Kindly Old Dr. K’s Hydrosphere

The Outdoor Industries Association occasionally publishes real numbers on participation and economics of various outdoor sports, including whitewater boating.  I took their numbers on participation in whitewater kayaking state-by-state and reorganized them into something like reasonable whitewater community regions.  I also divided the number of paddlers by the area of the state to get a boater density figure, i.e. how many paddlers per square mile for each state, just for fun.

There are a few surprises in here.  The region with the highest relative participation is New England, with a full 10% of Vermonters being paddlers.  Rhode Island has the highest boater density, with 20 paddlers per square mile!  What’s up with Indiana, with more whitewater boaters than Colorado or Georgia?  California by itself is as big as most other regions of the country.  New York City and its environs also constitute an entire region. 

Some cautions about these numbers:  first, they are old.  These figures are from 2001, and the sport has changed considerably since then.  Other OIA studies indicate that the number of people in the sport has fallen by as much as 80% since that time. 

Not every state was included: the states that don’t appear had numbers of paddlers too small to count reliably.  Also, the OIA based these figures on a metric they call”participants” which they define as a person who has been in a whitewater kayak at least once in the past year.  They also sometimes measure a category called “enthusiasts”, who have been in a kayak at least three times in the past year.  Participants outnumber enthusiasts about ten to one, so if you are using these numbers to describe what we might call “real” whitewater paddlers, i.e. people who own their own gear and go out regularly, you should mentally divide everything by ten.  AW says in their latest promotional video that there are about 100,000 whitewater boaters in the US, and that sounds about right.

So check these out.  How does your state and region rate?

I recently helped out some colleagues doing inspections of some dam structures.  My young engineers didn’t have a boat to get out to the riser, so they came to Kindly Old Dr. K for some help.  The Superstar may not be known as a workboat, but that’s what I had on my car, so it was pressed into service.  It turns out that playboats make fine platforms for dam inspections.  Standing up in the cockpit to get onto the ladder is dicier than a johnboat, but, hey, I had a budget and a schedule to meet.  Of course, practicing my double pump hardly slowed me down at all.  Sometimes I can’t believe I get paid for this stuff.

Photos are by Troy Biggs, PE.