from here down to Salt Lake City.

He missed his girlfriend, so he went home. An hour later, I got hit by a car. And as I was going over the handlebars doing a somersault, I was thinking, I need to get a helmet.

And I landed on my feet in a deep crouch. And I was okay and caught up with the guy. Got him to replace my bike and then went down to the Grand Canyon and then down to Los Angeles and took a ride to San Francisco and then rode home.

And that was, well, Highway 1 on the Oregon coast and the California coast was just plain dangerous. I was having to drive into the ditch on the inland side just to avoid getting run over by logging trucks. So that left boating.

I thought, well, I can see them coming if they're going to run over me. So I started building boats in ’77. And what got my interest was looking at the charts of British Columbia and looking at Knight Inlet and Butte Inlet, these long fjords. And I thought, those would be fun to see. 

I didn't have enough money to buy a boat, so I built a 14-foot dory. And the following year, headed north from Puget Sound and got all the way up to Prince Rupert.

And swore I'd never do that again because it rained all but four days for the month that I was out. But I got hooked. I would see boats that looked interesting or geography that looked interesting and come up with a plan to build a boat and take a trip.

And then I just did that for the Inside Passage a second time for Quebec to Florida along the Intercoastal Waterway in a paper canoe. And then from Pittsburgh down the Ohio and Mississippi and across the Gulf back over to Florida in a “sneak box”, which is a duck hunting boat that I built out of red cedar driftwood log I pulled off the beach in Edmonds. 

Boats all have their own individual purposes. And sometimes what was driving me was just to find out what this boat could do. 

The King Island kayak was one of those where I thought it would make a great cruising boat. And I built the King Island. And only later found out that to keep them upright, they would ballast them with rocks. So I didn't use that much. And that boat got sold fairly recently.

So no favorites. It's just exploring the whole array of possibilities with boats. 

[DUBSIDE]
So how did you come to be the editor of Sea Kayaker Magazine? 

[CHRIS}
That paper canoe trip I took from Quebec to Cedar Key, Florida on the Gulf was following a route by a guy named Nathaniel Holmes Bishop back in the 1860s just after the Civil War.

And he wrote a book, Voyage of the Paper Canoe. And that just happened to come across in the mail at the wooden boat shop here in Seattle. And I read that and saw that there was this inland route from Quebec to Florida.

And I thought, I've got to do that. And a paper canoe sounds cheap. 

In the late 1800s, Elijah Waters' company was making all kinds of things out of laminated paper.

It was sort of the composite material of the time. And they built racing shells, and those were the first monocoque racing shells. They'd all been lapstrake up until then.

And so they built a decked canoe for this guy Bishop. And then he started in Quebec and took it all the way down to Florida. So I needed a mold, and Verlen Kruger, who did the Ultimate Canoe Challenge around North America, Valerie Fons was a friend of mine, and she joined him and later married him. And she had Verlin's backup loon cruising canoe. So when Valerie left to do Baja with Verlen, she left the canoe with me. 

And I loved the boat.

So I laminated brown craft paper and handy wipes and used carpenter's glue. This is before Tight Bond. And I thought, well, if I just put good paint and epoxy on the outside, it'll be all right.

It was a great boat to travel in. They had a wooden framework to give it some structure, but it was beginning to dissolve even before we got back to Quebec, just being out in the rain. So I'd have to repair it every night.

I was rather disenchanted with the whole experience. It was just hard work, spending four and a half months with a partner that we didn't really get along that well. And so when we got down to Cedar Key, I just left the boat down there, and it wound up in their museum, actually hanging under the eaves.

So when I went back a second time.

[DUBSIDE] To make this trip you were camping out along the way?

[CHRIS]
Yeah. There were times when people would invite us in, and we were getting a lot of press. So I made it a point to stop in and find the local newspaper and ask them if they want a story. And inevitably, they said yes.

And it was kind of fun because we'd get to the south of whatever town the paper came out in, and we'd get people waving from bridges and said, “We just read about you this morning.”

And one of the best connections was in Beaufort, North Carolina. We'd stopped there and stayed in the marina and got invited to dinner by one of the well-to-do families in town.

And they said, “Well, you should stop by the Parris Island Marine Corps camp. It's your next stop.”

We said, “OK, we'll try that.”

So we left, and apparently we were under surveillance from the moment we left Beaufort, and they were watching us all the way. And when we got down there, the commandant of the base sent a limo to pick us up, and we stayed in his house. We met his wife that evening, and then in the morning, we hadn't met the major general.

And the wife said, well, the gunnery sergeant will be here to make you some breakfast. And so we're waiting for the gunnery sergeant, and the major general comes in with his uniform and all his medals and stuff.

And I looked up and said, “Well, good morning. You don't look like a gunnery sergeant.”

So we got breakfast, and then he had another limo with an escort drive us all around the Marine Corps base, where my father had trained for World War II. 

So it got to the point, though, that we were so used to sleeping outside that going into a house to sleep where it was a bit warm was just intolerable. We'd have the windows wide open. I didn't like mattresses, so I'd sleep on the floor. 

But the camping was good fun. It was always a challenge finding a new spot. And in general, people were very good about letting us camp wherever we happened to stop. 

The only time we were turned away was landing on a private island, I think it was the South Carolina coast, where the groundskeeper had an obligation to keep the club private, so we just had to go on to the next island.

[DUBSIDE]
And what year was this? 

[CHRIS]
This was ’83- ’84. So starting out in November, no, September and going through to January the following year. So 2,500 miles.

[DUBSIDE]
I can imagine anybody trying to duplicate that these days would find a lot of what was wilderness in your time completely developed all the way down to the waterfront. 


[CHRIS] 
Well, and also the small boat cruising was also a novelty. Now I think there are a lot more people traveling all these waterways, but back then we were a rarity.

There was one house we stopped in just south of Charleston, and there was an elderly woman well into her 80s living there, and we asked if we could spend the night at her place. She looked out at the water and she saw the canoe and the kayak. She said, “Ain't never been a thief come by canoe, honey. Yeah, you can stay here.”

[DUBSIDE]
So we're still trying to get to the Sea Kayaker Magazine editor thing. 

[CHRIS]
Oh, that. Oh, so pardon me. Yeah, the paper canoe. I wrote that up for Sea Kayaker, and they published that in issues…

[DUBSIDE] 
John Dowd started Sea Kayaker. 

[CHRIS]
John and Bea Dowd, yeah. And they started in ’84.

Bea was doing most of the heavy lifting for the production, so she had just had it. And I was in Washington, D.C. at the time working for the Smithsonian. Got a phone call from John saying, “You want to be the editor?”

I said, “I've never edited anything.”

And he said, “Well, you submitted the only clean manuscript we ever got, so you can edit your own stuff. You can edit other people's stuff.”

So I said, “Well, if you're going to be silly enough to offer me the job, I'll be silly enough to take it.”

And it was a bit rough going at the start because Sea Kayaker had been done with physical stuff, film and negatives, to get things ready for print, and then it was going to desktop publishing. So I was given a Mac and a pile of correspondence with writers and told to just figure it out. We set up an office here in Seattle along with 48 North, a sailing magazine, and the publisher, Michael Collins, was leading both publications.

He kept asking me when my first issue was going to be ready, and I said, “I don't even know what's next." 

But we got it out pretty close to on schedule and never missed a deadline after that. 

[DUBSIDE]
The magazine you put out, the initial issues don't look quite the same as the final ones just in terms of sophistication.

[CHRIS]
Oh, yeah, I had a heck of a lot to learn. One of the things I learned is that an editor is not qualified to do proofreading. That first issue came out and I got a letter saying something—
“I just got a good laugh out of slavaged”, when “salvaged” was the word that was supposed to be there. Thirty-five years later, I still remember that. 

And then we got more sophisticated with desktop publishing and eventually got away from film.

But for a long time… 

[DUBSIDE] 
So film is what? You lay out things, you take camera shots, and that gets to the printer? 

[CHRIS]
Yeah, you start out with these big signature pages, I think eight pages, and it's done in blue, so it's invisible to the photos they take for film. And then you have a printer that prints out the text, and then you go into a camera room and you take the photos or slides that have been submitted, and then you turn those into halftones and you cut those out, and then you run them through the waxer and you paste them on these big sheets.

Then it goes off to get duplicated in film, and then the film gets transferred to the printing plates. 

[DUBSIDE] 
And did you know that whole process when John doubts it? 

[CHRIS]
Nothing, nothing. 

[DUBSIDE] 
You learned all of it on the job.

[CHRIS] 
Yeah, I did a couple of press tours, and the presses were all in the Midwest to cut down on mailing costs to the coast. And it was good fun seeing these big Heidelberg machines that just go the length of a building with paper going through it at 35 miles an hour and coming out as a magazine on the far end. 

[ANDREW]
What was the target audience for Sea Kayaker? And how did you determine what kind of articles you were going to publish? 

[CHRIS]
Well, John Dowd and Bea Dowd owned Ecomarine in Vancouver, so they were in the retail business.

John Dawson was involved. He was a kayaker. There were, I think, six of the initial shareholders in the magazine, but eventually it was just Michael Collins and his wife Joan that were left with running the publication.

And the symposiums got started with a meeting with the Collinses and the Dowds, and they started that first Port Townsend symposium, which I think was also in ’84, maybe ’85. 

And John just knew who his customers were, and he'd written that book, Sea Kayaking, about the how-to book Bible of the time. And I guess they just realized their community needed a voice, so it wasn't so much establishing a magazine and then finding a community. It was the community started it, and then the magazine was created to serve that community. 

And I didn't get really any guidance because they wanted me to just make my own way, which was a little bit frightening and challenging at the start because I wasn't really a part of any sea kayaking community except for personal connections with the founders of Eddieline and local kayakers. But for years I paddled and never saw another kayaker.

[ANDREW]
And clearly you put in your own interest in boat building and traditional kayaking into it. 

[CHRIS]
Well, at one of the early symposiums I ran into Be a Dowd, and I had been doing presentations of Greenland kayak construction because I'd been doing that for a couple years. And so I was going to do a presentation at that symposium, so I went up to Bea, and I said, “I'm doing this thing on making Greenland kayaks. What about a how-to article?” 

She said, “I don't think there'd be much interest in it.” 

So it was, what, a year or two later, maybe three or four years later, where I got handed the publication. I said, “Well, I'm going to do that Greenland kayak construction article.”

So I ran it in two parts. Both issues sold out instantly. And the demand kept coming in, so we made photocopies of them.Those went out to people asking for the article. And eventually it led to the book that I wrote. 

[DUBSIDE]
Building The Greenland Kayak, A Manual For Its Construction And Use? 

[CHRIS]
The Greenland Kayak, A Manual For Its Construction And Use.

[DUBSIDE] 
Back in those times, the big voices for traditional stuff, it was John Heath, right? Anybody else? 

[CHRIS] 
David Zimmerly and Eugenia Arima. 

And with John, he had documented a two-hole Kodiak Island kayak in Adney and Chappelle's Bark Canoes and Skin Boats [of North America]. And I was just building whatever Arctic boats that I could get my hands on with plans.

And we used to have boat shows here in Seattle that lasted a weekend, up to the next weekend. So I had 10 days. So I'd take lumber down to what was then the Coliseum and started building this double from scratch and getting shavings all over the place, so much so that the fire marshal tracked down the shavings to me, and said, “Clean this up.”

But a guy came by and looked at the boat and said, “I know that boat.” 

And it was John's son, David. So David made the introduction to John, and I started corresponding with John, and we were fast friends up until his passing.

And David Zimmerly showed up at the Port Townsend Symposium doing a talk on the Hooper Bay Kayak. And I met up with him after his talk, and he was in the process of writing his book on the subject. And I said I'd love to build it, so he gave me a pre-publication draft of it.

And I built a Hooper Bay and paddled that from my home in Edmonds quite a bit, just along the beach. And then later on carved that model at another one of the boat shows where I had time to fill. 

[DUBSIDE]
So in those times, traditional type boats, skin-on-frames, and maybe the Greenland Paddle was a little teeny minority of the... This was like Euro paddles and fiberglass boats for the most part.

[CHRIS]
Yeah, I would go so far as to say it was insignificant, the traditional movement at that time.

I remember taking Tom Derrer and Kelly Jaden, the founders of Eddyline out. They were intrigued by a skin-on-frame kayak, so they came down to Edmunds and I turned them loose in on my Greenland boats and Kelly came back just beaming, and said, “Well that's a completely different feeling. You can feel the water through this boat. That doesn't happen with our fiberglass boats.”

And the Greenland connection was through a teacher at my high school at Lakeside School in Seattle. He was a whitewater kayaker. He had also known John Heath and I don't know if he built this fiberglass kayak. I know John was in on it, but they made a Greenland frame like a 14-footer kid's boat and then instead of doing all the ribs and stuff they just used plywood forms and longitudinals covered with fiberglass and then pulled the frame out piece by piece.

And my dad brought that boat home and that was the first Greenland kayak I was in. And it was a tight fit to get in. My legs were straight, my toes were down just to get into it, but I just loved paddling it because it was so fast and so unaffected by waves and wind.

So I'd go out until my lower body was numb and then I'd just plow into shore and then just lie on the rocks and wait till I could feel my legs again and scoot back out and I still couldn't get up to walk. But I enjoyed the paddling so much that the hardships that it imposed weren't an issue at all. I was just really inspired by that.

[DUBSIDE]
What was the typical sea kayak in those days that you commonly would see?

[CHRIS]
Well, Eddyline produced the Orca, which was a big boat, beamy and deep and it was meant for camp cruising to carry a lot of gear. And I think people were carrying more gear back then than people would carry now and heavier and bulkier stuff.

[DUBSIDE]
But that would have been before Gore-Tex and before...

[CHRIS]
Gore-Tex was just coming on the market, yeah.

[DUBSIDE]
Certainly before carbon fiber and... 

[CHRIS] 
Long before that, yeah. 

[DUBSIDE] 
I wasn't active in that era, but I was just knowing about it. High volume was a big deal, like you need all this space to carry all this gear for you to go camping.

[CHRIS]
Right, right, right. So with it and weight and windage. And a harder time controlling the boat because you just couldn't reach the water so easily.

[DUBSIDE]
Yeah. Do you have any recollections about John Heath in personal, like at symposiums and things? 

[CHRIS] 
Oh yeah, yeah. I always enjoyed meeting John. Very cheerful guy and knew everything. One of my favorite meetings with John was when he brought Maligiaq.

[DUBSIDE]
I was going to get to that. Yeah, well, here we are. That would have been ’98 or into ’99.

[CHRIS]
You probably know better than I, but that sounds about right. So John wanted me to see Maligiaq doing his rolling.

[DUBSIDE]
Them two coming out here to the Seattle area, right?

[CHRIS]
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So John came and picked me up and we went to some small lake somewhere, I don't remember where it was now. And Maligiaq spoke no English.

[DUBSIDE]
16, 17 years old.

[CHRIS]
16, yeah. And he had a bad cold. And yet the guy was a trooper. He put on his tuilik and got out there and rolled in this cold water. And that just opened my eyes up to what's possible with Greenland kayaks.

I don't remember if I'd, I'd probably, I'd worked on rolling before, but just a basic self-rescue roll, not rolling for the fun of it and the variety of it. 

But the one thing I learned about Maligiaq that I think (we did an exchange with English) is, “How do you like the food here?”

He said, “I like beef jerky.”

It was like the dried seal that he would eat at home.

[DUBSIDE]
As I recall, how you use a Greenland paddle for forward stroke, got to be a bit of a debate on that. Do you recall that?

[CHRIS]
There may have been a debate, but I had my connection with John through Maligiaq and we did an article on the stroke that John got from Maligiaq. That's the slashing stroke where you move the paddle…

[DUBSIDE]
I recall the picture with the angle like a circle. It took a little while for me to make sense of what view of that the thing is. But yeah, the paddle's not going flat through the water.

It's turned in and it goes around like that.

[CHRIS]
Right, right. Yeah. And that was pretty advanced thinking because, you know, they don't make airplanes with wings that flap up and down. They make them to go sideways and the paddle generates a lot of its thrust by going laterally rather than being pushed back.

So, yeah. So if there was a debate about it, I guess I was firmly entrenched on one side.

[DUBSIDE]
Oh, all right. Well, my understanding, the debate was, the other side of that issue was Doug Van Doren had put out a VHS tape in '96, I think it was. And he had figured out his own stroke.

I don't think he had access to Greenlanders in person, certainly, which was not canted at all. It was really low angle thing, lots of short, fast strokes. 

And he got it to work. He could get a kayak going pretty fast. But when they had Maligiaq and saw that Maligiaq did a whole different thing, because Doug Van Doren had the only thing out there, a tape, so there was no other reference point. But once Maligiaq showed the way he did it, then it became like, well, here's a real Greenlander and it went back and forth.

But I know there were plenty of other times in the history of Sea Kayaker Magazine where debates would issue, somebody would write an article and somebody would say, what about this? Then you'd give them a chance to respond. So you were sort of the referee in these things.

And I can imagine you could call it off when you said, I'm not going to print any more stuff. And people write in but just don't print that stuff. But you had to know when to give it enough time for somebody to make a valid point.

[CHRIS]
Yeah. It required a certain amount of ability to visualize how things work, both in construction and with paddling strokes, and to understand people's background and where they're coming from. With Maligiaq being the champion, there wasn't much question about whether or not he was doing something that was unorthodox.

But diplomacy was a big part of the job, as well as making decisions, being able to back them up. And yeah, there were things that people would object to, but doing a bimonthly had plenty of time to do research so that whatever got published, I could stand behind. So I never had too much trouble with getting argued about.

[DUBSIDE]
So at some point, you started to do the scenario ones that eventually turned into the Deep Trouble books.

[CHRIS]
Yeah, the safety articles.

[DUBSIDE]
Which was a tremendous service in the sea kayaking community.

[CHRIS]
Yeah, that section was pretty popular. Matt Broze and George Gronseth were the leading contributors to those articles and analyses. And I think some people in the industry thought it had a chilling effect on people getting into the sport.

[DUBSIDE]
There’d be people standing to make some money in the industry. 

[CHRIS]
Yeah, they want to sell boats. There's no problem with that. But we saw that when kayaking was at its peak, even the big box stores like Walmart were starting to sell kayaks. And we got worried about people going out beyond their equipment and their skills. So the Deep Trouble series and the safety articles were all a sobering message, but probably the most popular and most useful articles that the magazine did.

[ANDREW]
I bet it sold a lot of dry suits.

[CHRIS]
Well, dressing for the water. Yeah, I had a hard time when people would say, it's summertime, you don't need a dry suit or wetsuit, assuming we'll go swimming in Puget Sound. 

But I did that article on “cold shock” by Moulton Avery.

[DUBSIDE]
Moulton's been a special guest on my podcast.

[CHRIS]
Yes. I’d never heard of cold shock. I'd grown up swimming in Puget Sound, so I knew what the gas reflex was, but never worried about it because I expected it. But that was one that John Dowd said he wouldn't have published because it was just scary.

But it became one of the pivotal articles that was distributed by lecturers at symposiums. So I think it proved its worth. And that wasn't what led to the demise of sea kayaking at all. It just made it safer. And the readership was pretty knowledgeable.

[DUBSIDE]
The other big feature was the review of kayaks with the graphs and everything. Very, very detailed analysis of each.

[CHRIS]
Yeah, that was a chore. John Dawson started doing the analyses.

[DUBSIDE]
Did that start under your editorship? That was already going on.

[CHRIS]
I had to figure out how to keep it going on. And I recall they were doing group reviews. They'd get people together and boats together. And I tried that once up at Deception Pass. And the weather, there was no wind. And getting all these people together just proved to be a pointless way to go about it. 

So I just gathered up a group of experienced sea kayakers and would bring the boats to the office, have them pick them up, take them for however long they needed to. If they needed to wait for windy weather, that was fine.

The data on that required initially making a tank. So we had a 20-foot-long by 4-foot-wide tank in the storeroom, the warehouse by the office, with a plastic liner in it and filled it with water. And then I made a bracket to hold the bow that was attached to a swing arm that was attached to a scale.

And then we would put 150 pounds in, set to duplicate the height and fore-and-aft positioning of a paddler, and then tilt the boat bit by bit, take the readings. And once you get to the edge of secondary stability, the boat has to be absolutely still, because if there's any movement, it tips it to capsize. So that got to be kind of a struggle to get the figures on the downhill side of the graph where the stability was dropping off.

And eventually we went to a computer program to do that. New Wave Systems out of Rhode Island sent me, I think they were floppy disks, the big 4x4 ones. And I put those onto an IBM machine, read several hundred pages of manual, got some help with the developer of the program to establish a protocol for all the measurements we took.

That meant bringing the kayaks into the office and I made a drafting, turned the drafting table with a sliding arm into a vertical table with an extension that slid in and out on ball bearings. And then we used that to trace the cross-sections.

[DUBSIDE]
So did you still have to use the tank in the water?

[CHRIS]
No, we were able to get rid of the tank. And the tank was, you could get stability out of it and waterline length and waterline beam and a few things, but not a whole lot else out of it. Prismatic coefficients and all those things that go into calculations for speed and stability, we couldn't do.

[DUBSIDE]
But you still had the people taking them out?

[CHRIS]
Oh yeah, three people every boat.

[DUBSIDE]
I like the way how you'd say, this person is this tall and this is their weight. You have different weights in a given kayak would give you a feel for different, because everything handles differently, but different how heavy the person is.

[CHRIS]
Yeah, yeah. And if anybody knew my height and weight, they would know I snuck in there a few times. It gave me an opportunity to get out and know a lot of different kayaks.

The downside of that was, though I had experience with kayaks, I had experience with so many of them. People would ask me, what's this boat like? And I don't know, it's one of 150, I can't tell you.

[DUBSIDE]
I like the way you gave the manufacturer a chance to respond to what you printed.

[CHRIS]
That was essential, because aside from having a commercial vested interest, the designers were the ones that created the boats. 

We'd ask for a designer's statement. What's this boat for? Who's it for? That would set the parameters. So that led to fair testing.

And then before we published the review, I would send a draft to the designer and say, is anything in here unfair or inaccurate? And they certainly appreciated the opportunity to do that. And that process led to some really important improvements.

I think it was Eddyline sent in a boat, and they had those cam levers that took a strap, and you'd twist the lever, tighten the hatch down. One of the reviewers said, “Well, these popped open.”

So I took the boat out and did rolling.

And if I kept the paddle too close to the deck, I would snap those levers off. So I told the manufacturer about that. That was Tom Darrer at Eddyline.

And so they put a bend in the things so that the little slider that comes off the end couldn't get past that elevated spot. And then Pygmy Kayaks put a zigzag in it. And that was all because of a review we did of an Eddyline boat in what you could call a complaint, was a bit of advice for improving the product.

There was another boat that someone called the Guide. And we found it had really good tracking, not very good maneuverability. And we said, if you're a guide, you're going to need to scoot in and out of your charges and keep them safe.

By the time we went to press, they had retooled the mold, and they had made a new boat with more rocker. Yeah, I was quite proud of what those reviews did to help the industry along.

[DUBSIDE]
Another big feature was just the exotic place somebody paddled and pictures of the trip and that kind of thing.

[CHRIS]
That worked out pretty well for me because at the height of sea kayaking, when sea kayaks were showing up in commercials for banks and the like, press agencies were looking for stuff to do with kayaks. And they would call me up: “We’d like to get some coverage on Croatia.”

And I said, “Yeah, we can do that.”

And I said, I'll do the article and I can guarantee you it will get printed.” 

So I got to go to Greenland. I got to go to Croatia. I got to go to Palau. I got to go to the Galapagos Islands. I got to go to Florida. Yeah, I enjoyed taking photos and writing stuff up and publishing them and getting to travel a big chunk of the world on paid vacation.

[DUBSIDE]
Andrew was asking me the other day if you'd been to the Greenland competition. I said, I don't believe so. I didn't realize you had been to Greenland.

[CHRIS]
That was Baldvin Christensen who ran a tour group out of Denmark. And he was doing tours in Greenland. So this was on the east coast up to...

[DUBSIDE] 
On the east coast? 

[CHRIS] 
Yeah, to Knud Rasmussen Glacier. So he had four double Kleppers.

And so we were all grouped up in teams. And I was with another guy who was a reporter. So he was going to write as well.

So I can't remember what the name of the town we started at, but just went up the coast up to Knud Rasmussen and came back. I took my dry suit. And Baldwin just wore paddling clothes like everybody else so that he would know how other people were feeling.

And the dry suit came in handy for launching on some rocky stuff. Because I could just wade into the water and steady boats and get people in and out. And then when we get to camp, I like to go out amongst the bergy bits and then just lie down and take a little breather in my dry suit.

And the reporter and I, to get our photographs, we were just stopping at anything interesting. And then we'd race ahead to get ahead of the group, take pictures back. And then they'd go by us and we'd take more pictures.Then we'd race up ahead again. 

And Baldvin was trying to keep everybody well-fed and warm. So we'd have camps with a kitchen tent.

And I hadn't gotten cold during the day with my dry suit. And I was just a little bit hyperactive with just the excitement of being in Greenland. 

And he had everybody in the kitchen tent serving them hot drinks. And I went down to the beach and got a chunk of iceberg with my knife and chipped off some ice cubes, put them in my cup, and went back into the tent. And Baldvin saw me with my ice drink. And he said, “Get out of here with that!”

The thing that impressed me most about Greenland was the scale. At one camp, I took a hike up one of the ridges and got a few hundred feet up above camp and above the fjord. And just looking around. And there's nothing to give you a sense of scale because there's nothing man-made up there. And not even Inuksuks, those stone figures. And all of a sudden, this fishing boat came in to the picture.

Instead of it being this big to me, it was like this big. This terrain is just gigantic. 

And the icebergs were always fascinating. All the colors from white to black and blue and green.

[DUBSIDE]
Well, all good things must come to an end. So let's talk about the demise of Sea Kayaker Magazine. 

[CHRIS] 
OK.

[DUBSIDE] 
Was this sort of a writing on the wall thing for a long time? Or was it kind of sudden? Or how did it happen?

[CHRIS]
It was an inclination that things were thinning out in the sea kayaking community. That the populace wasn't growing.

[DUBSIDE]
I remember that. Symposiums not as full anymore.

[CHRIS]
So both the publication and the symposiums were noting that there wasn't a group of younger people coming in. The Trade Association spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to get new people into the sport. But they were competing with X Games and Gravity Games and all these high adrenaline sports.And that's where the interest went. 

And the final nail in the coffin was stand up paddling. There were so many things you could do on a stand up board like yoga and just piddling around that was appealing more to people than getting into all of the complexities of sea kayaking.

[DUBSIDE]
To the annoyance of those of us who are die hard sea kayakers waiting for this fad to go away. It just never seem to do that. But I mean, I note that Sea Kayaker Magazine defined itself by its very name as a sea kayaker thing.

Was there ever any thought to trying to branch out into these other fields? Or you were you going to just stick with it?

[CHRIS]
We certainly thought about it. Kayak fishing was one of those things.

[DUBSIDE]
The way I see it, that was the big trend. The Greenland was a new cool thing. Then kayak fishing was a new cool thing. Then stand up paddle boards came along.

[CHRIS]
Right, right. And with the fishing, the kayak fishermen, well, a lot of sit-on-tops, which we didn't do a whole lot of. And they developed their own publications and their own online networks.

[DUBSIDE]
My understanding, that wasn't kayakers taking up fishing. That was fishermen taking up kayaking.

[CHRIS]
Right.

[DUBSIDE]
It was a brand new audience to them.

[CHRIS]
Right, right. And the other thing was, with few exceptions, we were all sea kayakers. It's what we knew and it's what we loved.

And it just wasn't the connection with any of those other branches that the paddling public took up that appealed to us. 

The end did come rather suddenly when it came to running the numbers. Where are we?

And the big problem was what's called subscriber liability. You take all this money for subscriptions. And if you go out of business, you still owe them the magazines that they paid for.

The manufacturers were feeling the pinch too. 65 degrees north sometimes would produce a half a dozen new boats every year. And then they got down to one.

And at the trade show that presence of sea kayaking used to be a central thing. There'd be this big pool in the middle of the event. And that, I can't remember if that disappeared entirely.

And we held steady for quite a while. But once the subscriber liability was figured in, it was imperative to just stop now. Because if you're taking new subscriptions, you're just adding to the debt.

So we sold the, I don't know if “sold” is the right term, but was it Rapid Media, the paddling magazine, took up the subscriber liability and fulfilled our obligations to get magazines to people. And it was a difficult way to exit the community because we felt an obligation to all the people that had supported us.

[DUBSIDE]
I mean, to me, Sea Kayaker was the voice of sea kayaking, the authoritative voice of sea kayaking at that time period. Yeah, no question.
[CHRIS]
And I thought, well, if I'm going to send the readers there, I'm going to go there too. So I did a few columns for Paddler Magazine. I think it was Paddler.

And they were looking for a different focus than I could provide. So I just had to tell them we're on a divergent path here.

[DUBSIDE]
Well, if I can be so bold as to speak for the sea kayaking community, we very much appreciate all that you've done for the sport. It's a tremendous contribution, really. Thank you for that.

[CHRIS]
Well, it meant a whole lot to me to have a job for 25 years with Sea Kayaker that was so meaningful to me and to see an impact of the work we all did for the community.