the best laid plans…
I felt compelled to begin this note with a quote from a song by the great John Lennon:
“life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans”….
This feels like a good way to express how I’m feeling about the status of our 2023 season.
Paddle Time Kayaks was born from the desire to share our love of kayaking with our community, and was developed as “passion project” that worked within the high tide schedule of Shark River, and weaved in and around our full time job schedules.
From the beginning, I had a job that gave me the weekends off, and for the first five seasons I was able to be at the river every weekend to get Paddle Time Kayaks off the ground and into the water. I worked nearly every day, but I understood the commitment and was fully on board.
In late 2019, I was recruited to a new employer who provided more flexibility in my work schedule and gave me hope for the future of our part time passion project. Then, late in the 2021 kayak season, Jeremy moved into a new career as a bike mechanic and found an employer that afforded him the opportunity to have summer weekends off to help me operate the business. And so began what we thought was the next iteration of our kayak business. In the summer of 2022, we worked together every weekend and began to dream about 2023 and the great potential we had working as a team every weekend.
So as the John Lennon quote implies, we got busy making other plans for our business in hopes of 2023 being our best year yet….
And then life happened….and in early April I was unexpectedly laid off from the job that I hoped would sustain us for a good number of years and allow us the chance to really grow into our vision.
So here we are, forced to re-envision our 2023 goals as I search for a new job. The fact is, job searching when you don’t have a job is one of those life moments that forces you to weigh many things. I’m hopeful that I will land in a place that allows us to continue to run Paddle Time Kayaks every Saturday and Sunday at high tide, just as we have since 2018, but it’s seeming more likely that our vision will be slightly affected by the schedule requirements of a new employer. While this feels discouraging, I’m hopeful that the side effects of my new job to our weekend rental schedule will be minimal or none at all. But we really can’t predict that and we won’t try to.
In closing, our online schedule will always reflect our actual “real time” availability. And it’s possible that there will be a Saturday in the summer that has an ideal high tide schedule but I am unavailable due to having to work the “real job”.
I wish this wasn’t the case, but I’m still hopeful that we will be able to provide as much rental availability as possible, and that all of our past and future kayakers will understand and be able to find rental times they are happy with from what we are able to offer.
All that said, I am a person that believes things happen as they should, and as a positive person I’m hopeful that we will continue to evolve both our kayak business and our professional work so that they are complimentary to each other.
Please check out our 2023 availability and we hope to see you at the river real soon! Until then, we wish you good health and happiness, blue skies and calm waters.
Sincerely,
Kira Lang
