Withlacoochee River, Florida

Trips

Photo: Scott Smith Photographic — Withlacoochee River, Florida

Misty cypress swamps and sparkling aquamarine waters make up the wild counties of Florida’s Nature Coast—the state’s most remote coastal region north of the Everglades. Escaping the rapid development that is consuming the rest of the Sunshine State, it is a sleepy region of stunning natural beauty. The rivers and springs here can be paddled year-round, with each season offering something special.

If you have a week follow the blackwater Withlacoochee River South Paddling Trail from Green Swamp to the Rainbow River, ending at Rainbow Springs. Numerous access points and campsites make this a relaxing journey through scenic sandhills and cypress swamp. Outfitters: Paddle Florida is a Gainsville-based non-profit that organizes group tours on many scenic waterways, including the Withlacoochee; www.paddleflorida.org.

—Erin Leigh Rohan

Read about more Florida paddling trips here in the Spring 2014 issue of Adventure Kayak. Or download our free iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch or Android App.

Video: Escape

Videos

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91567082

“Water is a magical thing. Kayaking is a unique and beautiful way to experience that magic and just escape from the daily grind.”

From Logan Carter.

VIDEO: Ric Moxon. Kayaker.

Videos

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tH4MUPa4OhY

“Ric Moxon, 24, fell in love with kayaking soon after his first adventure at the age of nine and his passion for the sport has been evolving ever since.

After hearing about everything B.C. has to offer and its world-class whitewater rivers, Moxon ventured across the Atlantic in 2010, ending up in Whistler. Four years later, he says that not only is Whistler a great place to live, it is also one of the best places in the world for kayaking.

Moxon was recently awarded with a $25,000 video after being chosen as a winner of TELUS’ Optik TV Play with the Best contest.”

From TELUS.

Video: Waterwalker

Videos

Film: Waterwalker / NFB

Bill Mason’s Waterwalker is available in full online—if you’ve just got a couple minutes check out the awesome whitewater canoeing sequence that starts at 46:00 minutes in!

This feature-length documentary follows naturalist Bill Mason on his journey by canoe into the Ontario wilderness. The filmmaker and artist begins on Lake Superior, then explores winding and sometimes tortuous river waters to the meadowlands of the river’s source. Along the way, Mason paints scenes that capture his attention and muses about his love of the canoe, his artwork and his own sense of the land.

Betcha Didn’t Know About…The Night

Stories

Photo: IStock/Kathy Dewar — Betcha Didn't Know About...The Night

Nocturnal animals, which are only active from dusk until dawn, usually have spe- cially adapted senses. For example, owls have extra keen vision for hunting in the dark and a rabbit’s extra large ears help it avoid becoming a midnight snack.
The night is not truly black. A complete lack of light is interpreted by the brain as eigengrau, a German word meaning intrinsic gray. Contrast is important to the human eye, which is why this color appears lighter than a black-colored object under normal lighting conditions.
The night got a lot brighter after Homo erectus, the earliest human species known to have controlled fire, first lit up the dark between 125,000 and 400,000 years ago.
Today the phrase fly-by-night refers to a shady operation or fraudulent business but it was originally an ac- cusation of witchcraft, referencing flying on a broomstick at night.
To achieve optimal night vision, eat lots of dark leafy greens, sweet potatoes and carrots, which are all high in vitamin A—a deficiency can lead to night blindness. Expect to spend 20 to 30 minutes in the dark to allow your eyes to fully adjust.

In the northern hemisphere, the longest night of the year is around December 21 and the shortest night of the year around June 21. The difference in duration is due to a 23.5-degree wobble in the Earth’s axis as it rotates around the sun.
Nights on the planet Venus are the lon- gest of any planet’s in the solar system; there it takes 224 Earth days to com- plete one day-night cycle. Night falls ev- ery 9 hours and 56 minutes on Jupiter.
“Wimoweh, wimoweh,” is the beginning of the pop hit “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” made famous by The Lion King movie. Wimoweh is the phonetic spelling of a Zulu word that means lion.

This article first appeared in the Early Summer 2014 issue of Canoeroots Magazine. For more great content, subscribe to Canoeroots’ print and digital editions here.

Family Camping: Sticks and Stones

Photo: courtesy Scott MacGregor — Family Camping: Sticks and Stones

“Mr. MacGregor?” A short, stern-looking woman wearing a lab coat and holding a clipboard motioned me into a small room. She closed the door behind her.

Half an hour earlier I’d carried my six-year-old daughter, Kate, into the emergency department of the hospital. After a few words with the doctor on duty Kate had been wheeled off to the X-ray room.

Kate, the stern-looking woman told me, had a spiral fracture of her tibia, the large bone between her knee and her ankle. This type of injury is common in cases of child abuse, she said. It happens, she continued, when children are forcefully dragged in directions they don’t want to go. The stern look and clipboard were beginning to make sense.

It gets worse.

I’d told the receptionist that Kate had fallen down. In the X-ray room the radiologist asked Kate where she was when it happened. Kate said, “Whitewater canoeing.” Our stories where not matching up.

Later I learned that when Kate was asked about her mommy she replied, “She left early this morning with my brother.” It was a Thursday and both kids should have been in school.

For the past two years, my son, Doug, and I have been racing in the junior-senior division at the Gull River Open Canoe Slalom Race. My wife, Tanya, and Doug did leave early that morning to set up our campsite. Kate and I had stopped at a river on the way for a few hours of training. This was to be her first race.

We’d grabbed every eddy in the 300-meter, class II lower set of rapids and even back surfed the wave at the bottom. We’d carried up to the upper chute and shadowed a solo boat test course in our 14-foot tandem. An instructor high-fived Kate and told her she’d just passed her level two. She smiled and asked me if the snacks were in the truck.

I was dumping the water out of the canoe when Kate ran back to the beach in a sundress, juice box in one hand and a granola bar in the other. One moment Kate was hopping on top of a rock shouting that she had a sliver in her foot, the next she was laying on the beach screaming her little heart out. Her sandy foot must have slipped into a crack in the rock and her body fell the other way creating the spiral fracture.

It took phone calls to my wife and the public school before I was downgraded from abusive parent to irresponsible parent. In this woman’s eyes it was pretty much the same thing. Children anywhere near whitewater rivers were a big mistake, she said. I was just asking for trouble.

All the while Kate’s leg was being casted I argued the report not read that it was a whitewater canoeing injury. She hadn’t even gotten wet, I pleaded. “If she’d been in school this wouldn’t have happened would it, Mr. MacGregor?”

As I carried Kate out of the hospital she asked, “You didn’t like that lady, did you?” I said I didn’t. I told her that the nurse thought I was a bad father. She hugged me and asked if I would like to sign her cast.

Scott MacGregor is the founder and publisher of Canoeroots. At the next Gull River Open Canoe Slalom Race, Kate and Scott placed second. Kate can’t remember which leg was broken.

This article first appeared in the Early Summer 2014 issue of Canoeroots Magazine. For more great content, subscribe to Canoeroots’ print and digital editions here.

Skills: Understanding River Features

Skills

Photo: James Smedley — Skills: Understanding River Features

Identfying river features and knowing how to manage them is the key to paddling safe lines and having fun. If your next tripping route has sections of swift flowing water or rapids, these are some of the most common features and obstacles you need to be aware of before taking the plunge.

TONGUE

When considering where to enter a rapid look for the tongue—clear and fast moving dark water that forms a V-shape pointing downstream. Usually it marks the channel of deepest water and can indicate a safe place to enter. Tongues sometimes end in wave trains, three or more similarly sized and evenly spaced waves, often dark in color with crashing white tops.

ROCKS

Moving water wouldn’t be much fun without rocks to create river features, but sometimes they get in the way. If you hit a rock, control the collision by keeping your paddle in the water for stability and redirect your bow back into current. If you find yourself broad side to a rock, lean and tilt your canoe towards it and slide around. Don’t lean upstream, this will swamp your boat and could cause it to wrap. Beware of lone waves in the river as they can indicate a rock is hiding below the surface.

HYDRAULICS

Also known as holes, these river features recirculate water downstream of ledges. Hydraulics can be fun play spots, but larger ones can be nasty sticking points for boats or, worse, paddlers. If you miss your intend- ed route and have to paddle through one, point your boat downstream and keep pad- dling. The key to avoiding a capsize or get- ting stuck is to pierce the hydraulic with the bow of your boat and maintain momentum.

EDDIES

Downstream of exposed rocks and river bends, calm pools called eddies form where the water recirculates back behind the obstacle. They can give canoeists a chance to pull out of the current to rest or scout the next section of river. To enter or exit you’ll need to cross the eddyline—where the main flow meets the calm pool—with momentum.

STRAINERS

Created by trees that have fallen into current, the hazard is caused by water rushing amongst branches and through unyielding limbs. The force of water can trap paddlers and their gear and make rescue and recovery very difficult and extremely dangerous.

The first step to avoiding them is ensuring you have a clear view downstream before running a rapid. If you spot a strainer, choose a line that matches a deep-water current that directs well away. Take no chances, if there’s not a line that gives you a wide berth, get out and portage.

Paddling whitewater is a specialized skill and there are plenty of other hazards to be aware of if you’re taking on big rapids, including undercuts, recirculating eddies and sieves. There’s no substitute for on-water instruction by a trained paddler to ensure your river journey is a fun and safe one.

Andrew Westwood is an open canoe instructor at the Madawaska Kanu Centre, member of Team Esquif and author of The Essential Guide to Canoeing. Find him at www.westwoodoutdoors.ca.

This article first appeared in the Early Summer 2014 issue of Canoeroots Magazine. For more great content, subscribe to Canoeroots’ print and digital editions here.

Muddy Waters

Stories

“One has only matured in the sport of paddling when you can discover as much adventure in exploring a local swamp or marsh by canoe as running rapids or traveling to far-off lands.” —Ralph Frese (1926–2012), prominent canoe maker, conservationist and canoe culture icon.

To the average paddler, swamps conjure up visions of oppressive heat, treacherous mud, tangled vegetation, fetid water and creatures that creep, crawl, sting and bite. It’s a menacing, mysterious place with the power to suck an unwary traveler into its bowels.

At least that’s what horror movies like Curse of the Swamp Creature, Terror in the Swamp and Swamp Zombies, just to name a few, would have you believe. Maybe it’s Hollywood’s creepy and inaccurate stereotyping that causes many canoeists to shy away. But I believe swamps are fascinating treasure troves.

North America’s swamps vary in size from oasis-like bogs surrounded by steel and concrete to vast tracts of wilderness wetlands, the largest of which in the U.S. is Okefenokee Swamp’s 700 square miles. Tiny or immense, these oft-misunderstood liquid lands offer some of the most enchanting backdrops paddlers can hope for.

Swamps are a dream for wildlife lovers and botanists alike—lining the serpentine channels and tea-colored ponds are curtains of towering cypress, magnolia and water tupelo trees, their ranks broken only by patchy marshes and grassy prairies. If you’re lucky, you may spot a bald eagle snatching a fish out of the water and river otters at play. There’s a cacophony of unfamiliar insects, repetitive croaking of frogs and clamorous hooting of birds.

I’ve been smitten by swamps since buying my first canoe nearly 40 years ago. Whether on an overnight trip or weeklong journey into the labyrinth of brackish creeks and backwaters, I always feel like an explorer embarking into the unknown. Lakes and rivers don’t offer the same feeling of primordial exploration, the chance to paddle slowly and come face-to-face with wild growth around each bend and in every nook.

Henry David Thoreau, one of America’s most beloved and influential writers of the 19th century, was the patron saint of swamps. In an essay called Walking, he wrote, “hope and the future for me are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamps…that was the jewel which dazzled me.”

Venture with Thoreau into the wildest and richest gardens and expect to be dazzled.

This article first appeared in the Early Summer 2014 issue of Canoeroots Magazine.

Hull Revolution

If you’ve been living under a rock rather than scraping over them, you may not know that Royalex canoes are in short supply.

Manufacturer PolyOne announced last summer that it was calling it quits on the long-time favored hull material of whitewater and recreational canoes. Production of Royalex sheets ceased in March. The announcement sent the paddling community into a Royalex-boat-buying frenzy. Outfitters are bulking up their fleets while enthusiasts are buying backups of favorite models. Everyone is wondering about the future of the sport.

Jacques Chassé, owner of Esquif Canoes, thinks he has the magic bullet.

Beginning this fall, Esquif will begin replacing Royalex in its canoe line with a brand-new, in-house-made material they are calling T-Formex.

According to Chassé, paddlers can expect the same indestructability and performance of Royalex for approximately the same price. And he claims T-Formex will be 10 percent lighter and 20 times more abrasion resistant than Royalex.

“Seventy-five to 80 percent of our boats are now made from Royalex. We had no choice but to innovate,” says Chassé. “It’s not a secret I had been asking the manufacturer to improve their material but they weren’t interested. They’d been making Royalex for the last 35 years and there’s a lot of new plastic and new technology.”

Chassé is building a 6,000-square-foot T-Formex factory within Esquif’s existing 15,000-square-foot warehouse in southern Quebec.

“Because so many of our canoes were made from Royalex, we needed to find a material that could be used in the same molding stations in which the Royalex boats are shaped,” says Chassé. Switching to T-Formex will not require any re-tooling of this boat building operation. The same workshop will be able to produce the usual 20 to 25 canoes per day.

Like Royalex, T-Formex is manufactured into sheets using foam core, ABS plastic and another outer material Chassé won’t disclose. These are layered together to create a reinforced, multi-laminate sandwich that can withstand years of abuse.

At the time of publication, Chassé had just recently approached other canoe manufacturers. Before going public he wanted to let them know he had a new material coming and is hoping that T-Formex will replace Royalex in their canoe lines as well. No commitments had been made at the time of printing this issue of Canoeroots. In the meantime, Chassé is completing his factory-within-a-factory and setting up his operation to manufacture the T-Formex sheets needed to supply Esquif’s fleet.

“T-Formex is the only alternative to Royalex I know about,” says Chassé, adding that his first T-Formex prototype canoe hit the water mid-April. “I have very modest forecasts, but I’m pretty sure once the manufacturers and public see the properties of the material, everyone will step up and want to work with it. It’s the much improved material we’ve been waiting for.”

This article first appeared in the Early Summer 2014 issue of Canoeroots Magazine.

Walking the Plank

pexels-gurkanwal-grewal-2859589 — Photo: Pexels via Gurkanwal Grewal

A couple hours at the International Boat Show affirmed that everything old is new again.

The indoor, arena-sized pond hosted everything from paddlesports instruction to motorboat trials to crazy wakeboarding and water stunts throughout the weeklong show. I took the organizers up on a chance to try standup paddleboarding for the first time.

I admit it, from one canoeist to another, I was skeptical of the sport.

SUPs have been the wunderkind of the paddlesports world and a much-needed financial boom for manufacturers over the past five years. According to the Outdoor Industry Association, it was also the fastest growing sport in the United States last year.

At first, I thought SUP was a gimmick. “This will blow over,” we conventional canoeists told ourselves. The truth is far from it. “They’re out-selling canoes two-to-one,” a cheerful whippersnapper in a wetsuit told me, handing over a paddle. Fad or not, I was ready to dump my canoe—temporarily, of course—to have a go and see what the hubbub was about.

Waiver signed, PFD secured, watch and wallet tucked into my shoes on the makeshift dock, I should have accepted the counsel of the young man who suggested I begin on my knees and work up from there. (“A lot of the ladies are doing yoga on standup paddleboards these days,” he said brightly, “but it takes a minute to get your balance.”)

Not Captain Canoe, of course—being a gunwale-bobber from way back, I stepped right on and very nearly swam.

I began by J-stroking but changed to rhythmically switching the extra-long paddle from side to side to keep straight. Looking down at my bare feet, images from early days growing up with my faithful retriever, Princess, on the banks of the mighty Speed River came flooding back. Déjà vu.

In look, the SUP was more like a Carl-Wilson-autographed surfboard but in feel, it was a raft—childhood’s first vehicle of exploration, made of logs, bailer twine and old fencing wire—with improved hull shape and hydrodynamics. Here we go again, Huck Finn!

Lost in my raft revelry, I paddled easily, building up speed with every pull and push. Hoisting an imaginary Jolly Roger, I was again Bluebeard on the bounding main or Captain Hattaras on my way to the North Pole. The 21st-century design didn’t fool me—this was my paddlecraft of yore.

Of course, with little storage, no secondary stability and the requirement of standing all the time, the SUP remains an inferior craft to the canoe—but the child in me won’t hear of it.

Don’t worry, James Raffan hasn’t given up his canoe, but he is considering an Arctic SUP trip with raft support. He asks you not to be too disappointed.

Get the full article in the digital edition of Canoeroots Early Summer 2014. Subscribe to Paddling Magazine’s print and digital editions, or browse the archives.