-
Canoe Lovers: Grand Portage Rendezvous Days and Powwow
Last weekend was the annual Rendezvous Days and Powwow at Grand Portage National Monument in northern Minnesota. The Grand Portage was the 8-mile trail that fur-trading voyageurs took to bring the furs they gathered to the company’s remote headquarters. In August every year, the voyageurs would show up and the rich company owners would come from Europe, and Grand Portage became a rough and tumble celebration. After the celebration, the furs were loaded aboard massive voyageur canoes and paddled across the Great Lakes and eventually shipped to Europe where many became hats. In the states, the voyageurs would carry trade goods up the portage and then paddle 100s of miles back…
-
Jon Turk’s New Book Crocodiles and Ice: A Journey into Deep Wild Available for Preorder
Adventurer and sea kayaker Jon Turk has a new book coming out in September. Amazon is now taking preorders. The book, called Crocodiles and Ice: A Journey in the Deep Wild, ties together several of Jon’s expeditions under the theme of a “journey into a Consciousness Revolution based on a deep, reciprocal communication with the Earth.” The book covers Jon’s circumnavigation of Ellesmere Island, which is the trip that won him National Geographics Adventurer of the Year, and several other trips as well. Here’s the description: Crocodiles and Ice is a scientist/adventurer’s journey into a Consciousness Revolution based on a deep, reciprocal communication with the Earth. The book highlights my…
-
Illusory Truth Effect and Sea Kayaking (Sort of Off-Topic)
In a recent Facebook post, a person that I’ve known for over 10 years and someone who has authored several articles for this website, said, I don’t need to support my views with facts because I know that they are true. It was as if Stephen Colbert’s truthiness joke was manifest in reality. This person was arguing something that had no real evidence, but had been said over and over and over again — heck, it has been said enough times that I believe it, too, even though I’ve never seen any real evidence that could be used in court to prove it or convict the people involved. There’s a cognitive…
-
North House Folk School’s Wooden Boat Show 2016
Each year on the summer solstice weekend, the North House Folk School in Grand Marais puts on its annual Wooden Boat Show. The 2017 dates are June 16-18, 2017. The event not only is a gathering of handcrafted canoes, kayaks and other boats, but a festival weekend full of classes, workshops, talks, slideshows and more. It’s a fun weekend and if you love wooden canoe and kayaks, you should put it on your calendar as an event to attend. It also features a wooden boat auction. I let a wooden canoe go that I would have loved to restore this year, because I don’t have the space on my project list…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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,…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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.…
-
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…
-
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…
