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Instructions for
Aquatoner
At the beginning of the 1980's decade three products simultaneously put aquatic resistance exercise equipment on the map: Hydrotone, Aquaflex and the Aquatoner. Within the next five years Hydro-Fit, Aquajogger, J&B Foam and Wet Vest contributed their buoyancy products to the infant industry and Ruth Sova founded the Aquatic Exercise Association to certify instructors. Aquatic Fitness was up and running. Other associations and water resistance devices followed the trend and came along later. A comparison chart on this site evaluates many of these products.  Douglas
Bedgood first conceived the idea of variable resistance aquatic
exercise equipment, the Aquatoner, after racing outrigger canoes for
a couple of years in Hawaii for a new canoe club at Keouhou Bay
organized by Louis Kahanamoku.
The coach, Tahitian old timer Pierre Kimatete, taught him how to make canoe paddles the traditional way, shaped like the paddles used in Tahiti. With sandpaper in hand, he set up a crude vice under a monkey pod tree down at Keouhou Bay, on the Kona coast of the Big Island, next to a small canoe shed some of them put up to shelter the outriggers they practiced in every morning and evening.
We formed the Kauikeouli Canoe Club and began competing in Regatta canoe races, then long distance canoe races with other canoe clubs on the island. The paddlers were glad he was around to make them new paddles. He enjoyed it, barefoot in the sand and self-employed. They were victorious. At that time Keouhou Bay was a quiet breeze, a few fishing boats, coconut palms and monkey pod trees. There may be a large hotel there by now, and the trees may be cut down. The flower of the ocean is undergoing changes. One morning he was using a horse shoe rasp to shape the paddle shafts and a fisherman, who had been repairing his boat, came over. They talked like two carpenters about stories of a younger day, when they were up the Columbia river in Canada and saw an Indian paddling a canoe upstream with a lot of force.
He asked the Indian why he had a hole about the size of a quarter in the middle of the paddle blade, and the Indian said it gave him more power. I think it gave him more strokes per minute, maintaining a buoyancy for the hull and some stability during the stroke. Douglas pondered on that most of the day and drilled a hole on one of his paddles. Liking the smooth control of the water, he then drilled more holes winding up with three narrow radiating slots with a contoured hydrodynamic shape to the paddle. Pierre Kimatete was upset, like someone had put a leak in his spirit. They never had openings in the paddles in Tahiti. He couldn't stop changing things, though and felt obsessed with something he could not identify subconsciously. He figured it was from that fisherman's story, combined with other experiences, that something surfaced quite suddenly one day back on the mainland, and the Aquatoner was born. Having been educated in the Health Sciences at Western Illinois University, I immediately realized the potential for the concept for adaptive exercise for the disabled, its use for arthritis, for athletes and a good way for fun exercise.
The first people to use the Aquatoner were competitive outrigger canoe paddlers and athletes training for the second annual Ironman Triathlon on the Kona coast of Hawaii; then came professional football teams, dancers, hospitals, and later the military, schools, and health clubs. The first Aquatoner was made in a barn near Harvard, Illinois, where it was invented and used in a pond. The first sale of an Aquatoner was to Silver Pines Lodge and Retreat in Idyllwild, California. Idyllwild is where product development and marketing research were headquartered for a couple of years at High Castle, above the clouds on an alpine mountain ridge high in the San Jacinto Mountains.
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