Open Canoe Technique: Power Steering

Skills

Photo: Carole Westwood — Open Canoe Technique: Power Steering

Forward Stroke Rebirth

The forward stroke is enjoying a renaissance as more open canoeists use it as not just a method of propulsion, but as a means to steer their canoes. A proven skill that harkens back to the earliest C1ers, power steering is the ability to control your solo boat while using nothing more than basic forward strokes. The key is understanding that the stroke can be broken down into distinct variables that allow you to easily guide the canoe in whichever direction you wish to go. All this without having to draw from the traditional set of rudder strokes, which slow your canoe and waste valuable energy.

Power steering with the 2×4 technique uses the four main variables which define the relationship between any stroke and your boat. These are: stroke cadence or timing; stroke position; paddle angle; and boat tilt.

Individually or together, these stroke elements are used to change the direction of your canoe while paddling with forward strokes. Add the cross-forward stroke playing with these same elements on your offside, and you achieve total boat control using only forward strokes. It’s also easy to remember. Think of the two forward strokes and the four variables, and voila, you have the 2×4 technique.

2×4 Forward Stroke Technique

Power steering builds on the concept of carving, or paddling your canoe on an arcing path. To understand this, picture the canoe in motion and how the bow is cradled by bow waves. By using the 2×4 technique you can control how these bow waves direct the canoe’s path, much like the reins on a horse. By simply allowing a wave on one side of the canoe to be bigger than the wave on the opposite side, the larger wave will push the canoe into an arcing path. Canoeists “steer” by controlling the wave effect by paddling on the inside of this arcing path in such a way as to resist, or enhance, the circular route of the canoe.

The easiest way to get the sensation of paddling a controlled arc is to experiment with stroke timing. Get your canoe moving by alternating three to four forward and cross-forward strokes. Finish with a cross-forward stroke, pause and wait for the canoe to arc toward your onside.

Now continue paddling an arcing path with just forward strokes.

If the canoe begins to straighten out, slow or pause the timing of your strokes and allow the canoe to regain its arcing path. If the arc is sharper than you desire, simply increase your stroke rate to straighten your path. The timing of when you apply power to your stroke has the effect of tightening or widening your arc.

Stroke position has the same effect on the diameter of your arc. By positioning your stroke ahead of your knee you will experience a tightening arc. Pulling past your knee toward your hip causes the canoe to straighten its path.

Similarly, stroking with a nearly vertical paddle shaft keeps the canoe travelling in an arcing path, while an angled shaft can dramatically straighten your path.

Finally, paddling the canoe with more tilt to the hull uses the chine to carve a tight arc, while paddling with a flatter hull favours a straighter course.

All these elements apply equally to the offside with the cross-forward stroke. As a result, solo paddlers have complete control for turning left or right while the boat is under power. One important rule applies for power steering: always place your strokes on the inside of the arcing canoe– never paddle on the outside.

Implications on Instruction

Often, beginners learn the 2×4 technique after their first lesson and show effective boat control for entering and exiting eddies. The implications on instruction are groundbreaking as teaching more advanced stern strokes can be delayed until paddlers reach higher novice to intermediate levels.

The bane of many solo canoeists—and their instructors—is the difficulty in getting the canoe going in a straight line from a stand still. By teaching forward and cross-forward strokes to beginners, along with a method of boat control, new paddlers quickly overcome the number-one obstacle to success in solo canoeing. Greater success surely means more new paddlers sticking with open canoeing.

The rebirth of the forward stroke as a control stroke maximizes forward speed and provides directional control. Use of various stroke elements to tighten or lessen your arc means you can carve the canoe with complete control. Power steering with the 2×4 technique makes paddling a solo canoe easy!

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

This article on the forward stroke was published in the Early Summer 2008 issue of Rapid magazine.

This article first appeared in the Early Summer 2008 issue of Rapid Magazine.

Skills: Islands in the Stream

Skills

Photo: Bryan Kirk — Skills: Islands in the Stream

Rocks are often viewed as a river hazard, creating undercuts and sieves. What many paddlers don’t realize is that rocks can be very useful features on the river. Exposed rocks beside a drop can make the ideal launch ramp. Sliding across them may be the only way to avoid a nasty pin. Once you figure out how to make the most out of the river’s natural rock garden your river running and creeking will groove to new heights.

Use ‘em and Abuse ‘em

Using rocks to your advantage basically means getting away from the main flow and plowing up onto the edge of a rock that sits at water level, close to a drop. By getting your boat out of the water and up onto a nearby rock you can slide past a potential pin spot or undercut ledge that the main flow would otherwise push you into. The best rocks are smooth, around water level, and relatively close to the drop. Plowing up onto a sticky or jagged rock will kill your speed (if not stop you completely) and throw you off line. Smooth rocks at the lip of a drop will often auto-boof you to safety, allowing you to land away from the meatiest part of the hole at the bottom.

Body Positioning

As with any river-running skill you’ll want to maintain a forward paddling position. The trouble with leaning back is that you’ll be less balanced with excess weight on your stern. This increases the likelihood of your stern edges catching and is a more dangerous position if you happen to flip. To get yourself further up on a rock you can move your body weight to a less aggressive neutral position as long as you get your weight forward again before you land.

The Approach

If you plan to boof straight out from the drop, aim to make contact with the rock at about a 20- to 30-degree angle, with speed. Before your bow makes contact with the rock make sure your weight is forward and you’re ready with a stroke on the side away from the rock. If you plan to land at the bottom of the drop pointing to the left or right you’ll need to adjust the angle at which you approach the rock. As a general rule, making contact with any rock will straighten your boat’s angle and it will be difficult to angle away from the rock. This means that if you make contact with a rock on the left it won’t be easy to land pointing hard right.

Drying Out

Catch too much rock and you’ll lose all of your momentum, which often results in teeter-tottering over the lip of the drop. There are times when you’ll want to purposefully dry out, but for the most part drying out at the wrong time will blow your line. It’s important to understand the more rock you catch, the further you’ll slide back down into the main flow. When scouting a drop, look at where you plan on landing and consider the angle that you’ll slide off the rock. This angle will dictate how far you slide back into the main current.

Sound Check

Pick a safe drop and spend some time figuring out how your boat reacts to slid- ing on rock. Try taking different approaches to the rock, using lots of speed or no speed, lots of angle, straight on, taking a fast stroke, slow stroke, et cetera. With a little bit of practice you’ll be rocking out in no time!

Kelsey Thompson is a multi-time Canadian national freestyle medalist and Wave Sport team paddler, not to mention a music video producer.

This article on river-running was published in the Early Summer 2008 issue of Rapid magazine.

This article first appeared in the Early Summer 2008 issue of Rapid Magazine.

The Ghost Coast: Newfoundland’s Wild Southwest

Stories

All photos this page: Ryan Creary — The Ghost Coast: Newfoundland's Wild Southwest

Amid the bouts of seasickness that overcome my gut like the swells that pitch and roll this rattle- trap ferry, I feel a kinship with Joey Smallwood. The man responsible for bringing Newfoundland into Confederation in 1949 wasn’t much of a seafarer. He once spent days seasick in the hold of a hired schooner as part of a hare-brained plan to unionize remote coastal fishers and preach his political ideals. Since fishing season lasted from break-up to freeze-up, Smallwood decided that a wintertime voyage was best. When the captain dismissed him for a lunatic, the soon- to-be leader of the province disembarked and continued on his own, walking the ice of the island’s bottom half—locally known as the Southwest Coast.

Adventure Kayak editor Tim Shuff, photographer Ryan Creary and I came to Newfoundland with more rational plans. We sea kayaked 200 kilometres of the Southwest Coast, visiting many of the long-lost com- munities Smallwood attempted to unite. For 11 mostly glorious days in September our trip was nothing like Smallwood’s, with no high seas adventure, pack ice or blinding blizzards. But now, hanging over the stern of the coastal ferry as it retraces our route from Francois to Rose Blanche, I can’t help but feel fellow to a man who got to know the people of the Southwest Coast in its heyday, even if it was in the most manipulative way.

It’s fitting after a whirlwind journey by air and road to get here that Tim, Ryan and I find ourselves hunkered down with too much time on our hands scant kilo- metres from our launching point. We hummed and hawed in the fog at a wharf in Rose Blanche, New- foundland, while the local fishermen looked on with incredulity. Our general plan to spend the better part of two weeks paddling to the isolated outport of Fran- cois was as crazy to them as our immediate intention of launching into the three-metre seas punishing the breakwater. But we set off anyway.

An hour later we washed ashore on a decomposing boat slip in the old village of Petites, population two, where gale force westerlies held us captive for two nights. Petites was once one of the hundreds of “out- port” communities spread out along Newfoundland’s 10,000 kilometres of rocky perimetre. Few faces peer from the windows of the 20-odd houses remaining

atop rickety two-by-four stilts at the water’s edge or clinging to the treeless, granite barrens of uptown. Despite its mid-latitude location, the landscape in this corner of Newfoundland is an arctic-like, windswept and glacier-carved expanse of bogs, domes and fiords.

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At Petites we befriend one-half of the community’s resident pair who tells Tim and I how he returned to his birthplace in 2002 and bought a modest two-storey clapboard house for $2,700. A year later, the province sent in its last supply tanker to feed Petites’ diesel generators and most of the citizens collected $80,000 resettlement payouts. In choosing to stay, the man says the government paid him $12,000 for the house it now leases to him for one dollar a year. Petites’ last holdouts cook with propane and go to bed early. They let their subscription to satellite television expire and watch the caribou in- stead. The next morning, we’re paddling before the first curls of woodsmoke rise from their chimney.

There are about 90 kilometres of coastline to paddle between Rose Blanche and Burgeo, made up of rocky jetties, serpentine inlets, bedrock headlands, steep islands and, in the last half, sweeping sand beaches. Leaving Petites, we surf a residual swell and building wind waves past the ghost towns of Westport, French Cove and Cinq Cerf – outports that Smallwood once tried to unionize. The coastline is pleasantly diverse yet somewhat unremarkable, except for the portion between the active outports of La Poile and Grand Bruit where 300-metre-tall granite cliffs stretch far inland.

Wind holds us up for another day-and-a-half and we make tracks as soon as the swell is half-manageable, skirting the leeward side of a labyrinth of reefs with ominous names like The Smoker, The Jumper and The Galloping Moll. We pull into Burgeo after 35 kilometres and a long morning in the saddle.

Burgeo is the hub of the Southwest Coast with a highway to the outside world and an increasingly transient population of 1,700. The fish processing plant collapsed with the cod fishery and the town is now more of a bedroom community for Nova Scotia apple pickers and Alberta roughnecks. Streets of quaint saltbox houses radiate haphazardly from the probing fingers of the sea: Short Reach, Long Reach, Mercer Cove and Aaron Arm. The off-lying islands feel removed from the open ocean and make for great sea kayaking for the same reason that Rencontre—the largest of the lot—was chosen as rendezvous site for 17th century French sailors.

Everywhere we spend a night, entire lives have been lived before us. Smallwood for one was a benefactor of the clichéd Newfoundland hospitality—he need not have carried camping gear on his ice walk. Before the advent of deep-sea trawlers and on-board refrigeration, hardscrabble hamlets sprung up as close as possible to the best fishing grounds—sometimes within shouting distance from each other. Some outports date back 500 years to the time of Basque and French fishers and whalers, ranking them among the oldest European settlements in North America.

Up until Newfoundland ceded from England to become a province of Canada in 1949 and Smallwood took reign, outport communities thrived in an isolated, unheralded kind of way. Smallwood began the process of centralization and the majority of outports—like the codfish—started to disappear. By 1975, more than 300 communities and over 28,000 people had been uprooted. Our Sailing Directions guidebook, published in 1995, describes dozens of communities like Petites that have since been “evacuated” due to fishing moratoriums and the lure of greener pastures—not to mention healthy government-issued lump-sum compensation.

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A day’s paddle east of Burgeo, we tuck into a sheltered harbour rimmed by 150-metre talus slopes and forested hillsides and find a spectacular campsite on a gravel spit on the north end of Fox Island. Only two houses remain but the rotting cribbing of old fishing stages and a grassy meadow suggest there were once many more. I follow a trickle of a stream up a bram- bly hillside and discover a shallow-dug well brimming with ice-cold, peaty brown, sugary sweet water. Ryan finds the old cemetery on a dome-shaped promontory, its weather-beaten tombstones overlooking the sea.

The weather settles into a stable trend and the next day we knock off the 18 kilometres of cliff-bound coast between Fox Island and Grey River by lunch. The community of Grey River occupies all of the marginally flat land in a triangle-shaped bight. Otherwise, the 20-ki- lometre-long granite fiord is inhospitable. After some lean years the outport now bustles, though there’s less activity at the wharf than there is at the helicopter landing pad. The fiord echoes with the whirring thump-thump-thump of rotors and reeks of aviation fuel—the sounds and smells of a prospecting boom.

Luckily, the crux of the trip comes on a magical day of lifting fog, skirting clouds and bright sun and we tackle the better part of the near-continuous 300-metre-high cliffs connecting Grey River to Francois in idyllic conditions. The landscape blows the mind—as much Newfoundland as it is a combination of Alaska, Hawaii and Thailand. A talus valley bound by soaring, glacier-worn buttes fans out to the sea at the tiny in- dentation of Seal’s Rest Cove. And at Cape La Hune, craggy, crumbling spires of volcanic rock contrast with neighbouring slabs of granite. We round the promon- tory rubbernecked and walleyed and set up camp at another abandoned outport.

Screen_Shot_2015-07-23_at_4.17.30_PM.png We spend two days at Cape La Hune not because of miserable weather—by now the Southwest Coast is fully enveloped in a 1,025-millibar high—but because it’s so hard to leave. Hiking up the breadbox-shaped peak behind the campsite oc- cupies an afternoon with scrambling up sloping rocks and crashing through tuckamore thickets of dwarf birch and fir trees. From the top, the Atlantic stretches uninterrupted to Antarctica, save for the inconspicuous dots of the French islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon to the south- east. Facing inland, La Hune Bay cuts a granite corridor through a sweeping expanse of tucka- more and barrens. On the treacherous descent I find an old threadbare rope—proof that the Cape La Hune outporters did more than just fish. Later on, I watch the moon rise over the rockbound coast from within the foundation of the old church, imagining the building itself departing on a barge bound for the horizon.

In some ways, there was method to Smallwood’s madness. Like a used car salesman pitching to the spouse who’s keener on colour than anything else, Smallwood appealed to the outports where, at the time, the provincial balance of power was held. As dubious as his reputation was in St. John’s, Smallwood became a backwoods legend for his Southwest Coast sea ice expedition and popular radio show. He solidified his cause by flying into these same remote communities that had never seen an automobile, let alone an airplane, with promises of money for all should Newfoundland vote to join Canada.

Walking the ice of the Southwest Coast, Smallwood found communities of people who knew nothing of the concept of unionized labour, much less government and current affairs—the same way he was ignorant of their arduous and simple lives by the sea. Maybe Smallwood’s resettlement plans and promises of centralized labour and its associated benefits were innocently skewed attempts at giving thanks for their hospitality. One way or another, when the people of Newfoundland chose to cut ties with Britain and join Canada largely on the strength of the rural vote, it marked a beginning of the end that continues today.

Upon ending our trip in Francois—with 175 residents, two stores and a high school, the most populous and well-endowed outport on the Southwest Coast—the weather takes a turn for the worse. We board the coastal ferry in foggy drizzle and southerly winds, with the wavelets in the bay a gut-churning harbinger of what’s to come on the open coast. The last thing I remember before falling into the throes of nausea is spotting a pink, white and green Republic of Newfoundland flag flying taut alongside a line of sopping wet clothes, less an affront against Smallwood than a fading grasp on a way of life.

Conor Mihell is a freelance writer and kayak guide based in Wawa, Ontario.

This article first appeared in the Summer 2008 issue of Adventure Kayak Magazine. For more great content, subscribe to Adventure Kayak’s print and digital editions here.

Jon Bowermaster: The Ocean Ambassador

Stories

Photo: Fiona Stewart — Jon Bowermaster: The Ocean Ambassador

In January 2008, journalist Jon Bowermaster travelled to the Antarctica Peninsula to complete the final leg of his Oceans 8 expedition, a quest to explore all of the world’s continents by sea kayak. The Oceans 8 trips included Alaska’s Aleutian Islands (1999), Vietnam (2001), French Polynesia’s Tuamotu Atolls (2002), South America’s Altiplano (2003), Gabon (2004), Croatia (2005), Tasmania (2006) and Antarctica (2008).

Did you know that Oceans 8 was going to take 10 years when you started?
No I had no idea. When we went to the Aleutians it was just a pure, one-off adventure. It wasn’t until we’d done the second one, Viet- nam, that I thought that we should make this a long-term thing.

So how did you come up with the idea?
I was inspired by my climbing friends who had such simple and easily defined goals. I wanted some long-term project. Visiting each continent by sea kayak seemed pretty easy to me. At a sea- level way it’s our own kind of Seven Summits.

Why kayaking?
I’ve always regarded kayaks as our ambassadors. They open doors that wouldn’t open if we arrived by land. Along the coastlines virtually everyone we meet lives and depends on the sea. Everyone has a boat. Most of them are fishermen. So they don’t look at us like freaks, they look at us like brethren. Other than the Altiplano, no one ever said, “What are you doing here?”

So in South America you were just freaks?
We were dragging kayaks through the driest place on earth. The few people we did meet had never seen a kayak before. We’d rigged them on these little pull carts and harnesses. This is a place where people still believe in UFOs and extraterrestrials, so they’d see us come trundling across the desert and literally in some instances ran and hid.

In Antarctica you came across a sinking ship?
By pure coincidence when we had to drop the kayaks off in advance and I was riding on the National Geographic Endeavor, a big tourist ship, we were first on the scene of that sinking ship, the Explorer. We picked up the captain and the staff and all the Zodiacs. The captain had a guy with him who was carrying three bags—one was filled with all the passports, one was filled with the ship’s papers and one was filled with cash.

What’s next?
We’re going to South America and then Af- rica next month and the Galapagos and back to French Polynesia for other assignments.

Who’s “we”?
Fiona Stewart, my partner, travels with me, takes a lot of the pictures. She did all of the communication management from Antarctica. That’s the other part of this modern day adventuring is that it’s a lot of work. Every day you’ve got to download the images, edit the images, write the text, edit little videos.

Do you have a favourite place?
I’ve been back to French Polynesia and the Tuamotus many, many times. That might be my favourite. In a sense it’s more raw than some of the other places in that you can find people living very simply and not so removed from how their predecessors did, and it’s just incredibly beautiful.

What’s keeping you going?
Now that we’ve figured this website out and have gotten an audience that keeps checking in you really just want to keep sharing these kinds of stories—water-related and environmental-related.

This article first appeared in the Summer 2008 issue of Adventure Kayak Magazine. For more great content, subscribe to Adventure Kayak’s print and digital editions here.

Editorial: Apologies to Everyone I’ve Left in my Wake

Stories

Photo: Ryan Creary — Editorial: Apologies to Everyone I've Left in my Wake

“That looks like a good place to rest,” said Jacques Cousteau, while Mario Andretti and I pretended not to listen and continued our race to the campsite.

“Must keep going,” we grunted time and again. “No time to stop. Rest later.”

I am an inveterate impatient traveller. On my most recent kayaking trip I justified my abysmal behaviour by telling myself that Cousteau just preferred to paddle slowly and check out the sights while the rest of us charged forward. Surely he enjoyed shortcutting a kilometre offshore (which is why we secretly nicknamed him “Jacques Cousteau”) while we explored along the shore and waited for him at every headland. Of course, I never bothered to ask “Cousteau” how he felt.

It didn’t sink in how terribly I’d behaved until I was reading a blog, weeks later. Wendy Killoran and Rene Seindal are kayakers from different countries who tried, and bitterly failed, to paddle together around Sardinia last fall. Rene’s blog entry about what went wrong contemplates the importance of information sharing, mutual respect and patience that are integral to any expedition partnership.

Rene also slams the ultimate in disrespectful behaviour, “mock waiting.” Mock waiting means waiting just long enough for a slower paddler to get within a comfortable distance, then taking off before he has a chance to fully catch up and rest. I guiltily realized I knew exactly what Rene was talking about.

“Mock waiting is very destructive behaviour in a team,” Rene writes. It constantly underlines that ‘I’m faster and you’re slower,’ while it wears the slower paddler down physically too. It can drive the slower paddler into the ground, physically and psychologically.”

It further occurred to me that leaving someone in your wake highlights and abuses a power imbalance. Once you get far ahead of someone, it can be almost impossible for them to catch up unless you let them. Slowness gets compounded by wind and cur- rent, so a slower paddler will fall increasingly far behind and effectively be paddling farther through the water to get to the same destination. In other words, just as the rich get richer, the slow get slower.

I decided I don’t ever want to cause a Jacques Cousteau dynamic again. So I phoned for some expert advice from SKILS guiding school in Ucluelet, B.C. Instructor J.F. Marleau told me what should have been obvious. He said that when paddling with peers, you should first carefully choose partners with matching abilities, then make sure everybody has the same expectations for the trip, and communicate about any issues that arise.

A good way to do this is to start with a trip contract, which means sitting down with everyone before you leave to reach consensus on issues like how fast to travel, when and where to take rest breaks, what paddling conditions are unsafe, what to do if the group gets separated, how to communicate and resolve problems, and anything else that anyone in the group wants to lay down as a ground rule.

On my next trip I’m going to make a contract, and clause number one will be about paddling speed. I can already look back and remember all sorts of problems that this would have avoided. Like the first long paddling trip with my wife when we realized halfway through that only one of us cared at all about how far we paddled each day (hint: she wasn’t the one measuring the map distances with dental floss in the tent each night).

And while I’m at it maybe I’ll work on being a better communicator at home and at work. Because good expedition behaviour is really no different from good behaviour in everyday life. Nobody can be perfect, but a kayaking trip has a powerful way of showing you where to improve.

This article first appeared in the Summer 2008 issue of Adventure Kayak Magazine. For more great content, subscribe to Adventure Kayak’s print and digital editions here.

Boat Review: The Eighteen5 Sport by Delta Kayaks

Photo: Dave Aharonian — Boat Review: The Eighteen5 Spot by Delta Kayaks

Challenging the stereotype of what kind of kayaks you can make out of heat-moulded plastic, Delta Kayaks embodies all the ambition of a rock star stretching to compose a symphony. This company’s not stopping at the usual plastic rec and light-touring kayaks, no way. Its fleet includes a greenland-style performer, a 20-foot tandem, and even this—a true expedition-worthy long boat.

SPECS

length: 18 ft 6 in (5.6 m)

width: 23.5 in (59 cm)

depth: 12.25 in (31 cm)

cockpit: 18 x 32.5 in (46 x 83 cm)

weight: 57 lbs (25.9 kg)

volume: 121.9 gal (461.4 l)

dry storage: 67.6 gal (256.2 l)

MSRP: $2,750 Cdn

Reminiscent of fibreglass stalwarts like the Current Designs expedition and Seaward Quest, only wider, the eighteen5 Sport is the station wagon of the Delta fleet, a true cargo hauler with a stratospheric 256 litres of dry storage—the deeper eighteen5 Expedition has 24 litres more and fits larger paddlers. either boat will carry enough to paddle for a whole season without resupply.

There are at least two reasons why nobody has built such a long single kayak out of thermoformed plastic until now. The first we’ll get into later. The second is that thermoform is more flexible than other materials, so it’s harder to mould longer designs.

To overcome this, Delta has added a stiffener to the inner hull, an arched piece of plastic that extends along the keel from the bow hatch to the stern hatch. When we slammed the eighteen5 into large, steep wind waves, slight vibrations ran from our bums through to our neoprene-clad toes, but the stiffener kept the boat intact.

The convenient, oversized hatches were perfectly dry. We did notice some leakage around the seam of the rear bulkhead, allowing water to enter from the cockpit. however, Delta Kayaks says this leak has been eliminated in newer versions by adding a tighter-fitting bulkhead and modifications to the gluing.

The eighteen5 has a very comfortable cockpit with a sliding, fore-aft adjustable seat. The cruising speed is decent for a boat of its length. Performance is nonetheless nimble; it’s got quite a bit of rocker and it’ll about-face on an aggressive tilt much faster than you can say “Delta has tested its plastic to withstand re- peated hammer blows.”

all this capacity and performance comes in a beautifully finished package with the high- gloss appearance of gel coat and standard features you won’t find on boats from other companies—recessed foam grab handles, divots in the deck to make it easy to grab the bungies, paddle float straps, and more.

Which brings us to the second reason that nobody has built boats like this before: because it’s unknown if anybody will buy them. The mass market wants plastic rec boats while expedition paddlers—relatively few in number from the start—have always gravitated to pricey composites like bikers to leather. however, with expedition capacity, great touring performance and good looks at an attractive price, the eighteen5 may be one to break the mould.

Boat Review: Pyranha’s Rev

Photo: Jensen Klatt — Boat Review: Pyranha's Rev

There’s been a revolution in playboat design the last couple of years. Designers have ever-increasing demands to create boats that are easy for the novice market to make bounce, roll and spin and for the pros to get huge air. And you can’t just let them eat cake when the proletariat cries for an affordable and single kayak that does it all. So even as a freestyler, river running must be saved from the guillotine in design.

Pyranha’s new Rev takes it full circle, offering a small, medium and medium-long version, each with a Bastille-sized list of alterations to their 4-20 design to create a kayak that could make heads roll at the World Freestyle Championships in 2009. Although as purebred as freestyle kayaks come these days, Pyranha designer Graham Mackereth knew his boat had to appeal to both the expert and beginner paddler and he wanted a kayak that transitioned seamlessly from the biggest features to smallest rivers.

The wheels started turning on the Rev with some more obvious hull tweaks. Mackereth started with a far more symmetrical shape than Pyranha paddlers will be used to and moved the cockpit forward, giving the Rev a high-volume centre for lots of pop.

According to Mackereth, it is the full-length, releasing Vortex rails that allow great flat spinning. He says with a flat aft hull section and softer radius in the centre and front sections, you should find edge-to-edge transitions quick and require little effort. It feels snappier to carve but edgier for sitting and spinning, sort of like the Crazy 88, but not that edgy. The chined stern helps cut drag, adding to the Rev’s speed on a wave, which Pyranha has always been known for.

If you look closely you’ll also see Mackereth kept rolling by giving the Rev what he says are slicier ends than his previous models—oh, the forgotten joy of endless cartwheels—and finer edges will give better initiation for your other arsenal of tricks.

In late fall of ’07 the Rev made its first rounds out of the factory and around the world of official test rivers. In the hands of instructors at North Carolina’s Nantahala Outdoor Center, it impressed so much that they placed an order.

“It’s a boat that should make people look and feel better than they really are,” says NOC paddling school Director Wayne Dickert, so of course the Rev is being added to the school’s instructional fleet.

“The Rev proved to release faster, pop bigger and carve easier than any boat Pyranha has designed thus far,” says NOC store manager and boat buyer Daniel Dutton. “I especially loved initiating this boat in a hole or wave to go airborne and connected multiple tricks with control and ease.”

Keep in mind these fellows are pros, for the rest of us who take a little more time to get comfortable in a new boat, the finer points of the design may not be as obvious right away.

“It’s easy to roll, loop and flat spin if paddled aggressively; a good paddler should really be able to get the best from Rev,” Mackereth says. “But like any top-end boat, it does take a few paddles to get really dialed in. A quick test might not reflect its ultimate potential.”

One thing pros and recreational paddlers agreed upon was the Pyranha Connect 30 outfitting. The system is comfortable and easy enough to adjust, however some testers found themselves continually re-adjusting loose fittings. This does not outweigh just how responsive and forgiving the Rev truly is—two traits that have served monarchs and one English boat designer very well in the past.

SPECS

LENGTH: 6’ 1”/6’ 2”/6’ 3.5”
WIDTH: 23.5”/24”/24.4”
VOLUME: 46.2/53.1/56.8 US Gal
WEIGHT: N/A/31.4/N/A lbs
MRSP: $1,159 US
pyranha.com

This article first appeared in the Spring 2008 issue of Rapid Magazine. For more great boat reviews, subscribe to Rapid’s print and digital editions here.

Primal Instinct

Trips

From where I rested in a cliffside coyote den, my shotgun across my knees, I could see out across a yawning Owyhee Canyon. At the bottom, running thin and ragged, was the river itself. A guy could read the river like a book from high up on the canyon wall, but it was just jagged Braille down at water level. We’d spent six autumn days in this canyon in southeastern Oregon, canoeing nearly 100 kilometres of rocky riverbed from Rome to Birch Creek and, frankly, were having a hard time of it.

Running low in its boney bed, the high desert stream rattled through narrow clefts and boulder-studded channels. Each rapid we came across—and there were many—commanded us to pull ashore and scout. We ran a few and played safe with the rest, lining anything that looked dicey or gathering all six of us to hump our bloated hulls over spots where the boulders were just too close together.

Canoes had turned out to be the right choice of boat—rafts would be difficult to work through the boulder fields and inflatable kayaks don’t slip over rocks as well as hard Royalex—but our two 16-footers were nearly too big for the Owyhee this late in the season. We paid the price in busted thwarts, deep gouges and more grooves than a vinyl 45. Though still stable, the nearly lame Duck Hunter had to have its gunwales lashed together to make the distance.

After days of paddling, carrying, hiking, hunting and fishing we would huddle in the sand around a crackling fire, turning like flapjacks every few minutes to warm our backs or bellies. Solace seeped from a bottle of Bushmills we passed around while the water in our canteens froze up tight.

Though the river here runs through one of the least-populated regions in the lower 48, we were far from alone. Chukar partridge were thick as fleas on a cat and hanging low to the water. They live in the scree and rimrock on the canyon walls. We would routinely round a corner and find a covey of birds staring us down from the bank. It was an incongruous sight to see our hunters slip onto the earth-tone shore and give chase in their neon dry suits and PFDs.

Not having packed any dinners, we ate what we could shoot. Abandoned mines upstream had left a leeching legacy of mercury in the fish, so I knew what I wanted on my plate. Hiking out of camp with my shotgun on my back, I was looking for dinner no less earnestly than the eagle hunting his mouse. The alignment of function with purpose, of hunting to eat, was a powerful motivator. Granted, we hadn’t the predatorial focus of true canyon denizens like the coyote and the osprey; ours was a mere patch on the fabric of the primal imperative of hunting to survive. The satisfaction of feeding myself directly from the river canyon I was travelling through, without a thousand middlemen and miles between nature and my plate, brought me closer to a leaner style of life.

The den I was resting in was littered with small bones, fur and coyote scat. I fingered through the sand thinking I might turn up an arrowhead or chippings. I could imagine a hunter of long ago ducking in to escape the weather.

To the north I could see a thin plume of smoke rising from camp, which meant Cookie (he’s better at cooking than we are at giving nicknames) was firing up coals for the Dutch oven. Last I had counted we were a few birds short of a meal; it was time to get the two partridge tucked in my game pouch back to camp. I got up stiffly, shut the breech of my gun and looked for the best route to scramble down the ridge.

I could feel dinner pressing against my lower back as I hiked. In the distance, downriver, an old jeep trail scratched down from the rim, one of only two tracks leading into the canyon sanctum on this stretch. On a flat along the river two trucks were parked at a camp.

I’ve camped on rivers that way many times, driving in without worrying about tying gear to thwarts, pinning canoes against rocks and sustaining lower back pain. But we were on the Owyhee to feed ourselves from the land, not from a drive-through lane. Better to do that from a canoe than a truck. Headed toward the half-broken canoe on the bank I had a feeling the birds in my pouch would taste better than the ones the guys in the trucks had taken, even if they had bagged a few extra birds while we had our guns tucked away and our paddles out.

Rob Lyon is the author of ‘Water Marked: Journal of a Naked Fly Fisherman’ and lives on a small island off the Washington coast.

This article first appeared in the Spring 2008 issue of Canoeroots Magazine.

Finding Farley

Stories

Karsten Heuer and Leanne Allison are no strangers to long expeditions. But their last undertaking to cross the country by paddle, sail and train to meet an iconic writer quickly took the form not of an expedition but a pilgrimage.

For writer Heuer and filmmaker Allison, the story began in 2005 when Heuer sent an unsolicited draft of his book Being Caribou to Farley Mowat. As childhood devotees of the 86-year-old writer the couple was amazed a few weeks later when Mowat called and invited them to visit his Cape Breton farm. Living in Canmore, Alberta, Heuer and Allison weighed the options for getting there. Then they realized that Mowat had already written a multi-volume guidebook for them: Why not plot a route over land and water, criss-crossing the settings of Mowat’s books?

And so the Finding Farley project was born. Last May, Allison, Heuer and their two-year-old toddler Zev loaded up their Prospector and dropped it into the Bow River near their home.

The early stretch of their journey had the family paddling through the setting of Owls in the Family and The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be, two of Mowat’s novels about growing up in the Saskatchewan prairies.

By summer, they were deep into the northern wilds, battling long portages, a thick haze of bugs and a near-miss with a sleeping polar bear.

They followed the Cochrane and Thlewiaza Rivers through Manitoba into Nunavut, passing the barren settings of several of Mowat’s books, including No Man’s River and Lost in the Barrens.

“Farley remembers being terrified running these rivers with his life in the trapper’s hands,” says Allison. “He knows how unforgiving the landscape can be.”

From Churchill, Manitoba, they caught a train to Quebec and then sailed across the Gulf of St. Lawrence to Newfoundland. After three days on the choppy seas they pulled into Burgeo, the setting for Mowat’s 1972 novel A Whale for the Killing.

In early fall, the family sailed to Nova Scotia and anchored in the bay at St. Peters, where Mowat stood waiting on the shore.

Despite having never met, the group soon fell into easy rapport. “There was already such a shared history,” says Allison. “It felt more like a reunion than an introduction.”

The family spent three days exchanging tales from the Barren Lands with the Mowats. Mowat admitted being worried throughout the family’s pilgrimage, despite—or perhaps because of—his own extensive travels across the same land.

“He had tried a few times along the way to dissuade us,” says Allison. “So he was very happy to finally have us safely ashore.”—Amy Flynn Stuart

This article first appeared in the Spring 2008 issue of Canoeroots Magazine.

Family Pictures

Photo: Scott MacGregor — Family Pictures

I think I was seven when all my parents, uncles, aunts, siblings, cousins and I shuffled into a small main street studio. It was a stuffy low-ceilinged room lined with benches, strobes and an autumn-scene canvas backdrop.

The family portrait, commissioned by my grandparents, still hangs in their hallway, a reminder to me to never dress up a skinny seven-year-old boy and his extended family and stand them in front of a two-dimensional, neutral-grey-toned wilderness and expect them to look natural.

Portraiture, in the art world, happens when a painter depicts the visual appearance of his subjects. Just about any photograph does this, but a true portrait is more than that. A true portrait captures the essence or personality of the subject, not just a physical likeness. Think of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, perhaps the most famous painting of all time. Without that smile she’d just be another Wal-Mart portrait.

For this issue’s feature I asked our regular Family Camping photographers for tips on taking pictures for family albums. There were a few technical camera tips for making better photographs but most of the suggestions had nothing to do with buttons on the camera. Great outdoor portraits are more about natural environments, props, and simply standing back, and letting inner essences bubble to the surface.

Some of my favourite family portraits simply capture a moment in time. Like our first cross-country ski trip; skinny dipping in the river; or the smile on my daughter’s face with her first mouthful of roasted marshmallow. Time stops for no man. But I can hang a fraction of a second of it on my wall.

Other pictures I’m excited to show my kids in 10 or 20 years. I want to show them what they were too young or too busy to remember. I want to show them who they were. It’s one thing to tell them they loved jumping in puddles, it is another to show them mid-air and screaming.

And, there’s legacy. My legacy. My vain and backslapping ego wants my kids to know just how cool their good ol’ dad really is (or at least was). I actually grew my hair and beard, so they’d have photos of us together like this. I hope by digging through old shoeboxes of pictures (or scanning through DVDs) they’ll see just how much their parents love them. Never before have parents had the luxury of spending as much time with our kids as this generation. I want them to see the adventures we had while raising them.

When I was growing up my parents, like most of their generation, were busy. Cameras and film were expensive, and not very handy to use—flash used to come in disposal cubes. Consequently, there are only a few cherished pictures of me, and even fewer of my younger brother.

After three years of parenthood I have more than 2,400 family photos on my laptop. Only a couple are as good as those taken by our pros. A few more are special enough to hang in our hallway. But I guarantee you this, not a single one has an unnatural smile in front of a fake forest background.

This article first appeared in the Spring 2008 issue of Canoeroots Magazine.