Herring Paddles Toward Dream

Bill “Fish” Herring wants to build a paddler’s paradise in Northwest Arkansas — a manmade river for kayaking and canoeing.

Since summer whitewater on one of the Natural State’s rivers is about as likely as snow, Herring said river rats have to travel elsewhere to get their foamy fix. He should know.

Herring is one of a growing number of whitewater enthusiasts who often drives more than 10 hours to North Carolina, Tennessee, Colorado or West Virginia in search of a good wave.

“As you progress in skill level you run into a situation where in a typical Arkansas year there might be 30-45 days that you can get out on class two and three water,” Herring said. “It’s kind of a bleak picture in the summertime.”

That’s why Herring became general manager for a project called the Arkansas Whitewater Course, a local effort to build a 10-acre white-water park somewhere in the state’s northwest corridor. Herring, who’s also senior projects manager for the Fayetteville technology assessment firm Beta-Rubicon Inc., said a facility that could supply fast-class water would be a tourist attraction for the community in which it’s built.

He said the construction cost, based on three years of research and professional consultant revisions, would be about $500,000. The cost came from bids and estimates from suppliers and construction firms.

The horseshoe-shaped course would be for paddlers what a skateboard ramp is to skateboarders. Although it would take less than a minute to paddle straight through the 300-yard waterway, he said, most riders would not do just that.

“People want features so they can play,” Herring said. “Sure they go downstream and paddle some, but they also want to go over jumps and do crazy flips.”

Plans for the Arkansas Whitewater Course call for three pumps supplying water at 105 cubic feet per second, or roughly 150,000 gallons of water per minute.

“That could suck a residential pool dry in seconds,” Herring said.

With a plan to operate around 25 weekends or 50 days per year, the park must have at least 40 day-pass riders per six-hour day. Operating costs will be at least $75,000 per year.

Admission prices are tentatively set at $20-$25 per day pass and $200 for a season pass. The course has a maximum capacity to hold 100 paddlers at a time.

It Takes a Village

The board of advisors for the white-water course includes founding members Mark Crawford, an engineering consultant who has experience with large-scale hydraulic systems; Kevin Fendley, a market consultant and senior manager at the Pack Rat Outdoor Center in Fayetteville; David Reid, a business consultant and chief operating officer of nationwide carwash builder Kingsley Management LLC; and financial consultant David Robertson, a C.P.A. and former president of the Arkansas Canoe Club.

Robertson said the facility would make Arkansas competitve for business from other states.

“In Arkansas, white-water kayaking and canoeing are totally rainwater dependent,” Robertson said. “If you go to the mountain states they have snow melt, and if you go east they have dam releases and a wetter climate.”

Other Board members include David Irvin, a partner at Irvin and Zingre Architects in Kansas City, Mo.; Floyd P. Knipe, president of Mid-South Construction in West Fork; and Stanley Miller, a 20-year veteran in water treatment and filtering and a project manager for Operations Management International in Warner Robbins, Ga..

Costly Concerns

Herring said the optimal location for the park would be an easily accessible spot near the U.S. Interstate 40/U.S. Interstate 540 corridor between Russellville and Fayetteville.

“A location like that would put the course less than two hours from several major concentrations of paddlers in the area,” Herring said.

Herring feels confident there is a captive audience for the venue in Northwest Arkansas. He received more than 450 responses to a survey he conducted on his Web site: www.ozarkpages.com.

“Forty percent of people said that they wanted a play spot,” Herring said. “If we were looking for people that just wanted to paddle, this course wouldn’t do well.”

Because of the advances in boat design in the past few years, freestyle paddling has become more popular, he said.

“Technology didn’t accommodate that until two or three years ago,” Herring said. In fact, the enthusiasm for paddling has increased dramatically in less than 10 years.

The next biggest concern after location would be the liability insurance for white-water operators, which can be costly. But the Arkansas Whitewater Course has negotiated a partnership with the American Canoe Association to receive $5 million in liability insurance coverage through the ACA Event Sanctioning Program at no cost to the local course, Herring said.

Although the partnership with the ACA is not a long-term deal, Herring said that the ACA would require participants who use the course to become ACA members.

“You can pay a per-year fee or you can pay an event fee,” Herring said.

Technically Speaking

The amount of horsepower needed for adequate water flow speed is 540 horsepower, or the power of two to three fast car engines combined. The pump can be thought of as a big barrel with a propeller in it 15-20 feet in length, Herring said.

A retention pool will hold the water that will be pumped by three pumps up 20 feet through pipes 24 inches in diameter and then will run back down on a gradient that drops 20 feet over 300 yards. That amount of gradient will create class two to three rapids. Class two is considered beginner and class three is considered intermediate.

The classes are determined using the International Scale of Whitewater Difficulty.

“The idea is going to appeal from advance paddlers to people who have never been in a boat before and would like to try it out,” Herring said.

Would it Work?

Lance Sexton, director of the Small Business Development Center at the University of Arkansas, is a firm believer that a good market and solid managing can make a business successful.

“Paddling is a sport that is growing, and typically paddling enthusiasts have a little better level of education and have higher incomes,” Sexton said. “Northwest Arkansas has plenty of people that fit that criteria.”

Sexton also pointed to the lack of direct competitors for a potential Arkansas white-water course, citing only other tourism venues as indirect competition.

“What’s that phrase? If you build it they will come,” Sexton said with a laugh.

According to research Herring conducted in 2001 and 2002, the white-water sports market in Arkansas has grown roughly seven times its size since 1992. The figure comes from growth in local paddling club memberships and Web-site participation.

“Until recently, the user base has simply been too small to generate the sufficient revenue to sustain a viable white-water course in the area,” Herring said.

National research demonstrates a surge in paddling interest. In May 2001, the Outdoor Industry Association reported that paddling growth rates exceeded any other outdoor self-directed sport. Participation in canoeing and kayaking increased by more than 50 percent between 1998 and 2000 with 6.4 million participants.

Fendley, one of the board members, said that he has noticed an increase in boat sales in the past eight years at the Pack Rat Outdoor Center.

“We have probably tripled our boat sales overall,” Fendley said. “A lot more people seem to be getting into it.”

Fendley said that by nature of having a white-water course available to Arkansas, interest in the sport and sporting goods will increase, creating a win-win situation for retailers.

“By having this, we are going to introduce some potential new people to the sport that can go out there and experience it for the first time in a somewhat controlled environment,” Fendley said. “If we have a longer white-water season, we would have people more pumped up about paddling.”