Clean Lines Paddlesports

There’s an Instagram account that I follow called viewfromthegroover, and while they haven’t posted in a while, I like the concept and appreciate the humor (and the views!).  I know there are several schools of thought around groover placement, but before you consider where you’re putting it – and what sort of view it has – I think you really need to consider the groover itself.

“Consider the Groover” sounds like a writing prompt for the PHIL221 – River and Waterway Philosophy course at the University of Montana, but I take a little more practical approach – identifying the things I think are important when purchasing a sh!tbox.  Here are those things – broken down into bullet points, as I’m apt to do:

• Price
• Ease of Setup
• Number of Uses (and Scalability)
• Space on the boat
• Air-tightness
• Durability
• Stability
• Ease of Cleaning
• Comfort

When I plugged all of these into my mental calculator, the product that rose to the top for my needs was the Riverbank toilet from Selway Fabrication.  It’s not the most expensive out there (The Jon-ny Partner and the toilet from SDG are at the top of that list, mostly because they’re aluminum), but it’s certainly not the cheapest.  It’s very stable and easy to set up, holds A LOT, has very few parts to lose, is easy to clean and fits great in a 16-18” bay on a raft, even one near people because it seals up quite tight.  Like several others, it has a replacement inner tank so you can bring one toilet and swap only the tank out to save space. 

I don’t know if you’ve experienced this, but when you buy a specific make and model of car, you notice all the other folks out there who have the same make and model as you.  There’s apparently a name for this – the ‘Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon’ – and I have been Baader-Meinhofing the Selway toilets ever since I got mine.  What I notice is that lots of outfitters use them, which bodes well – they get a lot of use, take a lot of abuse, and continue to be used when guide companies are using them all summer long.  Have I noticed them set up outside a camp?  Maybe.  Have I seen myself floating by on the viewfromthegroover IG account? Not yet, but I look forward to continuing to try.