The Global Paddling Community

I’m not going to go through all the details of what was new at the Kanumesse 2009, since most of it has already been said and shown online (see below). Instead I’ll limit myself to listing a couple of trends I noticed, and then giving you a good list of links for further reading.

Trends

Listing trends is always a bit arbitrary and some have them have been going on for some time, but I’ll still list some things that I noticed. If you don’t find them useful now, it will still be interesting to compare them to next year’s list…

• SUP – Stand Up Paddling is still booming. The market probably doubled during the past 12 months and that growth is expected to continue during 2010.
• Gear to pieces – An increasing number of craft and paddles are take-apart, foldable or inflatable: sea kayaks, open canoes, surfboards, SUP, paddles.
• Graphics – There are more products with detailed and colorful graphics than ever: kayaks, paddles, spray skirts.
• Europe – It looks like the financial crisis hit America harder than Europe, and with the weak US dollar, the number of American manufacturers entering the European market is increasing.

Media Coverage

Playak was running a Twitterwall for the Kanumesse before and during the event. The wall picked up all tweets, photos, blog posts and forum discussions about the event every 5 minutes. The inherent flood of ‘information’ is obviously not for everyone, so I filtered out (what I think are) some of the more interesting links for you (alphabetic, English language only):

• Jackson Kayak
• Kayak Pucon
• PaddleBlogs (a.o.): Youtube frenzy
• Nick Troutman
• Palm Blogs
• Playak: Photo frenzy
• Shred Ready
• Steve Fisher
• Team I-Canoe part 1
• Team I-Canoe part 2

All in all, a great show, and a fantastic party…

See you next year!