Category Archives: Tutorial

How to Pick the Perfect Campsite

kayak campsite on Lake Superior

At the end of a long, hard day of kayaking or canoeing finding the perfect campsite can boost your morale and make the day’s effort feel more rewarding. With limited daylight and no desire to paddle further, and a just okay campsite at your bow, it’s tempting to paddle on just to see what’s around [...]

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How to Install a NDK Kayaks High Performance Seat

ndk high performance seat

If you own an older NDK (Nigel Dennis Kayaks), now called Sea Kayaking UK, you’ve probably experienced a broken seat. The older seats were fiberglassed into the kayak under the deck and that fiberglass would eventually tear away. The standard replacement was a foam seat, but now you can install a NDK high performance seat yourself. [...]

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Print BSB Raster Charts the Easy Way: NOAA Charts for Free

print bsb charts such as this one

For kayakers, buying multiple full-sized charts is not only expensive (at $25 a chart), but the full-sized charts are impractical for folding and carrying in a map case. I much prefer to use free NOAA bsb charts and print them on my own. I’ve written an article about how to Print Your Own NOAA Charts using a [...]

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The Path to Torso Rotation

Greenland-style balance brace

In kayaking, if you can rotate your torso, your strokes can become more effective. If you’ve ever taken a lesson or read a book on the forward stroke, you’ve probably heard “rotate, rotate, rotate” or some kind of encouragement like “show me your back, show me your chest” to force you to rotate. The reason [...]

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Guerrilla Camping for Canoeists and Kayakers

Guerrilla camping campsite

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 [...]

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Stealth Camping: the Path of the Ninja Paddler

not so stealthy stealth camping

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 [...]

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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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Organizing Camping Gear for Canoe Camping and Kayak Camping

Organzing camping gear by laying everything out.

Many checklists that help with organizing camping gear are broken down into categories that don’t necessarily reflect how we live our lives in our homes. For example, a checklist might break the list into paddling clothing, camp clothing, personal gear, group gear and personal items. At a glance, you can’t really tell what you’re bringing. [...]

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Kayaking Accessories for Beginners

Kayaking accessories on the beach

As a first time kayak buyer, you probably didn’t know or don’t know what kayaking accessories to get with your first kayak, and unless you bought from a knowledgeable salesperson, who also kayaks, he probably didn’t get you everything that you needed. The problem is two-fold: 1. Many salespeople don’t understand kayaking. 2. When you [...]

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How to Print Free Canadian Topographic Maps Quickly and Inexpensively

Free Canadian Topo map example

This is a guest post from educator and wilderness guide Dave Freeman. Canadian topographic maps generally cost between $11 and $16 dollars each. When buying many maps for an extended camping trip, the costs quickly add up. Luckily, the Canadian government offers free electronic copies of all of their topo maps. By following a few [...]

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Boundary Waters (BWCA) Primer

Canoe in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area.

The Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in northern Minnesota protects 1.09 million acres of Boreal forest and lakes under the Wilderness Act of 1964 and the 1978 BWCA Act. The U.S. set aside the area to provide a place “where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.” It is one of two protected [...]

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Navigation: How to Use a Compass

Part of a compass

When paddling, you use a compass to determine or identify courses, bearings and headings. Because the deck of a kayak or the workstation in a canoe is small, limiting the number of instruments used for navigation speeds up the process and reduces the chance of losing an item overboard. A baseplate compass combines a protractor [...]

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How to Use a VHF Radio

Icom M72 VHF radio ready for use on channel 16.

When paddling, you might need to communicate to other vessels. One tool that a kayaker or canoeist can use to communicate is a handheld VHF radio. A VHF radio broadcasts your message out to other boaters in the area listening to their radios. You can use VHF radios in emergencies or just to relay information. [...]

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NOAA Marine Chart Converter

NOAA Marine Chart

NOAA makes its marine charts available for free to the public, but those charts come in a BSB format. If you want to manipulate the marine charts on your computer, unless you hack the file, you have to use a computer program designed to read the BSB format. To make the charts usable in any [...]

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How to Cook Bannock on a Stick – Campfire Bread

Bannock on a stick cooking over a campfire.

Fresh bread on an extended paddling trip feels like a treat, especially after eating hard crackers, bagels or pitas for a week. One way to make this treat is by cooking bannock. For over a 1000 years, bannock, a simple bread made from the flour of a variety of grains, has filled the bellies of [...]

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