The Boat People, originally intended as a tongue-in-cheek name, began primarily as a raft rental service in the early 80's, and expanded into retail raft, inflatable kayak, and accessory sales by mid-1982. We published four rounds of a printed catalog called "Inflatable Kayak Specialties" between 1988, before the days of the internet, and 1996. There were already several large river gear mail order companies then, and we wanted to focus on what we knew best, which was small one and two person river craft. We've always sold rafts though along with the inflatable kayaks, and once we had a website it became much easier to display our entire line, and vastly simpler to do updates. The catalog went by the wayside since it was always out of date two weeks after being published.

       We've built a reputation in the Bay Area as one of the most honest inflatable boat businesses out there, so you needn't worry about us disappearing into the netherworld of evaporating webpages with your money or credit card number.

In October of 2006, we sold our commercial building in San Jose, and moved northward in March of 2007 to a more residential setting in the small town of Danville, CA. We had been in the San Jose bulding, which had the store downstairs and apartments upstairs, for eleven years. This building was erected in 1925, and though it served it's purpose well with it's high 12' ceiling, huge basement for storage, and rear building for rental gear, it was also something of an albatross around our necks. A fire had destroyed most of the upper floor back before we purchased the building in 1996, and the apartments had been rebuilt and re-wired. Nice as these apartments were after the reconstruction, the prior owners of the building elected to cheap out on the plumbing and only spend the money they were given by their insurance carrier. Apparently the city of San Jose did not force them to re-pipe the apartment floors & walls (which was the ceiling of the Boat People store). For most of the eleven years we were there, very complex, expensive and messy plumbing failures plagued us, and we were very concerned about staying put through another large earthquake. All the upper floor piping was brittle galvanized & cast iron, and there was even some really odd antique lead pipe used for sewer line.
For these reasons and the desire to move from what had always been a rather so-so neighborhod, we decided it was time to move to a quieter area. We never had a lot of walk-in business once we got out of the raft & kayak rentals, which we did a while back, so it didn't make sense to worry over losing the large store space we had.
The plan was to put a building of about 1100 to 1200 square feet at the back end of our property, and to have it ready by the time we moved in March this year. For the time being, our plans have been stymied, and our bulding may shrink to an even smaller size, due to the presence of a large and very old oak tree. This tree is where part of the building was going to extend, but trees of this size and age are protected by the local cities. The city of Danville did not want us to come as close to the trunk as we had planned, and after a consult with an arborist we found ourselves back to square one. We hope to have the litle structure for our store up in the near future, but in the mean time you are still welcome to come by. Just understand that we are operating largely out of boxes for a while. We miss the large space that we had in our old store, but we do not miss toilet water dripping out of the ceiling!

        Many whitewater websites talk of their employees using "almost everything we sell" -- which may be true enough -- but since we rented rafts and i.k's for over two decades, we've seen the worst case scenario for a lot of our inventory. Sharing our rental experiences and retail customer feedback clearly helps you compare similiar products to make an informed decision, and we don't gloss over any negative feedback we get. People who have spent much time chating with us know this to be true.
Catalogs and webpages that only speak in a positive light for every item seem useless to us. If each little widget is perfect, which little widget should you buy? You may be shocked at the way we seem to find negatives in much of what we sell, but that does not mean they are bad products. When we recently got in a new waterproof camera case, we realized there was no way to turn the camera on & off as it was set up. Could be a problem. Should we wait until it's in your hands to let you find about about this detail? No, because then you will be unhappy, and we will be dealing with returns that could have been avoided. If there are warts or drawbacks we want you to know about them before you order. And we want you to be clear on important differences between competing products so you can make an informed decision. We also try not to be excessively negative about items we don't carry, but if something really is inferior we want you to know the reasons why.

        Happy paddling!