-
Rant: Dear PaddlingLight, You Suck!
Dear PaddlingLight, This site is a joke, NOTHING is free, and the designer cannot show a completed boat, not one single boat! This is the weakest “bait and switch” I have ever come across! Sincerely, Exploration Dude that Wants Everything for Nothing I get tired of unconstructive comments like your comment on this. It’s funny to me that you actually thought it was going to get posted without become a rant, especially since it has been a long time since my last rant. Well, here it is. I posted it, Mr. Exploration. You can download for free the drawings of every historic kayak or canoe on the website. FOR FREE!…
-
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 The only thing protecting the BWCA is a law, and it wouldn’t take much for the law to be repealed.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…
-
An Ode to Beaver Dams
We paddlers don’t give beavers enough credit. When we come to a beaver dam that blocks our way, we know it’s going to be a haul over. Often in remote canoe locations, paddlers will have tried to break the dam to make it easier to paddle through. But, we don’t give beavers enough credit. Despite the slight inconvenience of maybe getting your feet wet as you pull your canoe over a beaver dam, beavers, a keystone species that important for the health of environment, create these wonders of the world and create helpful habitat for all sorts of species. They create wetlands by engineering a dam and raising the water…
-
Free Boundary Waters Guidebook
Stuck inside somewhere waiting to be released, dreaming of adventures on the 1000s of lakes in northern Minnesota after they thaw or just someone who loves paddling? Then there’s a new free Boundary Waters guidebook for you. The Friends of the Boundary Waters Wilderness released The Friends’ Guide to the BWCA. The new guidebook is a free ebook available for download on The Friends’ website. If you don’t know the Boundary Waters, then you’re in for a treat. It’s a great treat, because these types of books usually run much more. For example, Exploring the Boundary Waters: A Trip Planner and Guide to the BWCAW runs $16. You can get…
-
Photography and Paddling Mix in My New Video
The other morning, I paddled out to a location that I’ve wanted to photograph at sunrise for a couple of years. I paddled about 20 to 30 minutes in the dark and landed under cloudy skies. I thought it was going to be a big bust. In the end, the clouds broke up and the sunrise was amazing! Pictures below. The video I made from the morning is a mix of paddling and photography. Most of my photography is landscape photography, but if I’m traveling by canoe or kayak I’ll put a canoe or kayak into the landscape. It’s a combination of the two activities that I love most. I…
-
Siskiwit LV Launched
Ralph M. recently completed a Siskiwit LV build. Here’s what he wrote: I put my just completed Siskiwit in the water (Puget Sound) for the first time on Thursday evening. It is a wonderful boat; stability and handling exactly as you said. Excellent response to leaned turns, a bit of skeg as needed. With skeg all the way down it obediently heads downwind. I had whitecaps building up, modest chop, a good first test for an old guy with back problems. Weight is a bit under 40 pounds. Thank you for a really good design. Here are a few photos that he took of his kayak. It’s a…
-
Crackpot Kayak Dude
Every now and then some crackpot contacts me, and it irritates me enough to post the conversation. I get a ton of these types of emails and sometimes share them on my private FB profile, because they are humorous. But a few deserve to see the light of day. Here’s one of them. I have to wonder if it is because I give away drawings of kayaks for free on this website. Maybe I need to raise the price to $5 or $10 minimum for any drawings. Crackpot Kayaker: Hello !! I just tried to answer your questions about why you do not receive more pictures , answers or contacts…
-
The First Roll Expedition
For Immediate Release: 4/1/2019 Grand Marais, Minnesota: PaddlingLight’s publisher and primary author Bryan Hansel is excited to announce a new world record attempt and a new expedition. Over the next year, he will attempt to roll his kayak in a new pool every day. Not only will the pools be different, but each pool will be newly constructed and have never had a kayak roll in it. “I’m excited about this expedition,” said Hansel. “Each day, I’ll explore a new pool with a roll and discover what it is like to roll in that pool. To me kayaking is about discovery and I’m looking forward to this expedition of discovery.”…
-
Totally Lame GoPro: Setting a Kayaker on Fire
Someone posted the below video to my social media feeds today and made the comment, “There are thousands of good reasons and good ways to paddle, this is not one of them.” The title for the video was, GoPro: The Kayak Fire Fall with Rafa Ortiz. With a clickbaity title like that, how could I not click on the link and see what GoPro was doing now? My first thought when I started the video was, I wonder if they found a natural phenomenon like Yosemite’s Firefall. When the setting sun hits Horsetail Falls exactly right in the month of February, it lights up like a burning stream of fire.…
-
How to Take a $H!T in the BWCAW
The Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCAW) is America’s most used wilderness area. Each year an estimated 250,000 visitors paddle its pristine lakes and over 1,200 miles of canoe routes and camp at one of over 2,000 designated campsites. This many people using the million acres puts a strain on the land. While in other wilderness areas if you need to take a crap you dig a hole and bury your poop (as outlined in the book How to Shit in the Woods), it isn’t like that in the BWCAW. In the BWCAW, you take your shit by sitting your arse down on a thunder box (latrine) and letting it…
-
Kayakers Dying and Darwin
Natural Selection is a wonderful thing. This was a Facebook response to a news report about a kayaker drowning on the Great Lakes (See: Search for missing kayaker continues). The news report tells us that two men in their 20s went kayaking on Lake Huron. They weren’t wearing lifejackets and both capsized. One of the men couldn’t swim. He presumably drowned. They are still searching for his body. Natural Selection is a wonderful thing. So, instead of expressing empathy with this man’s family, his parents and his friends, the Internet-dude responds that drownings on the Great Lake are a “wonderful thing.” Natural Selection is a wonderful thing. You have to…
-
Cape Wrath Packrafting and Fat Biking Trip
It’s one of those days when I have a pile of work to do, but just want to watch videos about paddling. And then I stumbled onto this Cape Wrath packrafting and fat biking video. After about two hours of dreaming up trips to do with a fat bike and packraft, I think I better get back to work! This is a fun video.
-
The Audacity of Winning Bold Kayaking Arguments on the Internet
If you have been a long time reader of the website, you know that I’m officially out of the kayaking business. After years in the canoe and kayak retail business, years of guiding and then years of owning a kayak guiding business, I got out of it — it is now a hobby of mine. As a hobby and as a business one of my main goals and beliefs is that we are in this sport together and if we work together as partners we can make the sport better. Like everything on the Internet and maybe in the world, discussion is devolving to the point that partnership is no…
-
Ranting about Painters — WITH a Paddle in IT!
Here we go again. It’s that time of the year when paddlers make silly points on the Internet. I never understand the silly need of people to comment about how a photo of a canoe or kayak that they saw on social media doesn’t meet their idea of what a canoe or kayak should be or some other silliness like that. To be completely honest (cliched phrase on purpose, because it’s like a cliche that you going to get someone who thinks they are the know-it-all paddler to comment on a photo that they have no knowledge of), I just don’t even have the energy to continue describing this type…
-
To Preserve Public Lands, There is Only One Choice in This Election
One of the missions of PaddlingLight is to promote wilderness protection. Why? There are lots of reasons why wilderness and wild places and public lands are good for us, including mentally and economically, but, perhaps, more importantly because wilderness travel by canoe and kayak is the apex of this sport. It’s what we do. We go paddling, and much of the time, we go paddling in areas that are accessed via public lands. While all the destinations that we paddle aren’t in wilderness areas or areas with large expanses of public lands, the celebrated areas — those areas that we dream of paddling — such as the Everglades, Boundary Waters Canoe…
Or if you use a RSS Feed Reader subscribe via our RSS Feed.