Today we are celebrating the fifth anniversary of the last kayak building class that I taught in person, which was also the beginning of my video teaching career.
For anyone unfamiliar with my story, my health basically collapsed in 2014 after a decades long fight with an undiagnosed illness. I flailed for a few years trying to stay above water but ultimately had to sell my farm and my workshop, and finally I had to start grappling with basic survival issues: where am I going to sleep, how am I going to eat?
So I hatched a plan to lead one last 10 day class where we built every single one of my kayak designs start to finish, video the whole thing, and then put it up for sale in the Internet. In retrospect there was no part of this plan that wasn’t completely insane. It would be the largest most complicated class I’d ever taught, I knew nothing about video production, and I was so sick I could barely stand. On the plus side I had been building 60-90 kayaks a year with students for almost 14 years at that point so I knew that if I could just keep my mouth moving I could probably do a decent job on auto pilot.
For the venue we rented the Columbia River Maritime Museum’s Barbey Center, my friend Linda did the videography, my partner Liz started drafting plan sets while I was teaching, and 10 very patient students spent 10, 10hr days building the kayaks. Then I spent four months editing the videos.
Looking back now, that first video course is almost painful to watch compared to the crisp professional videos that have since replaced them, but it was a foot in a door that Liz and I have been steadily prying open with crowbars ever since.
The whole process of creating professional quality instructional videos and plan sets is literally orders of magnitude more complex than I ever imagined but I’m incredibly grateful to have it. I’m still really sick these days but I can afford to live and continue pursuing various medical options. I miss teaching in a classroom but it’s also pretty cool that people are building my boats all over the world these days.
Thank you to everyone who has helped to make this possible.
-Brian
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This post was originally featured on our Instagram feed.
See the original post and discussion here.
