Three hundred kilometers to the west, surrounded by cliffs and currents, Holy Island lies like a severed pinky off the mitt of Anglesey Island. For composite kayaks, the time from mold to final inspection is about a week. Several other men in gel coat-stained coveralls or spotless white Tyvek suits move the kayaks through their stations: painting the molds with gel coat, layering in the fiberglass and resin, glassing in the coaming, bulkheads and skeg box. A Mick Jagger look-alike leans intently over a brilliant orange kayak. Many of Valley’s 20 full-time employees have worked here for more than two decades. Cans of gel coat and resin line the shelves and tools, brushes and tape hang from the walls. Boats-in-progress rest on sawhorses and the sharp smell of solvents fills the air. On the outskirts of the bustling city, where the nearby River Trent winds out of crowded suburbia into a lush quilt of tidy fields, tinny Black Sabbath plays over too-small speakers in the Valley factory. Nottingham lies landlocked in the middle of England. Rather, they are modest metal sheds where kayaks are handmade by skilled workers in a labor-intensive, multi-step process. These aren’t cavernous buildings with deafening, automated machinery cranking out identical objects at a frantic pace. But don’t let the term factory mislead you. Valley and Sea Kayaking UK both occupy factories in nondescript industrial areas. It’s not exactly Sherwood Forest or the Shire. So when the opportunity arises, we jump at the chance to actually visit the birthplaces of our boats. The place names conjure images of rugged coast and rough water, of grey skies and green meadows. Every time we settle into our kayaks, we see the stickers announcing their provenance: Anglesey, Wales, for our Sea Kayaking UK Pilgrim Nottingham, England, for our Valley Avocet LV.
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