BANGOR, Maine — For the past few years, Douglas Marchio has made the rounds of outdoors shows, pitching a sit-on-top fishing kayak he markets here in Maine. The boat, a NuCanoe, is ultrastable, he said. In fact, it’s virtually impossible to tip over.
The keyword here is virtually.
Marchio learned a valuable lesson last summer, and he reacted the way you might expect a retired mechanical engineer to react: He invented a product to respond to the need.
“Up until last year, I didn’t think I could flip this,” the 71-year-old inventor said, pointing at a display NuCanoe during the Eastern Maine Sportsmen’s Show earlier this month. “I did.”
Marchio took his boat onto a lake when 30 mph winds were blowing and found it was, in fact, possible to tip over.
Then, while he floated in the water next to his overturned craft, he learned another lesson.
“I found out it was equally as hard to get it back upright,” Marchio said. “I didn’t even think about that before — dumb engineer.”
Marchio said a friend eventually helped right the 42-inch-wide boat by grabbing onto the shaft of the attached trolling motor, which was sticking up in the air, and using it as a lever. Although it worked, that method was not optimal, Marchio said.
Then he started thinking.
After collaborating with a friend, chemical engineer David Cassidy, they developed a product designed to right overturned kayaks — especially wide, stable ones.
Marchio calls the resulting product RightSider, and in a quick demonstration he showed how simple its use is.
The RightSider essentially is a ladder made out of the kind of strapping you might find on a backpack. It’s enclosed in a bag and firmly attached to the inside of a kayak.
If the boat overturns, the paddler simply pulls the RightSider out of the bag, tosses it to the other side of the kayak and starts climbing the ladder.
“It’s a series of loops, because I wanted it to fit any boat,” he said. “You put your foot in the bottom loop like a stirrup, reach up and grab one of the upper loops, and that combined action allows you to be able to easily turn [the boat] over.”
Marchio said Cassidy donned a wetsuit for product testing last year. Over a two-month period that involved 20 or 30 test flips, the pair made design modifications resulting in a RightSider that will fit kayakers of all heights.
Marchio and Cassidy took their idea to Bangor Canvas, which built the prototypes they used in testing. Marchio said he’s hoping to have a larger company take over the marketing end of the product.
For now, the RightSider is available for $15 through katieskanoes.com.
While he’s hopeful the product takes off — his unintentional swim convinced him there’s room in the market for the safety product — Marchio isn’t done inventing.
In fact, he recently finished work on a new battery he will work perfectly for fishing kayak owners who like to use electric trolling motors.
“One of the things that’s really popular right now for fishing kayaks is to put a trolling motor on it,” he explained. “There’s like 50,000 fishing kayaks sold a year, and maybe 1 percent choose a trolling motor, but that’s still a lot of people.”
The problem with trolling motors, he said, can be that the batteries used to power them can be too heavy.
“The problem with this battery,” he said, pointing at a 50-pounder, “is that it’s really heavy, if you want to get any capacity of it.”
Marchio said he has invented a lithium alternative that not only is lighter at 23 pounds but also more powerful. Most batteries are 12 volt models, he said. His is 14.8 volts.
“That means that my [propeller] will turn 36 percent faster, in air, with no load. When it’s got load, it’ll do 25 percent, probably,” Marchio said. In addition, Marchio said he has made improvements that make that power last longer than it does on traditional batteries that may run out of juice after a couple of hours of heavy use.
He said a factory in China is interested in working with him, and he has checked with various manufacturers in the U.S. to make sure hooking his battery to existing products won’t cause problems.
“I called every trolling motor company, their service departments, and said, ‘I’ve got a 14.8-volt battery. Am I gonna hurt your motor?’ And they all said, ‘No. It’s designed for way higher than that.’”
