Logan Builds the Seavivor

By Tom Hall

Logan Fleckles built his first kayak in Chicago when he was 12 and studying Eskimos. He sent away for a $30 kit advertised in a Boy Scout magazine; he tacked together the bits of plywood and canvas and paddled across Lake Michigan and back almost to Chicago. He was five miles off the beach when the Coast Guard picked him up and thought him a juvenile delinquent for insisting he had crossed Lake Michigan in a toy boat.

"I set a course 100 miles northeast and got blown 40 miles east and hit the far shore 90 miles south of where I thought I was headed," he says. "Then I came back 40 miles against the winds that blew me east. I was four days on the lake, without a compass or anything. The Coast Guard wouldn’t believe me. My parents raised holy hell. From then on I was always building boats."

He is now 50, grown lean and long-faced, still studying Eskimos and building Seavivor folding kayaks which are readily transfigured into luggage but otherwise are faithful to the West Greenland designs that evolved through 5000 years. He is voluble, spontaneous, and impressive in incidental ways, like keeping his van running half a million miles. But he has disconcerting traits - a raggedy-pixieish look, an air of abiding mischief, a fixation on understanding too much about everything to settle for easy concepts of anything. He is not easy company for dignified adults who come to sense that the primal force in him is still the 12-year-old crossing Lake Michigan -as if proper grown-ups are irritated by a man with such curious talents manifested so obstreperously from the precocious urchin within.

Fleckles, in short, is driven by congenital creativity out to the edge where people say he teeters precariously between genius and insanity. He says dismissively that they are the same point on the circle and either way he makes the best of all folding kayaks. "There are people who make good enough boats to argue otherwise," he says. "But there are only 13 folding kayak makers in the world. It’s a very small industry where everybody knows what everybody else is good for."

"The kayaks evolved over 5,000 years," he says. "The designers were Inuit seal hunters. Their R & D was selective survival. Imluk, the hunter, would make a new boat and build in his innovations and paddle out to sea. If he didn’t come back, his course of design was not developed. The hunters who did come back built better ideas into their boats by second guessing Imluk. After 5,000 years and many generations of Imluks lost at sea, they developed the configurations of the kayaks that I now make into foldups – same boats, same lines, the same engineering in effect, but with technology from different ages."

Fleckles became an engineer in the technologies of different ages. For 14 years he was a design engineer and creative force in corporate R & D: prolifically germinating patents in the skunk-works/brain-trust of a high-tech multinational. He had skunked there 10 years then the company counted its patents and felt so smug that it disdained further R & D and laid off Fleckles and 200 others. For a year, as he sought in vain for other employment, he built boats and worked in a white heat at his drafting board: inventing the fitting system by which the West Greenland kayak would be transfigured into luggage, and luggage reconfigured back into kayak. He also founded Seavivor and engaged himself as the sole employee. Then the high-tech multinational felt less secure and hired him back. He returned to corporate R & D as a prodigal free spirit: jaded but wiser and re-empowered with omnipotent laboratory resources. By day he skunked for the company. By night he skunked alone. For years he constructed sophisticated models of kayak dynamics: deriving optimal synthesis of high and low technologies; testing, analyzing, and purging the minutiae of critical, intrinsic flaws between theoretical and practical kayaks. He engineered both to aerospace tolerances and Inuit imperatives, taking care never to subvert the genesis of the West Greenland kayak.

"The Eskimos weren’t nearly so sentimental," Fleckles says. "They got themselves 100-horsepower outboards and forgot all about the Imluks who designed West Greenland kayaks by drowning at sea for 5,000 years."

He quit the high-tech multinational a dozen years ago, having endowed it with nine corporate patents in high technology. He set to work full-time at Seavivor, and within 5 years, he was granted 28 patents in kayak technology (technically one all-encompassing patent with 28 claims of invention, like 28 patents all at once) which was such a rare and bountiful outpouring from the notoriously restrictive U.S. Patent Office that it was reported in the business pages of the New York Times.

The Seavivor factory now occupies the Fleckles’ garage, basement, and attic, and each year, with part-time help, he now turns out less than 50 boats. He would seem either a production boat manufacturer of limited output or a prolific creator of handcrafted boats, and he makes a case for being both; though at first glance it seems remarkable that he manages either. His various shops seem preposterously crowded with eclectic and esoteric machines that cut, shape, bend, and stitch. He moves through cryptic passages, showing enigmatic lines of production. If the machines seem to betray the ideals of hand crafting, Fleckles says a hole drilled is a hole drilled whether he bores it with a hand auger or on a machine press. And where his punch press mechanically stamps out bits of metal, he says there is artistry even in punch pressing that each bit of metal is as good as if he fashioned it by hand – much better in fact. He says if he made more than 50 boats a year, he couldn’t rightly call them hand crafted.

In one phase of manufacturing he makes frames of ash and birch because he says this is where wood is better than all the high-tech, because wood is resilient where aluminum kinks, and if wood breaks it can be duct taped on the beach, where high-tech is only an abstract fantasy, or mended with epoxy and made stronger than new. Then in another phase he tailors skins of urethane compounds bonded most inextricably by long, complex molecular linkages: all so confoundedly high-tech as to be identified only by military specifications and vulnerable only to oyster beds. (The urethane manufacturer used to have only three customers: the US Military, NASA, and Fleckles). His boats are dynamic juxtapositions of high and low tech.

He finally transcends Inuit design in the creation of the small, mottled metal fittings, some so oddly shaped as to raise conjectures on ancient Inuit religious fetishes. They are made in five specialized alloys, in technologies on manifold levels, and at tolerances figured down to half a thousandth of an inch. The 28 patents have to do with the way they lock and unlock at all critical structural points and don’t galvanize in salt water and thus comprise the mechanism by which kayaks are transfigured to and from luggage – which was beyond the technology of the seal hunters.

Fleckles slides one metal sleeve into another. They seem to fit perfectly, but he says he makes it not quite so because sand on some beaches is so powdery fine that a nearly microscopic grain could get in and immobilize an exact fit. Thus he bores out the extra margin of a powder grain and transcends even exactness to create the best of all foldups. And if you need further convincing, just look at the boats.

The look of the boat is compelling. Everything about them seems structurally and aesthetically right – whether created by hand or machine, or by engineering or artistry, or by West Greenland seal hunters or corporate R & D. Elements fit so fundamentally and functionally that low-tech wood naturally belongs next to high-tech urethane, and the patented metal fittings, all mottled and arcane, appear jewel-like in their settings. At first one is simply awed by the craftsmanship, but there’s more to it than that, and there’s no way to know just by looking at how Fleckles does it.

The boats come without assembly instructions. Fleckles simply labels structural components A through G and says anybody who knows that much of the alphabet can assemble by deduction (an experience with a sense of vicarious transport, of advancing beyond mere puzzle solving into spheres of singular creativity where the mind of Fleckles flourishes).

He sells boats in about equal shares to buyers in North America, Europe, and Japan. He sells nine tenths of his boats directly to people who answer ads or just hear about him, and one tenth through dealers, about whom he has ambivalent feelings. He says too many displayed his boats merely to shill for other boats; some stripped off the skins and displayed the frames to enhance store ambiance.

His two models are the Classic Double and the Greenland Solo. The double is a scaled-down Bering Sea Umiak, which looks like a duck boat. It is amiable, seaworthy, and surprisingly fast; it can be paddled, motored, fished from, or serve as a dinghy to a yacht; it sails with a rig that folds compactly into luggage, and it does well at duck hunting. The solo is the true hunter’s kayak, on which most dialog converges: it’s long, lovely, exceedingly fast, and it concedes only the basic comfort, being wholly intent on stalking seals.

If Fleckles’ kayaks really are to be the best of all foldups, then the definitive test would pit the Greenland Solo against the best high-performance, hard-shell sea kayaks – and the judgement is ultimately subjective because the difference is like sinew and steel. Both track relentlessly, keeping a straight course on a delicate balance, having more secondary then primary stability. They are equally fast; though the hard-shells are athletic boats, dynamic like blades; while the skin-on-frame is a hunting boat, organic like a fin. The hard-shells surmount high crests and come slicing down heroically; the skin-on-frame comes sliding down existentially. Both are instantly seductive, though one might reach meaningful relationships sooner with the hard shells, and perhaps expect longer relationships with the foldups.

For more information, Logan Fleckles at Seavivor, 576 Arlington Ave., Des Plaines, IL 60016; (847) 297-5953.