A Tale of Two Trippers

I own a pair of Old Town Trippers. I purchased them two years apart from one another, from a gentlemen who inherited them from his father. His father had been a submarine engineer, working out of the Naval Submarine Base in New London, CT.

The first Tripper, I found in a craigslist ad and purchased in the early spring of '22. I corresponded with the seller, asked for additional photos and the serial number, etc. and settled on a $700 price remotely before setting out to pick it up. I drove down to Connecticut and collected it off a yacht club boat rack:




It was dirty and sun faded but had not been used roughly and the thwarts were relatively new. I grew up in RX Old Town Disco 169's and was very excited to pick up a venerable Tripper. Once, I spent an afternoon helping to unpin an RX boat (on the Allagash, I think) and it popped right back into rough shape afterwards ready to be paddled. An RX boat with a little more length and volume sounded perfect for a young family.

The fellow that sold me the boat was a BMW mechanic, a nice guy, who reminisced about his father as he helped me load the boat onto my car. I told him that my plans for the boat should live up to its name and I promised to send him pictures of the boat in use. And I did.

I brought it home, cleaned it up and removed the graphics.


My plans were simple: replace the plastic seats, install painter loops and outfit a spray cover.

The very first time I paddled it, I couldn't stay put on the plastic seats and my butt was scooting all over the place. I ordered some standard flat frame wood canoe seats with webbing and hung them on dowel drops, intending to replace the dowel drops later. I haven't.

After that, I drilled out some holes for the painter loops. I drilled them at what I considered a compromise height: as low as possible, but not so low that my loops would drag in the water when I didn't have painters tied on. Were I to do it again, I might go lower. That said, my loops are just big enough to grab with my hand to haul the canoe when my spray cover is in place and I can't reach the decks, so jury's still out.



After the pilot hole, I used a step pit to enlarge the hole and used a piece of electrical conduit for the sleeve. Electrical conduit is PVC manufactured to be ultra-violet stable, so it shouldn't deteriorate as quickly as typical plumbing PVC.

My hole turned out a little crooked. Wabi sabi, baby.


I epoxied the PVC sleeve in place and used a pull saw to cut it flush with the hull. Then I used a plumber's deburring tool to ease over the inside corners of the cut pipe and eliminate any hard edges contacting the painter loops.

Interesting post. We owned 2 Trippers over a 30 year period, and they were true workhorses on long wilderness adventures. A young man's canoe, as they were as heavy as they were indestructible. The only mod we made was painting the interior floor and adding sand over the wet paint as an abrasive, as those interiors were quite slippery. Enjoy yours.

Thank you, @Gerald. Yes, heavy indeed. I can still handle it, but now, in my 40's, I need to be conscientious about maintaining at least a modicum of fitness so I don't hurt myself. Any long carry is a bit of a suffer-fest, but I earned my portage knuckle a long time ago and always tell myself: "This isn't as bad as mud pond."

A friend accompanied me on the trip to collect this boat. On the way home, we stopped at a famous pizza place in Connecticut called Frank Pepe's. Later, during the first paddle, we determined that it would be funny to name this boat be named "Pepe."

Pepe's first light-tripping duty was on Seboeis Lake in Maine:

My next step was outfitting a spray cover. I settled on a North Water:

I selected the North Water because the attachment system afforded a lot of variance for how tightly the cover can be laced onto the canoe. I wanted to accommodate varying load heights above the gunwales. I do a group trip every year for which we tend to overpack. Because I outfit most of the group gear, organizing it all on the early days of the trip often means I'm the last to load my canoe. Just like a game of musical chairs, sometimes I end up with the extra item that just won't fit. Case in point, albeit in a different boat, here is me, stupidly overloaded on day one of the James River, before I offloaded a portion of the gear to some of our lily-dippers:


North Water was a pleasure to work with, they accommodated all my persnickety requests and helped guide me away from a couple bad ideas. They have an easy templating method that allows a quality fit for any canoe. I settled on a one-piece cover, with a single large portage cargo hatch in the center, and paddler cockpit skirts that could be kept rolled out of the way, most of the time. I worked with an incredibly knowledgeable guy named Morgan, who provided an initial sketch:


I talked Morgan through my notion about tall packing loads and he helped design an extra flap of fabric that could be tucked under the spray cover during normal use (i.e. reasonable packing) and then folded out and deployed for especially tall loads (i.e. my idiot loads). The second design iteration indicated how he would accomplish this. You'll see the extra flaps amidships, drawn in blue ballpoint pen:


In addition, I added paddle pockets for spare paddles, Velcro straps for painter lines, d-rings for map cases in front of each paddler position and a few extra anchor points.

I have a fondness for green canoes and my vanity precluded me from settling for one of North Water's standard colors (red and blue), so I asked for a custom option and Morgan obliged for a very reasonable $50 upcharge. The manufacturer of the PVC coated polyester had grey and beige as the additional options, so I went with beige. I think the combination of the faded-avocado-green hull and beige spray deck gives off Series I Land Rover vibes and I like it. Here's a photo of its initial sea trials, without the extra gear flaps deployed:

On the hull, you can see a couple squares of blue painters tape, which I used as a layout guide when drilling the holes for the lacing.

One final aesthetic consideration was plain black webbing along the cover's perimeter, rather than the standard webbing which is emblazoned with a repeating white "North Water" branding:

Great! absolut great thing. - and looks very sexy to this boat!

I sure liked my Tripper purchased new direct from OT in the spring of 1983 using a relatives SC Johnson employee discount. As I recall I paid $600 and I got the $75.00 shipping cost refunded due slight shipping damage from the trucking company. Shortly after I got the boat a buddy and I ran it down the Peshtigo Rv in NE Wisconsin and the shipping damage crease became just another mark on the hull. I owned it for 23 years and only sold it when the 80# weight became too much for me. The guy who bought still uses it on the bony whitewater rivers of NE Wisconsin.

Thanks @kahel!

@jdeerfoot, I was born in 1983 and I believe this boat is just a little bit older than me.

The spray cover is great. Very well made and sturdy. The PVC coated polyester is heavy gauge and waterproof (it will retain puddles in any low spot) but its not light. I've never weighed the cover, but it's not insignificant when portaging an 80 lb. canoe. I've already torn one of the paddle pockets but I admittedly put it under a lot of stress by strapping a spare paddle down over a lumpy load below.

Here's a picture showing a portion of the extra gear flap deployed, just to the left of the boots in the foreground.


The spray cover's first real duty was on the Machias River in May of '23. We had hoped to put in at 4th Machias Lake, but it hadn't rained in a couple weeks and had to settle for Second Machias instead. The water was cold and on the second day of the trip, it hailed, which is a moment I'll never forget.

The Machias is fun white water paddling and we managed to make good use of the cover because I put us sideways across a rock: perfect position for a pin. We leaned downstream, but the upstream gunwale still dipped below the water surface and we would have been taking on significant water if not for the cover. The river was too deep to stand in our immediate vicinity and we couldn't free ourselves, until my 200+ lb. bowman climbed out of his cockpit and crawled back towards me across the top of the spray cover. By the time he got to the middle of the boat, he was above the rock and our pivot point, which allowed the unloaded bow to swing free upstream. We pivoted off the rock backwards, spun 270 degrees in the rapid and lived to fight another day! A credit to the spray cover, both for keeping water out and holding up to the scrambling of a large man.

One of the downsides to the boat's age and UV exposure is that the hull materials are more brittle and soft than I had hoped. RX boats tend to oil can when they're not loaded with gear and I've tandem day-paddled it quite a bit in salt water. The bilge now exhibits a series of cracks in the vinyl surface layer of the Royalex. I've detailed that condition previously in this thread:



I can probably forestall its further deterioration with some G-Flex, but either way, this boat's days as a tripping canoe are numbered. Notably, the vinyl on the underside of the boat is totally fine, which is odd because boats are stored upside down, most of the time. After a trip on the Machias, and another on the Raquette, the bottom was holding up ok, Certainly a fair number of scrapes, but no cracks as with the bilge.


Needless to say, I was bummed out to have a brand new spray deck that was made custom for a dying boat. I also wasn't sure I wanted to get another Tripper just to have it age out on me again. But as luck would have it, the same gentlemen who sold me this first Tripper called me up and asked if I'd like to buy another, this one was garaged its whole life and absolutely mint. I couldn't resist.

"It was the best of times . . . ."

"It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done . . . ."

Pseudonym said:

But as luck would have it, the same gentlemen who sold me this first Tripper called me up and asked if I'd like to buy another, this one was garaged its whole life and absolutely mint. I couldn't resist.

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S u s p e n s e . . . Show us!

I arranged to pick up the "new" Tripper on the way home from a trip on the James River, in VA. My phone's camera lens was waterlogged (bet you can't guess why), so I never got any photos of the boat when I collected it. I already had my Bell RX Wildfire on the roof of my truck and wasn't set up to put two canoes on my roof bars side-by-side, so I removed the Tripper's plastic seats and yoke, so that I could place the Tripper right over the Wildfire, like a Russian nesting doll. It worked great.

Here's my RX fleet:



I ordered a pair of seats from @Conk, based on endorsements from @Glenn MacGrady and others on this site. Paul is a lovely person to talk with about canoes. I ordered a 15 and a 20, each with a curved front frame rail to accommodate more comfortable kneeling in rapids. They're beautiful and very reasonably priced given that they're made to order. I haven't mounted them yet, but will share the details when I do. Since their purchase, I have come to realize that the curved bow seat rail might not serve me well if I'm ever soloing the boat in reverse, but that's not really its intended use: this is my tandem.

The new boat is so mint that I'm actually a little gun-shy about drilling holes for my spray cover. I'm sure I'll succumb once there's a pending trip that warrants it.

No name as of yet, because the seats are still out, I'm embarrassed to say I haven't even paddled it yet.

Nice fleet. Looking forward to the outfitting.

Pseudonym said:

I have come to realize that the curved bow seat rail might not serve me well if I'm ever soloing the boat in reverse, but that's not really its intended use: this is my tandem.

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Doesn't @Conk make a double curve bow seat? Maybe you can get a trade-in for one.