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Sans Meal Bar Review – Can it replace a meal?
Recently, I took Sans Meal Bar up on an offer to pay $3 in shipping and get two of their meal bars for free. I figured what-the-heck because I’ve been looking for a bar that could be a meal. If it was good, it might work on some of my paddling trips as a good replacement for crackers, cheese and summer sausage or crackers and peanut butter and jelly or wraps and tuna. While, I do like variety on a trip, it wouldn’t bother me to not have that variety for simplicity. Also, it’s seemed like a good and inexpensive way to add a Sans Meal Bar review to PaddlingLight.…
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2021 PaddlingLight Update
This is an annual housekeeping post to inform loyal readers, subscribers and readers who get notifications about the 2021 plan for PaddlingLight. First, I’m personally embarking what I’m calling the year of lightness. Each day, I’m getting rid of something. It’s been really fun for the last couple of weeks finding and either selling, donating or throwing an item a day. While not really part of that (but inspired by it), I’ve deleted PaddlinghLight’s social media pages. I looked at the traffic coming to this website from the social media accounts and decided it wasn’t worth trying to maintain or develop the social media pages. The biggest downside to doing…
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Unalaskan Kayak Built
I received your blog post about the Unalaskan kayak. In 2000, I looked for a kayak design, which was possible to build with strips and suitable for a tour on the coast of Brittany (France). I knew there were sometimes rough conditions from day tours before. I wanted a kayak design that could handle those conditions. I found the kayak I wanted drawn as figure 178 in Bark Canoes and Skin Boats of North America, and I decided to draw it the old fashion way on paper. But the bow and stern seemed to be difficult to build with strips, therefore I changed it a little. I built the stern…
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BWCAW Photography Gear Loadout Video
I often get asked about what photography gear I bring to the Boundary Waters or on paddling trips. To answer that question, I’ve created a new video. The video covers all the gear that I usually bring on a canoe trip. It also shows how I pack that gear into one bag. If you like photography content, consider subscribing to my YouTube channel.
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How to Store and Clean a Sawyer Water Filter for the Off Season
Over the years, I’ve used the Sawyer Squeeze Filter and the Sawyer Mini (Reviews: Sawyer Squeeze, Mini and the Kataydn BeFree). Usually during the first year they do great. The flow is good for the most part, and they work fine. Then winter comes, and they get stored. After storage, they never seem to work like they did the first year. This is especially true for the BeFree, which I’ve given up on completely after having a trip where it would take 5 to 10 minutes per liter. The Sawyer filters seem to do better after storage, but never get back to the flow rates I’d expect. This fall, I…
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Retreat! We Bailed from the Canoe Trip
Last weekend, it looked like the last chance to do a canoe trip before freeze up. It was going to be one of those rare early season snow storms while the lakes are still open. You know the type — they coat the trees with white, and if it is calm, it’s magical, especially if a blue sky shows up in the morning. We decided to do two nights in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. This would be our five-year-old’s first winteresque camping trip. It looked like the coldest it would get would be in the lower 20s, so it would be cold enough to feel like a winter…
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Free Plans – 1894 Unalaska Baidarka Kayak
The Unalaska baidarka appears as Figure 178 in the Bark Canoes and Skin Boats of North America. Howard I. Chapelle, the author, writes that it represents the standard design used throughout the Aleutian Islands and on the mainland as far east as Prince William Sound. The Aleuts also used this style in the Pribilof Islands and at St. Matthew as a sealing kayak. Chapelle notes that the bow varied from the style used in this free plan, but he says that the body style remained the same. The Aleuts also built this kayak in two-cockpit and three-cockpit versions. I had a hard long battle modeling this one. Like the last…
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The Writing is on the Wall for the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness
We just spent a week in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, which currently faces the threat of copper-sulfide mining on its border. The BWCA is one of America’s greatest treasures and to think that people would want to build a type of mine with 100% track record of polluting right next to it for 20 years of jobs shows the writing on the wall for this special place. The only thing protecting the BWCA is a law, and it wouldn’t take much for the law to be repealed. Recently, we saw this with the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), the largest national wildlife refuge in the country, which was…
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How to Cook Bannock on a Stick – Campfire Bread
Fresh bread on an extended paddling trip feels like a treat, especially after eating hard crackers, bagels or pitas for a week. One way to make this treat is by cooking bannock. For over a 1000 years, bannock, a simple bread made from the flour of a variety of grains, has filled the bellies of adventurers sitting around campfires. Its attraction is the simple base ingredients and its ease of cooking. A favorite way to make bannock is to cook it on a stick over a campfire. Preparation of the Bread Dough At home mix all the dry ingredients into a plastic bag. You can substitute or remove some of…
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How to Pack a Sea Kayak Part 1: Selecting and Packing Dry Bags
Despite their small size, most sea kayaks can carry enough camping gear and food for a multi-week kayak camping trip, which is one of the main draws of paddling a sea kayak. You can travel far away from the car and camp in comfort. How to pack a sea kayak is the tricky part. You need to balance the trim, accessibility, kayak performance and ease-of-access. Additionally, when you pack a sea kayak, you need to make sure your gear, especially your sleeping bag and clothing, stays dry. To keep the gear dry, you pack it into dry bags, which are waterproof storage bags. Dry Bag Description A dry bag is…
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How to Dispose of Fish Guts in the Boundary Waters
This is a picture of how not to dispose of fish guts in the Boundary Waters and Minnesota. You don’t just leave them on the ground at a campsite for birds and animals to get into. We found this pile on Saturday. It wasn’t really a pile. The skins and guts were scattered by animals all over the campsite, which caused the campsite to smell like dead fish. It was unpleasantness incarnate. I piled up everything for the picture. So, how to dispose of fish guts in the Boundary Waters and Minnesota? If you don’t want to read everything, skip to the end. The Best Way: Pack them Out The…
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Ode to Scratching the Snot Out of Your Canoe
Years ago, I worked for a guy who had an obsession against setting a canoe on the ground. He believed there were two places for a canoe. One was in the air not touching the ground, and the other was in the water. He’d wade out into the water, place the canoe on it and then proceed to load the canoe while standing in the water. He’d do it just to make sure he didn’t scratch the bottom of the canoe. He went so far as coming up with an eye-rolling but pithy saying about it. Then he printed t-shirts with the saying. That’s not how I am. I like…
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Tupik Kayaker Fly
There’s an interesting tarp on Kickstarter right now. It uses two kayaks and two paddles to setup. It looks big enough to fit a couple of people and one of the pictures shows them camping under the fly in a bug netting of some variety. It looks pretty sweet. If I had the spare cash, I’d back it. The way that Gearlab Outdoors describes the tarp sums it up nicely: Tupik is a tent fly that works with your existing kayaks and paddles to instantly upgrade the beach experience. No extra anchors, pegs, nor poles to mess with, just swift and easy setup in 90 seconds or less. With this…
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Best Kayak Bilge Pump
Many websites claim that they recommend the best kayak bilge pump, but they list every possible kayak bilge pump in existence. They really don’t tell you anything. The reason being is that the writers of those websites probably haven’t used multiple kayak bilge pumps over the years to be able to tell what the best is. You’ve seen these sites, and the only reason they exist is to get you to click on a link. If you buy from that link, then they get a commission. We do that here as well, but the difference is that I’m not going to beat around the bush and claim that all the…
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Kayaking Accessories for Beginners
As a first time kayak buyer, you probably didn’t know or don’t know what kayaking accessories to get with your first kayak, and unless you bought from a knowledgeable salesperson, who also kayaks, he probably didn’t get you everything that you needed. The problem is two-fold: 1. Many salespeople don’t understand kayaking. 2. When you first start, the kayaking accessories just don’t seem necessary. A third problem occurs when you run into a salesperson that believes the second point. Although the first problem is easy to fix — just go to a different store — the second is much harder. To fix that second, you can take a sea kayaking…
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