Bombproof your kayak roll in whitewater with these tips from Thea Froehlich, guest instructor at the Madawaska Kanu Centre (owl-mkc.ca/mkc).
Rolling is simple once you understand it’s a combination of hip movement and a sequence of placements of your paddle. Follow these easy how-to’s to get your first whitewater roll, or perfect your technique.
Learn the safest and most efficient way to get your canoe on your shoulders. Canoe tripping guide Erik Fenkell, an experienced guide at Temagami Outfitters (www.icanoe.ca) in Temagami, Ontario, shows you how.
“Paddling up the inlet feels like a reverent intruder entering a magnificent throne room. Along the fiord’s steep sides, bald eagles stoically perch on ancient treetops protruding from the fogged mountain slopes. From this high vantage, they stand sentinel, guardians of a sacred place that keeps nature’s secrets…”
I wrote these words in summer 2012, after falling in love with one of Clayoquot Sound’s remotest corners. A pristine region on Vancouver Island’s west coast, the inlet radiates the mystical air of the Pacific Northwest more than any other place I have visited. A dramatic topography covered in an exquisite expression of the ancient temperate rainforest ecosystem, the river valley and adjacent fiord are powerfully humbling.
The wild charm of the place cast a spell over me. After venturing out there on kayak trips and camping in the valley for one or two nights, I knew I would return some day to spend much longer.
In early summer 2014 everything seemed to fall into place. I prepared for a stay of one to two months. A solitary, hidden cabin clinging to the vastness of the wild scenery and representing the only human trace in this realm would act as a perfect home base. My intention was to explore the nature of wilderness living, tune in with this region’s pristine air, observe wildlife and sharpen my senses in interplay with the natural world. I wanted to deeply connect to the feeling of being in this place and situation rather than exploring the place itself.
The spirit of this trip would be quite different from my past wilderness journeys, in that I wasn’t looking to go on an ambitious destination-driven adventure. My aim was simply to see what I could learn from being myself in my favorite wild place.
I found myself heading out into the sound on a sunny morning in mid-July. When the shuttle boat I had hired entered the mouth of the inlet, I felt the overpowering dimensions of the place reduce our human scale to insignificance.
The cabin nestled secretly between the waterline and steep forested mountain slopes behind. I unloaded my kayak and boxes full of gear, waved at the driver and watched his boat disappear into the distance. This had been my dream for two years. I moved into the cabin, settled in and started the simple, rustic, yet very comfortable and gentle way of wilderness living I had imagined.
The cabin was an ideal home base and a safe shelter. The days were sunny, without a single cloud in the sky, the nights starlit and cool. I observed the morning fog lifting off the mountains and the fiord when I awoke, saw the tides roll in and out in front of the cabin, watched the light revealing the many different facets, shades and moods of my favorite place.
In most wild and abundant places, you rarely see the wildlife, although it is there on its elusive missions, defying human understanding. Here, however, bald eagles, kingfishers, gulls, ducks, seals, sea lions and river otters revealed themselves quite frequently. The haunting call of a loon traveled across the water from the estuary in the evening, and often I could hear the deep booming of male sooty grouse resounding from deep inside the mountain valleys.
I paddled to the river estuary each day and evening, quietly sitting in my kayak, observing and listening. After dark, I ate dinner by candlelight inside the cabin, and then switched on my headlamp to write wildlife reports and journal notes. Later, I lit incense sticks to keep the mosquitos away and fell asleep comforted by the solitude of this remote place, so used to echoing back at itself without the attendance of a human witness.
My mind was free of distractions, and time seemed to stretch—four beautiful days of living in the moment felt like weeks. I came to realize that part of the beauty of my favorite place and its appeal to me was its unapproachable seclusion. As much as it was a place of bright beauty, abundance, peace, retreat and serenity, it also carried an obscure air of reticence, inaccessibility, twilit hostility and deep mystery.
I could sense nature’s inexhaustible potential and energy there. It was wild. A place for humans to visit but not to remain.
On the fifth day, I lay down for a nap in the afternoon and awoke to the filtered light of early evening. I launched my kayak and went for my customary paddle to the river estuary. When I returned, I noticed the first weather change since my arrival. After dinner, I stepped outside onto the front porch. The clouds were a lid sealing the roof of the fiord and making the standing air close and muggy. In the pitch-black beyond the porch, the night was conspicuously silent. The water was still, there wasn’t a breath of wind, and I couldn’t hear any bird calls or seals catching fish close to shore like the previous nights.
I went back inside and exchanged texts with my friend in Tofino on my satellite communication device. Then I heard a strange sound somewhere in the distance. I stepped back out onto the porch and listened carefully. Yes, there it was again. It sounded as if big rocks or boulders were being turned over or thrown.
It must be a black bear looking for a late night snack in the intertidal zone, I reasoned, or perhaps rocks loosened by the change in temperature falling out of the cliffs. I strained to hear any other clue as to the source. That’s when the strange, owl-like vocalizations started. It seemed like several of them replying to each other from different locations in the distance. Between these sounds was absolute silence.
Half an hour later, the tumbling boulder sounds continued. Brushing my teeth, I tried to convince myself that the periodic silences were peaceful rather than strained. Suddenly, one of the rock sounds erupted with the intensity of an explosion.
It was much closer than before!
My toothbrush nearly fell out of my mouth. My hairs stood on end. Was I not alone? Was there illegal logging nearby? I hadn’t seen any lights, no traces of human activity at all. It couldn’t be, especially not at 11:45 at night. No, I was completely alone in this remote corner of Clayoquot Sound. And I was beginning to feel it.
My instincts told me to retreat into sleep. I had probably just allowed myself to get spooked. I felt almost comfortable retiring to the cozy half-attic under the roof, away from the dark window panes that stared blindly out into the raven-black night from three sides of the cabin. Very soon, I drifted into sleep. The rock sounds and eerie calls continued cutting the silence outside.
“I was rudely awakened from my dreams into a nightmare. I sensed this is what mortal fear feels like.”
I was rudely awakened from my dreams into a nightmare. Fully and immediately present, my eyes opened widely, my breath came to a stop, my heart pounded wildly and I felt a torrent of adrenaline flood my body. I was petrified. My senses had never been more acute. I sensed that this is what mortal fear feels like.
Loud stomping on the ground right next to the cabin’s surrounding boardwalk shook me to the very core. Each stomp made the cabin tremble. The massive force applied and its rhythmic nature were absolutely intimidating. More than that, they were beyond anything that I could associate with the animals you would usually expect to encounter in these forests.
The stomping was joined by the most horrifying vocalizations— disturbingly erratic and deliberate at once, tribal, not quite like human speech but similar enough to recognize certain elements. It sounded as if something was trying to speak, shout, articulate itself without quite mastering the language.
It is our senses that are the primary knower of truth and not our mind. Even before my brain jumped in with a thought, my senses understood the message: Clear out! Go away! Leave! We are here! You cannot be here!
I suddenly yearned to start a life in the city and work in the safe boundary of an office, drawing a heavy curtain around everything that is wild.
After several seconds of this turmoil, I heard them leave with emphatic steps. Two bipedal creatures erratically running off with tremendous speed and agility, each footfall causing the ground and the cabin on it to tremble.
I pressed my hands against my ears as hard as I could. I wanted to seal off my senses. I hid under my sleeping bag in the darkness, every muscle in my body strained, fully covered in cold sweat. For the next few hours I remained frozen, still pressing my hands against my ears and vowing that I would leave as soon as the light of dawn released me.
My love of adventure stems from challenging situations that make me present in the moment, but this experience was way too visceral, and my passion for adventure faded in those moments. I suddenly yearned to start a life in the city and work in the safe boundary of an office, drawing a heavy curtain around everything that is wild.
That night I tried to send 17 messages on my satellite device, daring only to lift one hand to text my friend 55 km away: “I NEED A PICK UP RIGHT AWAY. PLEASE SEND A FLOATPLANE!!!”
Of course, I didn’t have a clear view of the sky from my hideaway under the roof. Still, I prayed that the messages would somehow send through the tiny air circulation window under the gable. I couldn’t imagine moving to a more exposed spot.
As dawn slowly seeped into the cabin, I carefully allowed my ears to listen again and my eyes to see again. I tentatively climbed down the ladder into the main living area and started packing the most necessary things into a few immersion bags. The floatplane wouldn’t be able to transport all my gear, but I didn’t care about leaving things behind.
I didn’t dare look outside.
Finally, I received a message back from my friend: “I’m on my way down to the dock. I’ll send you a floatplane!” An hour later, I heard the plane descending into the gigantic scenery of the fiord. I stepped outside into the overcast morning without turning back or looking around the cabin, walked down to the water and caught the pilot’s attention with my red rain jacket.
“How are you doing?” the pilot asked, searching my face for clues.
“I’m alright,” I lied. “Just didn’t feel safe here last night. The ground was shaking and I heard the sounds of moving boulders. Might not be a good thing to be trapped in this spot in case of an earthquake or landslide, right?”
There was no way I could tell him the truth without seeming crazy. But he pressed me, curious to learn more about the sounds I had heard. I described them more precisely.
“Hmm, that sounds like Sasquatch to me,” the pilot offered. “I hear stories from people up around here who see them turning over boulders on the shoreline.”
Later, my friend in Tofino would echo the pilot: “I guess there’s a reason why the First Nations call that place Home of the Sasquatch.”
The plane turned down the fiord, picking up speed and lifting into the cloudy Clayoquot morning. We flew over the dense and mysteriously fogged forest cloaking the inlet’s mountain slopes. For the first time, I saw the waters, mountain ranges, cliffs and river valleys of my favorite place from the air. I couldn’t peel my eyes away. A mere four hours before it had taught me what real fear is, and now I fell hopelessly in love with it all over again.
Sander Jain is an outdoor photojournalist with a focus on wilderness, natural history and conservation topics. His work has appeared in GEO, explore, Adventure Kayak, Natural History Magazine and Kanu.
The dramatic fiords of Clayoquot Sound humble a lone paddler. | Feature photo: Sander Jain
“What are you tree people doing?” the woman peering in the window of our colorful trailer asked. She took in the multi colored prayer flags, the bright yellow curtain blowing lightly in the breeze from an open window, and my expensive coffee grinder (I believe everyone gets a luxury).
“We’re being tree people!” I reply, to her confused look.
Of course she’s confused. Every year, a week before Thanksgiving, groups of Carhartt wearing men and remarkably strong women take up residence in tiny trailers in parking lots of grocery stores and hotels across the nation. Our forearms get covered in sap as we hustle Christmas trees for four weeks to make the money needed to travel for months. We tell tales of kayaking in South America all winter: “Winters? What are those? We chase an endless summer.”
As long as I’ve been kayaking, even before I became a “dirt bag”, I heard stories of the fabled “trees”: a side gig most kayakers have had at some point to fund travel.
People like Brad McMillan, who holds the world record for an open boat descent, have been working this gig for nine years. He started out selling trees on a lot, then began doing the behind the scenes work. After a couple years he made his way up to managing the shipping and receiving end. In the past he’s used the funds he makes working trees to compete at events like the Teva Mountain Games. This year he plans to use his money for a Grand Canyon trip with his girlfriend and then return to school in the spring.
This year Rowan Stuart worked on our lot. She flew in from where she had been competing in the United Kingdom on Thanksgiving Day to work for a little over a week. We squeezed her onto a shelf in the back of the trailer, and displayed her First Place trophy in the window.
Trees are hard work, but don’t get me wrong, we make the most of it. We transform stark work trailers into warm, cozy living places, with rugs we roll out at night and pictures on the walls, torn from travel magazines, of the trips we pine after. Once the lots slow down for the night, we gather in the small living space. Empty milk crates turn into game tables, beer flows abundantly, and a couple times a week we all pitch in for a family meal made in our cast iron skillet.
We swap stories from the day, telling each other about the artist who came looking for the “ugliest tree on the lot”, or the couple from Canada who argued in Romanian over stands. As the night winds down, we roll up the carpet, sweep the floors and begin pulling down beds from where they’ve been stashed during the day. Settling into our somewhat lumpy air mattresses and Paco pads in our various perches, we rest our bones and get ready for another day. In a few shorts weeks, we’ll be headed to Ecuador and the Grand Canyon for the winter, where crystal clear waters will reward us as pay off for the weeks we spend living in parking lots.
This video from Nova Craft Canoe shows you how to do a simple gelcoat repair.
The canoe in the video is made from Aramid Lite, but the same technique can be applied to any composite canoe with a gelcoat finish including fiberglass, TuffStuff, TuffStuff Expedition, and Blue Steel.
He’s a local treasure, mapping a labyrinth of canoe routes that crisscross Manitoba, and inspiring countless paddlers to discover the wilderness via river byways. Many consider Réal Bérard’s hand-drawn maps to be works of art. Not intended as navigational charts, each is annotated with Bérard’s illustrations, old trapper songs, botanical notes, recipes, historic anecdotes, biographies, as well as markings for every waterfall, rapid and portage—measured out in paces like the Voyageurs—along Manitoba’s rivers.
“When I first put my hands on one of his maps, I was transported to the rivers,” says Jonathan Berger of Philadelphia, author of the extraordinary Canoe Atlas of the Little North. “His drawings give me my aesthetic lens through which I view the North.”
Bérard got his route mapping start when he snared a summer job with Manitoba’s Department of Natural Resources in 1962. That season his supervisor sent him and two others on a 500-kilometer canoe trip.
It was a dry summer and the canoeists were ostensibly to help extinguish any forest fires they came upon. The trip took a month, ending at the mouth of Berens River at Lake Winnipeg. They never saw a single forest fire.
In those days, conservation staff was required to keep daily logs, which Bérard dutifully did. A few years later, with Bérard now a full-time employee, the supervisor asked him to make a canoe route map from his notes and drawings, as a way of encouraging people to experience Manitoba’s wilderness.
Bérard made his first map, and filled in the margins with local lore and history. He continued mapping waterways for the province for the next 20 years, producing 13 maps to date. They include dominant rivers like the Assiniboine and Winnipeg, and well-known canoeing routes like the Bird and Manigotagan rivers. Most have a central theme specific to that area, exploring native culture or the fur trade for example.
A full-time artist since 1990, Bérard’s other artistic endeavors include being an award-winning ice sculptor. He has also been the political cartoonist for 30 years at La Liberté, a weekly Francophone newspaper in Manitoba.
And he still canoes. Last year, Bérard, 79, and a friend, an 82-year-old trapper, paddled for a week on a loop that starts on the Nelson River in Northern Manitoba. He is currently making a map of the little-known route, which is an easy trip, accessible by road and without rapids.
“When I first put my hands on one of his maps, I was transported to the rivers.”
When asked if he isn’t a little old to be making such treks, he responded in his characteristically unconventional way: “I’d rather be eaten by wolves and ravens, than by maggots.”
Order Réal Bérard’s maps from Paddle Manitoba.
Feature photo: Mike Deal/Winnipeg Free Press
From a paddler trapped underwater and a river so polluted it literally caught fire, to creatures and craft rebounding from the edge of extinction, we celebrate seven tales of extraordinary comebacks.
Paul Kuthe lost his father to a heart attack on the river while whitewater kayaking together. He was just 12. Rather than turning his back on the water, Paul was inspired by his father’s love of canoeing and kayaking to pursue life with a paddle in hand, from class V West Coast whitewater, to the endless surf of Oregon’s Shi-Shi Beach.
Forty-seven seconds doesn’t seem like a long time, but it felt like an eternity that day.
It was late October and I was in Tofino with friends for our annual autumn surf trip. It was a classic West Coast fall day—cold, wet and windy. Usually, I love these days but today was different. I was frustrated, things were not going my way. I had already endured countless beatings, broken a paddle and nearly swam.
Common sense should have told me to give up and go in for a beer. But I was too frustrated to quit, and despite being tired, I stormed back up to our camp, grabbed a new boat, and headed back to the grey and cheerless beach.
It took me five minutes of shifting and squeezing to force myself into the small, plastic surf boat I had hastily selected. I paddled back out through the breakers to try and regain some kind of control over my day. Nothing changed. The first wave ran me over. After a few more beat-downs, I realized that my head just wasn’t in it, I wasn’t focused, and I needed to get off the water. So I headed in.
With fixed fins mounted in the hull of the surf boat, I couldn’t run it up on the beach. I paddled into waist-deep water, popped my skirt off, put my hands on the coaming and pushed…nothing. There was no movement at all. I was stuck. As I pushed again, I felt a wave lifting the stern. I reached down to grab my paddle but it had vanished. It must have slipped off my boat while I was struggling to free myself and now it was gone. The wave picked me up, dumped me on my side and I capsized.
I pushed harder. Still nothing. I pushed again, nothing. I reached down with one arm and pressed off the sand to catch a breath. The boat started to fill with water as I slipped back under. I pushed with everything I had. I could hear my groans vibrating in my head under the water.
I reached for the sand again, pushed and came up for a half-breath. Now I could feel my fingers dragging ineffectively along the bottom, losing traction as I was pulled out to sea. I lost my grip on the sand and slid under a third time.
Now I fully understood the severity of my situation. If I couldn’t get out now, I wouldn’t get another chance. Seawater would flood my lungs and I would drown just a stone’s throw from the beach.
I pushed with every ounce of strength and desperation. My hips slid a bit as my right knee twisted painfully. It hurt, but it was working. Feeling the tissues in my knee starting to tear, I gave a final determined push and popped free.
I took a ragged, grateful breath and looked around. It was still raining, still grey; my friends were still enjoying the surf. I felt strangely calm—neutral, not happy, not sad, just calm. Kim and Whirlson were on the rocks filming. As my eyes caught theirs, my friends yelled out, “What are you doing?”
Couldn’t they see the chaos? Didn’t they know what had happened? What had very nearly happened? I didn’t know how to respond. So I yelled back, “Going in for a beer.”
When I got home I reviewed the footage of the trip and there it was… 47 seconds of me splashing around in waist-deep water. The video didn’t look like much, just the hull of my kayak shifting around in the surf. But I can tell you this: it was a very different experience below the surface.
Forty-seven seconds doesn’t seem like a long time, but it was nearly an eternity that day. —Rowan Gloag
Environmentally speaking, our species is not doing well. In the past four decades, half of all the wildlife on earth has vanished; there’s talk of us triggering the planet’s next mass extinction.
There is now hope we can turn things around, and good reason to try re-wilding the earth. Witness the remarkable return of sea otters to the Pacific Northwest, where the luxuriously furred creatures are rebounding in a relative jiffy. From a North American population of 300,000-ish when Captain James Cook started trading pelts on Vancouver Island in 1778, the cuddly mammal that shucks shellfish on its belly was hunted to near-oblivion. By the 1920s, otters were almost completely wiped out from California clear to Alaska and the global population plummeted to fewer than 2,000.
Hopeful biologists reintroduced small numbers of otter in the late ‘60s, and with legislation to stop hunting and the coastal environment still relatively pristine, the new couples proliferated quickly. At last check, British Columbia populations had rebounded to 5,000; in Alaska, 12,000—and rapidly counting.
But there’s more, thanks to the sea otter’s linchpin role. Saving the otter triggered a chain reaction. Otters eat sea urchins, urchins eat kelp, and kelp is the basis of a finely balanced ecosystem. The wild West Coast as we know it isn’t how it’s supposed to look—it’s an urchin barren, a dead zone where unchecked urchin populations have clearcut the kelp forests.
Bringing back the otter puts the urchin back in its place. The kelp returns along with all the fish, animals and birds right on up the food chain to soaring bald eagles. By fixing our otter mistake, we’re gradually flipping the on switch for a complete near-shore ecosystem.
Bonus: we’re also making a friendlier environment for ourselves. Because as any open coast paddler knows, kelp helps dampen the waves. —Tim Shuff
Before there was land, there was water. Before there were creatures that walked, they paddled about. Before the wheel, there was the boat. For those of us born pre-digital, there is deep comfort in a basic tool that is fundamentally unchanged from something in Grandpa’s shed, or his great-grandpa’s distant memory.
When the first restless, striving Europeans brought the wonders of the modern world to indigenous peoples, our neighbors in the North already had this marvelous craft called a kayak. Born of a watery planet and an elemental need to move, it’s an idea as old as fire and wood, sinew and skin. The aquatic equivalent of walking, perfectly calibrated to the speed of thought.
Like popcorn and chocolate, potatoes and peanuts, the first peoples gave us this happy invention. It takes us to dream places, relaxes us from the world our anxious genius has wrought, and cradles us like Moses when that world fails.
The kayak has floated since time immemorial. Then, suddenly, it declined when its inventors and their traditional way of life were decimated. Remembered and cherished by a few, and later embraced by recreationists, it’s now been on the upswing for half a century. Consuming nothing to operate, depreciating slower than inflation boosts its resale, kayaks are practically free to paddle and own.
As long as there are people and water, the kayak will thrive. And in our most utopian dreams, the kayak will dominate. —Tim Shuff
Boréal Design was a well-respected, Canadian-based brand in the challenging longboat sea kayak market when it went into receivership in early 2012. Its wide-ranging lineup—including the aggressively rockered Vaag ocean playboat and unique, reverse hard-chine Greenland-style designs like the Baffin and Ellesmere—had a loyal following among dedicated sea kayakers, particularly in eastern Canada and Scandinavia where the brand had a solid foothold and a promising future.
But, the company’s bankruptcy halted production at Boréal’s Quebec City manufacturing facility, put long-time employees out of work, shut down its local retail store, and froze the existing inventory before it shipped to dealers, jeopardizing not only the 2012 season but the very existence of the 21-year-old brand.
Marc Pelland, president of Kayak Distribution, heard that various bidders were stepping up to fight over Boréal’s vital organs—manufacturers wanted the molds; industrial equipment dealers, the machinery; kayak dealers, the inventory.
“I’m not sure how that would have turned out, or if it would have still been Boréal Design as people understand it,” muses Pelland. There were no other serious bidders to revive the company in its entirety. The remaining inventory might have been blown out in a sale. The factory and retail store would have remained shuttered.
Kayak Distribution stepped in to resuscitate the brand—a big leap for Pelland’s company, which at the time only manufactured Riot and Azul Kayaks—outmaneuvering other bidders to buy Boréal intact.
“It’s not like a whale came up and ate a minnow. We’re a small company with a small staff. It was a huge chunk for us to take on,” says Pelland. “The advantage is we have a much faster decision-making process than a large company.”
Kayak Distribution’s next move was to scramble to save the brand’s 2012 season, shipping boat orders to dealers out of the existing inventory, rehiring employees and transitioning production to its own factories.
Pelland isn’t sure what drove Boréal to bankruptcy, but suggests that the company was on a downward trajectory. “The products were very high quality but for many they were kind of overpriced. Retailers were going, ‘Well, I love the product but it’s too expensive for my market. People won’t pay for it.’ And this gap was growing so they had reached what they could do retail-wise.”
Kayak Distribution positioned Boréal Design as a premium brand in its lineup, but at more attractive prices. Now all Boréal Design boats are built overseas—plastics at Kayak Distribution’s own brand new factory near Shanghai, composites in Estonia—and pushed out through an extensive global distribution network. Kayak Distribution recently placed Boréal Design in a new market, Russia, and vastly stepped up distribution in Australia.
Last year, Kayak Distribution purchased all of Seaward Kayaks’ thermoform molds and is quickly integrating those designs into its Riot and Boréal brands. Sales manager Mark Hall says Boréal will also release two new 17-footers for 2016. All this while maintaining two of its own Boutique Boréal Design retail stores back home in Quebec City and Montreal, employing some of the original staff to nurture sea kayaking’s local roots.
By the year after next at the latest—five years after the brand threatened to disappear forever—Pelland estimates Boréal Design will be bigger in every way than it was in its pre-bankruptcy heyday.
“We stepped up and made a big bet on this company whose products we thought were great. We kept the boat afloat, worked like hell and transitioned it into a competitive company that we feel can be a global leader.” —Tim Shuff
Jaime Sharp knew he was in trouble the moment he realized the wave would catch him right in the gap he had entered amongst the jagged rocks.
Two and a half hours earlier, Sharp and his two companions—all experienced rough water paddlers—had departed under clear skies and light winds for a day trip around the imposing headland of Oregon’s Cape Falcon.
With fine August weather and no specific plans to rock garden or surf along the way, Sharp wore fleece-lined shorts and light layers under his anorak and chose to paddle barefoot—common kayaker dress code in his native New Zealand. As always, he also wore his ditch kit with extra dry clothes, snacks, cell phone and VHF radio. He buckled his helmet to the back deck, just in case.
It was still there when he followed fellow Kiwi kayaker Tara Mulvany into the gap.
“When I saw the wave, my first thought was ‘I’m not wearing a helmet, I’m dead,’” Sharp recalls. Despite the wave’s modest size—Sharp estimates its height at four or five feet—his position on the shallow reef, surrounded by sharp volcanic rocks and sea stacks, made him extremely vulnerable. With just a foot of water under his hull, Sharp was certain he’d be knocked unconscious if he capsized.
“I ended up bongo sliding [side surfing], trying to protect my face and keep my body between the rocks and my head. Next thing I know, I’m wedged up against a sea stack, with the wave sucking out and the boat locked upside down.
“I was totally gobsmacked that I managed to get washed up on the rocks without even a scratch. I tried a roll but the boat was jammed. The next wave in the set would be bigger, and I couldn’t risk getting smeared across the rocks again without a helmet. I dropped out of my kayak into a pool of water just as it hit.”
After several attempts to retrieve his boat—each scramble leaving him more bruised and battered—Sharp abandoned the kayak and climbed to temporary safety on a sea stack. With his companions unable to get close enough to assist, Sharp made the decision to call the Coast Guard on his VHF. It was now 20 minutes since his capsize.
When a nearby fishing vessel responded and reported that it could not safely approach closer than half a nautical mile, the Coast Guard told Sharp that a helicopter was on its way. An hour later, the bird arrived.
Watching the Coast Guard Aircrew’s rescue footage, Sharp can be seen hunkered atop an almost impossibly craggy and precipitous spire, framed by larger, similarly toothy black rocks. The eight-foot swell explodes as it runs up against Cape Falcon’s basalt sentries, sending white plumes above Sharp’s head.
“I don’t see any other way of getting this guy off of here,” a member of the aircrew can be heard saying as rescue options are discussed and a rescue swimmer on a hoist is mobilized. He goes on to describe the operation as “a bit of a risky evolution” for both the rescuer and the “survivor.”
The view over the rescue hoist operator’s shoulder out the heli door is mesmerizing: whitewater swirls around the dark crags, Sharp a mere speck of red Gore-Tex. After three attempts, they snatch him from the rocky perch, haul him up the cable to the heli, and a pair of rescuers drag him like a slab of Angus beef across the chopper’s threshold and into the safety of its cabin. Sharp is obedient, almost limp, allowing himself to be manipulated onto a bench for the ride back to Tillamook Bay.
He was surprised to receive praise, rather than a scolding, from the Coast Guard technicians. “As far as they were concerned, I had all the appropriate gear to deal with that environment.”
Sharp is less forgiving of himself. The simple act of putting on his helmet before entering the gap could have given him the protection to attempt a second roll after his capsize. Similarly, his lack of immersion gear ruled out a long swim in the 60°F water to the fishing boat or the other kayaks.
Sharp’s biggest takeaway from his close call relates to judgment, rather than equipment. Assumption and complacency, he says, were the chief errors that day.
“When you’re paddling with strong peers, you sometimes assume that those people are making a good decision, and you don’t necessarily have to make your own. If I’d assessed the situation myself, made my own choice, waited and noted where my safe zones were—rather than just following Tara through the reef—none of this would have happened.”
As skills and experience increase, so do comfort and confidence in more challenging environments. “You can become overly comfortable in moderate conditions and not take the necessary precautions,” says Sharp. “You forget that all it takes is that one unexpected thing and you’re out of your boat.” —Virginia Marshall
As in most great stories of transformation, Cleveland’s greatest ignominy was also the beginning of its comeback. June 22, 1968, is the day the Cuyahoga River caught fire.
The event is immortalized in a folk song, Burn On, appears on cheeky “Burning River Surf Club” tourist T-shirts, and is remembered as the nadir of the period Clevelanders called their city, “The Mistake on the Lake.”
“Of course Cleveland hit rock bottom when they had a fire break out on the river, but that was a driving force in a very positive way,” says author Doc Fletcher, who profiled the Lower Cuyahoga among six urban Midwestern rivers for his new book Paddling & Pastimes.
“That got a lot of notoriety well beyond Cleveland and was a major factor in passing the Clean Water Act in the early ‘70s and the International Joint Commission for Great Lakes water quality. You can even say that it was a major driver for the creation of the EPA.”
We can all thank Cleveland for a cultural and political shift toward river stewardship that’s part of a larger trend of urban and environmental renewal across the so-called Rustbelt, and continent-wide.
Akron, Ohio, upstream of Cleveland on the Cuyahoga, is another city undergoing a multidimensional overhaul and turning a caring eye to its river. The source of the Cuyahoga’s worst pollution—spilling raw sewage into the river for more than a century—Akron’s undertaking a “big dig” to revamp its sewers and treat 100 percent of its outflow by 2027.
Fletcher observed the same pattern of renewal in Detroit, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, Chicago and Milwaukee. Pittsburgh’s Allegheny River held only one species of fish in the 1950s; today it’s home to 53.
Dan Hudak, owner of River Cruiser Kayaking, regularly reels edible large- and smallmouth bass out of the Cuyahoga while guiding clients through the city’s industrial heartland. His three-hour tour from Harvard Avenue to Lake Erie takes you on a flashback to the late 1800s.
As you pass 900 acres of smoke-belching factories at ArcelorMittal, one of the world’s largest steel companies, you vividly witness the industrial bustle that once drove the river’s decline. But you’re floating on water that’s cleaner than it’s been in a century. Nearing the Lake Erie mouth you’re more likely than ever to see people out dipping paddles and oars into the water, or even swimming.
“Back in the ‘70s there were just motorboats and people partying and drinking. Now it’s the opposite,” says Hudak. Canoe and kayak registrations statewide doubled in a decade from 50,000 to over 100,000.
A citizens group, Friends of the Crooked River, rejoiced when two dams were demolished along the Cuyahoga’s length. The river had nine dams choking its 100-mile course until 10 years ago. Now four have been bypassed or pulled down, replacing brackish water with healthy, oxygenated flow and clearing the way for fish—and paddlers. All but two remaining dams are now slated for removal.
Friends of the Crooked River is turning the Cuyahoga into a state water trail, and publicizing the watercourse’s turnaround from a symbol of shame, to one of pride. In the words of spokesperson Elaine Marsh, “It’s becoming a real river again.”
Rather than turning his back on the water, Paul was inspired by his father’s love of canoeing and kayaking to pursue life with a paddle in hand. | Feature photo: Steve Rogers
Getting kids into kayaks, let alone practicing skills in them, parents and adults have to lead the way by example. When Andy Parry is in his kayak, he acts like a big kid. With high energy and a contagious smile he blends into the swarm of kids that paddle and play around him.
Born and raised in the UK, Parry paddled at the national and international level and is now a Physical Education teacher, with a degree in Sports Coaching. He is the owner and main instructor for the Muskoka Kayak School where he incorporates fun and learning into each session on the water. When it comes to paddling with kids, laughter and goofing around are all part of the lesson. Parry shares his knowledge – as a professional coach but also as a father – on how to get kids in, on and around whitewater.
“I think the key is getting youngsters in paddling is to have their friends there too,” says Parry. “It’s such a social thing for them.” Being on the water with friends helps diminish fear and apprehension and also helps with progression.
“Kids that are of the same ability start to push each other more to progress. Kayaking is no different than any other sport–making sure they have friends to paddle with them is so important,” he says.
Parry now calls Port Sydney, Ontario home and paddles there with his eight-year-old son and five-year-old daughter. “The first time the kids got in kayaks was on the river,” says Parry, referring to a section of slow, moving water along the Muskoka River where he holds many lessons. When you get on the river with kids, make sue the focus is fun. “Take their mind off being in whitewater,” says Parry. “The key is to make it normal for them. Don’t make a big deal. Don’t worry about it and don’t be scared yourself. If it’s scary to you, then they take on that fear.”
Substitute the bigger, more technical whitewater you like to paddle for something more forgiving and gentle. “Take them places that aren’t scary, don’t take them places you want to go,” Parry suggests. “You (the parents) need to be okay with not having any fun yourself – you have to take on their fun, to eat their fun.”
Parry’s son Daniel paddled the gentle whitewater of Palmer Rapids on own at six.
Paddling gear for growing kids can be costly. But the proper gear is important for a good day on the water. “Boats are really important,” says Parry. “They can’t be small adult boats, they need to fit the children. But then you are talking expense.”Parry does not encourage parents to go out and buy new boats. In fact he doesn’t approve of kids paddling new kayaks. But he does recognize that kid-sized boats are hard to come by, especially if there isn’t a whitewater club nearby. Affordable alternatives are becoming more common. “Not many people know that the Daggar Axiom 6.9 exists,” say Parry of the youth-size whitewater boat.
Paddles and proper layering is also important. “Hand size and grip size are really important when it come to paddles,” he says. “It should feel like you are holding a teaspoon when you pick up a kids paddle.” Layers of non-cotton clothing are vital to keeping kids warm on the water. “Spray skirts…don’t bother,” says Parry. “They don’t need it.” He gives his students the option but feels that they skirts can sometimes contribute to fear.
Encouraging you child to get comfortable on whitewater can be done very informally. “Find some moving water where they barely notice that it’s moving and they just learn to adapt to the water,” says Parry. Kids begin learning to read water by feel, without knowing it. “If they are in a suitable boat, in a suitable river then kids are often better than adults,” he says with regards to whitewater newbies.
“They will have mega amounts of fun on the tiniest amount of whitewater that you wouldn’t even notice.”
If winter has set in, or whitewater is far away, hit the pool. “Pool sessions provide a warm and user-friendly environment to practice all skills,” he says. Play around. Make your own fun. “Just play with the boats: on, in, around them,” he says. “Fill them up with water. It all builds confidence and that in turn builds confidence in whitewater.”
When do you start teaching kids to roll? “When they ask,” say Parry. “If you teach them to roll, that’s all they will end up doing. If you teach them to stay upright, that’s what they’ll do. And that’s what we want!”
“If they have friends to paddle with them and you can keep them warm, then normally, they make their own fun!” Try Parry’s approach. If you can think like a kid, paddle like a kid and show them how much fun whitewater is, you will be on your way to raising a life-long paddler.
The ability to challenge ourselves in almost any environment is one of the great attractions of our small, nimble craft. As quickly as you can find a challenge in your sea kayak, it is just as easy to get in over your head. To avoid ruining a good trip, preparation is key. Identify common problems you could encounter, develop creative solutions, and then try them out— before you get into trouble. Consider these kayaking survival skills as the first ten turns in an endless game of “What if…?”
Some problems can wait a few minutes, but in the case of heavy bleeding it’s important to minimize time spent rummaging for supplies. During a morning of rock gardening with friends, bad timing resulted in my buddy breaking his paddle shaft with his face. As we opened day hatches and retrieved emergency bags, he sat patiently on the ledge that had been his undoing—blood streaming from just below his eye. Keep a compact, waterproof bleeding kit containing gloves and a couple large gauze pads in your PFD for faster response.
Whether it’s hypoglycemia, hypothermia or just plain old bonking, it’s important to have simple sugars close at hand. When we run low on energy, our ability to make good decisions is one of the first casualties. To deal with a cold, exhausted paddler, or to keep yourself performing at critical times when the next break is still over the horizon, carry a few packets of energy gels or candies.
Water saps heat from the body much faster than air. Carry equipment for hypothermia prevention and treatment. Warm up a chilled paddler by dropping a chemical hand-warmer pack down the neck of their drysuit (outside of their base layer). They’ll be basking in a personal-sized sauna that can reverse the cooling trend, even before you’re able to reach shore and employ other warming measures.
More than just a place to keep your lunch, watertight hatches keep your boat afloat. If you lose a hatch cover or the seal is poor and the compartment floods at sea, pumps are useless. You’ll need to try a curl rescue. With the stricken boat alongside a rescuer’s boat, reach across the rescuer’s deck and grab the open hatch rim, both palms facing up. With forearms resting on the rescuer’s kayak, slowly raise the flooded boat to drain water from the open hatch. Inflate a paddle float in the open hatch rim to create a quick and effective seal.
Whether by shark, rock or someone else’s bow (yes, they’ve all happened) any kayak can be holed, and sometimes an on-water repair is the only option. With the unfortunate boater straddling the rescuer’s foredeck, facing aft, both paddlers can pull the holed boat across the rescuer’s spraydeck and turn it upside down to expose the damage. Carry a vacuum-sealed baggie in your PFD with a paper towel to dry the hull and a square of sticky window flashing tape to seal the hole.
Crossings in limited visibility are best avoided, but they’re a reality of coastal paddling. Stick to the shallows as much as possible and avoid deep-water channels. Stay together and make yourself heard—use a VHF radio and foghorn to reduce the likelihood of close encounters with larger vessels. Chart and compass skills need to be second nature. Navigate with a chart every day you paddle, regardless of visibility or familiarity with the area. Only by employing navigation skills on nice days will you be able to rely on them on bad days.
When paddlers are faced with an unfamiliar environment, the basics sometimes fly out the window. On a particularly windy day, a student capsized while surfing steep swell. Momentarily losing contact with her boat, the paddler came to the surface to find the unburdened kayak blown out of her reach. While another student made contact with the swimmer, a second rescuer quickly towed the empty kayak back to her. It is faster to bring the boat to the paddler, rather than the other way around. If you’re the sole rescuer, head for the escaping kayak, tell the swimmer to hold her paddle up in the air for visibility, and quickly tow the boat back to the paddler.
When extra seconds might mean a long slog back up-current or worse, execute a lightning fast wet-boat rescue. By skipping the longest step—emptying water from the cockpit—you can be on the move in just seconds. Direct the swimmer to right his boat, then move directly to stabilizing the boat as the swimmer heel-hooks (faster and easier for many than a traditional rear deck re-entry) into his cockpit. Contact tow the rescued boat into quiet water or, if it’s stable enough, he can paddle himself to a safer spot for emptying the flooded cockpit.
Many kayakers are unsure how to use their VHF radio for clear, effective communication with other boaters. Know the types of safety calls: “Sécurité” for general safety issues such as fog crossings; “Pan-Pan” for incidents where help is required, but there is no danger to life or vessel; “Mayday” for true emergencies. In all cases, make sure to include Who (a description of your group), Where (your precise location, by coordinates or description) and What (the nature of the emergency). Radio calls are difficult to hear in poor conditions. Think about what you will say before you call, and keep your message succinct. Practice making calls with your radio off and have friends give you feedback.
Recently, a paddler set out on a four-day trip from Stonington, Maine. When his cell phone battery died, his worried contact on shore reported him missing to the Coast Guard, setting in motion a costly search. A day later, the paddler was found in an area miles north of his planned route, unaware that the helicopters humming to his south had been looking for him.
Whether it’s a typed document, or a text message exchange from the put-in, float plans are an essential part of every trip. Include a basic description of the group, your route and, most importantly, the time at which you should be reported overdue to the Coast Guard. If your destination, check-in or return time change, update the float plan by talking to your shore contact or calling the Coast Guard.
Nate Hanson lives on Maine’s Downeast coast, where he offers skills and leadership courses through his company Pinniped Kayak.
Feature photo: Steve Rogers
When you travel in the backcountry, you’re a visitor. Just like when you visit a friend’s house, you don’t throw your garbage in their yard, carve your name in their furniture or put soap in the drinking water. Those same courtesies apply when you’re outside. Hiking and camping without a trace are signs of an expert outdoors person, according to Jason Grubb, program director at the Leave No Trace Center for Outdoor Ethics in Boulder, Colorado. The principles of
Leave No Trace wilderness travel teach us how to limit the combined effects of millions of outdoor visitors. “By being aware of how feeding wildlife habituates them to humans, how irresponsible campfire use can destroy entire forests, and how to properly dig a cat hole when nature calls, we protect the environment and increase our own skills and knowledge,” Grubb says. Find four more principles to leaving no trace at lnt.org.
“One of the most useful knots in any camper’s arsenal is the mighty bowline. It’s quick, versatile and reliable,” says Black Owl Outdoors’ instructor Anthony Beaston (blackowloutdoors.com). “Use it when you need a fixed loop in the end of a line that is capable of holding weight or when you need to secure something to a stationary object. A properly tired bowline is easy to untie even after being tightened under load.” A quick way to remember how to tie the bowline is the rabbit-in-a-hole story. Form a small loop near the end of your line. Pass the running end through the loop from underneath (the rabbit comes out of the hole). Next wrap the line around the standing line and back down through the loop (the rabbit goes around the tree and back down the hole). Finally, tighten the knot by pulling on the free end while holding the standing line.
Leaves of three, let it be. Learn all about poison ivy from Canoeroots here.
“Cotton balls are my favorite. They’re lightweight and when Vaseline or petroleum jelly is worked into the ball, it’s highly flammable. I’ve even dipped them in paraffin wax and melted Vaseline and stored them in my pack in a Ziploc bag.” —Happy Camper Kevin Callan
Man-made trails through forests and by riversides are walkways for all sorts of wild animals. Stop mistaking dog tracks for wolves and moose tracks for deer with the tips below.
DEER: Deer tracks, shaped like upside down hearts, are about three inches long and are often found on hiking trails. A doe’s back hooves usually fall on top of her front hooves or slightly outside of them. A buck has a wider chest than hindquarters, making his rear tracks fall to the inside. his rear tracks won’t reach the front ones.
WOLF: Many a camper has had their heart race when they found a wolf track, only to meet up with a dog further along the trail. Mature wolves have larger paws than pets; more than four inches long. Their front paws are larger than their rear, and elongated middle toes help distinguish their tracks from the rounder track of your furry best friend.
“There are only two rules: always know what is behind your target and never aim your slingshot— loaded or not—at a person, an animal or anything expensive and fragile. All you’ll need is a forked stick, eight to 12 inches from top to bottom, and latex tubing. Notch both top ends of the Y and tie your latex in place. Aim to make the tubing the same length as the distance between the child’s wrist and elbow. Make sure to keep thumbs out of the path of projectiles.” —Dave Quinn, Outdoor Educator
The best defense against a bear encounter is keeping a clean campsite and not giving a bruin a reason to get interested in the first place. Still, it helps to learn the basics of bear behavior so you can recognize the difference between a defensive attack versus a predacious attack.
“A typical defensive bear makes a lot of noise—it’ll huff and swat the ground. The bears that are going to get you in serious trouble a r e the bears that follow you and don’t make noise,” says world- renowned bear ecologist and retired University of Calgary professor, Stephen Herrero. He adds that bear attacks are incredibly rare. “That there are 800,000 black bears in North America and so few attacks is really a testament to how benign they are.”
If you become lost, the U.S. National Forest Service recommends using the simple Boy Scout prompt: STOP. As soon as you realize you may be lost, stop, stay calm and stay put. Think through the situation—how did you get here? Observe your environment—which landmarks should you see? Don’t take a step until you have a good reason. “Based on your thinking and observations, come up with some possible plans, think them through, then act on one of them. If you are not very, very confident in the route, then it’s always better to stay put,” the organization recommends. Signaling devices, such as a whistle and mirror, will aid rescuers. Learn more at fs.fed.us.
A well-insulated shelter should be your top priority in a survival situation, but building one can also be a fun learning activity. Man’s number one survival threat is the weather. A good shelter in cool weather provides insulation, wind block and sheds moisture.
Build a simple A-frame structure using a fallen tree resting at an angle and dead wood. Place large limbs against the sides of the tree first, followed by smaller branches. Then cover the en- tire structure with leaves and forest debris. Utilize local vegetation, such as evergreen boughs, dry pine needles and dry leaves to create a bed eight to 10 inches thick. Once inside, the front entrance should be plugged with more leaves and debris. A shelter like this will help to contain precious body heat and keep the elements at bay.” —Survival Instructor Creek Stewart (willowhavenoutdoor.com)
This article first appeared in the Fall 2015 issue of Canoeroots Magazine.
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