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Kayak Deck Slates for Navigation
Last year, I had a bunch of kayak deck slate stickers made to make them for sale again. I still have a bunch left and available for purchase. Deck slates are handy for taking notes while on the water, for tracking tide information and for keeping notes for navigation. Instructors also use them for writing down names and tracking how a student does during each exercise or paddle stroke. You write on a deck slate with a grease pencil, and the slates clean up easily either by rubbing the grease off with a wet finger or with an alcohol prep pad. The stickers are easy to apply. And stick to…
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Rhythm of the Hayes: Paddling Expedition to Hudson Bay
From Juan Pablo Quiñonez: The expedition will focus in creating a short film with “our connection to nature” as its theme. Two ecotourism and outdoor leadership students will embark on a remote route along the Hayes River from northern Lake Winnipeg through 610 kilometres of wilderness to arrive at their destination on the shores of Hudson Bay. Their journey will follow along a historic fur trade route and one of the few major rivers in Manitoba not influenced by hydroelectric development. Jennifer Ford and Juan Pablo Quinonez are students at Mount Royal University in Calgary; Juan Pablo is an international student from Guadalajara, Mexico and Jennifer grew up in Winnipeg.…
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Namby Pamby, the Kayaker and Minnehaha Falls
Minnesota is in flood. We’re getting lots of rain on top of lots of rain, which means that many of the streams and rivers are at some of their highest levels ever. If you’re a whitewater kayaker, your ears probably just perked up a little, because you know that the legendary whitewater rivers of Lake Superior’s north shore run the best during the spring runoff when the water is cold. It’s June and the water is somewhat warm, which means warm whitewater on the north shore. But that’s not all, 53-foot Minnehaha Falls on the Minnehaha Creek in Minneapolis hit an all time record high yesterday. Apparently, there was a huge…
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Spring Kayaking
The ice just won’t leave. It’s going. At the edge of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, Sawbill Outfitters up the Sawbill Trail from Tofte reports that the ice thickness has dropped from 27 inches to 22 inches from the 2nd of May until the 5th. At that rate, assuming a linear ice melt, the pace of ice melt puts ice out on the 18th of May. That’s when Devil Track Lake, the lake I currently sort of live on, went out last year. We broke a record. I wonder if it’ll happen again. There’s something about this time of year, especially this year with the 1 to 2 feet…
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Jerry Vandiver’s Every Scratch Tells A Story
Back in 2012, Jerry Vandiver, a Nashville-based singer and songwriter, sent me a copy of True And Deep – Songs for the Heart of the Paddler. I was instantly hooked by the canoe country inspired songs. Jerry has followed up the first album with another one filled with tunes inspired by the canoe lifestyle and the northwoods. While the last one hit home for me, because much of it was inspired by trips to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCA) and several entry points to the BWCA are just 20 minutes from my backdoor, this one hits home even more — it has a song about the town I live…
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Northstar Canoes: Bell is Back in Black-Lite
Back in the good ole’ days when I used to work retail, we carried Bell Canoes. They were made in Minnesota and were the perfect canoes for traveling the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, which was where our customers were heading. If you don’t know that Boundary Waters, you should. It’s a 1 million acre wilderness area that is only one of two wilderness areas in the U.S. designated specifically for canoes. It’s also America’s most used wilderness area. In the BWCA, you travel from lake to lake using portages that you carry your gear over. Bell Canoes were light, efficient at touring speed and nice and stable. They also…
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Wilderness in America Under Attack (Still)
One of PaddlingLight’s missions is to increase awareness about wilderness in a way to try and increase wilderness protection. One way that PLight does this is by calling attention to attacks on America’s laws that govern Wilderness Areas and National Parks. These attacks on American wilderness hurt all Americans by making it so there is less space protected for the enjoyment of all Americans instead of just the few. I wrote about the problem of extremists before the 2012 elections and how they want to take away our wilderness. The extremist attack on U.S. National Parks and Wilderness Areas continues in the U.S. House of Representatives as they move to pass…
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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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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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