Monthly Archives: February 2012

Canoe Outfitters Website Announcement

Canoeing in the BWCA

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 [...]

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Super Secret Kayak Design

free kayak plans

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 [...]

Posted in Articles, Free Kayak and Canoe Plans, Free Kayak Plans, Kayak Plans, Kayaks | Tagged , | 3 Comments

Should You Buy That New Piece of Paddling Kit?

Packing a sea kayak with dry bags.

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 [...]

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How to Call Mayday When Kayaking or Canoeing

Icom M72 VHF radio ready for use on channel 16.

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 [...]

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To Protect Minnesota’s Water and Natural Heritage

dog sled

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 [...]

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Free Canoe Plans and Free Kayak Plans Update

Chestnut Chum canoe computer model

One of the main (many) purposes for PaddlingLight has been to store a number of canoe plans and kayak plans. Most of the plans are free, but a few, my designs, are for sale. The revenue that I get from sales doesn’t add up to much. Last year, it was just enough to pay off [...]

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