Kind of a hard question for me to answer definitively. My family had no connection with boats of any kind. When I was about ten, I went to a summer kid's camp at a lake in the Sierras outside of Grass Valley. There was a fleet of aluminum canoes there, which we all were going to get some exposure to. But before that could happen I came down with an excruciating earache that sent me home. The memory of the alluring sight of those canoes floating at the dock on the mountain lake never left me.
Several years later, a winter storm left some flooding in my town. There was a photo on the front page of the local paper of a teen paddling his home built kayak around the city park. I thought, "how cool is that"?
Not long after that, a friend who had built a skin on frame kayak with plans from BSA passed the plans on to me. With a little help from the neighbor who had a custom woodworking business in his home shop, I produced this thing we would now call a 11.5' recreational kayak. I had some great days in that on the local lake and river. And that inspired me to join a group for a day trip down the nearby Russian River in canoes. I liked it okay, but wasn't overly impressed compared to my kayak. None of us had any clue of what we were doing - or should be doing.
A couple years later, my kayak was stolen. Work life and friends led me to other things (mostly motorcycles). The only canoe I came into contact with during that time was the Colman....which didn't entice me.
Eventually, when my kids were young teens (later than I now wish) I started thinking about boats again. I decided I wanted something I could paddle with my wife or a kid. So that led me to buy the first canoe I found that wasn't a Coleman. That happened to be a 13' Navarro Legacy. That was a nice little canoe, but it didn't take me long to figure out I needed something bigger.
Oh, back up several decades to when I was 14. I was taking sailing lessons with a group of kids. Two Sunfish dinghies and eight kids meant we had wait time while we took turns in pairs. During my wait, one of the guys found some river trash, in the form of a 4'x4'x1' block of styrofoam and an 8' stick. Being normal boys, the two of us began a little competition to see who could stand on that floating block and pole it the farthest across the little inlet by the dock. We both did surprisingly well at it. This bit of history came to mind while in that little Navarro, and of course I had to break that rule and stand up and push off the shallow bottom with my too long paddle. That was an epiphany.
So what followed was what sailboat owners call a spell of "two-foot-itis", and I was soon in a 16' royalex canoe. That made poling really work well. Poling, to me, was an obvious route to getting to fishing holes on the local river without a shuttle - a huge issue for me because my unconventional schedule usually disallowed any shuttle help. Someone on Pnet mentioned Harry Rock's book, and putting that to practice hooked me hard. It's been all downhill from there.
