A couple years ago, on the Team Pyranha blog, Ryan Scott posed a retrospective of pictures of himself paddling various Pyranha boats through the years (see his post here). At the time I remember thinking that it would be a fun project to look back through some of my older padding photos and try to find pictures from the many Pyranha boats that influenced my paddling life. As with all too many ideas, I promptly forgot about it… until recently.
This year, Pyranha celebrates its 40th anaversiry. As I thought about the long history of Pyranha as a company, it reminded me of Ryan’s post and prompted me to finally dig around in my own photos to find a few pictures to share. Pyranha was founded before I was born, but I can’t think of another company that has had more of an impact on my life. After owning a number of used boats, the first boat I ever purchaced brand new was a Pyranha Micro 250 (thank you student loans!). It served me well in my early days of learning to creek and was the start of long line of Pyranha models that remain my boats of choice to this day.
The trusty H2 forced me to learn edge control and taught me the many benefits of paddling a creekboat with a bit of an edge.
Along with looking through old photos, I dug out some old video footage as well from the days when Micro’s ruled the creeks. Years ago several friends and I were driving from TN to WV when a bunch of heavy thunderstorms came through the area. I had some knowledge of the area I remembered a neat park-n-huck that wasn’t far off the interstate… so we went. It was by far the biggest thing Dustin and I had run up to that point and we didn’t really have much waterfall technique either, but we went for it and scraped off the lip to the cheers of some locals who were watching. Good times! See video HERE!
Stay tuned for more from the archive!
Until Next Time…
-adam