As a Boy Scout, I vividly recall all of the forest service signage cautioning “Do Not Feed The Bears” and warning us to properly dispose of all trash and food scraps as we camped. The message was simple but the implications were severe: Southern California’s mountains were rife with brown and black bears. These omnivores had uniquely evolved to excel at both foraging and scavenging – that is, when they weren’t hunting small and/or wounded prey. Quite literally from berries to bobcats.
Unfortunately, bears – so much like humans – often gravitate towards the path of least resistance, and when access to food scraps and leftovers, bears will quickly abandon their arduous hunt for wild honey, nuts, grasses and other animals, and opt for tearing open dumpsters, coolers and passenger cars when a quick (and often, far tastier) meal is within reach. Not only does this put people in danger of contact with a hungry bear, but it almost always results in the bear being euthanized.
As I hinted earlier, humans are in many regards, no different than these bears. When given the option, we’ll opt for comfort and convenience far more often than labor and effort. And it is this fact of human nature that has brought the personal watercraft industry to where we are today, and in my view, to its very knees. A sport that once required skill and athleticism is now a leisure recreation replete with surround sound digitally funneled through your satellite-guided handheld device.
I’ve bemoaned this shift towards slothfulness for a few years now – and much at my own expense. First, I personally feel the onus of having cheered-on for greater innovation and instrumentation on today’s runabouts for decades. Second, pushing against the tide of opening up the “sport” to a wider demographic rewards me with no shortage of vitriol and degenerate comments. I am labeled both a gatekeeper and an elitist, waving my cane from my front stoop shouting, “Back in my day we didn’t need USB ports!”
…and fatefully, many of my detractors would be correct. I very well may be a hypocrite and a curmudgeon but I am such for good cause. Distracted riders are inattentive riders, and inattentive riders are dangerous riders. Dictating text messages, scrolling song lists, pairing devices, sliding through pages of GPS prompts are just as deadly behind the wheel of a car as they are on a jet ski. And I would argue even more so as your PWC is riding atop a dynamic ever-changing surface.
So what does this all have to do with The Watercraft Journal’s seemingly absence from its YouTube channel this year? My not-so-subtle discontentment with the trajectory of the industry (not to mention the sport itself) has incurred a great deal of public, private and industrial anger. We always experienced a moderate share of trolling, but a series of threatening comments towards my children and denigrating my wife were hinge points. No majority of praise could drown out a minority calling for the death of my kids.
These weren’t credible threats that required police or legal interference, but enough for me to want to distance myself from the community that WCJ’s YouTube channel had cultivated. If me giving a negative review to the one particular jet ski that you liked warranted disparaging my wife, then I wanted to part of that conversation. So emotionally, I checked out. In fact, the only time I rode a watercraft in 2025 was to film the video linked below (which was recorded the Friday before this writing).
Frankly put, I didn’t like where the industry was going, the kinds of people that dealers and OE’s were trying to appeal to, and the current community as a whole. Add in the passing of my father, Kerry in November 2024 – the man who introduced me to jetskiing and encouraged me throughout my short career racing skis – and I had little left to keep me emotionally invested. Hell, Craig Warner literally set his world championship-winning STX ablaze in his backyard. Jeez, and I thought I was “out.”
All of the while, Jessica Waters was doing her best to keep The Watercraft Journal afloat. Admittedly, I wasn’t much help and often punted assignments to her that really belonged in my wheelhouse. That guilt along with the nagging feeling that WCJ’s YouTube channel still carried some equity brought me to this point. I’m bringing it back to how it used to be, namely an appendage to the magazine itself. Video content cannot be disconnected from a written article. Everything must point back to the magazine.
This means that podcasts – especially, the conversational “shoot the bull” ones are pretty much over. I love hanging out with Greg Gaddis and Billy Duplessis, but they ultimately watered down the impact that the channel had. Producing videos is costly – both financially and productively – so I want to refocus on personal watercraft and product reviews first. That’s where we can make up the most traction. From there, more tutorials, technical content and the like will come.
And here’s s’more bad news: there won’t be a “Watercraft of The Year” announced this month. Why? Because besides the 300-horsepower Sea-Doo Fish Pro Trophy Apex, we didn’t review one single 2025 model. The Sea-Doo GTR-X 300 you see in this video? It’s a 2024 model – and a pre-production one at that. For us to claim to have reviewed anything when we clearly hadn’t would be to immediately call our integrity into question. And I’ll be the first to say that while I’m a bit of an a-hole, I’m no liar.
So there it is. I’m aiming for quality over quantity. And if that means only one or two videos a month, so be it. YouTube’s precious algorithm can suck it. I’m more interested in equipping you, the reader with the information that you need to make the most informed purchase possible; one that will hopefully ensure a safe and enjoyable time on the water. Upsetting the “status quo” has never been a hurdle to high for me to vault and nor has it been for The Watercraft Journal team.
–Kevin
