How to recruit new canoe paddlers?

Glenn MacGrady said:

This is an excellent thread topic on a very difficult issue.

As a member of the board of directors of the Wooden Canoe Heritage Association, I can say that we and many boards before us constantly struggle with the even more niche question: How to get more people interested in and involved with wood canoes, which mainly means wood/canvas canoes. I have not yet heard any magic answer to this, and I have none.

One common phenomenon expressed by the confirmed canoeists on this forum is exposure to canoes at a formative early age, either with family or scouting or summer camps. Those institutions used to use wood/canvas canoes exclusively before WW2. After the war, lots of us were exposed to aluminum canoes as children, particularly from airplane maker Grumman. Then fiberglass canoes in the 1950s and 1960s, but still canoes.

I suspect that young kids today, consumed as they are with electronic socializing and screen time, to the extent they even are exposed to outdoor activities at all, will find mostly kayaks in the former canoeing institutions. Especially in the U.S., where day tripping far, far exceeds overnight wilderness tripping.

In the late 1970s and 1980s, the whitewater canoe clubs in the northeast U.S. had success in recruiting newbies into whitewater canoeing in Royalex canoes, which was a time when rotomolded plastic kayaks were just coming into the market. As those kayaks became more and more available, running whitewater in open canoes began to diminish. In the early 90s, sea kayaks began also began to become more available and popular.

As many above have pointed out, newbies seem to be driven to inexpensive kayaks because they are cheaper to buy, easier to propel forward, and are more stable and easier to self-rescue.

I'd be interested in any statistics that show the trend of all paddle sports over time, normalized for population growth, if anyone can find such data.

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bonpawtuck said:

The Outdoor Industry Association has some data on this. Most of it is behind a paywall, but their 2015 special report on paddle sports (attached) is public. It only covers 2010-2014. According to the report, canoe participation dropped from about 10.6 million people to 10 million people in the US during that window, so an absolute decrease as well as a relative decrease.

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How to recruit new canoe paddlers?​

tketcham said:

Both water craft need a way to haul them, although short, plastic kayaks have more options.

Unless you enjoy the solitude of transporting it to a distant remote water body. The canoeists who I know tend to enjoy solitude more than the average kayaker, IMO. When it comes to larger waters, those wide open waters tend to collect big heavy fast motorboats. I suppose kayakers as a whole will handle, and may even seek out large rolling wakes more than canoeists might enjoy rolling through and over.

Kayakers tend to be more social and are prone to travel in larger groups when they can, from my observation. Near me there is such a local kayaking "club', who make weekly excursions into various Adirondack lakes not far away. A couple of years ago, at my small 2 mile long lake, the private access gate happened to be temporarily inoperative and was left up for residents to come and go.

As president of the lake association, I happened to drive into the beach area near the gate to find not a single open parking spot available for local members to enjoy our sand breach and pavilion. As I looked down the lake, I saw a continuous broad line of kayaks heading away, stretching the entire width of the lake. I was most concerned about a loon family with two recently hatched chicks who spend time in the area where the kayaks were thrashing. As lake association president, I quickly drove to my property a mile down lake to intercept them, 28 kayaks by my count, and I hopped in my canoe to investigate.

On the water, I asked within the lead kayakers who authorized them to allow their massive number access on a known private gated lake? Crickets and shrugging shoulders was my answer from all of them. Finally, someone gave me a name, who I knew as a local land owner. But he was not even there with them. Invoking my authority, I told them they had to depart the lake immediately and so they turned around and left, never to return again, although on their way out, a couple of kayaks stopped to approach the loon family a little closer than the recommend comfortable observation non-harassment distance, as I explained to them. I wasn't mean, but I was firm. I later spoke with the local guy who planned to be with them, he said he had another commitment and could not paddle that day. He understands now to my objection, and I then wrote a policy for the Association Board to approve, requiring that any size group of visitors must be accompanied by a legal local lot owner to access Association property as a guest.

My lake does have many lot owners who enjoy kayaks only, but some do have canoes that never get used. I have a fleet of 13 canoes at my camp, but unless I have friends or family over, most of the time I am out only in one of my solo canoes, most likely training for an upcoming canoe race, or I am inspecting the advancing vegetation growth in the wetlands. For the past couple of years, I have put a notice in our quarterly newsletter, offering free canoe lessons for anyone who might want to learn But, so far no one has come forward with desire to learn.

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