Kayak: The New Frontier
The Animated Manual of Intermediate and Advanced Whitewater Technique
Laugh and learn kayaking skills, from basic to advanced, through detailed text and more than 400 humorous illustrations!
If you want to learn how to paddle—and laugh out loud while doing so—William Nealy’s classic illustrated kayaking-skills manual remains dead-on hilarious. Kayak demonstrates important paddling techniques through humorous illustrations, along with detailed explanations from the renowned kayaker.
This book is perfect for beginners and more experienced paddlers, from hardcore hippy hairboaters who used to catch air in their block-long Dancers to insane youngsters clattering tiny plastic boats down steep creeks with more rocks than water. You’ll get to know everything from kayak and rapids anatomy to paddling techniques to river rescue methods.
Inside you’ll find
- Over 400 illustrations that break down even the most complex kayaking skills
- Carefully crafted information to reflect the latest in paddling technology
- How-to descriptions that make even difficult whitewater techniques understandable
William Nealy is back and more useful and entertaining than ever. You may break a rib laughing, but with him holding your hand, you’ll be less likely to break a bone while boofing an insane rapid or even an entire waterfall!
A world famous cartoonist, called the "Poet Laureate" of the whitewater community, William Nealy became a cult figure in the world of outdoor sports with his combination of instruction and artful caricatures in his paddling and mountain biking manuals. Nealy died in 2001.
As an instructor, Nealy's strength lay in his ability to convey in simple terms the often counter-intuitive techniques of adventure sports.
Nealy was arguably the best-known ambassador of his sport, entertaining and instructing hundreds of thousands of paddlers through his illustrated books. The success of the first edition of Kayak as an instruction manual hinged squarely on Nealy's ability to convey himself personally to the reader. It is all too obvious that each of the mishaps that befall the illustrated characters populating each of his books happened, in reality, to Nealy himself. That self-effacement, while hilarious, also embodied empathy for the reader and for the mishaps that were sure to befall him as he bounced his or her way down the steep learning curve of the sport. In short, each reader of Kayak, as well as Inline (an inline skating manual) and Mountain Bike, grew to trust Nealy as a teacher because he felt he knew William as a friend.
