Way back in time......
If anybody has kayak photos older than this, the boats were probably made out of seal skins!
I THINK the river photos were January 1977. My brother, Frank, invited me to join a float trip on the Caddo River. It was very cold and I was to paddle tandem with a guy I struggle to remember. I don't think I even owned a rain coat, so I'm seen here in my cowboy hat, PBR in hand, a down vest, borrowed shell, and , if you look closely, you can see the camlok beavertail closure of a diver's wet suit top over my jeans. At least I didn't have a Kool cigarette in hand in this pic, as I did in another of this set. Diving gear was the only readily available cold-water gear around. Frank got certified as a diver at the Downtown YMCA while he was in junior high or high school, followed later by my Dad and I, though had I sold my hard-accumulated gear by this time because I didn't own a vehicle and there was no way I could afford to go anywhere.
(Side note: Our Dad lived in Fort Smith and opened a dive shop in his garage. I remember my him explaining the just-introduced modern marvel of "velcro" to me, as it was a boon to divers accustomed to dealing with jammed twist cams on gear.)
In the next photo is our own Tomcat, also attired in a long-sleeved US Divers wetsuit top, horse-collar life jacket and paddling what I think is a Phoenix kayak. Brother Frank is in the background.
The top photo is at the Little Rock Tennis Center in the summer of 1978. d*ck Held Kayaks sponsored a roll session and I was being instructed by John Fergason. I did roll the boat in that session, but didn't get back in a kayak until the following year, after which I swam all across this great land of ours before acquiring a reliable roll.
A key selling point of the d*ck Held boats was that they were designed to easily break in half at the cockpit in the event of a pin. Really. I couldn't make that up. Early big-water legend Walt Blackadar had recently drowned pinned in his boat, so that feature got the attention of the small but growing whitewater community.
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Things started developing fairly quickly around this time. We got Seda helmets, plastic boats were displacing glass and hard-earned skills allowed us to bite off bigger challenges.
