adventures of a canoelover

Wow, what a wonderful day! Rather than complain about the fact that there’s no snow, some of us weird folks rebel. The annual Fog Bowl is an informal paddle, mostly made up of members of Mad City Paddlers, our local paddling club, plus a bunch of other folks who show up to spit in the face of Old Man Winter. We get some help from Wisconsin Power and Light, now called WE or something like that, who have a coal-fired power plant near Poynette, WI. Lake Columbia is the cooling pond for the plant, and the water was a balmy 70 degrees, warmer near the outlets where the water comes from the plant’s turbines. Since it was only 35 degrees (rather than the normal zero F or less), there was less fog. It was fun…

The picture is of my kids, Whitney in her own boat and Ian testing an Impex Force 4. Really nice, even in some significant chop…Ian gives it a thumbs way up.

…is a blog.

The hardest thing in the world to maintain is a blog.

Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. That’s right, I’m breaking out the self-flagellomatic and giving myself a few good blows.

Okay, moving on…I hereby resolve in public before both of you reading this that I will post more posts to my blog.

So back to business…since last March when I posted a picture of a knife blade that was sort of a mess, I finished the knife and gave it to a friend for a birthday present. He liked it and has so far killed no one with it. That is a good thing.

Since April I have been working a lot. Some staff turnover has kept us all a bit more busy than normal; that’s one excuse I can give. That, and with travel to trade shows, manufacturers, and other fun stuff I’ve been separated from technology a lot (good thing too). I’ll post more later…promise. No, really.

Been too busy to post anything. I did get in a glorious paddle yesterday morning…last day of winter, but the water was open on Lake Wingra much earlier than usual. More pictures are forthcoming…

I spent the day blacksmithing with my mentor and friend Larry Cooper. I spent a bunch of time working on filing a knife blank I had been working on for a while. It looks a lot different now (this was just after forging and doing some preliminary shaping). When I get the handle on I’ll add a picture.

So last Tuesday I got an Argosy demo from Wenonah Canoe, the Argosy being their new solo downriver canoe. Okay, so it’s not exactly new new, since it was made last year in composite construction, but this year it’s being produced in Royalex. So that part is new.

I have only had it out for about 20 minutes (it was very cold, under 20°F) but it was a really nice 20 minutes. It is lighter than I would have thought for the length (14’6″), is quick and has good secondary stability. The seat adjustment has been refined nicely and so far, it’s one of the nicest solo downrivers I’ve paddled in a long time. Frankly, it’s a pretty nice flatwater canoe for those wanting to do rivers with occasional rapids.

That said, I think the boat has a few aesthetic challenges. The stems are too straight and too pronounced, probably to make it easy to get out of the mold, but I have always felt that making aesthetic compromises for the sake of manufacturing ease is the kiss of death for a canoe. I know it’s a slippery slope, but it’s worth examining your footing once in a while.

I’ll post pictures when I get ’em.

It’s a wintery week and thoughts turn to warmer times. Our crappy winter has been a nasty excuse for winter…cold, rainy, no snow since before Christmas. All that good skiing is a distant memory. Now I’m thinking about paddling, and there’s no turning back. It’s Spring, I tell ya.

Anyway, this pic I took last July in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness just a short walk from Little Indian Sioux Falls on the Little Indian Sioux River. It was a maiden voyage for my Nova Craft Prospector 16. Lovely boat, perfect for rivers. Look carefully at the web page and you’ll see a red boat with two people in it by a beaver lodge. That’s me and my son, Ian.

My friend Jim is driving up this weekend for a little ice paddling. The Lower Wisconsin River is the perfect place, and given how bloody warm it has been there should be plenty of water.

Last summer I was paddling the Lower Wisconsin Riverway with a friend and woke early—it was bloody cold! Freezing in May! I looked upstream and saw this, ran and grabbed my digital and took this shot. It was literally the first picture I took with it (Nikon Coolpix 5900) and I sold it to the local independent newspaper (my friend is a newspaper reporter and wrote a story about it and they wanted proof).