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The Ikkatsu Project: Documenting the Tsunami Debris
People are attracted to sea-kayaking for many different reasons. Relaxation, adventure or the occasional adrenaline rush are all valid reasons. Over the years I’ve found my reasons morphing and growing. Of late, I’ve been moving away from kayaking for kayaking sake, to using kayaking as a means to an end. When I found the organization Adventurers and Scientist for Conservation I realized that I wanted to get involve with a program where my desire for outdoor adventure was couple with a bigger cause. Then just as I was sending in my application to A&S, I was approached by Ken Campbell, a fellow guide-instructor with a project that grabbed my attention…
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Apostle Island Sea Kayaking Trip Report
Yesterday, I went over to the Apostle Islands with Stephen Regenold and TC Worley of Gear Junkie. They were filming a travel piece and needed some kayakers to help out, so I recruited my friend John Amren, and we all trekked over to the islands. For those that don’t know, the Apostle Islands are often called the premier sea kayaking destination on Lake Superior. The National Park Service, which manages the islands, calls them the “Jewels of Lake Superior.” They are about two hours east of Duluth, Minnesota, four hours from the Twin Cities and about 30 minutes north of Ashland, Wisconsin. A peninsula juts out into Lake Superior and the 21 islands that…
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Guerrilla Camping for Canoeists and Kayakers
I awoke with a start, not due to loud rumbling, but due to the ground shaking under my sleeping bag. It was 3:30am and a heavily laden freight train was headed north on tracks located just across the river, less than 30 yards from my tent. We were guerrilla camping along the Tioughnioga River in upstate New York paralleled by a little used railroad line. It was the only train we heard or saw during our trip down river, but its timing was exquisite. After the train passed I snoozed a little and then got up to the sounds of wild turkeys coming off their roosts on the nearby hillside. …
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Signaling Devices to Carry While Canoeing and Kayaking
Maintaining communications within and outside of your group when kayaking or canoeing, whether it’s a day trip or a longer one, adds a degree of safety to your trip. There are multiple types of signaling devices on the market, and many can be used for both communications to your paddling partners and any outside entities, such as other boaters or shore-based stations. The following can be considered the minimal recommended devices for a trip of any length. Why Carry Devices? If you’ve heard the safety acronym “CLAP” before, you know that the first two letters stand for communication and line-of-sight. The reason that these are important is that if you can’t communicate with…
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When They Want to Take Away Wilderness
On PaddlingLight, I try to steer clear of politics, but one of PaddlingLight’s missions is to increase wilderness protection so I have to stick my toes into it now and then. Recently, we had some alarming numbers on wilderness participation rates, and with an increasingly anti-environmental U.S. congress, which according to some numbers is the most anti-environmental congress in the existence of the United States — as of September 2011 they made 125 votes against the environment and 33 votes to undermine protection for public lands and coasts — I feel like it’s my duty as a paddler, a blogger and a lover of wilderness to speak out. Especially now with…
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Review: True and Deep – Songs for the Heart of the Paddler
Nashville songwriter, author and educator Jerry Vandiver recently released True And Deep – Songs for the Heart of the Paddler, an album of canoe country inspired songs. After getting a copy of the album, I was instantly hooked. The songs capture the spirit of a canoe trip in the northwoods and the arrangement takes you on a journey that includes the excitement of canoeing a whitewater river on More Than A River to connecting with the ancient history in The Spirit Of Fishdance Lake. Catchy and humorous songs like Rock And Roots, Too Tired To Start A Fire and Camp Coffee will have you humming the day away while dreaming about your next trip.…
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Stealth Camping: the Path of the Ninja Paddler
Many of the areas that I’ve paddled have built up shoreline with houses coming almost to the water and parks, if they exist at all, more than a day’s paddle away, or parks that don’t allow camping. During a multi-day kayaking or canoeing trip, if you want to camp in these areas, you’ll camp on private property at some point — known as stealth camping. In a few countries, such as Norway, you have the right to access, which means that you can camp freely on wildlands and other private lands. In Norway, as long as the land is uncultivated, you can pretty much camp there (see the Outdoor Recreation…
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Canoeists Getting Older and Introducing Fewer New People to the Wilderness
Lots of news in the paddling world today, but the scariest is a report just released by the U.S. Forest Service about the Boundary Waters Wilderness Canoe Area: In it, we found out that the average user age in 1969 was 26 and in 2007 it was 45. We also found out that first time visitors have dropped from 30% of visitors to 6%. This means that fewer people are being introduced to the BWCA. I’d guess that also means that the age of the average visitor will continue to rise and current users grow older. As a point of reference, the average age in Minnesota is 36. The study…
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Courage in Wilderness Travel
courage: mental or moral strength to venture, persevere, and withstand danger, fear, or difficulty In February of 2011, I was thinking about courage and how technology can change the amount of courage that a wilderness trip requires (see: Modern Technology and Courage in the Wilderness). I concluded that certain types of technology can reduce the risks of wilderness travel and reduce the courage it takes to tackle the trip. In a more recent article a commenter made a remark about how boat type can affect courage. In his example, he used an inflatable kayak in an area where the norm is hard-shelled sea kayaks. While his choice may or may not make…
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Kate’s Bars Review
Years ago, I decided that the best food in the world would be a bar named “Food Bar.” You’d eat it in the morning, and it would sustain you throughout the day. While that still isn’t available, many energy bars do the trick for me. Years ago I settled on Clif Bar’s Crunchy Peanut Butter, and that’s what I stuck with. While I’ve tired other bars, I always go back to Clif bars. I was excited when I heard about Kate’s Real Food, which makes beefy energy bars with peanut butter as one of the core ingredients. Peanut butter energy bars with extra ingredients, such as rice, oats, honey, bananas, apricots, raisins and…
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Canoe Outfitters Website Announcement
I’m proud to announce the new Canoe Outfitters website. It’s a website designed to quickly connect paddlers looking for an outfitter with outfitters servicing the area. The goal is to list every canoe outfitter worldwide, so that a paddler can just show up on the website, search the area they want to go and see every outfitter in the area. Outfitters can opt to be rated and reviewed or neither, so there’s a good chance of some social interaction as the website builds. The reason that I wanted to start a website like this was because it’s really hard to search for outfitters on Google. One day I was paging…
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Super Secret Kayak Design
A couple of years ago, I designed this kayak for someone in China. He never got around to building it, or at least he never let me know if he built it. It’s been sitting on my harddrive since then. Recently, I pulled it up and refined it a bit to add extra stability. This kayak falls into the recreational touring class. It’s 15 feet long with a touch of rocker. It should cruise along nicely in the 3 to 4 knot range and feel really solid for beginners despite it’s slightly narrower width than plastic boats in this class. It could be built in cedar strip, plywood or possibly…
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Should You Buy That New Piece of Paddling Kit?
This post isn’t going to have a lot of meat, but, hopefully, this flow chart will help you decide if you should buy that new piece of paddling kit. It’s inspired by guitarsquid.com’s flow chart for buying music equipment. I changed it up slightly and added an additional step. And simplified: Enjoy. I kind of like this flow chart idea. Anyone have any other perplexing paddling questions that need to be answered by a flow chart? If so, I can throw one together for you.
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How to Call Mayday When Kayaking or Canoeing
Hopefully, when canoeing or kayaking you’ll never get yourself into a situation where you need to call for outside help, but if you do find yourself there, you need to know how to call Mayday. A Mayday call is an internationally recognized distress signal used to signal a life-threatening emergency that, if heard, should trigger a rescue. Before you learn how to call for Mayday, you need to learn about VHF radios and if you don’t own one, you need to budget for one, because they are one of the items that any coastal kayaker and many canoeists should own. What is a VHF Radio? A marine VHF radio is a two-way…
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To Protect Minnesota’s Water and Natural Heritage
One of the issues that America’s most-used Wilderness Area, the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCA), faces is pollution from sulfide mining, which has a 100% track record of polluting. I’ve written about sulfide mining in the BWCA before. The political and money machines continue to march forward on this plan despite not being able to prove that they won’t pollute nor providing any reassurances that they will clean up the pollution in the future. It’s a raw deal for the BWCA, one of the most beautiful areas in the U.S. Friends of this website site Dave and Amy Freeman and former legislator and Grand Marais resident Frank Moe plan…
