“Why potato paddles?”
This is the first question I am usually asked when people see or hear about my product. Let me tell you the story!
Some kids play catch with their parents as they grow up but my dad and I have always loved to play any kind of racket sport, rallying for hours without competing. In high school, this meant hours of ping pong in the garage on a table my dad built and now it means tirelessly playing beach paddle ball on the coast of Vancouver Island whenever I’m at home for a visit.
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| Mystic Beach, British Columbia |
About ten years ago, I found a long forgotten set of old wooden paddles in my parent’s basement that I had never seen before. With the newly found paddles, my dad and I volleyed back and forth for about 30 minutes; no points and no rules, just constant movement and loads of fun until one of the paddles broke. I was heart broken. Not to be defeated, my dad salvaged what he could from the broken paddle and, using the good one as a template, rebuilt it. Thus, the seed was planted.
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| First Generation, Nova Scotia |
Fast forward 6 years or so and I decide to take a page out of my dad’s book. I wanted to build my own paddles (before the old ones I was still using broke again!). The first generation of paddles was closely modeled after the ones from my parent’s basement. Far from perfect, they served their purpose as I hooked everyone I could into playing on the beaches in British Columbia (see the picture of my dad and I above) and Nova Scotia, leaving sets of paddles with friends and family wherever I went coast to coast!
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| Rissers Beach, Nova Scotia |
The second generation of paddles builds on these basic early versions and gets a bit more creative. I made the handles more attractive with a lamination of five different types of domestic hardwoods and a black leather strap tied at the end. I also began burning random designs into the paddles with a simple wood burner. As fate would have it, some friends of mine wanted to give a set of paddles to their twelve-year old son for Christmas and asked me to burn the image of a potato with a Harry Potter lightning bolt scar along with his initials onto them. I loved the wackiness of this design (thanks Isaac!) and began brainstorming the different ways potatoes could be anthropomorphized. Potato Paddles was born!
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| First Potato Paddle Set |
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| Carter's Beach, Nova Scotia |
