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Doug Riddle – Fast motorcycles and fast boats Article by Jack McNeel Speed has long been a highly successful cornerstone of Doug Riddle’s life – first with motorcycles and later with boats. Recently, he has directed his energies toward building innovative new boats. Doug is a lifelong resident of Idaho – born in Mountain Home but raised in Lewiston from the time he started school. “My parents owned the motorcycle shop here in Lewiston. That’s why
I was into motorcycles,” Doug relates. He worked in motorcycle shops as a mechanic after he graduated from high school, including his parents’ shop, but he also got into racing motorcycles. He raced motorcycles for about ten years. “Mostly to have fun, but I did well,” he says. That’s a bit of an understatement as he won the Idaho state championship, held in Boise those years, for three years in a row! That was in the early 1970s and he raced throughout the northwest during that time while still working primarily as a motorcycle mechanic. Meantime, his dad had started building aluminum boats and founded the Weldcraft boat company. Doug worked there off and on as well but admits, “I wasn’t too interested in boats.” But that changed when his dad started guiding up in the Hells Canyon region of the Snake River, built the Kirby Creek Lodge, and soon found that trying to run both a boat building business and the lodge was just too much. He called Doug and asked him to take over the boat business. “That was how I started in the boats,” Doug says. “That was in 1978 when I took over Weldcraft and bought it from my dad. I was pretty young and had to learn real fast.” He kept Weldcraft until 1991. Times were tough, so he took on a partner, and in the process he later got eased out of the company. But he stayed in the boating industry. Doug started a company that didn’t build boats but was more of a dealership and repair shop. It wasn’t until about 2000 that he returned to building boats. Even before that, from the early 80s into the 90s, the racing bug hit again, but this time it was jet boat racing. “I raced in Canada, Mexico, and all over the U.S. and won the U.S. Championship three or four times. I had all the records on all the rivers but since then they’ve all fallen. Boats have gotten a lot faster,” he said. Continued on page 10