Maria Teresa Chupacabra wrote:
"Steve Cramer" wrote in message
...

The fact that Dagger's site lists it among the whitewater kayaks didn't
suggest anything to you?

In retrospect only. I navigated directly from Google to the product page at
http://dagger.com/product.asp?BoatTy...C&BoatID= 257.
That little tab at the top that says "Whitewater" is orange on red, a
minimally visible combination, and I saw it after the fact. Not an excuse,
but a reason.

I can understand that you and your friend are upset, but it's the
salesman's fault for misleading you, not Dagger's

As I said, I think the classification of the watercraft is less prominently
displayed than it could have been. [snip]

Well, in Dagger's defense, they probably made the assuption --
correctly in most cases -- that visitors would navigate to that
particular description after entering at their "home" page. In that
case the visitor would have had to actively press the white-on-red
"Whitewater" tab (which *then* changes to orange-on-red) to get to the
list of whitewater boats. The fact that you might have googled
directly to that page is a subtety their web designer should have
considered, but corporate management (boat-builders, right? Not
necessarily web-savvy) might be forgiven for having failed to consider
the possibility.

Don't feel too bad. When yer new to a sport, hobby, activity, it takes
a while just to discover how much you don't know (I understand yer an
experienced canoeist; I'm refering to your novelty wrt kayaking).
No-one -- least of all Steve Cramer -- in this newsgroup is malicious;
it's just the ol' hastily-typed written-communication-between-strangers
thing, the stuff flame-wars are made of, that doesn't happen in
face-to-face conversations between well-meaning people. Did I set a
record for "number of hyphens in one sentence", or must I keep trying?

But I digress. Even the fact of being steered wrong by the salesman is
not very unusual; I couldn't count the number of people I have heard
from who bought the wrong boat first time out. Including me (I mean,
it *said* "whitewater" right in the name of the model -- the Mohawk
Whitewater 16; how was I to know it was vastly inappropriate for solo
paddling of serious whitewater?) If there is any kind of livery or
kayak school in yer vicinity, yer friend could go a long way toward
nailing down her choice of boat by test-driving a few, and maybe taking
a class and discussing in detail with the instructor the kind of
boating she wants to do (of course, the validity of this can also vary
with the instructor; I've met a few who were so focused on their own
paddling style that they could not be trusted to make unbiased
suggestions).

-Richard, His Kanubic Travesty
--

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Richard Hopley Winston-Salem, NC, USA
rhopley[at]earthlink[dot]net
Nothing really matters except Boats, Sex, and Rock'n'Roll
rhopley[at]wfubmc[dot]edu
OK, OK; computer programming for scientific research also matters
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