Matt Porter gives Rapid Mag TV a sneak peek of two new drysuits for 2014. These rear-entry drysuits come in great colours, some great features and all the right fabrics in all the right areas.
Looking for a raft that can handle the big water and zip around the water? Check out the latest offering from Aire rafts – the Sabertooth.
Steve Wagner shows us all the neat design features of the new PFD from Salus, The Proto. If you are looking for a rescue vest and something you can strip down to play in, check this out.
NRS has so many things to show Scott from Rapid Media that they don’t quite get to it all before the duck starts quacking. Watch the video and it will all make sense.
Canoeroots TV grabs Pete Newport from Sawyer Paddles and Oars at Outdoor Retailer to tell us what the Sawyer Racing team is all about. He fills us in and shows us some of the paddles that are designed to be light, look great and make you go fast.
Publisher of Canoeroots Magazine Scott MacGregor is shown the new Old Town Pack Canoe by director of R & D Bob McDonough. Find out why this design gives you some of the benefits of both a kayak and canoe.
The new kid on the block, Core Paddles is poised to take the market by storm. With the introduction of one-piece Easton Elite alloy shafts combined with carbon composite blades, Core has put the notion of aluminum paddles being low budget to rest. The Kirri is Core’s premier whitewater product and it’s lighter, stronger and more durable than most full carbon paddles. Grips on the shaft eliminate slippage and the optional 12- or 30-degree offset lets you choose your angle
corepaddles.com | $449
This article originally appeared in Rapid magazine, Early Summer, 2011. Download our free iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch App or Android App or read it here.
I didn’t know Jeff West. Jeff died this summer attempting the first solo, one-day descent of the Grand Canyon of the Stikine River. I didn’t know Lynn Clark either. Lynn died 14 years ago this February at Little Picky on the Ottawa River. She was out for an afternoon paddle with friends. She was swept and trapped under ice. I attended Lynn’s memorial service, although I’m not exactly sure why. Paddlers were lined up out the door and down the street of the funeral home. I don’t remember saying anything to her family and close friends at the front. I’m not sure anything any of us could have said would have mattered. Lynn was an accomplished paddler and award-winning paddling filmmaker out for an afternoon with friends and then she was dead. What the hell was she thinking paddling then and there? How did she flip? Why didn’t she roll? Standing in line at a funeral home is not the time or the place to ask such questions.
If she’d not died, she’d have gone for a greasy pizza at the Country Kitchen and today she’d likely be paddling’s most celebrated filmmaker. If Jeff West was successful, he too may have gone for pizza and been famous, although being famous was not his was not his thing. What drove him to attempt back-to-back runs on the most extreme river in the world? Only Jeff knew for sure.
It’s easy to ask questions and form opinions. It’s tempting to weigh-in to online debates. Certainly many have. It is a natural part of our grieving process. It’s part of the collective trying to figure out how shit like this happens. Searching for answers in tragic accidents can make a falsely comforting list of why it hasn’t happened to us.
I’ve not paddled the Stikine. I don’t know the lines or the levels. I don’t know how pumped I’d feel after a successful attempt. I do know however that I have cartwheeled on Christmas Eve day, a short swim above an otherwise frozen river.
As kids, when my brother and I would pick at my dad, he used to say, “If you mess with the bull, you’ll get the horns.” He meant of course, if you keep doing something dangerous, you will eventually get hurt. We’d keep at him until we got the horns, in this case just a good tickling. Getting the horns was all part of the game. When paddlers die, we remember that rivers have horns.
When we lose paddlers to rivers, the best we can hope for is a raised awareness of the true risks. The facts of tragic river accidents provide the framework for self-assessment. The facts help us understand why we haven’t gotten the horns. And if we’re truly honest with ourselves, the facts are a list of why we very well could.
Let’s remember great paddlers and friends for who they were and for all they’ve given us. Lynn Clark taught me to stay off icy rivers. For that, I’m forever grateful.
This article first appeared in the Spring 2013 issue of Rapid Magazine. For more great content, subscribe to Rapid’s print and digital editions here.
There was one moment in each of my favorite trips where I stopped and thought to myself, “What the hell am I doing here?” It’s happened on a portage that climbed and climbed, during a week of rain that resulted in trench foot, when barely making headway in 120-kilometer-an-hour winds, or, quite literally, just being a stranger in a strange land. It’s that undeniable, holyshit- I’m-in-over-my-head moment of total discomfort. Not to be confused with the sickening lurch of a backcountry, “Uh oh.”
On every trip that’s meant something to me—really meant something—there’s always a moment where I stepped so far outside my comfort zone that a panicky, almost painful sensation entered mychest. Hours of pushing an 80-pound bike weighed down with camping gea up a steep Cape Breton road, only to crest it, enjoy a short-lived, white-knuckle 70-kilometer-an-hour descent and do it all again. A 30-kilometer day in a weeklong hike through Torres del Paine, where, only two-thirds of the way there by late afternoon, I threw off my pack, fell onto my back and raised swollen feet to the sky in absolution. Standing in the Wabakimi landscape I’d been tracing on a map in my living room for months, watching the floatplane disappear…
This article appeared in Canoeroots & Family Camping, Spring 2013. Download our free iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch App or Android App or read the rest here.
At summer camp, sizing a paddle was as easy as grabbing one that stood at my toes and touched my nose. As adults with greater attention spans and finer attention to details, most of us now seek a more precise fit that combines hand position, the distance from the lower hand to the water and blade length.
Most people begin their quest using the bent arm technique: holding the paddle on your head with your arms at 90-degree angles. A better method is to go paddling and mark your most comfortable and common lower hand position.
Your position in the boat, and the boat itself, changes the desired paddle length. For example, if you paddle with the boat heeled way over and your lower hand at water level; your hand will be at the top of the blade, or throat, of the paddle. In this case, the ideal paddle length is simply your bent arm length added to whatever blade size you prefer.
However, trippers generally prefer to paddle with their lower hands dropping just below the gunwale. Furthermore, whitewater paddlers actually keep their lower hands above the gunwale. Not to mention that kneeling versus sitting, two weeks worth of gear, bow or stern positions and sitting low in a performance touring canoe all change the distance from your lower hand to the waterline.
The most precise sizing method I’ve found gets you in your canoe on the water with a broomstick. You pretend to paddle as you normally would. The part of the stick that remains dry is your ideal shaft length in this canoe. This method accounts for your hand position, seat height, depth of the canoe and paddling style, requiring only the addition of your preferred blade length.
I have different length paddles for whitewater C1, slalom, classic solo paddling and tripping. The only thing that remains pretty much the same is my hand position. In each case it took trial and error to figure out what works best for me.
This article originally appeared in Canoeroots & Family Camping, Spring 2011. Download our free iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch App or Android App or read it here.
