The "new" canoe

I'm still not sure how it began, but a friend and I started talking canoes at prayer meeting one night. He was telling me he had a nice canoe, but was thinking about getting rid of it. I told him I'd be interested in buying it from him, if he'd tell me what he thought a fair price. Well, he decided a fair price would be me coming to his house to take it from his garage.

So yesterday I went up to his place and picked up the canoe and three paddles. I wasn't quite sure what I'd find: he said it was "a good canoe", but didn't recall any particulars about it. I figured it would be worth a drive to find out.

From Sundance

Turns out the canoe is a Mad River Sundance. According to the old Mad River catalogue, it's 17' 6" long and 34.5" wide at the beam. That's a whole lotta canoe.

From Sundance

When I saw the canoe, I told my friend that it's too nice a canoe to give away: he should sell it. He said, "I can't sell it, because I'm giving it away". That's very generous.


The canoe's in great shape, but a little dusty.

From Sundance

I cleaned it up a little this afternoon to get rid of the dust and touch up the dings in the wood. A little polish and it's in fine shape.

From Sundance

I did rub some Danish oil into the gunwhales: that might be a stupid thing to do, but they felt a little dry. I think it'll be fine. It definitely added some shine to the wood, which is nice cosmetically. Danish oil should handle the water just fine.

From Sundance

The hull only needed some soap and water, then we put a shine on it with a vaguely Armor-All(R) -like substance.

From Sundance

From Sundance

This is a little longer, but narrower than my current canoe, a We-no-nah Prospector. And the Sundance has a keel, while the Prospector is flat-bottomed.

Of course the Prospector is a gorgeous canoe

From Mohun Lake

but I've found it's pretty squirrely. It's flat-bottomed and doesn't track very well, and the high stems catch the wind like sails: it's a challenging canoe for the solo paddler or the novice. On the other hand, it turns on a dime and can handle a lot of abuse. I love my Prospector.

But I'm really excited about the new canoe. It's probably about 20 years old, but it's been well looked-after. And there's something really classy to those lines.

I'm planning on trying it out later this week, so I'll try and post an update then.

I'm really grateful for my friend' generosity. He insists he wasn't using it, but the fact is that he could've sold it: giving it away really was kind. It's a nice canoe, and it's in good shape, he didn't have to give it to me.

True craftsman

I just love this film. It runs about an hour, and it's well worth the time to watch it.

Watching this guy is simply stunning: he is clearly master both of his tools and his medium. Whether it's the axe or the paddle, he's right at home.

Wow

Now this is impressive:



Some of the more elaborate canoe dancing is a little out there, but these people can definitely handle a paddle.

Dreaming

Well, we got in our first canoe outing of the year this weekend. We don't do any serious tripping or anything, but I love to get out on the water and forget about my high-tech job once in a while.

Speedboats on the lake disturb my reverie, but they're not nearly so bad as a cell phone that rings all the time.

Charlotte's not got the best selection of water for paddling---especially not in drought conditions---but we've been making the best of it, rather than whine about what we haven't got.

Moving to an apartment put a light cramp in my paddling plans: canoe storage space is just not a standard feature in apartments in Charlotte. But a friend generously agreed to store the canoe for a few months, so we didn't have to sell it. I'm driving around with a canoe on top of my truck right now, I want to try and get a few hours on the water before taking my canoe back to storage.

Anyhow, paddling always gets me fired up about paddling.

Last year I decided to carve myself a decent paddle, which has not gone very well. I haven't actually ruined my paddle yet, but progress is slow; and realistically, it'll be even slower now that I've not got a workshop, have gotten rid of almost all my tools, and don't have a dedicated space to work in.

The joys of urban living.

So until my home-made paddle is finished (i.e. for the foreseeable future), I've decided I'm going to buy a decent paddle. Or even better, I'm going to try and figure out a way to have someone else buy it for me.

Random thought: my birthday is next month.

So I've been more and more playing with the "Indian Stroke" when paddling, and I really like it. But I want to get a narrower blade to work with. The standard el cheapo paddles I've seen in the various outdoor stores have really wide blades. Worse, they don't offer higher-end paddles with narrow blades. If you want a cheap paddle, the blade is wide; if you want a more expensive paddle, you either get a bent shaft or some fancy composite construction, and the blade's still wide: there isn't the option of a narrow blade. It seems blade shape is not a configurable option in the various outdoor stores I've checked.

Now to be fair, this is North Carolina. Here "paddling" almost exclusively means "kayak." This is not exactly canoe country. There is much wider selection of kayak paddles than canoe paddles.

But I've spent some time looking online, and I've found a couple contenders for my new paddle. Here are a few I'd really like to try out, not in any real order:

• Algonquin Guide by Turtle Paddle Works. It has a narrow blade (5.75") and a "Northwoods" grip. It's also got leather whipping for padding if you lever the paddle against the gunwale of the canoe, which I do frequently.


• Ottertail, also by Turtle. This has a smaller blade than their "Guide", and a more traditional grip. It also costs quite a bit less.


• Porter's Woodworking has a nice looking Ottertail, but I can't get a good look at it on the site, so I'm not sure it makes it to the finals, although it could be something really special. Still, the blade's a little wider than the 5" I'm looking for. Maybe I'll class this one a semi-finalist.


• Racine by Shaw and Tenny. This paddle looks really very cool. It's a little cheaper than the Guide by Turtle, and it's got the shape I want: 5" blade and all.

I've seen a few other offerings, but these appear to be the closest to what I want. And best of all, they're all made by small shops. And here's where it gets cool: those paddles all cost less than $150. That doesn't sound impressive, except I was looking at paddles this weekend in the outdoor stores, and they go up to $290. $150 for a traditional canoe paddle is much less than I expected.

I'm leaning toward the Guide by Turtle as my #1 choice, and the Racine by Shaw and Tenny as my #2. Sadly, Turtle won't ship to the USA, so I may have to find a retailer (like Rutabaga) if I go with the Guide. Both of those shops are the sort of thing I like to support: small artisan businesses.

Sacagawea

Well, we took the the new canoe out for her maiden voyage. "Voyage" is a strong word: we paddled around in a bay or two for 30 minutes or so.

We forgot to take the camera, but we got a couple more detail shots when we got home, so I updated the photo album:

New Canoe

I was going to christen her Persephone: I've always wanted to name a boat after Nick Adonidas' boat, and since this is the first boat I've ever owned, I naturally thought "this is my chance!". But Pocahontas thought we should name her Sacagawea, and I have to agree that's probably more appropriate. So Sacagawea it is.

She's got some scratches on the hull from a gravelly launch. Apparently Royalex can take a beating, so I'm not worried (they're not deep), but it re-emphasizes that I need to get some 303 or something on her before long. I typically wait 6 months on that kind of thing, I don't want to do that now.

So how is she?

We paddled tandem with three kids in the canoe, and she glides well. She's definitely an agile boat, and turns lightly. She's also not as stable as the huge freighter I grew up paddling, but she's a canoe: the kids were worried about her rocking, so I rocked her good and hard, and they got the idea of secondary stability.

I did paddle her solo after everyone disembarked, Canadian style. She rocks a lot, so I found myself shifting frequently, looking for her stability point. She's light too, so the wind caught her a lot without the weight of the others in the canoe. It may take some more practice to find the point where she likes to heel.

In the couple days between buying Sacagawea and putting her in the water, I've been doing some reading about canoeing online. Most of the information out there seems suspect, but there is some good stuff too. I'm sure Dad would be appalled at a lot of it. Dad's a more Zen paddler: "Just paddle the boat, and point it where you want to go!". Of course, that won't sell boats or allow people to get certified as instructors, so they have to name strokes and techniques.

As a side note: the couple times I've had a canoe instructor around, they always tried to teach me a "J-Stroke". I always thought it felt tight, cramped, and forced. I'm not entirely sure what it was my Dad taught me, but after a little reading, it seems it was either a "Canadian", or something very similar.

At any rate, I stumbled across something on the "mystical North Woods Stroke", where a paddler paddles without really taking the paddle out of the water. This excited me, as I remember Mum telling me many times about how Grandad would paddle without lifting his paddle out of the water.

Well, after some digging, I found out the so-called "mystical North Woods Stroke" is also called a "Knifing J Stroke" or "Canadian Stroke". It's basically what Dad used to make me do when we went canoeing. Not that I minded, of course: I was delighted to learn more canoe lore. But it is interesting to find out what my Dad taught me from a young age is considered "advanced", even "mystical".

That may actually be an oversimplification: apparently the really good "North Woods Strok"-ers do it without actually letting the paddle clear the water, which is more complex than what I do... but watching the demos I could find online, it's basically the same. Dad always made me skim my paddle just over the top of the water instead of knifing it through, but that's the only difference I can see. The "talking points" of the "Canadian Stroke" are all identical to what Dad told me a good paddler does.

But ever since I can remember, I tried to do what Grandad did, and invariably it wouldn't work, so I woud revert to "normal" paddling (which I now know is called a "Canadian Stroke", or maybe a really extended "J-Stroke"?). But I did find a hint that helped: and I think I got the trick of it. Now I just need to practice to get it perfect and powerful.

Apparently the "Grandad Stroke" is called an "Indian Stroke". There's a diagram of it here, which indicated what I had always done wrong: I was trying to "knife" the paddle in place, rather than paddling in an oval. In other words, I was turning the paddle the wrong way! I was turning it in instead of out.

So today I paddled most of the time "Indian style", and found it very relaxing. I don't have a lot of power there yet, and reverted to lifting the paddle out of the water on each stroke when I had to turn quickly around a sunken tree with protruding limbs. But I'm very excited: I've been trying to figure out the "Grandad Stroke" for twenty years (keep in mind about 15 of those with no access to a canoe), and today it finally clicked.

So we're very happy with our canoe, and I can hardly wait to get it back out there. Next time, I want to get the kids to take a turn at a paddle. That's how Dad taught us: 100ft of rope tied to the canoe, lifejackets on, paddle in hand, take the canoe out, kids! He'd stand on the shore and coach us. Then we graduated to taking turns in the bow while Mum enjoyed the view.

It's supposed to get to 68F this week, so maybe I can take the afternoon off and we can spend it on the lake!

New Arrival

Well, we finally did it. We bought a canoe.

New Canoe

We've been talking about this for years, but in the last couple years, I looked at Pocahontas and said "We really need to get a canoe!" We are really sedentary people, and while we're all well read; we really all need some fresh air and exercise. And since we live in a place where it's warm well over half the year, a canoe seemed like a good idea.

We did our research, and I wanted either a Wenonah or an Old Town. A local shop: Great Outdoor Provision Co. was highly recommended, so we went there. They didn't have the canoe I was looking for: the Minnesota II by Wenonah, but they had a 16 foot Prospector in stock. I have to admit the Prospector caught my eye as soon as I saw it. It's didn't look like much on Wenonah's website, but in person it was beautiful: sweeping lines, high bow and stern, and a wide hull. But it wasn't what I had been looking for, so we thanked Amanda for her help, and went to the Bass Pro Shop.

The Bass Pro Shop had a few more canoes than the Outdoor Provision Co., but sales staff wasn't anywhere around, and the majority of their stock was too small for us. However, they had two Old Town Discoveries in the 16 foot length.

So now we had two 16 foot offerings available, from two excellent names in canoes, but the Old Town was a lot cheaper than the Wenonah (around $400 or so).

Of course I wanted the more expensive one more...

So I did some research online, and decided the Prospector was the right thing to do. It cost more, but seemed more along the lines of what we wanted. And it was slightly narrower than the Discovery, which means slightly easier to push across a lake.

So this morning we went back to Outdoor Provision Co. and talked to Amanda again (if you're buying a canoe or kayak in Charlotte, talk to Amanda, she's awesome). We bought the canoe, two padddles, some assorted gear, and lifejackets all around. A little pricey, but it'll have been worth every penny if we get some family time outside out of it.

The reason I finally went with the Prospector is this: when I was growing up, you bought a canoe. Now they're modernized the industry to the point where you can't just buy a canoe, you buy a canoe for lake travel on days when it's sunny, and you're heading due north. The canoes people make are uber-specialized, and it's a little intimidating. The first thing they ask is "what'll you use it for?" Well, when I was growing up, Dad and I took our huge canoe on lakes, whitewater, and even saltwater. If you wanted to go solo, you turned it around, sat backwards in the "front" seat, and went "backwards". Now you're expected to buy a seat to sit in the middle of your canoe, just for solo trips.

But the Prospector is a remake of a circa 1910 canoe. It's as old-school as you get. Actually, I noticed it was hailed as a great all-round canoe before I realized a lot of companies make a "Prospector", and they're all take-offs of one built in the early 1900s. So this is the closest thing to the canoes I grew up with. But being made of newer materials, this thing is light. I carried it more or less alone from the truck to the backyard, and it was a breeze.

And just for comparison, the Discovery, the other canoe we were considering, has molded plastic seats. So you couldn't turn it around and run it backwards if you wanted to!

Of course, a lot of canoes today wouldn't run backwards, as they're not symmetric front-to-back. Check out the Wenonah Minnesota II I was considering on their website for an example.

We got everyone to sit in it before we decided to buy, and we all fit great, with room enough for a night or two of camping supplies. So it's a good, practical choice.

It's been too cold to go out on the water, so the baby's sleeping in our backyard. But next weekend is supposed to be warmer, so we'll try again Saturday. Then I suppose we'll know whether it really is worth what we paid.

I'll be sure to post a full review of it here once we actually get it wet.