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Fenix HL60R Rechargeable Headlamp Review
Recently, I received a Fenix HL60R Rechargeable Headlamp for review. For the last month, I’ve used it on night outings for photography and for night riding a fat bike. Due to the time of year, I haven’t had a chance to use it while paddling at night — something that I seldom do — but I have used it for camping. The HL60R is the highest end light in Fenix’s headlamps lineup and one of the brightest headlamps on the market. This is Fenix’s description for this headlamp: Featuring a micro-USB port for go-anywhere charging, the Fenix HL60R Headlamp delivers a maximum output of 950 lumens, beam distance of up to 381…
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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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Mythic Gear Drysuit Review: a Budget Drysuit
The water temperature on my home waters of Lake Superior seldom rises above 55°F. For most of the year, it’s much lower. It’s not unusual to have temps in the 30s even on the summer solstice. The warmest I’ve seen the big lake is in the 70s after unusually calm stretches of weather in August when the air temp reached into the lower-80s. It doesn’t stay that warm long. It can literally drop from the 70s to the 40s overnight. I’ve seen that happen several times when 5 to 6-foot waves mix the surface water with the colder water just a few feet lower. Because the lake is so cold,…
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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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Source to Sound on North Carolina’s River of Death
Only the ripples showed where the steel blue water starts. The glassy surface reflects in perfect composition the land also hued in the steel blue of the sun’s last light. Escaping the 18 foot wide Cut Cypress creek, the 4 of us enter into the large bay of Three Sisters. In the sun’s darkening light, a lone barred owl sits sentinel at the entrance. In the dark we reach our platform. Headlights on, gear is pulled to the night’s home deep in the bottomland forest. The Roanoke River, known locally as the River of Death for carrying away the unprepared on its swift currents, runs 130+ miles through North Carolina.…
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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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Northstar Phoenix Mini-Review
I’ll admit it right up front: I’m a Ted Bell and David Yost fan. I used to own a Bell Magic and Bell Wildfire. Those canoes really paddled like Magic and were the best combo to own. The Magic was perfect for fast and light tripping in the BWCA and the Wildfire was a fun boat to take down rivers or just mess about in on flat water. I was bummed when I heard that Bell Canoe went out of business. And then Ted Bell got back in business under the name of Northstar Canoe. And then I ran into a perfect deal. The deal was a trade from my old…
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Under Armour UA Storm Tactical Patrol Pants Review: Best Canoe Pants?
Late this summer, I was in a store looking for a first aid kit (I left mine at home) and I stumbled across Under Armour’s UA Storm Tactical Patrol Pants. I wasn’t aware that Under Armour made pants or anything other than underwear, so I was surprised to find the pants. Over the years, Under Armour has formed strong relationships with the hook and bullet stores, and these pants are geared towards the hook and bullet crowd, such as hunters, sport shooters or people who fancy themselves some kind of tactical-militia person. They have all the features a pistol-carrying enthusiast would desire, such as an offset belt loop to allow for proper…
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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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Tubism Review: Lightweight containers for liquids
I’m always on the lookout for lightweight products that can carry liquids easily without leaking. The gold standard is Nalgene bottles, because they don’t leak. But, they weigh more than I’d like at 0.5 ounces, and they don’t work with food or products you need to squeeze. I was excited when I saw the Tubism resealing zip tubes. At 0.4 ounces for 1.7 fluid ounces, they looked like a good deal. They could carry small amounts of liquids on trips while keeping down the weight. The Tubism tubes are unique because they’re flat instead of round. One end has a zip closure and the other end a squeeze lid. They are…
