Last summer, my five-year-old daughter Kate and I—and Rapid Media TV cameraman, Dan Caldwell—parachuted into a Black Feather Wilderness Programs’ Family French River trip. After 20 years of paddling, it was my first guided trip where I wasn’t the guide. And it was Kate’s first canoe trip with complete strangers.

We met the Black Feather guides and the other families at The Lodge at Pine Cove, 350 kilometers north of Toronto, or a four-hour drive from our home through Algonquin Park.

The historic French River is a 105-kilometer heritage waterway Provincial Park and designated Canadian Heritage River that was once a major fur trade route. The French winds its way from Lake Nipissing to Georgian Bay through a maze of channels and bays in a windswept pines landscape made famous by the Group of Seven.

We were there for four days. We’d packed only the items on Black Feather’s checklist. I didn’t know where we were going, and for the first time in my life, I didn’t care. Somebody else was taking care of all that.

If you want to get out this summer but don’t have the time, skills, confidence or desire to pull it together yourself… call an outfitter now, show up and have the time of your lives. Here’s how and why. 

It may bring back memories of Janis Joplin, shag carpet and lava lamps but tie-dye is actually an ancient art that’s been around for thousands of years. Making your very own tie-dyed clothing is the perfect backyard or lakeside activity because, like most things that are fun, it’s messy! 

WHAT YOU’LL NEED

“The lake was ours,” wrote Konstantin Schwartz in his diary, recalling the moment he and a comrade paddled out of the reedy shallows and into the gently rippled expanse of Whitewater Lake in the Manitoba wilderness. Many canoeists alone on a secluded lake have probably experienced a similar feeling.

Unteroffizier Schwartz and his companion weren’t alone, however, or free. They were German prisoners of war held in a labor camp at Whitewater Lake in the backcountry of the Riding Mountain National Park, southwestern Manitoba, from 1943-45. Most were Afrika Korps captured in Egypt after the Second Battle of El-Alamein in late 1942.

The craft paddled by Schwartz was one of an unknown number of dugout canoes built by the PoWs in their spare time. The Germans were free to canoe the isolated lake and occasionally broke away for several hours to visit Ukrainian farmers they’d befriended. Permanent escape was all but a geographical impossibility. The handcrafted canoes may have been hypothetical getaway vessels, but even if the prisoners paddled and portaged for weeks, they’d still be in the center of an enemy continent.

This rare canoeing chapter of the Second World War might have been lost if not for the recent efforts of Stanford University Archeology PhD candidate Adrian Myers. The Vancouver-born scholar has just wrapped up three years of fieldwork at Whitewater Lake and is currently cataloging and analyzing his findings. His study focus is on the PoW camp as a whole, but the canoes have proved to be a diverting sidelight.

Myers and his team uncovered six Prisoner of War-built canoes in various states of preservation.

“This was a labor detachment sent to Riding Mountain National Park for the purpose of logging. So as the prisoners came across trees that were big enough, they set them aside for recreational use,” says Myers, who has identified the canoemakers’ likely tools: a bow saw, axes, chisels, hammers and knives. Mature fir, spruce, or poplar trees logged from the surrounding forests probably provided the raw material.

In addition to the canoes identified in situ and two preserved at Fort Dauphin Museum, more probably existed. “The historical documentation mentions a flotilla,” says Myers. “They might’ve made 20 or 30.”

How did the prisoners know how to make canoes? This is a question that Myers is still looking to answer; he admits that he doesn’t have hard proof but an oral account he came across suggests the presence of a magazine at the camp.

“Could someone with no knowledge of boats just carve a canoe? Would it float and go where you wanted it to go, or not? We looked closely at the canoe in the Fort Dauphin Museum and it’s a sailing canoe with hardware—either someone knew how to do it from before the war, or they had a magazine in the camp with a picture or instructions.” Myers is hoping to unearth a publication from the period to verify the oral account. Until then, German engineering will have to be explanation enough. 

Don Starkell and I are talking in Winnipeg, as we do from time to time. He is poking my chest with the stubs of his amputated, once-frostbitten fingers.

“Never,” he growls. “I never wore a PFD on my trips because I didn’t want any false sense of security. It’s hard enough paddling coastal waters and all the hazards they present, without having to worry about a false sense of security.”

That was Don; opinionated, inspiring, accomplished…different. With his passing earlier this year from cancer, we lost a genuine paddling legend.

Don’s passion—his obsession—saw him through two particularly epic journeys in an impressive lifetime paddling resumé.

His 19,603-kilometer jaunt with sons Dana and Jeff from Winnipeg, Manitoba, to the mouth of the Amazon River in Brazil landed him in the Guinness Book of World Records.

His shorter yet fiercely ambitious three-year kayak romp from Churchill, Manitoba, to just short of Tuktoyaktuk, Northwest Territories (he was frozen in just a few kilometers from his goal) very nearly landed him in the morgue.

Don’s journeys added two timeless books to the paddling canon. Paddle to the Amazon (1987) and Paddle to the Arctic (1995) are must-reads for any paddler looking for inspiration.

Don’s story is finding new life in 2012. In March, there was an online reunion of all of the principals involved in the Paddle to the Amazon odyssey, except Don, in a live webcast hosted by filmmaker Chris Forde. Forde didn’t hear about Paddle to the Amazon until some time after the book was published, but one read was all it took for the Toronto documentarian to begin an 11-year journey to bring the Starkells’ achievement back into public consciousness. Forde is in the process of creating a multi-layered, interactive film and website that will inspire budding adventurers for years to come.

What is it about Don Starkell that makes his life story so compelling?

For me, it is that he acted on what he believed in and drew us all along with him. More importantly, in imagining the canoe as a vessel in which to travel a north-south axis, he added a rich international complexity and diversity to the east-west fur trade axis that we all know and love. But Don did more than that.

He is one of those rare individuals who dared to imagine and to commit everything to following through. In the opening sequence of Forde’s film, Don is speaking. “I love the word imagination,” he says to the camera. “…dreams are only dreams. Imagination flowing in action is reality.”