Paddling With the Current : Outdoors: Business is growing for a handful of Southland stores dealing with kayaks, as more people discover joys of taking to water.

David Tremblay, an avid canoeist when growing up back East, adopted scuba diving as his primary water sport when he moved to Southern California several years ago.

But Tremblay missed being on top of the water. He would often look longingly at people in kayaks--long, thin, double-ended boats of plastic or fiberglass.

So the Aliso Viejo resident recently ended up at Southwind Kayak Center in Irvine, determined to have a kayak.

Less than an hour later, Tremblay handed Southwind co-owner Doug Schwartz a check totaling almost $1,400 for equipment, including a bright red, 14-foot molded plastic kayak and a $190 double-bladed paddle.

Schwartz had just sold a similar package of kayak, paddle, life vest, spray skirt and emergency bilge pump to a mid-50s professional from Long Beach. He shook his head in wonder.

“This isn’t a typical day,” he said of the $3,000 in pre-lunchtime sales.

If not typical, it was at least indicative of the direction in which the business of catering to the sport of sea kayaking has been heading in recent years along the Southern California coast.

Sea kayakers paddle out beyond the surf line or, if less adventurous, in protected inlets and bays like Orange County’s Newport Bay. When kayaks are used in lakes and on gentle rivers, the sport is called kayak touring--but enthusiasts use the same boats and equipment for both fresh and saltwater.

The more daring branch of the sport, practiced in places where rivers aren’t confined to concrete channels, is whitewater kayaking. Along the Southern California coast, innovative paddlers seeking adrenaline rushes have developed the sport of kayak surfing--using the pounding ocean surf to propel the short, highly maneuverable river kayaks on rides that they claim can equal running rapids on a freshwater river.

Stores like Southwind sell both kinds of boats, but it is sea kayaking that is blossoming.

“But it’s not a boom sport like roller blading,” said Jeff Poffinberger, a manager at Long Beach Water Sports. “It’s still kind of eccentric, that’s why there aren’t very many (stores).” The Long Beach store, which opened eight years ago, is the oldest kayak specialty shop in Southern California.

Most paddle-sport specialty stores are small operations, where a year with a $250,000 gross is a very good one. And while some kayaks and equipment are sold by big outdoor retailers like REI and Sports Chalet, as well as by diving and water-sports stores up and down the coast, there are only about half a dozen retailers in all of Southern California that deal exclusively in kayaks and canoes. Ocean-loving Orange County has two of them--Southwind and the older but smaller Paddle Power in Newport Beach.

At an average cost of $1,200 to get started, the sport doesn’t attract the teen and college crowds--a demographic group that can quickly create a boom when its fancy is captured.

Instead, sea kayaking has been discovered by aging baby boomers.

The typical customer for a sea kayak is 30 to 60 years old, retailers say. Ocean kayakers tend to be college-educated professionals who come to the sport with a background of outdoor pursuits--hiking, camping, bicycling, canoeing. The only thing about the profile that seems to change from coast to coast is the gender mix. In Southern California, Schwartz said, kayak sales are about evenly divided between men and women. On the East Coast, however, about 70% of the buyers are men.

The sport got its start in the Pacific Northwest about 25 years ago and kayakers started appearing in noticeable numbers off the Southern California coastline in Santa Barbara about 1980. By 1985, the sport had made its way down the coast.

The first boats were made of fiberglass and other composite materials and were costly because of the huge amount of hand labor required to build each one. It was the 1980s advent of the plastic boat, made by spinning liquefied plastic inside an aluminum mold, that made kayaks less expansive and increased their popularity.

Southern California is the home of one of the newest wrinkles in kayaking--the so-called open cockpit or “sit-atop” boat. Ocean Kayak, one of the principal manufacturers, started in Malibu about 15 years ago and since has moved to Washington to be closer to the center of the kayaking world.

While the traditional kayak is a hollow shell that encloses the paddler from the waist down, the sit-atop is a molded platform on which the paddler sits. The benefit is that they are self-bailing since they don’t have cockpits that can fill with water, are relatively easy to climb back onto if capsized, and are far less expensive than closed-cockpit boats. The drawbacks are that the paddler is exposed to the elements and must sit in a puddle of water at all times and that the boats don’t lend themselves to long-distance touring or open ocean paddling.

Still, sit-atops are a big reason kayaking has caught on in Southern California, said Mark Olson, owner of Paddlesports of Santa Barbara. “They’re easy to use and fun” and are less intimidating to novices, he said.

Olson said sales have doubled each year since he opened in 1985. “We sold one boat the first year, two the next” and about 200 last year, he said.

Even the recession hasn’t dampened the market--kayaking, in fact, is counter-cyclical.

“When times are good, people interested in the water will buy a powerboat or a sailboat, but when things get tight, that $800 kayak isn’t nearly as hard to swing as a $25,000 bass boat,” said Neil Weisner-Hanks, executive director of the paddle-sports industry’s two trade groups, Trade Assn. of Sea Kayakers and the North American Paddle Sports Assn.

Schwartz and partner Joanne Turner, whose official business name is Southwind Sports Resource, opened the kayak center 14 months ago after operating a kayak tours and lessons business out of their Tustin garage for nearly seven years.

The couple, who met eight years ago while kayaking, had four students in their first commercial lesson in 1986. By the end of their second year, they were hiring additional instructors.

In 1992--the year before they opened the store and started devoting most of their time to it--Turner and Schwartz had several summer weekends in which 95 students kept them and seven part-time instructors paddling frantically at sites from San Onofre to Ventura--the stretch of coast from which Southwind pulls most of its business. They also conducted more than a dozen tours, ranging from weekend kayak-camping and wildlife watching trips down the Colorado River and at Lake Mead and Morro Bay to a weeklong trip down Utah’s gentle Green River and a week paddling around the island of Hawaii.

This year, Southwind’s most exotic trips--all fully catered--include the Green River week, three weeks paddling around the islands of the Kingdom of Tonga--the only monarchy remaining in Polynesia--and a week kayaking up the protected inside passage of southeastern Alaska watching humpback whales.

Schwartz said it is the opportunity to get away to places like that and use their avocation as a way to have fun while earning their living doing it that kept him and Turner out of the retail business until recently.

“We’re a pretty low-key bunch,” Oceanquest Kayak Center owner Larry Stephens said. The 50-year-old former tile contractor took his first paddle five years ago and opened Oceanquest in his Oceanside garage in 1991. He sells “an average of half a kayak a month” but makes enough money to pay the mortgage by teaching lessons and guiding kayak tours along the San Diego coastline.

At Southwind, the lesson and tour business grew so big it pushed Schwartz and Turner out of the water. “Our clients kept asking us where to buy this boat or that piece of equipment. One day we realized we were sending thousands of dollars a week to other businesses,” he said. So Southwind Kayak Center was born.

It took six months of planning and a whole lot of money to start the retail store--which opened in April, 1993. Schwartz declined to discuss finances in detail, but said the store exceeds $500,000 a year in gross sales and keeps $250,000 or so worth of inventory in stock. About 60% of Southwind’s revenue comes from retail sales, the rest is income from lessons and tours.

At 4,500 square feet, Southwind physically is one of the biggest stores in the country devoted entirely to kayaking (well, not entirely--there is one canoe in stock.)

The store offers customers 40 different boats from domestic and foreign manufacturers at prices ranging from $350 to $4,500. Along with the boats, Southwind features racks of specialized paddlers’ clothing and equipment that includes $350 graphite paddles, racks of books, maps and instructional videos, kayak sails, flotation devices, even special watertight bags to keep food and camping equipment dry.

Schwartz said the retail operation won’t expand regardless of its success. “We have no desire to grow any bigger in retailing. What we’d really like to do is find someone who can run this place for us and concentrate on increasing our touring business,” he said.

But that’s a few years away. In the meantime, business as usual for Schwartz and Turner means a lot of 17-hour days in the store.

Avid advocates of kayaking and ecologically sensitive outdoor recreation, the couple will spend most of this week with officials of the National Park Service pursuing Turner’s dream of creating a national kayak camping trail through the Channel Islands off the Santa Barbara Coast. Turner has been working for years to get the park service to establish beach camping grounds for kayakers on several of the islands so paddlers can spend days exploring the caves and rugged coasts of the marine-life-rich islands without having to return to the mainland every afternoon.

Schwartz said he and Turner also are working with the concessionaire at Irvine Lake to get the ban on kayaking lifted so kayakers in Orange County will have a calm freshwater place to paddle.

The upshot of both efforts might be to increase the popularity of the sport and Southwind’s opportunities to sell more gear and more lessons, but Schwartz says both campaigns began before the store was started and are rooted in a love of kayaking, not the pursuit of money.

“You don’t go into outdoor sports for money,” he said. “You do it for the lifestyle. We’re lucky because nothing has really gone wrong for us in this business. But if there is a lesson here for people who want to turn their avocation into a career, it’s that you’d better be sure it’s a heartfelt passion and not just a passing fancy. It takes a great deal of tenacity to survive in this kind of business, and if you don’t have a love for what you’re doing to help get you through things, then success just isn’t going to happen.”