So let's start with the basics. I'm planning on doing expended weekend trips with the wife and 2 young kids, With fishing along the way. I'm looking for thoughts on which materials I should be looking at and what brands are high quality for the money. Capacity and durability is key. Interested in anyone's thoughts...
Let’s start with the basics as far as canoe choices go, I’d look for used tandems in the 15 to 16 foot range. Royalex or composite, or even poly if you are young and strong of back. I would avoid the cheapest big-box type poly canoes with molded gunwales, seats and thwarts. There’s a reason those are common as crows on Craigslist.
More specifically symmetrical tandems that can be paddled bow backwards with a young kid in the better dimensioned (backwards) stern seat. That means flat bench seats (not buckets or molder plastic) and no fore thwart in the way of the bow backwards adult seat position.
We started our sons with a flat bottomed 16’ Old Town Camper and a 14’10” OT Pathfinder. When the kids got big enough we flipped those canoe around bow forwards, and got a few more years out of them before the boys moved on to solo boats.
Yes, 2 boats. Four people and gear in a canoe necessitates a hull with substantial length and, with squirmy kids, width. Let’s say at least 17 feet of canoe with you in the stern, the missus in the bow…..and two kids trapped deep in the wide middle, bored senseless, unable to see where they’re going, unable to learn paddle strokes, in squabbling proximity, arrgghh….
And, soon enough, when the first kid outgrows that discontented passenger compartment you’ve got a canoe that is oversized for one adult and one offspring.
We went to two canoes when my youngest was a toddler and it had many benefits. The missus and I were Commanders of our own ships, the boys were each Captains of their own appropriately-sized paddling station and we had two canoes that served us well over a decade of growth.
20 years later we own neither of those canoes, having sold them for close to what we paid, and they were the best investment we made in child rearing.
With young kids my approach was frequent stops to give them a chance to get out of the boat and explore. The kids will like it more if you don't make it a canoe trip but rather the canoe is the vehicle that lets you go explore. As she got older the trips became longer and she grew into paddling.
I made early camps to maximize exploring and hanging about for the kids. This approach made for shorter length trips, but if the kid(s) aren't having fun, neither will you.
Read that again. Willie is right on.
We started with canoe camping trips on smallish lakes, where we could paddle out a few miles to a site to camp. At first that was with the just-in-case rational that we could be back at our vehicle in short order. And there were a couple of trips where I paddled back to the vehicle for something we had forgotten. Or to get more supplies when we stayed longer.
As our trips involved lengthier paddling distances we would stop along the route to camp to explore, swim or play, to keep things interesting and make it more the being there than the getting there.
We made camp early enough to wander or play games or swim, and often stayed on one site for at least a few days. On warm summer trips my boys would be in the water for much of the day, and a site with a shallow sloping beach and watchful camp vista was ideal.
Excepting the watchful parental vista that part hasn’t changed. We still make camp early, wander the shoreline, play cards or word games together and swim ‘til pruney.
