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Is Your Silent Sport a Fad?
Silent sports defined by a sports sole reliance on self-propulsion is the category of sports that paddlesports falls into. It’s joined by other sports such as biking, mountain biking, fat biking, hiking, running, climbing, snowshoeing and many other sports that don’t rely on fossil fuel or electronics to participate. Within the silent sport category, many sports have shined for a short time only to die out as a fad. Remember inline skating, anyone? Here are a few silent sports that have stood up to the test of time as well as some that ended up as fads: Canoeing – not a fad Biking – not a fad Cross Country Skiing – not…
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Safety-shaming says, “Say it ain’t so.” The Coach’s eye says, “You messed up.”
There are several Facebook paddling groups that I find enjoyable and both approach safety in two different ways. The approaches couldn’t be more polarized. One group focuses on safety and understands safety. The other group rallies against safety. Two recent posts demonstrate the difference. In one group, a respectful safety conversation was had after someone posted about safety. In the other, people railed against the original poster and eventually the post was deleted by an admin. The Post in the Pro Kayak Safety Group The first post was in Inland Seas, Kayaking the Great Lakes from one of the most experienced kayakers in North America and he posted a photo taken…
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A Skene Walrus Hits the Water
Another Walrus hits the water. This time it’s a folder. And it looks great. Norman L. Skene originally published the drawings in The Rudder Magazine. Later George Putz published the plans in his book Wood and Canvas Kayak Building. Skene based the Walrus on the 1921 Southwest Greenland Kayak, aka the Skinny Walrus. Markus Kosel, the builder, did a great job as you can see from the following pictures. Here’s what Markus says: I followed you advice and I built the Skene Walrus. The boat is built as a traditional folding kayak, with a wooden frame and a skin made from PVC coated fabric underneath and a canvas deck. The dimensions are those of Skene’s…
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Field Test Your Cold Water Gear
Throughout the years, PaddlingLight has provided information on cold water and winter paddling, so if you are a long-term reader, you’ve probably read articles. But if you just started to read PaddlingLight or came here via a Google search, you might not understand everything that goes into cold water paddling or expedition paddling. While this web-a-zine often covers philosophy and gear more now than skills, but skills are more important (we do and have covered skills as well) than both. One skill that we haven’t covered often is the need to field test your gear. While I think that many long-term paddlers take it for granted that we’re going to test…
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PaddlingLight to Become PedalingLight
After a long debate with our publishing partners, authors and advisors, we decided that PaddlingLight will shut down within a week and change our focus to biking. Our new domain name is PedalingLight. PedalingLight’s mission is to provide information on lightweight bicycle travel, touring and bikepacking while promoting the protection and preservation of our federal, state and local lands. It will continue PaddlingLight’s belief in the DIY culture by providing drawings and free plans for bike frames. Over the last five months, we’ve been working hard at converting all our articles from sea kayaking and canoeing to articles about biking. All the current content that was relevant to biking has…
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How to Pack a Sea Kayak Part 3: What to Bring
Selecting the gear you bring on a kayaking trip feels like a balance between comfort, weight and size. But, when selecting the right, modern gear, you can camp in comfort without having to carry significant weight or bulk. As you learned in How to Pack a Sea Kayak Part 2: Packing Your Kayak, a sea kayak has different compartments used to store gear. Within those compartments, you store different gear types to make certain gear more accessible than others. For example, if you store you paddle on the front deck, it makes it hard to access gear from the front hatch during the day, so you could stash your camping gear…
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KayaLeg: Help or Hassle? Making Entry Into a Kayak Easy?
Recently, Ralph Wirsig, the owner of KayaArm, contacted me to introduce me to his new product. The new product is called KayaLeg. Both the KayaArm and KayaLeg offer kayakers a new and potentially easier way — at least for some kayakers — to get into a kayak. The KayaArm is a product that you permanently install on a dock. It stabilizes the kayak while you get in. I actually think that the KayaArm is a pretty cool product and if you’re lucky enough (or rich enough) to live on a lake with a dock, then the KayaArm is something to consider adding to your dock. Especially if you have any flexibility…
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Sandals! You’ll hurt your feet!
Sandals are awesome to wear for paddling trip. When wearing sandals and you step into the water, your foot gets wet. You take it out of the water and it dries. The sweat dries off your feet quickly, and, well, they’re pretty darn awesome. Sure there are some downsides, such as they don’t offer the support of a hiking boot and sandals that have open toes don’t protect your toes and they suck in mud (although you can wash your feet when you get to a lake). These disadvantages are common sense no brainers, and the awesomeness of wearing sandals outweighs the disadvantages. Still, there are some who can’t imagine…
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Halloween Kayak(ing)
My friend Travis Novitsky made this time lapse video of me paddling a kayak during the night. Happy Halloween! It’s spooky.
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And you have to believe in wilderness.
While we usually don’t post just quotes here, this one has to be one of the best. Kirk was the founder of the Canadian Canoe Museum, located in Peterborough, Ontario. I had the pleasure of listening to a presentation of his once and meeting him afterward. This quote really sums up for me what life is about. You have to do what you can, do your best with what you are. And you have to believe in wilderness. If you do that you can’t go wrong. -Kirk Wipper
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Kayak Changing Rooms — Now!
One of the hassles of kayaking involves changing into paddling clothing at the boat ramp. If you’re like me, you try to do a quick surf change on the beach using something like Orange Mud’s Transition and Seat Wrap (See: Orange Mud Transition Towel and Seat Wrap Review). You may have picked up something like a Sqivvy, a popup changing room. Neither offer a perfect solution. The Orange Mud towel doesn’t allow you to dry off easily, so when you pull you pants and underwear on, it feels wet and sticky. The Sqivvy tends to blow down in the wind even when fully staked and guyed out. The ideal solution is to…
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Greenland Paddles Can’t Get No Respect
In the Fall 2015 issue of Adventure Kayak, James Roberts writes an article called Stickin’ It To ‘Em: Greenland paddles are superior in every way to their wide-bladed brethren. In the article he states, “It’s time Greenland paddles got some respect.” He then goes on to point out the myths and benefits that he finds when using a Greenland-style paddle (GP). I’ll list these below. While reading the article, it felt like being transported back to the late-90s or early 2000s when the online paddling world at paddling.net argued about which was better. I thought this issue was settled back then with the conclusion that you paddle what you like.…
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A Year in the Wilderness: a BWCA Adventure
Imagine living in wilderness for an entire year. Imagine living with only a canoe for transportation in the summer and only dogs to haul gear in the winter. Imagine living in a tent in northern Minnesota when the winter temps drop to -40. Imagine watching the northern lights over lakes so clean that you can dip your cup into them and drink the water. Imagine being away from it all for a full year. That’s what Amy and Dave Freeman, 2014 National Geographic Adventurers of the Year, are going to do next. They’re going to live inside the Boundary Water Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCA), a million acre wilderness and America’s…
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Why I Got Out of the Sea Kayak Guiding Business
According to a study published in APS journal Psychological Science, after receiving an unappealing prize for hard work, a six-year-old kid will hold on to it. Whereas a four-year-old kid who works hard for an unappealing reward will detach themselves from that reward by giving it away. The six-year-old, says the study, “tend to employ a cognitive strategy to accommodate the knowledge that they worked hard to earn an unattractive reward.” They revalue the reward based on how difficult it was to earn it. The four-year-old doesn’t perform that mental jump and sees the prize as it is: not worth it. In this way, six-year-old kids function more like adults,…
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How We Lose Access to Wild Places
Recently, Scott Jurek, a long distance runner, completed a record-breaking run from Georgia to Maine on the Appalachian Trail (AT). He finished the trail in 46 days, 8 hours, and 7 minutes. That’s quite an accomplishment and I’m sure from a runner’s perspective and the perspective of a FKT (Fastest Known Time) enthusiast it’s an amazing way to travel the AT. It took me almost six months to do the same. I met a trail runner on my 1996 thru-hike, and ended up spending a night with him in a trail shelter when he missed the canoe shuttle across the Kennebeck River. If I remember correctly, he thought that would cost…
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