A man poles his canoe off the coast of Zanzibar.
This photo is was taken by Flickr user blhphotography and licensed under Creative Commons. Want to see your photo here? Send to [email protected] with subject line Daily Photo.
Freestyle Move: Loop Lunar Orbit
The loop lunar orbit is an awesome aerial hole combo that is sure to get you more chicks than a Nickelback concert. The beauty of it is that once you have it dialed, you can cartwheel into a mcnasty, and then keep adding more moves to infinity.
1. Start by plugging your bow for the loop.
2. Stand up tall and jump forward. The higher you go and farther upstream you jump, the better because the lunar orbit will pull you downstream.
3. Throw your body forward and pull back on your paddle blade. This launches your bow around over your head. Using only one blade to pull the loop stroke is key; this will set you up for the combo.
4. From here, you actually want to land on your stern, rather than finishing all the way flat on your hull.
5. When you are vertical on your stern with your paddle behind you from pulling the loop stroke, quickly use that same paddle blade for a reverse stroke. This is the stern pry that initiates the lunar orbit.
6. The farther back your paddle blade when you push, the more vertical your boat will go. Keep your paddle blade in the water the entire time or you will fall over on your head.
7. Finish the reverse stroke and turn it into a forward draw to pull yourself around vertically.
8. Lean forward as you turn your forward draw back into a reverse stroke for your bow smash.
This article originally appeared in Rapid, Early Summer 2011. Download our free iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch App or Android App or read it here.
Base Camp: Algonquin’s Logging Museum
The amphibious tugboat pictured here was invented in 1889. Called an “alligator,” it is a wood-fed paddlewheel steamer capable of warping 60,000 boom logs in a day, then winching itself on a temporary railway of logs overland to the next lake. Built in 1905 and taken out of service in 1946, the William M. is one of only three alligators remaining in existence. For the last 49 years, it has rested on the shore of a small creek 600 metres down a wheelchair accessible, stone dust path at the Algonquin Logging Museum.
Located on Highway 60 just inside Algonquin Park’s east gate, the Logging Museum has a bookstore, theatre and souvenir shop, but it’s outside—in the bush, above a log chute, behind the wheel of the William M. and aboard a locomotive—where Algonquin’s logging history really comes alive. The Logging Museum, like hundreds of others across the country, didn’t make this issue’s list of North America’s top six interpretive centres. Nevertheless, it is outdoors, interesting for kids and within an hour’s drive of my house, putting it at the top of my family’s favorites list.
By comparison, a 10-minute drive deeper into Algonquin Park is the Visitors Centre—a state-of-the-art interpretive facility opened in 1993 and heralded as a must-visit on any trip through the park. We do visit. However, all of the exhibits are indoors—like a museum, complete with a cafeteria. My four-year-old son refers to the Visitors Centre as, “you know Dad, that place where we eat pie.”
Stuffed wolves hide safely behind Plexiglas well protected from curious little fingers. The French lumberjack’s story of the log drive is interesting to small children for all of 10 seconds. After an hour inside the Visitors Centre, both kids and parents go crazy like moose with brainworm (see the exhibit if you have time). Quick kids, back outside to the wheelhouse of the William M.
In a hurried, blackberry-driven, concrete world so focused on higher marks and organized sports, it’s alluring to blow into these visitor centres for a canned, one-hour educational tour. However, study after study from education and health organizations like the American Academy of Pediatrics says free and unstructured child-centred play is healthy and even essential to the development of children. Free play is even more beneficial when it’s outdoors in nature. This means that if we want our children to learn more, be more active and be socially and emotionally well balanced, we need to turn off our ringers, get them outside and let their imaginations lead the way.
Dan Strickland, author of the Logging Museum’s interpretive guidebook, writes that the twice-rebuilt alligator will never again belch out smoke and sparks as it struggles across Algonquin’s lakes. Perhaps, but in the imaginations of my children, the log drive has just begun and there are plenty of trees to be floated downstream. “Stoke up that fire Katie, we need more steam.”
—Scott MacGregor
This article appeared in Canoeroots & Family Camping, Early Summer 2009. Download our free iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch App or Android App or read it here.
Swedish Fireknife Gear Review
A look at the Swedish FireKnife from Adventure Kayak magazine.
Light My Fire
Swedish FireKnife
Never be without heat. This sturdy, super sharp knife stores a 3,000-strike FireSteel fire-starter in the handle. Draw the back of the blade down the FireSteel and watch the sparks fly in even the foulest weather.
$32.50 | www.lightmyfire.com
To read about more survival essentials in the Early Summer 2013 issue of Adventure Kayak, click here.
Extreme Street Kayaking
Tahe Outdoors
In this amazing video, talented (and brave) Zegul Kayaks rep Andres ‘paddles’ through the snowy steeps of a medieval European village. “We wanted to put our kayaks to extreme testing and since it was still winter in Estonia, we did our kayaking on snowy city streets,” says Risto Pårtin of Tahe Outdoors, makers of Zegul. “Right there between the traffic, down the stairs, in the medieval old town and so on. We wouldn’t recommend trying this yourself!”
Learn more about Zegul Kayaks at www.zegulmarine.com and check out Adventure Kayak’s review of the playful Zegul 520 touring kayak in the Early Summer issue here.
Daily Photo: Looking Ahead
Georgian Bay’s Franklin Island is a popular summer weekend getaway for kayakers escaping the city. Here’s looking forward to the next three months of warm breezes, hot sunshine, balmy nights, campfires, swimming, camping and paddling. What could be better?
Want to see your photo here? Send to [email protected] with subject line Daily Photo.
Daily Photo: Stand and Deliver
“Everyone must believe in something. I believe I’ll go canoeing.” — Henry David Thoreau
This photo is was taken by Flickr user Bluenose Canoehead and licensed under Creative Commons. Want to see your photo here? Send to [email protected] with subject line Daily Photo.
Nova Craft Canoe Rebuilds the Ocoee
The Ocoee rides again. Proclaimed one of the best solo whitewater open boats of all time, the Ocoee was re-released this February by Nova Craft Canoe.
Designed by the late Frankie Hubbard and Dagger in 1996, this remarkable recreational open boat was the first to transition from a shallow arch hull to a flatter bottom—the Ocoee had hard edges in a world where rounder, softer edges were the norm. When Dagger got out of the open boat market six years ago, Bell Canoe works picked up the mould, only to cease production four years later. The Ocoee’s absence from the market has been keenly felt since.
“The Ocoee has a cult following,” says Joe Pulliam, co-founder of Dagger. “To this day it’s considered one of the benchmarks in high-performance, whitewater solo boating.”
Famed for its high waterline, hard chines and extreme rocker, the Ocoee has been embraced by aggressive paddlers, and made a meal of out more than a few beginners. It’s been used for everything from winning rodeos to class V creeking. Voted the best open boat of all time in 2012 by readers of Rapid magazine, the fact that the Ocoee is easily customized and a favorite of instructors has further boosted its popularity.
“This is big news for open boating,” says Emma Stinson, a whitewater canoe instructor and one of almost 50 paddlers to pre-order an Ocoee. The re-launch news ended Stinson’s four-year hunt…
Finish reading this article in the Spring 2013 issue of Rapid. Download our free iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch App or Android App or read the rest here.
Flushed: Doin’ It Duckie Style
My partner Steve Thomsen and I work together on field projects as a photojournalist team. Our gigs are often crossover affairs: mountain biking and fly-fishing on rafting trips, disc golf on a sea kayak expedition. Invariably, our diverse pursuits require a lot of gear.
For our latest trip—a scenic downriver journey with fly-fishing, fowl hunting and some canyoneering on the side—we pack all the typical necessities plus such eclectic luxuries as a Dutch oven, camp chairs, cooler, fly-fishing gear, SLR camera setup, espresso brewer, shotgun and shells, fresh veggies and down pillows. We are set up in the tradition of a classic safari and that’s how we like it.
Our cargo, stuffed into Rubbermaids stacked three deep, fills the bed of Steve’s Tundra truck as we roll past Boise toward the put-in for the Owyhee. Most groups run southeast Oregon’s mighty O during spring runoff, when 7,000–10,000 cfs create a three-day, class III run from Rome to Birch Creek and raft support, or a lean tripping style, is de rigueur.
We’ve chosen to run this 45-mile stretch of river in early October at a niggling 100 cfs, taking a leisurely week to do it. Because our payload is lean only in comparison to a fully loaded 18-foot Aire Cat, we’re paddling inflatable kayaks (IKs)—no raft support required, or possible given the extreme low water.
Canoes are out of the question. The first time we took open boats down the late season Owyhee, the canoes emerged so thrashed that the rental guy refused to take them back. We paid for that mistake in no small amount of change.
Without all our planned side ventures we’d probably be paddling the new crop of crossover kayaks: Liquidlogic XP10s or Pyranha Fusions, hard shell kayaks with hatches and space for a little extra—but just a little.
Steve and I know we’ll be leaving cool at the corner running the Owyhee in duckies, but so what? We’re the only ones on the river and we stopped worrying about cool a couple decades ago. Our goal is to get our butts and our swag through the canyon, and if IKs are the ticket, so be it.
Putting on the river in stellar weather, we bump inelegantly down the rapids dodging as many rocks as possible and bouncing off or sliding over the rest. Sometimes we get hung up—the beamy IK hulls refuse to go over—and have to wade out to haul the damned things free.
We drag ass in the riffles, line the boats down the messiest stuff and struggle over one truly miserable portage. We nail every lava nugget that more nimble river runners would easily slip past. More than a few times I think how fun it would be to slalom gracefully down a rapid that we’ve just pinballed through.
Still, we have no regrets. We are a different breed of boater.
We dig what meager performance we can squeeze from our rubber ducks, but our sights are set on the bigger picture: Eating Cajun-blackened quail from the Dutchie. Catching smallies on flies from stacked pools. Hiking up the canyon flanks to photograph the grandeur of the Little Grand. Exploring crumbling rock wall wind breaks built by Basque shepherds on the dry grass plateaus. Hunting for petroglyphs, partridge and bighorns. Playing a game of call-shot disc golf up the arroyo behind camp with a cold beer in hand.
When we roll up the IKs at week’s end, Steve and I agree we’ve found the perfect match to our tripping ethos. Next time we run the Owyhee, you can bet it will be duckie-style. Sure, the cool crowd would probably heckle us, but they won’t be there.
Daily Photo: North Fork
Were you at round two of the North Fork Championship this weekend? If not, you missed out!
This photo was taken by John Webster. See more of his work at www.webstermediahouse.com.
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