Dear Diary

Stories

I had no interest in canoeing when my father gave me a copy of Don Starkell’s Paddle to the Amazon on my 13th birthday. Two weeks later, I had finished Starkell’s diary of his father-and-sons canoe trip across the Americas, purged the public library of all its canoe titles and convinced my father to take me on my first overnighter. As we drove to the river, a stout rented fibreglass canoe tied to the roof of my dad’s Jetta, Starkell’s journal dominated my imagination. I was psyched for pirates, mutiny and towering waves—maybe even starvation and long, stringy hair.

The best trip journals are part personal reflection, part record of information

None of that came to pass. I know this because I kept a journal myself. The penmanship is sloppy, and some trains of thought never pull into the station, but all I have to do is re-read it to trip again for the first time.

It’s because of that journal that I remember that first canoe trip better than my last. Memories of the nine summers I’ve spent as a wilderness guide are more fleeting. My logbook from those years is mundane and impersonal. I recorded campsites, weather, menu and morale.

The only things that seemed to warrant more documentation were scraped knees and bee stings. Strings of campsites and thunderstorms replaced feelings about what really happened.

That’s not to say that a matter-of-fact trip log doesn’t have its place. It depends why you want to put pen to paper. A trip journal can be one of two things—a personal reflection, or a record of information. But the best are a combination of both—like Starkell’s day-to-day deliberations of paddling nearly 20,000 kilometres from Winnipeg to the Amazon. According to editor Charles Wilkins, Paddle to the Amazon began as a million-word, foot-high stack of trip notes. Pared down, it became the stuff of legends, a story of high adventure, hardship and love.

The feel-good reason for taking time to write in a journal is that the very activity forces you to slow down and appreciate where you are. It also helps you understand why you’ve chosen to escape society for a time. The practical part is that a journal reinforces your memory and makes things easier if you decide to go back for a second trip, or share your notes with friends.

I still have the yellow Hilroy notebook that was my first journal: Saturday, June 4. … I broke my paddle on the third rapid and I had to use the blade part like a ping-pong racket for the rest of the day. Dad said we should’ve brought along one of my broken goalie sticks as a spare.

Perhaps not a bestseller on par with Starkell’s, but well worth recording.

You need not aspire to win a Pulitzer Prize to keep a journal:

• Discipline is paramount. Don’t miss a day, or you’ll miss the next one too.

• Keep your notebook accessible in a Zip-loc bag so you can grab it throughout the day before your thoughts leave you.

• Voice recorders work, but only if you trust yourself to transcribe later.

• Engage the group and elicit material by conducting daily polls or surveys relating to the trip.

• Awarding a “quote of the day” is a good way to engage your partners and mark each day’s most worthy moments.

• Don’t leave the journal entry until night when you are tired and need to hang the food. Take regular breaks on the water to write as your canoe spins in the wind.

• Dirty paper and pens don’t mix; use a trusty pencil.

• A group journal in which each trip member is responsible for specific days adds variety to the manuscript and lets you learn from other people’s writing style.

• Hold yourself to a higher standard than just recording the weather and menu for the day. Years later, you’ll be more interested in the sounds and feelings of paddling a class III rapid, rather than the line you took through it.

This article on journaling was published in the Spring 2009 issue of Canoeroots magazine.

This article first appeared in the Spring 2009 issue of Canoeroots Magazine.

The People in Your Neighbourhood

Stories

Photo: flickr.com/hebdromadaires — The People in Your Neighbourhood

I was excited about my new five-pound refillable propane tank. I had two buttered cheese sandwiches in the frying pan and two hungry campers begging for food. It was our first father-toddlers camping trip and I just then remembered the safe place in my basement where I’d left the adapter hose that connects my new tank to my Coleman stove.

What happened next is a bit shaky, like the real life video footage from an episode of COPS. Driven to crime by hungry, whining children, I stole the green canister from my neighbour’s abandoned picnic table.

Upon their return I thought it best to confess. I’m glad I did. The two large middle-aged men were, I’m certain, linked to the Russian mafia—or let’s just say one was in importing and the other was a simple truck driver who just purchased a new BMW 760.

I know all this because they invited us back for souvlaki skewers cooked over their fire. After the kids were tucked into their sleeping bags, I returned to share a $200 bottle of Johnny Walker Blue toasting the new automobile.

My first 20 years of camping I did in remote places—mountains, lakes and rivers— where seeing another group was grounds to keep moving to a different spot. Since starting a family, one of the many changes I’ve had to accept is trading these solitary sojourns for a more convivial camping atmosphere.

A few weeks after the propane incident, I spent the August long weekend at the busiest campground in the Highway 60 corridor of Algonquin Park. Packed into the knot of campsites were nearly 300 people—more than the population of the two towns in which I live and work.

Ziggy was the first person I asked to borrow a corkscrew. The twenty-something hippy girl across the campsite road rummaged through embroidered pouches and secret compartments in her chartreuse Westfalia. Nothing.

The campers to the left were Baptist and said they didn’t drink, although the teenage son suggested we just sink the cork. I said thanks and moved on before the questioning began.

On the other side, a young couple cuddled close to the fire, wine glasses in hand. Perfect. Except they’d forgotten a corkscrew too and grabbed a screw-off bottle on their way to the campground.

Finally, I met Harry Sarin, a radiologist at a big hospital in the city, and his wife, a nurse on leave raising their three children.

It was their first time camping with kids, but by the looks of their sun-faded pup tents and micro stoves (and yes, a corkscrew) I guessed that they’d backpacked Europe.

The following morning, Harry wandered over asking if we had sugar for their coffee. We handed him a bottle of maple syrup. It was the best we could do. Over breakfast the kids became fast friends and we planned an all-day hike and cycle together.

Campgrounds like these aren’t about wilderness. To me they are about being surrounded by like-minded outdoor families— people you get to know more in a weekend than you do your neighbours at home.

Campground neighbours give what you don’t have, loan you what you’ve forgotten. They pick things up in town and leave you their worms and leftover wood. They boost dead batteries and return stray Frisbees. These neighbours make family camping more fun than it would be without them.

And, campground neighbours forgive you for stealing propane canisters and don’t ask truck drivers how they afford $200,000 European luxury sedans.

This article on campground experience was published in the Spring 2009 issue of Canoeroots magazine.

This article first appeared in the Spring 2009 issue of Canoeroots Magazine.

Betcha Didn’t Know About… Moose

Stories

Photo: Steve Page — Betcha Didn't Know About... Moose

The word moose is derived from the Algonquian name moz, meaning he trims, shaves. Must be that unfashionable mullet, goatee, and patchy spring coat.
Moose are known as elk in Europe. North American elk were named by early European explorers who thought this large deer species resembled the European elk (i.e. moose). Presumably they had yet to see an actual moose…
In 1910, 10 moose introduced in Fiordland, New Zealand, disappeared into the impenetrable bush. occasional sightings were as credible as reports of Bigfoot until moose hair was found in 2002.
Male moose lose their antlers in the fall and re-grow them every spring. Antlers take three to five months to develop, making them the fastest growing male organ in nature.
Native American myths about moose with devil’s antlers are based on the misshapen appendages worn for life by castrated bull moose.
The largest moose ever recorded was discovered in Alaska. It stood 2.34 metres at the shoulder, weighed 816 kilograms, and had a rack spanning two metres.
The flap of skin that hangs beneath the throat is called a bell.
In 2000, the Moose in the City project flooded Toronto, ontario, with 326 life-size moose statues. Sold at a charity auction, these moose quickly became a source of corporate pride and prize targets for high school car rallies.
Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, is named from the Cree word moosegaw, which means warm breezes. Nevertheless, the city’s mascot is a 10-metre, 9,000-kilogram concrete moose named Mac.
Chocolate moose, a dish made famous by the Muppet Show in 1978, is a culinary staple of northern tourist towns.

This article first appeared in the Spring 2009 issue of Canoeroots Magazine.

Butt End: Bushcraft

Stories

Photo: Kevin Callan — Butt End: Bushcraft

I think I have the humble pen thing figured out. It seems to come naturally when writing about misadventures. In any case, it works for me.

Humility will also take you far when canoe tripping. Lacking humility in the wilderness is the surest way to get into trouble. I’m frequently awed and humbled when I’m out there. In fact, that’s why I go out. Frequent humblings are good for the soul.

Humiliation? That’s another matter. But it’s just what I stumbled into last year on a trip with my friend Scott.

We had been given the job of preparing a base-camp for a BBC crew while they filmed a television special with Ray Mears. Mears is a bushcraft expert from the U.K. The kind of guy that can carve a paddle out of a tree in minutes or get a fire going without a match without breaking a sweat. The man’s bushcraft films are admired by thousands of fans worldwide, and here I was, charged with setting up his camp.

We were to stay a day ahead of them on the river, making sure everything was set for when they arrived.

“You want to be a writer, don’t know how or when? Find a quiet place, use a humble pen.” — Paul Simon

It sounded like an easy job. And it would have been. If we had cooking pots. If I hadn’t forgotten them back at the put-in.

After taking an increasingly panicked inventory of the campsite I stared at the river and considered paddling back upstream, but we were too far and the current was too fast. We were trapped.

The first evening Scott and I ate peanut butter sandwiches rather than cook up our macaroni dinner. It was a hardship but we got through it. But not being able to boil water for coffee the next morning was unacceptable. What’s more we had to figure out a way to cook for the eight-person crew about to arrive that day.

First we tried placing hot rocks into a barrel pack full of river water, which gave us luke-warm, murky water filled with dirt, ash and probably parasites.

Next we spent an hour carving a log into a bowl to heat over the fire. It looked good, until it ignited, leaked and spilled its contents, dousing the flames. The third attempt was a little more successful. We found an old whisky bottle (bushcraft indeed) back in the bush, filled it half-full with water and hung it about a foot above the fire. A long while later, we had bubbly water to steep our coffee grounds in.

At noon the film crew arrived and I put on my humble hat and told them what had happened. Then, with little hope I suggested that maybe the bushcraft expert could show us, and the camera, what he was made of.

Mears looked thoughtful and for a moment I thought I might be about to learn something. Turns out I already knew his lesson.

“Well Kevin,” he said, reaching into his canoe, “we could use these pots left behind by some poor fool back at the launch.”

Later, with a full belly, I had to agree he was good at what he did.

This article on bushcraft was published in the Spring 2009 issue of Canoeroots magazin

This article first appeared in the Spring 2009 issue of Canoeroots Magazine.

100 Years of Quetico

Trips

The summer of 2009 marks 100 years since the inception of one of the canoeing world’s largest protected areas. When Quetico became an Ontario forest reserve in 1909 and then a provincial park in 1913, a paddler’s paradise was born.

It’s a place you can exercise your eyes on cascading waterfalls, reflective tannin lakes and stands of old-growth forest; spend calm evenings lying on a rock listening to loons call; pick marble-sized wild blueberries for morning pancakes; and take on a challenging portage to some remote lake full of feisty fish.

There’s no better way to celebrate the centennial than to paddle the renowned Hunter Island route. This is where it all began. It was the “island” area that was first protected in 1909.

It’s not really a true island. The Hunter Island area is a chunk of land and lakes that split the two historically significant fur-trade routes, Kaministiquia and Grand Portage. The route is chock-full of history and has far more water to paddle than trails to portage. And with Quetico being a border park, you can get to it either at the north end from Atikokan, Ontario, or from Ely, Minnesota and through the Boundary Waters Canoe Area to the south.

The 200-kilometre circuit takes 12 to 14 days to complete, though it’s possible to slice and dice the circuit to leave you with different trips of five or seven days. If you are in a hurry, have a go at the annual Hunter Island Canoe Race and try to break the speed record. The current record, set in 1994, is just under 29 hours.

But you’re best not to rush the trip. Hunter Island has too many natural and historic treasures along the way. Paddling this route you will pass: the place where Bill Mason starred in his first film, a portion of David Thompson’s survey route of Canada, the route of the militia heading to engage Louis Riel during the Red River Rebellion, the place where the infamous John Tanner was shot, a portion of pioneering conservationist Aldo Leopold’s favorite canoe trip, significant native pictograph sites and Warrior Hill, where young Ojibway braves raced to the top to test their worth as warriors.

This article first appeared in the Spring 2009 issue of Canoeroots Magazine.

Off The Tongue: Babies Save Rivers

Stories

Photo: Scott MacGregor — Off The Tongue: Babies Save Rivers

The most dangerous thing that can happen to us guys is not a waterfall, nor a boulder choked, class V creek. It’s chicks and babies who kill paddlers!” wrote Reactionary columnist Ben Aylsworth in the Spring 2001 issue of Rapid.

Eight years later, now married with two little kids of my own, I have a completely different perspective. Aylsworth’s opinion at the time was too shortsighted (not to mention bitter and sexist) to see the lives of his paddling buddies come full circle.

Whitewater boat sales and participation peaked around 2001, not because of the super Ego, but because the last of the largest group of the population—the baby boomers—were still enjoying the golden whitewater years of their mid-thirties. Soon after, Ben would write, they were sucked from their boats, resurfacing in Lamaze classes and in minivans en route to soccer practice.

To be fair, these years are also the busiest time in most careers and a time when many paddlers are purchasing and trying to pay for their first houses. Paddles are traded for rakes, paintbrushes and drywall trowels. If you want to catch up with your thirty-something paddling buddies, try the tool rental desk at Home Depot. I have an account.

This special Love Issue is here to show those paddlers running scared from commitment that love doesn’t have to be as restrictive as a river-wide strainer and that there can be whitewater at the end of the wedding aisle and birthing canal. In this issue you’ll meet river kids and whitewater couples who are making it work.

My own family’s secret has been establishing Rapid and our lives in the Ottawa Valley. It was a conscious decision. We decided we’d rather live and work at the rivers than spend our weekends driving to them.

My son Dougie and daughter Kate, now four and two years old, have been swimming and paddling in class II rapids since they were born. Dougie has 35 river days scribbled in his log from last year alone. The kids have their own kayaks, paddles, canoe tripping barrels (one specifically for stuffed animals), fishing rods, sleeping bags and Therm-a-Rests. We have two tandem whitewater tripping boats and we split on a 14-foot raft (think giant playpen) with Rapid’s River alchemy columnist Jeff Jackson and his family.

There have never been more kids’ courses, boats and gear.

Some people argue that it is a result of this new gear that more kids are on rivers.

No doubt the availability of smaller gear and boats is making parents realize that they can start their kids younger. But I believe there is a second element at work. The RPM dads (and moms) of the late ‘90s have grown sick of soccer and are coming back to the rivers, bringing with them the offspring of the first whitewater boom.

Even if only half of the whitewater boomers get back in their boats and bring their families to the rivers, river paddling will be 50 per cent bigger than ever before.

Why should you care? Because today’s river rats will be tomorrow’s river advocates and environmental policy makers. When you look at it that way, babies don’t kill paddlers; paddlers’ babies save rivers.

This article on kids and paddling was published in the Early Summer 2009 issue of Rapid magazine.

This article first appeared in the Early Summer 2009 issue of Rapid Magazine.

Flushed: Just Follow Me

Stories

Photo: Matt Corke — Flushed: Just Follow Me

Aislinn and I met in college and bonded over cappuccinos and boiled perogies. She worried like a mother about my regular diet of Pop-Tarts and Lucky Charms. We shared a penchant for dreaming about far-away places too remote to make Outside magazine’s 50 Trips of a Lifetime and trying our luck at things that scared us.

That’s how I find myself scouting from a slippery bank as my first class IV resonates like the third beer on an empty stomach. A kaleidoscope of frantic foam, lashing tongues of dark water and air saturated with the river’s breath. The din of the whitewater drowns out the voice of my instructor—a callow hotshot who turns away to gaze at the wave for vital, entirely inaudible periods of his briefing.

My stomach flutters. A rabble of butterflies is trying to escape from its knotted clutch. With blissful ignorance and naïve optimism, I conjure an image of my boat slipping cleanly through the galloping whitewater. My faith in my fellow paddlers is unquestioning. Kayakers are transformed into knights; their boats are loyal steeds. Smelly neoprene is shining armour. Besides, nothing will go wrong, Aislinn assures me.

We are opposites in many ways. Aislinn is lanky and graceful where I am powerful and clumsy. As a climber, she moves up rock like a feather caught in a rising thermal. I scrabble below her, using brawn and grit without technique or strategy. She takes to kayaking with equal elegance.

Above the rapid, our instructor disappears over the drop without a word. Aislinn is calmly coaching, as if I am her personal responsibility. The sequence to the roll she taught me just three days earlier flickers like a dying light bulb in the dim labyrinth of my memory.

“Just follow me.”

I see her slip gracefully up the massive green tongue and slide effortlessly across the wave into the eddy below. The curling wave arcs above me. Water rushes my face and chest like a schoolyard bully in a game of Reeds. My boat stalls on its stern, then pirouettes and rolls upside down in what amounts to the only graceful part of my run.

I swim

Boils claw at my feet and threaten to hold me forever in the deep, black water. I drag myself onto a rock, shaking and swearing. Adrenaline courses through numb limbs. I’m a fighter who’s just lost after 15 rounds in the ring.

I might have left kayaking forever right then. But Aislinn wouldn’t let me. When my wit had fled to hide in vaulted towers high above the water, she brought me back to the river. And when I did my first combat roll later that day, I quietly thanked her.

We now live at opposite ends of the country. Our lives still revolve around paddling—hers in giving instruction and advice, mine in telling stories. Perhaps we have each other to thank.

This article on whitewater kayak instruction was published in the Early Summer 2009 issue of Rapid magazine.

This article first appeared in the Early Summer 2009 issue of Rapid Magazine.

River Alchemy: Virginity Lost

Stories

Photo: Charlie Munsey — River Alchemy: Virginity Lost

I’ve just returned from scouting what I believe to be the fifth first descent of a tributary to the Bonnechere River.

Fifteen years ago, I dragged along a local “old guy” when I first scouted the creek. He didn’t tell me he’d run it a generation earlier. Like him, I haven’t the heart to tell this new crop of keeners that i’ve run it before.

A quiet Ottawa Valley canoe tripping river for most of the year, the Bonnechere booms in spring high water, fed by several feet of snow melt. This unnamed tributary enters above Basin Depot and drains the southeast corner of Algonquin Park. An eight-minute run with a window of just a couple of days a year, the creek packs continuous class III rapids and a couple 20-foot falls.

Before people paddled for recreation and adventure, a first descent was merely a means to an end

Fur, gold, logs and mapping the borders of a growing colony brought industry-minded paddlers to nearly all of the continent’s rivers one or two hundred years ago.

Early explorers such as Alexander MacKenzie, David Thompson and Simon Fraser left their names on newly “discovered” rivers, but it’s unlikely they bagged first descents on these waters. Native guides whose ancestors had used the river corridors for thousands of years led these European explorers. Even our first descent tributary to the Bonnechere has been thoroughly modified for log drives that ended 70 years ago.

Unlike Sir Edmund Hillary and Neil Armstrong, our river running forefathers tended not to plant a flag on the summit of their accomplishments. Assuming natives, fur traders, gold miners, log drivers or surveyors didn’t travel it earlier, there is little way of knowing who was first down a river.

The difficulty of proving a first descent doesn’t mean there’s no such thing.

Three examples of indisputable first descents stand out in our collective whitewater history

The granddaddy of them all, and the one that arguably started this whole first descent fascination, was major John Wesley Powell’s 1869 exploration of the Colorado River including the Grand Canyon. The one-armed civil war veteran walked more rapids than he ran, but he was there to confront the unknown. When Powell ventured down the Colorado, the river didn’t even have the same name at the top and bottom of the run. His four-month trip defined the term epic. Not only did Powell connect important dots on the map of the West, he more or less created the whitewater river trip as we know it.

In 1971, Dr. Walt Blackadar, a 49-year-old physician with only four years’ kayaking experience, became a modern legend of first descents when he ran Turnback Canyon on the Alsek River solo in his mithril Vector fibreglass kayak. Located in the middle of the Yukon/B.C.’s remote Coastal mountains with the only walk-around option across 16 kilometres of glacier, Turnback was aptly named. The run typified Blackadar and topped a long list of impressive class V solo first descents. Blackadar was inducted posthumously into the interna- tional Whitewater Hall of Fame in 2007 and Turnback has seen only a handful of descents since.

Remote, committing, huge and still rarely run, the Grand Canyon of the Stikine in northern B.C. belongs on any first descents shortlist. in 1981, fellow Hall of Fame honouree Rob Lesser began a nearly 10-year quest to run the canyon in its entirety. On his fourth attempt in 1990 with Doug Ammons, Lesser succeeded in making the canyon’s first self-supported descent. Reportedly, it was three days of psychological torture.

Powell, Blackadar and Lesser each represent a different era and a landmark accomplishment that redefined the realm of the possible. There is no evidence to suggest someone travelled their paths before them. Unlike the voyages of Mackenzie and other early explorers, these were the first deliberate attempts to confront the challenge of a river as opposed to avoiding it.

This is why my Bonnechere tributary keeners are lining up their own Grand Canyon descent. As with any of a thousand out-of-the-mainstream runs, this one requires research, planning and commitment all commensurate to the skill and ambition of the group. Class II or class V—it doesn’t matter. As far as they know it has never been run before.

Would knowing change their mindset? Perhaps.

Does this fact diminish the sense of adventure and giddy nervousness that accompanies peeling out of an eddy into the unknown? This is, after all, why we bother. True first descents are personal, regardless of who may have been there before.

Jeff Jackson is a professor of Outdoor Adventure at Algonquin College in Pembroke, Ontario.

This article on first descents was published in the Early Summer 2009 issue of Rapid magazine.

This article first appeared in the Early Summer 2009 issue of Rapid Magazine.

Standing Waves: Seeing Green

Trips

Photo: Alisdair Marshall — Standing Waves: Seeing Green

Perched largely above the Arctic Circle between the 60th and 85th parallels, Greenland stores 10 per cent of the earth’s freshwater reserves in the form of a giant ice cap slowly melting into the sea. The island’s rivers flow straight off this ice cap, tumbling furiously down mountainsides and into barren valleys home only to caribou and the occasional stray polar bear.

Greenland is also the birthplace of kayaking

The first qajaqs were constructed of sealskin stretched over driftwood and bone 2,000 years ago. since then, generations of the native inuit people have paddled, hunted and fished along the island’s treacherous coastline using these seafaring crafts. One place they never ventured was inland to ply the rivers. They simply had no reason to.

In 2007, English adventurers Ali Marshall and Simon Tapley became the first paddlers to explore Greenland’s largely untracked interior in search of runnable whitewater. The two-man expedition was challenged by the difficulty of running adequate safety on the river, viscious weather and sketchy information and transportation.

“We’d gamble on valleys sometimes three days’ walk away to find all the gradient lost in big falls too high to paddle,” says Marshall.

The hit-or-miss nature of their six-week expedition only made the reward of good whitewater that much greater. After sailing down the island’s west coast with a great danish cod fisherman in a boat called Nardvhalen—and later being rescued by the same when a storm blew their tent and kit into the sea—the men launched a two-week assault on the rivers flowing into the Bjornesund Fiord.

“It was a true wilderness at least 100 kilometres from other people,” says Marshall. “It really summed up the reasons we came to Greenland: warm weather melting a seemingly infinite snow pack, smooth ancient granite and good gradient.”

The promise of more undiscovered whitewater lured Marshall and Tapley back to Greenland

In the summer of 2008, this time better prepared and with the addition of two more paddling friends, Mike Scutt and Graham Milton. The short, plastic creek boats they brought with them—evolved from the ancient qajaq design to perform in a different medium—were nearly unrecognizable to the locals.

“We stopped in Qaqortoq where a man hand crafted traditional Inuit kayaks,” Scutt recalls. A thriving local qajaq club let the visitors try their seaworthy speed machines but declined an offer to demo the team’s strangely-shaped, garishly-coloured boats. “They laughed at our plastic whitewater boats,” Continues Scutt.

The English paddlers described their experiences to the qajaq club. How they had spent two weeks crossing fiords, walking over land, hitching rides on tractors and quad bikes and being dropped off by speedboat at the mouth of a brown, silty river churning through an impassable canyon. They told the Inuit kayakers about the arduous trek up around the canyon into a tributary full of waterfalls, smooth slides and beautiful, blue snowmelt water. After showing the local paddlers footage of running a long, steep slide, milton told them that all the pain and struggle to get there was worth it for that moment of ecstasy he felt in the pool looking back at that monster.

The locals’ reaction? “I think part of our descriptions were lost in translation,” says Milton.

This article first appeared in the Early Summer 2009 issue of Rapid Magazine.

Open Canoe Technique: Trouble Brewing

Skills

Photo: Rick Matthews — Open Canoe Technique: Trouble Brewing

Imagine you’re accepting accolades for a perfect run of Coliseum on the Ottawa River when a boil in the outwash flips you and all your credibility. if you’ve spent most of your paddling days on smaller rivers, the seemingly random power of big-water boils and their seam lines are likely to catch you off guard. Whether you’re in a solo playboat or paddling a loaded tandem on a northern river trip, these features demand your attention. With the right strategies, even the strongest boils can be made a fun part of whitewater paddling.

Named for the appearance of the water, like a lobster pot on the stove, boils are most common where there are powerful flows and water depths of at least three metres. A boil on large volume rivers like the Ottawa or Nahanni might be the shape and size of a pitcher’s mound. To understand boils and seam lines we need to first consider the movement of water in the vertical dimension.

Boils are caused by a current that flows upward, erupting on the surface. It could be a current that was deflected by an obstruction on the riverbed, in which case a boil will be pretty consistent and stationary. Or it might be a fast-moving current that collides with a slower one and is forced upward, creating an inconsistent boil that surges and dissipates, or reappears up- or downstream.

Seam lines form at the edge of a boil’s mound. Where there is water coming up, there’s water moving down to fill the void. seam lines are like vertical eddylines formed where diverging vertical currents meet.

Boils can be distinguished from whirlpools—another big water feature—by how and where they form. Whirlpools typically appear near the top of deep, strong eddylines and move downstream where they dissipate.

Boils and seam lines usually form further downstream where the eddyline is less distinct

Knowing where and how these features form helps you to avoid them. Avoidance is your first and best strategy. Plan your moves ahead so you don’t have to turn too aggressively and kill your speed in an unstable situation. If you are going to hit a boil, you’ll have to paddle uphill to get over the mound. Approaching with speed and continuing to paddle maintains your momentum across the boil and makes it easier to steer when you reach the seam line.

Cross seam lines at 90 degrees whenever possible and move away from them quickly. These are often the trickiest part of the boil since the water is pulling down on one side of your boat and pushing up on the other. The same loose hips you use to stay balanced atop the surging mound will allow you to make the quick adjustments needed to counteract the seam line’s opposing forces.

In the event of a capsize, boils, seam lines and whirlpools can make it difficult to roll. If you do swim, hang onto your boat—the downward currents in strong features can outweigh the buoyancy of your PFD, taking you momentarily below before firing you back up to the surface.

This article on boils was published in the Early Summer 2009 issue of Rapid magazine.

This article first appeared in the Early Summer 2009 issue of Rapid Magazine.

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