Subsport
Is squirt kayaking making a comeback?

Sirius Satellite Radio's 24/7 Grateful Dead channel keeps cutting out as I descend into the New River Gorge. The trees hint at autumn. Jim's hand-scrawled directions take me down a one-lane road past a few tightly packed houses and trailers. Smoke rises from grills. A girl walks barefoot across the grass with a baby on her hip. The grade steepens and I plunge into a dank, steaming forest.

At the first turnoff, I see a car with a squirt boat on the roof. Slapped to the guardrail, marking the path to the river, is a round, purple sticker that reads P.S. Composites, the name of the only American boat shop licensed to build Jim's designs. A white pickup with squirt boats in the bed rolls up beside me. The occupants hop out and introduce themselves as Ricky and Randy from Virginia. I recognize their names from the Angst Board. "Where're you from?"they ask. "Colorado. My first time here."Big, guileless smiles spread across their faces. "Welcome to the Halls of Karma.”

The Halls of Karma is the most famous mystery spot of all. Squirt boaters around the globe whisper its name and travel here to sink into the long, swirling pool. As a young raft guide in 1979, before squirt boating, Jim named this place after a lyric from a song by the southern-rock group Black Oak Arkansas: I've walked through the Halls of Karma/I shook hands with both the Devil and God/They turned my eyes to the inside to see/Where my energies have gone.

I paddle up the deep, slow-moving expanse of green water. A group of perhaps 10 squirters, dwarfed by massive boulders and steep green gorge walls, circle around and around with the eddy currents, the topmost one disappearing underwater and then emerging about 15 feet downstream and entering the slow drift back up the eddy again. Others lounge on flat rocks, stretching their legs. They wave and call out introductions as I drift into the scene. The boaters floating around the mystery circle acknowledge me with barely perceptible nods; their eyes focused elsewhere, their paddle and handpaddle blades slowly stirring the water as if to divine its intention. I slide into the turning wheel. Just in front of me in a brown and gold boat is Eric Stahlman, 26, from Lancaster, Pennsylvania. He drops deep on each go, completely disappearing. I start hitting a few small rides, trying to figure out the fickle entrance move of this new spot. Ricky, Randy, and Brad—another Virginian—slip in, disappear, surface, and drift back up.

To qualify as a legitimate mystery move, it's generally agreed, one's head must go entirely beneath the surface, at least briefly. Big mystery moves can send the rider deeper than six feet and last longer than 20 seconds. Getting under requires slicing or purling your bow underwater near the most powerful part of an eddyline, and then using paddle or handpaddle strokes to submerge your stern. Once your bow is underwater, you adjust the angle of your boat in relation to the oncoming current, using the hull like an inverted wing to fly downward into the water. Once you've submerged your entire boat and body, the idea is to level out and spin. Stop spinning and you'll usually resurface quickly. To get a good mystery, or do anything intentional on a river, you need a good plan. Jim coined the word "charc,"a contraction of "charging arc,"to describe this idea. Experienced mystery boaters can maintain enough control underwater to decide where they're going, which subsurface currents and eddies to engage, and when to surface. Often they'll opt to use handpaddles, pancake-size plastic discs, because conventional kayak paddles can be unwieldy underwater.

Most civilians and, indeed, many seasoned kayakers, think mystery moves sound scary and dangerous. But most mystery venues—arenas, as they're often called—are deep pools with few obstacles. Compared to river running and creeking, mystery boating can be a relatively safe, mellow undertaking. Despite the boats' low volume, it's rather difficult to stay submerged, and surfacing can be as simple as tilting your boat sideways and allowing the trapped buoyancy to rush you upwards. For the squirtboater himself, the move is fundamentally a very personal endeavor: You're out of sight, and showing off is out of the question.

Eric and I are resting on a flat rock in the eddy watching 24-year-old Andrew as he tries to tap in. Eric, Andrew, and Craig arrived together. This is Andrew's first day in a squirt. His day job driving trucks had earned him the nickname Driver. "Come on, Driver!"yells Eric. "Drop the hammer!"Andrew sinks out of sight. It's his first mystery. The group yelps and cheers. "See?"Eric asks. "You just gotta put things in trucker terms and he understands.”

Soon after, a fellow in a white helmet and dark, small-lensed glasses ferries over. He looks somewhat like Ozzy Ozbourne. "Hey, Sam,"he says. It's Jim. Suddenly I'm slightly anxious about Jim seeing my boat. I had flames painted into the stern deck and rumor has it Jim doesn't like flame graphics. Colorado had beaten divots out of my gelcoat hull and it looked neglected. Later, though, he flashes the OK sign when I sink above my head and fly away spinning downstream for a few seconds.

We session the Halls until the sunlight leaves the gorge, talking only when we climb out to stretch, and whooping every time Driver goes under. That night, I set up camp with the Virginia boys. We pile into my sedan and drive toward the Gauley River Festival, the event that draws thousands of whitewater paddlers to West Virginia every fall. From the back seat, Brad, 37, says, "I love the underwater flight most of all. Being able to sink into currents and fly. It's really an outer-space feel."Parking amidst thousands of boat-stacked cars, we pop some Heinekens, and the warm chatter continues. Randy, also 37, ribs Ricky, 46, for being such an old man. Brad hums along to Scarlet Begonias, and I remember something else Jim said. "I'm proudest of the crew of people who have collected into the sport. It's not a lot of obnoxious, abrasive people. They're really cool people and they're going to be there for decades. So I'm like, OK, I'm one of those guys.”

There are only four people in the world who have mastered the skill of custom-fitting a squirt boat. Jim is one. Ed, in Toronto, is another. Taiki is in Japan. Paul Schreiner, Sr., 50, lives just north of the West Virginia border in Markleysburg, Pennsylvania, but he's standing right next to me at his Gauley Festival booth. He's the P.S. of P.S. Composites.

Known as chopmeisters, these four have spent enough time creating, observing, and stuffing themselves inside squirt boats that they know how to craft—chop—a squirt boat to efficiently translate its specific user's wishes into on-water performance. Buying a base-model, custom-built boat involves plunking down about $1,800, and picking a design that matches your inseam length, foot size, and performance desires. The builder then molds your boat in separate halves: deck and hull. Before seaming the halves together, the chopmeister (who's often the same person as the builder) makes very precise cuts to both halves based on your input and leg dimensions. If you know you want a reactive, quick-to-sink bow on a mystery-specific boat, the chopmeister will consider your foot size and then remove just enough material to optimize the bow's finished volume for that task. In a boat that's to be used for river running, the chopmeister would leave more volume. Being able to create such a rider-specific boat requires nuanced understandings of how hips, legs, and feet interact with the boat's interior, and of how water moves over its exterior contours. The skill takes years to learn, and there's no money in it.

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"I'm proudest of the crew of people who have collected into the sport. They're really cool people and they're gong to be there for decades."-Jim Snyder

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Paul regards me through thick glasses. A camouflage ballcap is perched backward on his head and a long, brown ponytail flows out from beneath the brim. Paul was once the primary builder at New Wave Kayaks, a now-defunct company that once serviced a larger squirt boating market when expert paddlers had few other boat options; if you were an expert, you paddled a squirt boat. He now builds made-to-order, ultra-custom boats. If more people were buying squirts, Paul would know. "Yeah, there's a resurgence,"he says with a smile of mock perplexity. "But I've built thousands of boats, and you sons of bitches keep finding them in barns and garages and reusing them."He hasn't seen any dramatic rise or fall in orders in the last five years.

Later, I'm trying on sparkly helmets in the back of Paul's booth when a twenty-something guy walks up. He wants to order a squirt boat. He's an expert boater, a former video kayaker on the Gauley and New Rivers. "I was on a climbing trip before I started kayaking,"he says. "I looked down and saw these guys in the river, they're fluid and acrobatic, and I thought that was the neatest shit I'd ever seen. But people told me ‘you need to learn to kayak before you start squirt boating or you're going to die.' Now that I'm out of school, it's my present to myself.”

It's my last day in West Virginia. I caught a ride with Steve, Stro, and British squirters Pete and Emma down to a mystery arena at the takeout of the Upper Gauley called Last Chance, about one hour's drive from the Halls of Karma. It's literally my last chance to paddle before I return to Colorado. Nearly everyone from yesterday's Halls session has come to squirt, except for Jim. After a few revolutions in the circle, everyone's getting good dunks. There are six of us in the water and seven more reclining on shore. I'm normally a paddle user, but today I'm handpaddling.

The entrance to Last Chance is a tiny pourover that sends a dense slab of current downward beneath an eddy. It's a simpler initial move than that of the Halls, so I dip the left bow of my Sneaker into the pourover. I feel a clutching near my feet and turn to expose more of my left, upstream edge to the slab's grip. Then, whoosh, I'm engaged in the slab and flying downward, beginning a slow spiral. I see my hands and bow in front of me, blurry through the dim beige translucence, and I hear the murmur of swirling currents all around. I'm casually pushing my palms to the left to maintain my clockwise spin, aware of currents buffeting my bow and stern and making slight hip and knee adjustments to coax my boat to horizontal. Then I'm sitting upright, my head about three feet below the surface, spinning slowly to the right, using my arms to keep the rotation going. The currents become calmer and quieter. Now I'm not rising or sinking. Just slowly spinning. My longest ride ever had been about 15 seconds. This one's not feeling like it will be quite that long, but the last thing I would do underwater is count seconds.

"Everyone's got their own little frontier with mysteries. There's a robustness built into that,"Jim had said. I took that to mean that by surpassing incremental, personal goals, squirters stay hungry and thus maintain a healthy baseline of collective interest in the sport. He'd admitted to having seen growth, but not in terms of significantly more squirtboaters. The growth has been an evolution of the mystery move to a point far beyond the quick dunk Jim got on the Upper Gauley in 1981. Where the 20-second ride was a rarity in the past, today's realmhogs regularly top 25. Squirting's participant numbers may not be climbing, but the sport is robust.

My head breaks the surface and I suck in a deep, sweet breath. My shoulders emerge and I glimpse Ricky, grinning at me from just upstream. I'm back in the mystery circle. With a flick of his submerged handpaddles, he's facing upstream again, planning his own charc. The spin continues.

In early winter, Colorado's rivers are dry and I'm sitting at my computer. I've just bought a Bigfoot off Craig's List for $175, my fifth squirt boat in 17 years. I'm jonesing. I can almost feel the currents sliding past my torso. A picture of Jim's pickup tailgate flashes across my screensaver, showing a bumper sticker that reads "Mystery Zombie on Board."I reread some e-mail correspondence from Jim and come across these lines: "The trance is deep in this sport. The trance, and its counterpart focus—these will shape the future of this sport. The other disciplines don't have that. We will evolve differently. Just watch.”