Light-years from the hard lunchroom seat pans and meager foam back nubbins of classic sea kayaks, today’s plush seat systems bring the comfort of the couch to the cockpit. With manufacturers striving to get more butts in boats, it is no surprise that kayak seats are a focal point for eye-catching—and posterior-pleasing—innovation. Necky Kayaks and sister brand Old Town now sport the stylish and high-tech ACS2 Seat System. The fully adjustable seat is designed to curve ergonomically from the bottom pad into the backrest to relieve back fatigue. Swedish brand Point 65’s AIR Seat features an inflatable cushion to quickly customize fit. And pedal drive pioneer Hobie Kayak created a buzz at this year’s Outdoor Retailer summer market tradeshow with their new Vantage Seat, a high-back, fully breathable, mesh chair with nearly as many positions as a Zero Gravity Lounger.
This article originally appeared in the 2015 Paddling Buyer’s Guide.
Anyone who’s spent a night at a campsite knows flashlights are inconvenient. Keep both hands free by wearing a headlamp instead. Look for a lamp with some water resistance. There are pricey, submersible models out there, but for budget-minded boaters, headlamps like Petzl’s Tikka will hold up in a rainstorm. It’s a small, reliable option with two modes, one for close range and one to illuminate further distances.
For base campers, Gerber’s cool new one-pound, tap-on-tap-off lantern provides easy adjustability. One touch turns it on and another brightens or darkens its light level. The Freescape’s output ranges from 15 to 300 lumens. Compact and powerful, this lantern uses four D batteries, and features a battery power indicator.
This article originally appeared in the Late Summer/Fall issue of Canoeroots and Family Camping. Read the entire issue on your desktop,Apple or Android device.
Stef McArdle from Madawaska Kanu Centre shares her top tips for turning your kayak with a sweep stroke.
Stay tuned for more great paddling skill videos, including canoeing, kayaking and whitewater techniques, brought to you in partnership with Rapid Media and Ontario Tourism.
DO WHAT YOU LOVE,
AND DO IT OFTEN. |
PHOTO: VINCE PAQUOT
Less is more. Witness the glut of fuel-efficient ultra-compacts, the small home movement and the profusion of five-minute workouts. Kayak manufacturers have embraced this philosophy with a growing sector: light touring.
What is light touring, anyway? On the facing page you’ll find an ad from Delta Kayaks for their new 12-footer with this summary: “Light touring kayaks are a great choice for the recreational or transitional paddler looking for better performance in a smaller lightweight design.”
While light touring designs can certainly be that next step up, they also appeal to those looking to scale down. Our backcountry adventures are becoming fewer and getting shorter. According to a recent participation study from the Outdoor Industry Association, 86 percent of camping trips last four nights or less, with the majority of campers getting away for just one or two nights. Traffic, overtime, school and organized activities crowd our hectic schedules, making long expeditions—and long kayaks—impractical.
Since mini touring kayaks first started to emerge a decade ago, their sales have rapidly outpaced those of 17-foot sea kayaks. More and better designs have followed. Delta now has twice as many light touring models as they do those in the classic 16- to 18-foot range. And they’re not alone. Walk into any kayak shop and you’ll notice these shrinking waterlines.
The basic principle behind light touring kayaks is this: Less boat equals more paddling.
It’s not as contrary as it sounds. Consider light foods. The invariable truth about light food, as most of us know, is that often you just enjoy more of it, more often. Light beer, light crackers, light cheesecake – “I’ll have another, thanks…it’s light.”
Boat manufacturers are betting the same is true of touring light. While light foods shave kilocalories, light touring designs cut kilograms. Lighter, shorter boats are easier to get from garage or basement to roof rack and from rack to water, so you’re more inclined to get out after work or at lunch, even if its just for an hour.
Lighter, shorter boats are easier to get from garage or basement to roof rack and from rack to water, so you’re more inclined to get out after work or at lunch, even if its just for an hour.
If light touring kayaks reduce the reasons why you don’t paddle more often, there’s another niche of boats that are even more manageable – portable, inflatable, or folding boats.
DO WHAT YOU LOVE, AND DO IT OFTEN. | PHOTO: VINCE PAQUOT
Transporting a folding or inflatable boat is as easy as pulling the duffel from your closet and tossing it in your trunk, or onto a bike trailer, bus or subway. At the launch, set-up time can be as little as five minutes. Just grab and go – no car-topping, no storage headaches, no excuses.
For the 82 percent of North Americans living in urban environments, a portage kayak’s compact size and light weight make it the ultimate Tuesday night boat – a boat that’s easy to enjoy wherever it’s convenient and whenever there’s an hour or two to escape.
Light touring, inflatable and folding kayaks are also more affordable. You can buy two of these boat for the price of one expedition kayak. One less excuse – now you have someone to go paddling with.
Adventure Kayak editor Virginia Marshall is looking forward to spending more weekdays on the water.
This article first appeared in the Summer 2014 issue of Adventure Kayak Magazine. Subscribe to Paddling Magazine and get 25 years of digital magazine archives including our legacy titles: Rapid, Adventure Kayak and Canoeroots.
Watch Kiwi kayaker Tara Mulvany’s inspiring video of her paddle around New Zealand’s South Island, in winter. Mulvany is the first woman to paddle around all of NZ, and she accomplished this epic achievement largely solo. Read more about Tara and her journey in the Spring 2015 issue of Adventure Kayak magazine.
Humble Trips, Grand Adventure | Photo: Virginia Marshall
Five splintery rungs ascending higgledy-piggledy into a low cloister of fragrant cedar boughs. It was my beanstalk, my yellow brick road, my Argo.
In fact, it was my childhood tree fort, constructed haphazardly in the woods just beyond the backyards of my neighbors. No matter that the barking of suburban dogs penetrated its airy deck. To my fertile imagination, it might as well have been the Hounds of the Baskervilles. It wasn’t the remoteness or grandiosity of the roost that mattered—it had neither. Looking back, it may have been the tree fort’s very accessibility that made it such a cherished escape.
More and more, the idea of humble trips, grand adventure is defining many people’s paddling experience. Peruse the stories on the following pages and you’ll notice this recurring theme. In his column, Waterlines, Tim Shuff writes of the transformative and unexpectedly enchanting experience of kayaking a local urban river. Frequent Rock the Boat columnist Neil Schulman urges paddlers to embrace accessible mini-adventures and stop measuring their achievements on the unrealistic yardstick of well-marketed, international mega-expeditions. Our obsession with the latter, writes Schulman, “robs more realistic trips of their own considerable grandeur.”
Wild Image Project adventurer Daniel Fox collects photos and videos from wild places to share with and inspire the many people who are increasingly disconnected from the natural world. His Minute to Nature video series encourages viewer to tune out distractions and engage with nature in a meditative way, if only for 60 seconds – an achievable sabbatical for anyone, you’d hope.
The featured image in Fathom depicts photographer Bryan Hansel’s favourite campsite, “just a long afternoon adventure from my home port.” Hansel ups the adventure ante not by cleaning out his savings account and shipping off to Fiji for a month, but by paddling solo and returning to familiar places with a different perspective.
Humble Trips, Grand Adventure | Photo: Virginia Marshall
Reading these stories, talking to other paddlers and reviewing the comments on Adventure Kayak’s social media pages is a reminder of the diversity of our readers and, by extension, kayakers the world over. For a huge number of folks, any boat that floats and makes kayaking accessible is sufficient. For others, like Facebook fan Dennis Mike, a kayak should be nothing less than a gleaming pinnacle of naval engineering: “Spend at least $4,000,” he advises, “otherwise you’ll feel like a putz.”
A determined few dream and paddle truly extraordinary adventures. Far more find joy and contentment on quiet local waterways. Having graduated from free forts to tents – and to the apiary that is adult responsibility – I’m often forced to acknowledge that some of my paddling ambitions are, well, ambitious. While they simmer on the someday burner, the waters beyond the backyards of my neighbours beckon.
This article first appeared in the 2015 Paddling Buyer’s Guide. Subscribe to Paddling Magazine and get 25 years of digital magazine archives including our legacy titles: Rapid, Adventure Kayak and Canoeroots.
Sorcery, sacred canyons, first descents and redemption runs. Four kayakers take on Papua New Guinea’s deadly jungle rivers in this feature, first published in Rapid magazine.
Bounding over rock and moss, ducking beneath low hanging branches, children ran along the riverbank. “White man! White man!” they yelled, pointing at the kayakers as they ran along side them, trying to keep up.
Paddling into the tiny village of Gembogl Station was like entering an arena filled with bewildered spectators. Everyone, from those in the huts and schools high on the steep hillsides, to those along the riverbank, turned to look.
“It was the most people I’d ever paddled in front of,” says Barny Young.
Hamming it up for the unexpected audience, Jordy Searle eyed the town’s log bridge hanging mere feet above the fast-flowing river and, reaching it, rolled to slide his kayak under. Young followed suit. “It was ridiculous. It felt like thousands of people screaming and cheering,” Searle says. “I think they were just stoked to see us survive.”
As the first whitewater paddlers in remote Papua New Guinea (PNG), the entire expedition was a spectacle. With 4,500-meter tall peaks and exceptional rainfall, Papua New Guinea has enough gradient and water to keep a skirt on any kayaker. On an island off the north coast of Australia, PNG is a country untouched by tourists. With a reputation for virgin jungle, deadly wildlife and modern-day cannibalism, it’s a destination for only the heartiest of paddlers.
The first time Barny Young and Jordy Searle took on the wild rivers of PNG was in May 2011, six years after they met on the west coast of New Zealand through a mutual love of paddling and partying. Together they hatched a plan to paddle the unknown rivers of PNG, a country untouched by rafters and kayakers.
PHOTO: BARNY YOUNG
Together, with a third team member, Shannon Mast, the group successfully paddled eight rivers in 2011, notching seven first descents, including the Bosu, Koningi and Mai rivers.
After almost a month of successful paddling—overlooking a few bouts of food poisoning—what ended the 2011 trip was a nasty swim. On the Chimbu River, the last of the expedition, Young got caught in a big hydraulic.
“It was one of the scariest swims I’ve ever had,” says Young of the 30-second beatdown. Knowing the river disappeared underground just downstream, he saved himself by grabbing onto a protruding rock on shore. Young had only a few scratches and bruises to show for his misadventure, but his boat was gone, sucked into the undercut he’d narrowly avoided.
After waiting fruitlessly for hours for the boat to be flushed out of the underground cavern, the group found a coffee trail and walked out to the nearest village. They asked that if the boat resurfaced they be contacted and they would pay a reward of 100 kina (equivalent to about $40 USD, or approximately 10 times what the average local worker makes in a day).
A few days later, they received a call that the boat had been found and some kids were running 10 kilometers to town to meet the kayakers and return it and collect their reward.
“It turns out, they’d been swimming under the rock with ropes attached to them to get the boat out,” says Searle. “A lot could have gone very wrong with that.”
For anyone looking for an easy vacation, PNG is not the first choice. It occupies the eastern half of the island of New Guinea, the world’s largest and highest tropical island. Though it’s a basin for bio-diversity, PNG is generally regarded as a high-risk destination for tourists and has been the subject of unsavory press about sorcery killings, cannibalism and high crime rates.
In just 100 years, the people of PNG have fast-forwarded from stone to steel to silicone—it’s a country where many people who have cell phones still cook over fires.
“We wanted to go because no one had been there,” says Searle, adding that the country’s mountainous topography and wet climate promised a great kayaking destination. “At the same time, there’s a huge cultural hurdle to get over. There’s no tourism, no precedent, no system—that’s part of the adventure.”
PHOTO: JORDY SEARLE
PHOTO: BARNY YOUNG
PNG’s rivers aren’t the toughest on earth, but Young says they have “some of the best whitewater in the world,”—and he’d know. A jet-setting kayaker, he paddled the Stikine four times over the summer of 2013 and is one of the few to paddle all 13 classic High-Sierra runs. “It’s the full-on nature of the country that has stopped people from going,” he says. The difficulty of logistics, combined with the cultural experience and lack of river beta makes PNG rivers undoubtedly epic—a paddling destination like no other.
Rivers are the lifeblood for the remote communities, who use the water for drinking, cooking and cleaning. Even in remote jungle, the group drew crowds to the riverbank everywhere they went.
“People genuinely thought we were going to die,” says Searle. “It was always a good indication that we were coming up to a big rapid when locals started yelling and waving their arms from the riverbank.”
PHOTO: MATT COLES
Searle and Young had been warned that PNG was not a place where they could walk around freely. Acquaintances, who flew helicopters for the mining industry, the biggest industry in the country, said that they were picked up at the airport by guards and stayed in barbwire-enclosed compounds they didn’t leave on foot.
At a take-out along the Mai River, a local kid explained that several weeks prior the bodies of two women who had been drowned for practicing witchcraft had washed into that very eddy.
According to the United Nations, sorcery-related killings in PNG have been on the rise. The grisly murders gained worldwide attention last year when a 20-year-old mother was burned alive in front of hundreds of onlookers.
“A lot of bad stuff does happen in PNG,” admits Searle. “But I have this idea that people are inherently good and you just have to find that common ground.”
By randomly messaging people in PNG on Facebook prior to their first trip, Searle and Young were able to hook up with some well-connected locals who set them up with reliable drivers and safe accommodation once in-country.
The 2023 return trip to PNG had one specific goal: The Chimbu. “It was unfinished business,” says Young. “The Chimbu was the river that beat us and that’s why we were so keen to get back.”
Its class V waters are in the heart of the country’s rugged highland region where the river carves its way from the base of Mount Wilhelm (4,500 meters) through 100-meter deep gorges to the mighty Wahgi River below. Getting there meant two days of bouncing around in the back of a pickup.
The aim of the trip was to travel a rough dirt road that paralleled the river to its highest navigable source, then negotiate the challenging rapids and canyons of the Chimbu to the town of Kundiawa, 50 kilometers distant.
PHOTO: ARI WALKER
Aided by a Sport New Zealand grant, awarded to Kiwis pushing the boundaries of sport, and with the contacts garnered from the first trip, Young and Searle were also accompanied by two new Kiwi trip mates, Ari Walker and Matt Coles.
On a hot and humid April morning, the group put in a kilometer below the source lake of the Chimbu. It took them most of the day to get to Gembogl Station four kilometers away, paddling burly waves and perfecting their limbo technique under low-hanging bamboo branches. It was there they were greeted by the highland’s version of a stadium audience.
They spent the night in the Gembogl Station Resource Centre for Orphans, a home for children whose parents had died of HIV/AIDS. The next morning the group followed the sound of singing to the local elementary school. After the song finished, the teacher translated as hundreds of kids and adults gathered around in the steamy morning air to listen to the paddlers’ stories.
“We told them how lucky they were to live in such a pristine environment and why it’s important to take care of it for future generations.”
“We told them how lucky they were to live in such a pristine environment and why it’s important to take care of it for future generations,” says Young. As for the 100-child game of Duck, Duck, Goose that came next, “that’s just Barny, random shit turns up,” says Searle, laughing.
The group approached the crux of their route two days later. Home to a series of increasingly difficult rapids, Sikewage Gorge was the site of Young’s trip-ending swim in 2011.
It’s a sacred site to locals, and it’s easy to see why. Cascading water, class V rapids and mist reflecting in beams of light give the gorge a surreal and mystical feel. They spent the day battling its monster holes and ferocious waves, dwarfed by the 100-meter rock walls on either side.
Nearing the final destination of Kundiawa, the gorge receded and the river slowed. Two young boys came to the river’s edge, running to keep pace with the kayaks. Young and Searle knew they’d succeeded when they reached a crowded riverbank. The people began to cheer, stunned to see the group emerge from the walls of the dark Chimbu canyon—a first descent through the last frontier of Papua New Guinea.
For more whitewater adventures, check out the group’s blog at www.gradientandwater.blogspot.com
This article was first published in the Spring 2014 issue of Rapid Magazine. Subscribe to Paddling Magazine’s print and digital editions, or browse the archives.
Boiling water can kill harmful bacteria but when you’re on the water and need a refill it’s an inconvenient option. Filters are great for on the go, but when you’re packing into a creeker, a pump system takes up space and adds extra weight. Chemical purifiers like Aquamira’s Water Treatment Drops offer good bang for your buck. They fit in the palm of your hand and make river water drinkable right in your Nalgene.
Get through the cold winter with the help of Tim Gent’s new book, Canoe Camping, in which he shares his enthusiasm for and experience of travelling and camping from a canoe from a uniquely British and European perspective. “No grizzlies, but plenty of Scottish midges and Swedish mosquitos,” he jokes.
He covers planning a journey, selecting the right canoe and equipment for the journey you are planning and how to pack your canoe. All the traditional skills of campcraft such as fire lighting, cooking on an open fire, campsite selection and many more are explored, as are the more modern lightweight options.
About the Author:
Tim has enjoyed an outdoor life since childhood. Farming, forestry conservation and archaeology have provided a working environment in the field, and contributed to an understanding of the land. While paddling and camping from Arctic Scandinavia to the Mediterranean coast, he has absorbed more, and hopes he is still learning.
Writing about fishing, hillwalking, canoeing and camping, Tim had the first of many magazine articles published in 1990. He is a regular contributor to Bushcraft and Survival Skills, and often writes for The Great Outdoors.
This article originally appeared in the 2015 Paddling Buyer’s Guide.
This article first appeared in the 2015 Paddling Buyer’s Guide. 
This article was first published in the Spring 2014 issue of Rapid Magazine. 
