The Outdoor Retail show is always a blurrr of action for anyone involved in the industry. We spend months preparing our new lines of products to present to all our dealers at the show. It looms large on our horizon through out the year. This year was a huge transition for us at Liquidlogic. We are back to producing a full flatwater line as well as our ever present whitewater line of boats. And most importantly we started our Automatic for the People campaign. We have always relied heavily on feedback from paddlers but this year we made it official. We asked you all on our facebook page to let us know what you wanted us to do and we did it (well most of it)! and its working! Your feedback has helped us create some really great products and improve what we already have.
Category Archives: Company News
The first prototype of the Stompers on the Green River
The first day that I had the protos of the Stomper 80 the Green was so crowded that I didn’t want to have our brand new protos out on the river will the entire world to see. So we had headed over to the Chattooga river where we knew we wouldn’t run into too many folks, especially since it was over 4ft. The next day was a Monday and we knew that it wouldn’t be crowded out there on the river so we decided to drop in on a good flow of 15″ on the stick. A couple of us had paddled the boat the day before but John and Jeff hadn’t so those guys were excited. They geared up quickly and were on their way down the trail almost before I could get my frozen dry suit on.
The First Round of Prototyping of the Liquidlogic Stomper
Woody and the rest of the team and I had been thinking about doing a flatter hulled creek boat for a long time. In fact I had started a design a while back but had put it on the back burner because the Jefe as always is still killing it for us in stores, and everybody loves it, but once we got all that feedback from you all it was a no brainer. The full on design process began. I worked off the initial design concept that I had started earlier and started adding new thoughts and details. The main focus of the design was to get more speed out of a creek boat that was super easy to use, comfortable, and bomber safety wise.
The Design and Development of the Liquidlogic Stomper Creek Boat
Its been a while since we (Liquidlogic) introduced a new extreme boat design. I mean what are you going to do next, once you have the Jefe as your go to creek boat? The answer is that we have done nothing for 6 years. Few other creek boats have come close to the respect and accomplishments of that which has been normal and expected of the Jefe series. So we came at this project with the knowledge that it was going to take a special boat to accompany the Jefe in our line as a legitimate design. Let alone we have to face our team of paddlers when we say we are going to come out with a new boat. John Grace, Tommy Hileke, Evan Garcia, and Adriene Levckencht are not gonna just let us come out with an average kayak as the next great thing. They want it to be something special.