Professor Popinjay's Compendium of Perspicacity

First published March 8, 2018

——“Kayak” means “hunter’s boat” in the Inuit, Yup’Ik, and Aleut languages. Unlike their massive diesel powered ocean-liner counterparts which blast a steam-whistle upon both landing and departure, the Kayak is considerably quieter and lends itself well to sneaking up on unattended pic-a-nic baskets, gators to wrastle, and oblivious skinny-dippers!
——Kayaking became an official Olympic Sport in the summer of 1936 in Berlin. This proved much safer and enjoyable than sending them down the ski jump at the winter Olympics earlier that year.
——The two man kayak (known as a klepper) has been used by US Marines, British Commandos, and even Canadian Special Operations, a remarkable feat in itself as the klepper kayak does not accommodate their horses as well as they’d hoped.
——-The Country with the most Olympic medals in kayaking is Hungary where kayaking is the primary mode of transportation. In fact, the two signature musical notes often repeated in Johann Strauss’ “The Blue Danube” are meant to represent kayaks bumping into each other during rush hour traffic.
——-The most kayaks to “raft up” together is 1,902 in Inlet, New York. The event shall henceforth be referred to by me as the Kayak Centipede.
——-The highest waterfall drop in a kayak was 189 feet. The now famed kayaker’s last text before going over is purported as reading “OMG! A waterfall! brb.”
——-In 1929 the German-born Franz Romer was the first person to cross the Atlantic ocean in a kayak, traveling 4,000 miles and arriving in Puerto Rico. Had his first act upon landing on the small Caribbean island been to claim it in the name of the Fatherland he would have likely been promptly thwarted by Puerto Rican Nationalists. Thankfully, the only thing he claimed was that he had just crossed the Atlantic.