Recent content by yknpdlr

For one canoe race training season, we had an exchange engineer from Germany join us. We quickly learned to definitely not want to put her in the bow of a 7 padder voyager canoe, once was enough. Whew..... complete with everything you have heard about European women including her obvious furry...

I spent three awful less than enjoyable outdoor recreation related years while stationed in the Air Force in Ohio, Columbus, to be exact. I bought my first canoe while there, a Grumman with the then available lightweight thin skin model aluminum for me and my wife to enjoy. The awful outline of...

Most racers prefer to have an adjustable foot bar, often with a loop of webbing just big enough to slip their toes under, firmly attached to the bar at their preferred foot location . As I am usually in the bow seat, I have to come up with some other methods in a canoe without a solid bulkhead...

I have known people who say they collect antique bottles and coins and other stuff of value from old abandoned home sites or long ago abandoned logging camps in the woods. The first place to go to find the best treasures is in the pit of old rotted outhouses.

"We're almost there... it's just around the next bend" when speaking of the marathon canoe race finish line. - anonymous

"A meander is the pleasantest distance between two points." -Paul Jamieson writing fondly about the Oswegatchie River in "Adirondack Canoe Waters, North Flow"

Native American Indians did not permanently live in the Adirondacks, but different tribes did travel through the area as hunting grounds. The word "Adirondack" is a mispronounced derivation of the Iroquois word for "bark-eater." The "Ha-De-Ron-Dah" Wilderness area in the western Adirondacks is...

Maybe so, and one might think so, but have you ever seen the physics of the surface of a golf ball?

I'm about to purchase a buffer and am looking for the best methods for cleaning up last season's water stains on my canoe hulls. Harbor Freight has one or two (Bauer and Hercules models) that I am considering getting one of this week.

I'm a fan of using a tool in the way it was designed to best operate. Even though I have several ultralight canoes, call me old school for sure in many of the things that I do. I'm with Al's thinking, I have never been of the mind to turn my canoe into something that it is not. I just became...

Just because many of us "east coasters" live south of the border, for the most part we (at least I) do not speak with anything like a NYC dialect. I have had linguists place my home town accent at more then 350 mile from that place. For over 30 years I have been an instructdor of a BSA high...

How about pronouncing the American Voy'-ager (emphasis on "Voy") vs the French Canadian Voya- geur' (emphasis on "geur"). Long boat canoes at one time were once designated in races as War Canoes, but that switched over to the supposed less offensive PC term of Voygeur canoes.

When I paddle long distances on rivers or lakes, most often some kinds of shore landmarks are all along my route, I pick an observable point (an odd tree, or a bend along my path) at some distance ahead, a few hundred yards, quarter mile, whatever is distinctive within easy sight. IN wide open...

Most paddlers may not actually get into the finer intricacies of Freestyle paddling, but it doesn't take learning or much doing of the strokes skills to realize that aspects of the techniques, once learned what they do for you, have a tremendous usefulness and easily carry over to everyday...

It is always fun to learn a new stroke that you have never known before, then to discover that you have been doing a version of a commonly well known stroke self-learned, but it only needs a little tweaking refinement to make it more efficient in the time and way you employ it. Especially as you...