“Jim was always forward thinking,” said John Gereau, director of the Adirondack Canoe Co. in Mineville, New York. “What he did in the ‘70s with composites was incredibly cutting edge.”
Legendary canoe designer Jim Henry and his son Dana recently teamed up with ACC to release the Trapper, the first model in a new line of canoes labeled Henry Designed.
Legendary canoe designer Jim Henry and son team up with Adirondack Canoe Co.
Made with cutting-edge composite technology, this 14-foot tandem weighs just 38 pounds. Yet it’s designed as a rugged recreational canoe for everything from day trips to backcountry fishing to multiday adventures. The Trapper is based upon an unreleased design from Henry’s extensive archive of roughly 75 canoe schematics, the vast majority of which were never sold to the public.
“What’s particularly exciting is the opportunity to introduce these designs to today’s market,” Dana Henry told Paddling Magazine. “Jim’s unfulfilled innovations were ahead of their time but constrained by the market conditions in the past. We are all very excited to share [Jim’s designs] with a new generation of paddlers.”
Dead River to Mad River
In the early 1970s, Jim Henry checked out a library book about Native American bark-and-skin canoes. This inspired him to design a plaster mold for a fiberglass canoe that he named the Malecite.
In August 1971, Henry raced his new boat in the second annual National Whitewater Open Canoe Championships. Held on the Dead River in Maine, the 22-mile downriver course combined flatwater, a portage and 16 miles of class II and II rapids. Henry won the competitive C-1 division with a time of 3:35:21, eight seconds ahead of the runner up. Word quickly spread about the winning boat, and Henry was soon building custom-ordered Malecites in his garage.
This led Jim and his then-wife Kay to co-found Mad River Canoes in Waitsfield, Vermont. At its height, Mad River had over 80 employees building more than 20 canoe models sold by a network of 200 distributors. One of Jim Henry’s major innovations came in the mid-1970s when he introduced DuPont’s newly invented Kevlar into canoe construction. Mad River’s most popular model became the Explorer, and further Henry designs incorporated rotomolded construction, Royalex hulls, pre-preg and carbon fiber.
Henry continued working with Mad River after it was sold to Confluence Outdoors in the early 2000s. In 2019 Pelican International acquired Confluence, but the company hasn’t produced canoes under the Mad River brand since 2022. As a result, for the first time in more than four decades, paddlers couldn’t purchase new models created by one of canoeing’s most famous designers.
Enter Adirondack Canoe Co.
“There’s almost a cult following,” said Gereau. “People are begging for [Henry’s] designs.”
In recent years, the ACC director began to notice a revealing trend. Numerous paddlers were posting comments in online forums lamenting that they could not replace their aging Mad River canoes with new models designed by Jim Henry.
By now, Gereau believed that new canoes on the market mostly fell into two categories. He saw carbon-fiber racing canoes that were fast but unstable, sacrificing primary stability for secondary. Or he saw wide canoes made from plastic or aluminum that had plenty of primary stability but were slow and heavy. What Gereau wanted for the ACC lineup was what he calls “the best of both worlds.” A modern composite boat that bridged the gap between extremes: fast and light but stable and durable.
“There’s almost a cult following. People are begging for [Henry’s] designs.”
“I do an awful lot of backwoods fishing,” said Gereau. “When you’re fighting a brook trout, you certainly don’t want to take a dip in 30-degree water in May.”
Meanwhile, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Jim Henry moved to a retirement community in Pennsylvania. Before relocating, he passed down his collection of tools and canoe schematics to his son. The hope was Dana might find a way to release some of the prototype designs using modern manufacturing techniques. This led the Henrys to Adirondack Canoe Co.
Founded in 2013, ACC is a boutique boat manufacturer affiliated with the nonprofit Essex Industries, also located in Mineville, New York. For 50 years, the latter company has built canoe accessories, employing an integrated workforce of abled and developmentally disabled employees.
Gereau explained that ACC is committed to building cutting-edge boats through research and development of composite technologies. One of their primary manufacturing techniques is vacuum infusion, which Gereau describes as an environmentally friendly process that provides two key benefits.
First, the process allows greater control over resin saturation when laying up composite fibers. In the past, resin amounts were often estimated, and over-saturation led to excess weight while undersaturation could cause weak spots in the finished canoe. The second benefit of vacuum infusion is that the toxic resins are contained within a vacuum-sealed barrier. This reduces the hazards associated with composite manufacturing and allows the ACC to involve more of the Essex workforce in constructing canoes like the Trapper.
The Trapper by Henry Designed
Fourteen feet long and with a waterline width of 37 inches, the new Henry Designed Trapper is intended as a tandem canoe for a wide range of paddlers. Its symmetrical, shallow V-hull offers a relatively flat bottom that aims for the sweet spot between primary and secondary stability. This allows paddlers to enter and exit the boat more easily or stand up while fishing.
The standard layup for the Trapper is a carbon fiber exterior with a Kevlar interior. An underside gelcoat serves as a wear guard for withstanding rocky shorelines like those found in the Adirondacks. ACC is currently taking pre-orders for the Trapper, which retails for $2,500 USD.
Renowned canoe builder Jim Henry talks shop with his son, Dana. The Henrys are partnering with Adirondack Canoe Company to unveil never-before-seen designs under the brand Henry Designed. | Feature photo: Courtesy Adirondack Canoe Company
