Ocean River Sports clients enjoying an afternoon paddle
VICTORIA – Brian Henry has always enjoyed adventures, especially kayaking and sharing that experience with others through his company, Ocean River Sports.
Ocean River Sports owner Brian Henry helps out with some of the heavy lifting
His latest adventure is a return to his roots, with opening a small specialty paddle sports and marine store at Oak Bay Marina.
After closing the 5,500 square foot downtown store, the timing was right to enter the market again. The new store is tiny but is also available online to view and shop everything.
In 1981, Ocean River Sports was established in 1981, when Henry opened a 250 square foot kayak shop in Market Square. With successful sales, and the new sport of kayaking, taking off, Henry also started to manufacture Current Designs kayaks, and the store grew into a 5,500 sq. ft full outdoors store than ran for 40 years.
Due to changing circumstances, the downtown store was closed at the beginning of the pandemic. Now Brian’s paddled back to his original starting point, with the small specialty paddle sports shop at Oak Bay Marina.
Ocean River Sports customers ready to hit the water
Ocean River continues to offer courses, tours, rentals and kayak storage at the downtown floating dock facility location at the bottom of Swift St. Oak Bay docks running all of the same programs operate out of the beautiful Oak Bay Marina.
“We do the whole thing: Teach our clients how to kayak, share our passion and knowledge and once they become paddlers, we can help them find the best possible boat or board and equipment for their needs,” he says.
“It is a vibrant little operation that is fun to be part of,” he says. “The retail stop is run by Jamie Dawson, who was the manager at our big store for nearly five years, and it is so good to have him back and in charge of our new venture.”
Ocean River Sports has a wide variety of kayaking and boating equipment for sale
Lee Phillips manages the Adventure Center, which Henry says is a vibrant operation that instructs and certainly inspires people to get out paddling.
Ocean River has 12 instructors along with the two managers.
“Our company is in good hands with Jamie and Lee managing,” Henry says.
“A lot of people come in to do three-hour tours, and we’ve introduced thousands and thousands of people to our sport,” he states. “What we do at Ocean River is we make paddlers. Every time we teach somebody how to paddle, we hopefully do such a good job that they want to continue.”
Henry says competition and Covid nudged the company towards the change in direction.
“We kept our docks and paddle sports tours, courses and rentals, and we opened a new paddle sports specialty store, and continue to run both of our docks,” he says. “The new format of Ocean River is allowing us to do brick and mortar as well as online sales and marketing, and be more current with our business model.
“This is very exciting for us, and it looks like we are alive and healthy again.”
