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Initial Big Agnes Wind Lip Review: a Sleeping Bag with Pinneco Core® Insulation
This spring (if spring ever comes to the polar vortex), I’ll be testing out Big Agnes’ Wind Lip sleeping bag on kayaking and canoe trips, but I had a chance to test it out over the last week while in the Badlands National Park. I was out there photographing the park and scouting locations for a potential photography workshop that I’d run in December (if you’re interested, email me). I used to be a geek about sleeping bags and sleeping bag insulation when I worked as a buyer/line leader for a major sporting good retailer, but since then I’m fallen out of the loop. The Big Agnes Wind Lip sleeping bag…
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Adventurer Savant
Adventurer Savant? The Savant Syndrome is when a person with mental disabilities, such as autism, shows above normal capacity in some specific area, such as music or math. We could apply this to adventurers with a little tweaking. Adventurer Savant: Someone who completes an expedition despite a serious ineptitude in both the physical and mental skills required to succeed at the sport and an inability to properly judge risk thus putting himself or herself into serious danger.
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The Death of Sea Kayaking?
Every year about this time, when the Internets are abuzz with northern canoeist and kayakers jonesing for open water, we hear about how sea kayaking is dying as a sport. We hear that the numbers are dropping, only graybeards kayak anymore, symposiums (which according to the arguments tell you how many people sea kayak) are on the decline and with a Sea Kayaker Magazine going under, it’s only a matter of time before the world of sea kayaking proverbably evaporates and we all lose our favorite pastimes. We hear this: Every. Single. Year. Except that it’s not true. Sea kayaking is growing and has been for years. But. But. But.…
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Looking For Kayak Action This Winter? Tune in to these great video casts
If you haven’t been following Sea Kayak Podcasts.com, you should. Sea Kayak Podcasts is the brainchild of Simon Willis, the man who made the excellent Sea Kayak with Gordon Brown videos, and it features short videos on a variety of subjects. The most recent include videos about repairing your kayak and interviews with kayak adventurers. Not only can you watch the videos on the website, but you can also download the videos right to your computer to watch them. I’m keeping this post short so you can head over to check out all the great videos that you’ve been missing.
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Best of PaddlingLight in 2013
I’m wrapping up the year at PaddlingLight and like I did last year, I’m looking back to see if there were any themes (In 2012, I got philosophical). This year, I didn’t really have a theme. I attempted and got close to my goal of a blog post a week, but summer was difficult. I was guiding trips, running my guiding business and teaching lessons about six days a week on average and that didn’t leave time for anything else, plus I wrote a lot of articles for magazines this year, which put Plight on the backburner. Mainly, my thought process in 2013 was pretty disjointed when it came to…
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Getting Icy: The Last Winter Kayak of the Year
Got out for the last paddle of 2013 the other day. It has been a cold winter so far in the northwoods, and in the winter I prefer to paddle on warmer days, but with December coming to an end my streak of paddling once a month every month on Lake Superior for the last 5+ years looked threatened, so I just needed to get on the water. I met up with Dave Schorn, a guide who works for another sea kayaking company in the area, to get a last-minute December paddle in. The air temp was in the upper teens, water in the mid-30s and the waves and wind were…
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Orange Mud Transition Towel and Seat Wrap Review
One of the awkward parts of paddling happens after you finish kayaking and need to change out of a wetsuit or wet swim trunks. If you’re like me, you usually forget bringing a towel, but if you have one, the worst is when you have it wrapped around your waist, your wetsuit is around your ankles and then the towel lets go. It’s a quick naked shuffle to the car door and you hear lots of jeering from your friends. This is where Orange Mud’s Transition Towel and Seat Wrap comes into play. Orange Mud’s Transition Towel and Seat Wrap is a towel with a built-in belt clip and a…
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Cold Water SUP and a Paddlesport Marketing Fail
Yesterday, Tower Paddle Boards, a manufacturer direct SUP company, posted a tweet about cold water paddling. It said, “Scared to paddle when it’s cold out? Don’t be. Here’s how it’s done.” The tweet included a picture of a guy in a jacket and blue jeans paddling on a SUP with a cup of coffee resting on the board. In a later tweet the company said that the tweet was meant in good humor. But, even though it probably wasn’t meant to do so, it promoted unsafe practices when dealing with cold water. I’ve written about cold water paddling safety and winter kayaking before, so I thought I’d address this issue…
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Homemade Esbit Stove and Windscreen
Just two months ago after a miserable, rainy trip on which we only brought a Solo Stove wood burning stove and had a terrible time trying to cook on it, I vowed off experimenting with stoves, and I vowed to keep my backcountry kitchen simple by just using a MSR Pocket Rocket from now on. My memory of how terrible the experience was must have been short, because I’ve decided to give esbit a go again. For this experiment, I decided to use the smaller pan and lid from my Snow Peak Ti Multi Compact Cookset, a homemade esbit burner based on Brian Green’s design and an experimental conical windscreen…
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Rough Water Kayaking in Norway
It’s that time of year where I don’t get out paddling very much. Devil Track Lake, which I live on, just froze over completely and while the big lake is open, I just ain’t all that motivated to go paddling on it. I’m in that mode where I’ll get out once a month on Lake Superior to try and continue my record of paddling once a month, every month, on the big lake, but I’ll grit my teeth when I do it. Here’s an image from this month’s paddle: I do need to get out paddling in the next couple of days though, because I bought a Nikon AW1, which…
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Where to keep your kayak pump?
I consider a kayak bilge pump an essential kayaking accessory for all levels of kayakers. I know that there’s a movement out there that says that you don’t need one, but I’m not in that camp. At some point, if you leave swimming distance of the shore, you’ll need to pump out a kayak, either your boat or one of your paddling partners. The key about a pump is that in order for it to be useful, it needs to be accessible when you need it. And, that means that it really needs to be close to the cockpit. There are a couple of ideas about where exactly to store it,…
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Sawyer Mini Water Filter Review
When a 1.6 ounce, $24 Sawyer Mini water filter showed up at my door, I felt hopeful that it would be all that it claimed to be, but skeptical as well, because of an experience I had testing another lightweight water filter over the summer (one which the company withdrew from review after I told them it was like sucking concrete through a straw). I also knew that by getting a chance to test the Sawyer Mini Water Filter in the fall, I’d be one of the first people to review it and because it stands to be a revolutionary water filter in the way the bigger Sawyer Squeeze Filter…
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Navigation: Leave Your Compass at Home and Use Handrails and Fences
Although it’s best to always have a compass with you, if you have a detailed chart or map, you don’t always need to use it when you’re navigating. If you use handrails, fences (also call catches) and checkpoints during the day, you needn’t check your compass often. Handrails and fences are techniques and features that do exactly what they sounds like they do; you follow a handrail and a fence keeps you in. A checkpoint is just like a checkpoint on a road or race. It’s a known point on the chart. A handrail is a feature or landmark that leads towards your destination and one that you can follow or…
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Sawyer MINI Filter Preview
Earlier this year, I had the opportunity to review Sawyer’s Squeeze Filter (see: Sawyer Squeeze Filter Review). The summary of that review was that I loved it. It completely revolutionized the way I filter water, because I no longer have to pump. Since then, Sawyer has been working on a new water filter called the Sawyer Mini Filter, and I’m going to review it during the next month. Here’s a note I got in my email the other day: A 0.1 micron absolute filter, that weighs 2 ounces, is rated up to 100,000 gallons and costs $20???? You might think we’re crazy but we’re not (well maybe just a little…
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Lightweight Stoves: Rated for Ease of Use and Weight
Over the years, I’ve used all kinds of backpacking stoves for my kayaking and canoe trips. Those stoves have burned a variety of fuels, including white gas, alcohol, wood, propane, isobutane and esbit — I’m probably missing a few. I’ve used different configurations of stoves from systems designed specifically to work with one stove and one pot, such as Jetboil’s stove to systems that I pieced together to systems that I built myself. After spending a weekend using a stove that just wouldn’t work, I decided it was time to stop messing around with my stove systems and just pick one variety and stick with it. Life is too short to…
