By Corran Addison

Corran Addison is a regular contributor to the Paddler magazine and owns Soul Waterman

www.soulwaterman.com

Are you a gear breaker?

There are two kinds of people in the world.

OK, fine, more than two, but for the purposes of this article, we’re going with two. People who look after their stuff, and people who… well, don’t. It’s not malicious. It’s not intentional, and in fact, when I bring it up with people who seem to destroy everything they own as a matter of course, they look at me with a confused blank stare of, “What are you talking about?”

Since I was about 16, I’ve been a sponsored athlete. I’m blessed with two skills that have made this possible; pretty much any sport I try, I get good at, and I’m an incorrigible self-promoter. The result is that anything I get into, I quickly get sponsored to do. At worst, I get all my gear for free. So I’m pretty well placed to treat my gear with disdain, abuse it, be careless with it, and then get more. After all, for me, it’s generally free.

But I don’t. I’m infuriatingly picky with my gear. I baby it and do my best to keep it ‘like new’ for as long as I’ll need it. This is because I want my gear to function on day 100 exactly like it did on day one, whether I pay for it or not. I’m a genuine and lifelong believer that equipment does make a difference.

My wife ribs me that until very recently, I still had some 1990’s bright yellow Cébe sunglasses that I still wore, in almost perfect condition. That’s because, after 20 years, they’re pretty much in the same condition they were when I got them. I have snowboards from my time as a sponsored athlete that sit in my garage collecting dust because the designs are outdated, but the boards themselves are in perfect condition still, despite many seasons of use. My three-year-old carbon 303 is in pristine condition – barely a scratch on it. And today, it performs exactly like it did the first day I got it.

OK, maybe I’m a little excessive with my ‘protect your gear’. When I met my wife, and I took her to the Lachines to surf for the first time, I told her while walking up the slippery rocks, “If you slip and fall, protect your board. Take the hit on your body; you’ll heal, but if you land on the board, it’s ruined.” I instilled that mindset into her, and today, we both do it with our seven-year-old son.

Everything they own is broken

But there is another group of people that I can’t even begin to understand. Most pay full price for their gear. And almost instantly, the gear starts to fall apart around them. It’s like as soon as they touch it, it just starts to decompose. Everything they own is broken, taped up, and ragged looking. The door handle on their car is busted off, the hip pads in their boat are ripped out and duct-taped into place, with the bottom deformed and warped. Their paddles are delaminating, and the snowboard bindings are held together with tie wraps and tape.

Marilyn Monroe once said, “Sometimes good things fall apart, so better things can fall together.” Is there a subconscious underlying truth to that for all the ‘breakers’ out there?

Of course, they are not to blame. I hear it all the time about how companies can’t build stuff properly. It doesn’t matter if it’s the toaster, a car, or a kayak: the makers did a poor job building it.

Strangely, it’s the manufacturers of literally every single thing they own that is incapable of producing a quality product. I have these conversations with my friends like this, and none of them acknowledges that perhaps it’s not the equipment that’s the problem. “How is it,” I ask, “that everything you own is broken, and nothing I own is broken, and we own the same stuff?”

Blank, confused stare.

As I said, it’s not malicious nor even intentionally abusive (for the most part). It’s just the way they handle their stuff.

‘The breakers’

In my circle of friends, there are a handful of these guys, ‘the breakers’. I’m going to claim this term as mine. Some are worse than others, but there is a similar streak in all of them and the way they go about the daily routine of life that results in everything around them falling to pieces. But within this clique, there is the champion, the king – the master of all masters of ‘breakers’.

His name is Shred

Yes, that really is his nickname. At first, I thought it was because the guy shreds (actually, he does), but I think it’s more appropriate to credit him with that name because literally every single thing he touches, he shreds to pieces.

Enter Karl Gustavsen. Kayaker, snowboarder, rafter, and an all-around great guy. Shred.

I first met Karl when I moved to Asheville, NC (USA) in 1993. He was a raft guide on the French Broad River, and I was paddling for Prijon. Karl and his friend Pat Miljour tried my Hurricane, loved it and used their sparse and hard-earned raft guide pay to buy a hurricane each. Mine? Mine was free. Within weeks, Karl’s Hurricane looked like it was seasons old. Scratched up deck and hull, the insides ripped to pieces, missing screws, holes oversized from movement, duct tape holding things together. Meanwhile, both Pats and my boat were fine.

All of our boats went on the same river. They went on top of the same rafting bus to the put in. We played the same holes, surfed the same waves, splatted the same rocks. Our boats were just fine. You should have heard Karl ranting on about how crap the build quality of his boat was.

Snowboarding

That winter, we ski patrolled together. Pat, Karl, Nathan Brown and Dave Durham and I were five of the first snowboarders certified by the National Ski Patrol on snowboards. We rode together five days a week at a small mountain in N Carolina called Wolf Laurell. That winter, we all started with new boards. Pat and I had a brand new Nitro, and Karl had a K2 Fat Bob.

Within days of the season starting, Karl had delaminated the top sheet from the core, broken a high back, and cracked a boot. K2 replaced the board. The replacement was broken within a week or so. If memory serves me correctly, they replaced the board four or five times that winter. Clearly, the board was poorly made, right? So next winter, he gets an Asym Air from Burton. Same story with four or five replacement boards through the season. Our sponsored North Face ski patrol suits were great, but Karls was covered in duct tape and glue.

I am tempted to say that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg might have gotten his quote of, “Move fast and break things. Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough,” from Karl. It certainly describes Karl.

Everything on Karl’s Toyota truck was falling off. Handles, bumpers… upholstery was torn, screws had come out of the inner panelling.

I was fascinated and began to observe. How was it possible that literally, everything he owned atomizes as it all does?

I’d walk into the ski patrol hut, place my board on the floor carefully, and tilt it up against the wall. Karl would come in and do the same. But there was a difference. I’d carefully place the board onto the floor and then lightly tilt it against the wall. Karl, on the other hand, when the board was about 2-3 inches above the floor still, let it drop and then clatter against the wall. He’d drop his stuff onto the ground, step onto it as he crossed the room, lightly kicking it so it brushed his board, which would clatter to the ground. I’d carry my board edges away from my jacket so the coat wouldn’t get cut. Karl didn’t care, and as a result, his jacket was torn on both sides at edge level from walking to the lifts.

Brusque and aggressive

Stepping into my binding, I open it all out, hold the straps open, and then step in and close it all. Karl would drop his board onto the snow (and rocks) and step onto the binding; however, it was when he left the patrol hut, then kick the high back and any straps that had flopped into the chassis out of the way, until he could get his foot in. Then with brusque, aggressive hand movements, thread the straps into the buckles and ‘angrily’ ratchet it down. Meanwhile, I’m softly threading the stuff together and ratcheting without extending the buckle beyond its natural hinge point.

My buckles last for years and Karl’s weeks. But when his high back snapped off the chassis, or the foam peels off the ankle strap, or the spring in the buckle stops working, the gear was always to blame.

It was the same with kayaks. I squirm into my boat, one hip at a time, so I don’t rip the hip pads off the seat. Karl plumps his backside down onto the boat, pads, backband and all under him and sort of squishes his way in. No wonder everything from webbing to pads to foam to glue rips out and tears. When I’m getting out, I place my paddle onshore – Karl launches his carbon paddle yards up the bank onto rocks.

Not intentionally destructive

I know, I’m painting a pretty poor picture of Karl, but he’s not intentionally destructive. He’s not trying to break his stuff like a five-year-old might. He’s an amazing guy, an incredible athlete, and a very good friend. And he’ll get a giggle out of reading this article.

But the sorts of actions that I’ve just described are simply not on his radar. To him, he sees absolutely no difference in how he treats his gear than how I do. We both put our boards on the floor, we both put our paddles onshore, we both squirmed into our boats.

His stuff is just poorly made. Or he was unlucky in that he got factory rejects. Pick one.

Product testing

The flip side of this is that I’m a terrible product tester when it comes to seeing how gear will fail. I take such good care of my equipment that nothing breaks. But I have friends who paddle my boats that are ‘Karl lite’. It’s accelerated testing in my eyes. These guys will break in weeks what most people take seasons to break. Want to know what’s going to fail? Give it to them – you’ll get your answer quickly, which helps bring the product to market faster as you quickly learn what’s going to break and how.

I’ve tried to treat gear I’m testing like this. But I don’t seem able to break it, no matter how hard I use the gear or how hard I abuse it ‘in normal use’. When it comes to breaking things, I simply don’t have the Midas touch. One of my friends, Marc Godbout, I now sponsor. On top of being the 2016 two-time World Cup freestyle silver medalist, Marc destroys everything I give him. Paddles, boats – it doesn’t matter. If there is something that’s going to fail, Marc will find it and find it fast.

So it’s not all bad, I suppose, if you’re someone like me looking for product testers, or you’re someone of Marc’s fantastic skill set looking for sponsors. But if you’re paying retail for your gear, and everything you own seems to be ‘poorly built’ (regardless of brand or sport – “it’s all built like crap”), perhaps it’s not the equipment that’s the problem?

More attuned to the phenomenon

I’m not a psychologist. I have no clue what our upbringing or personality makes us one or the other, but since my days in the 1990s with Karl, I’ve become far more attuned to the phenomenon.

I know that I’m teaching him to look after his stuff in my son’s case and have explained the performance advantage as to why. Would he have been one of the careful ones anyway? Or would he have been a breaker, and I have cured him? I’ll never know, I suppose.

As a boatbuilder, I’ve learned to spot this when I get an ‘it just broke’ email, and I see that everything around the broken part looks like it’s on its last legs too. Yeah, my product isn’t defective, mate. You just broke it!

So which one are you? Are you the sort of person that looks after their gear, or are you that other ‘happy go lucky’ one that’s always wondering why nothing seems to last or work properly for long? I’m not picking on either one, just giving the readers a chance to reflect a little and ponder over this.