01:00 AM EDT on Monday, July 24, 2006

BY MARK ARSENAULT
Journal Staff Writer

NORTH KINGSTOWN -- This was just a light training paddle a few days before a big race, but Wesley Echols had brought his fastest boat: a 21-foot carbon fiber surf ski shaped like a stiletto, a racing boat fast enough to shred the common image of kayaking as genteel recreation.

"Most people in kayaking progress, ultimately, if they are serious about racing, to a surf ski," said Echols, preparing his boat last week at North Kingstown Town Beach. "These are the Porsches and the Ferraris of the kayak world. There's a learning curve on it. The downside is you have to put a lot of time in them because they are so unstable."

The 46-year-old is one of a handful of men widely considered among the top surf ski racers in New England, though he considers himself the slowest of the top five or so paddlers. "If one of those other guys has a bad day, I can beat him," he said.

Some speed addicts might buy a cigarette boat to race across open water. Wes Echols is addicted to going as fast as he can under his own power. Having progressed from plastic kayak to carbon fiber surf ski, he has reached a pinnacle of his sport.

Echols is hard to top for his obsession with speed. He owns "around 9 or 10" kayaks and surf skis, he says. These are different boats for different water. Some are for open ocean, some for flat water, such as the Narrow River in South County, or the Charles River in Boston. Out of those 9 or 10 boats, "I have three flatwater boats to race in."

He has been known to arrive at kayak races with several boats, and then to decide on which to use after seeing the conditions. "It used to be, my wife, Betsy, and I traded [in] cars, too. We used to call it 'car fever,' " Echols said drily. "She's glad now it's 'boat fever' -- they're much less expensive than cars."

Over the past dozen years, more than 20 boats have cycled through his possession. He'll buy a boat, try it out and flip it to someone else if it's not for him. "Selling boats -- I kind of like that aspect as well," he said. He has worked a little bit in kayak stores. He's a kayak instructor.

He uses on-board Global Positioning Systems technology to measure his speed and distance. He tracks his heart rate electronically during races. He uses computer logs to record the course, conditions, speed, time and heart rate of his workouts.

Echols trains on the water about 12 hours per week. He is not paddling to photograph the seabirds, to watch the sunsets or to fish. He paddles to condition his body and build the experience to handle the surf ski.

On most Tuesday evenings, you can find him among a group of kayakers at an informal paddling workout that leaves from the town beach in Wickford, which is his way to spread interest in the sport and offer his expertise to new paddlers.

Asked whether Echols is obsessed, his wife, Betsy, also a kayaker, just laughs heartily.

Nobody starts out obsessed; it's something you have to grow into. For Echols, it all started innocently enough. About 12 years ago, he saw a kayaker pictured in a travel magazine, lazily paddling on flat water on a sunny day. He thought, "That looks like an inexpensive way to get on the water," he said.

"A couple weeks later I bought my first plastic sea kayak. My neighbor bought one as well. We paddled together, and it springboarded from there." Echols, who works in pharmaceutical sales, says he is lucky to live in Portsmouth, so close to the water.

Twelve years after buying that first boat, the sport, for him, is no longer an inexpensive way to get on the water -- it's a serious pursuit in boats that can cost several thousand dollars each as he strives to push himself faster, in boats that get ever lighter. His 21-foot surf ski weighs 25 pounds.

"Like anything, the lighter it is the more expensive it is -- whether it's boats or paddles or bikes," he said. His $325 paddle, for example, feels impossibly light for its size: at 21 ounces, it makes a traditional plastic or wood paddle seem like a barbell.

When he sees a boat for sale that he likes, "I'm really decisive. Some of my paddling buddies will take four or five months to decide. Once I've researched it, I just go for it and get it. And if it's not the right boat for me, I can sell it pretty quick."

He thinks his passion for the sport evolved to addiction when he started racing several years ago. "I would see guys racing in faster boats," he said. "And they would literally come in 10 minutes ahead of the sea kayaks I was paddling. I was thinking, 'Are these guys really that much better paddlers than I am?' And that's when I thought, 'I gotta get a faster boat!' I progressed up. That's when I really became focused on the speed, because you can't be competitive unless you have a competitive boat."

His best piece of free kayak advice is this:

"By being an instructor, I know that people need to buy the right boat for the conditions they want to be paddling in," he said. "I see it all the time. People will buy one of the recreational kayaks, with a big open cockpit -- they're only like 10 feet long or something. On a flat [water] day, they'll paddle out to the lighthouse [at the Jamestown Bridge]. Seems innocent enough. But if they were to capsize, their whole boat is going to fill up with water. Many recreational kayakers haven't thought it through -- what are they going to do when their boat capsizes? So the moral of the story is to buy the right boat for where you are going to be paddling. You wouldn't buy one of those recreational boats for out here in the Bay, you'd buy a legitimate sea kayak. And the other thing is, pay the $100 and take a lesson, for safety reasons."

In a race, he'll keep his GPS unit attached to the boat by Velcro. "On one screen it shows how fast you're going -- whether that's in miles-per-hour, or knots or pace per mile -- and it has the distance you've gone, and then, on mine, it has heart rate."

For Echols, knowing his heart rate at every moment is critical to race strategy. "I know that just like in cycling and other sports, in the beginning of a race you don't want to get your heart rate too high. Especially in a long race . . . of 20 miles," he said.

He was training last week for a long race in Massachusetts. The first three miles were on a flat river, before it emptied into the ocean. Racers might be tempted to go too fast on the flat water at the beginning. "You could easily get your heart rate up," he said. "At age 46, my max heart rate is 182. So I could easily be paddling 175, 176 and I don't want to do that because I'd burn out at the end of the race. Those first two miles, I'll keep it around 168, 170 so I don't bonk at the end. So that's why I use the heart rate."

"I have this computer program at home, I log everything in -- what my heart rate was, the time, the miles -- so I know what I did from year to year in these races."

The surf ski is not for beginners: a novice would probably tip it in the first few strokes. "You need to have the skill to stay in the boat," he said. "If it's blowing 20 knots out here, that's what separates me from somebody who doesn't have the skill level -- they're going to come out of their boat. It takes a lot of skill to paddle this fast in rough conditions."

He averages an 8.5- to 9.5-minute-per-mile pace in the surf ski, which is faster than many people can run. "This is made for big surf. I've had this down to 6:40 pace, which is flying." He grinned.

marsenau@projo.com / (401) 277-7231

BOAT SPECS Make and model: Huki surf ski

Length: 21 feet

Width: 17 inches in the beam

Weight: 25 pounds

Hull: Carbon fiber

Cost: $3,400