Passing the time of day .. conversations with other paddlers

[Guest]

Do you meet old and new friends on trips?

Old friends occasionally and those are always memorable encounters, especially when I had no idea we would be in the same place at the same time. Yellowcanoe and I have just missed each other from the Adirondacks to the Everglades to the Green.

New friends often. I don’t often approach people, but if someone, a paddler or just boat-curious stranger, comes up at the put in or take out and I am feeling unrushed and gregarious, we may be off to the races. Drives my wife crazy.

I have met a number of people while camped who have become friends, despite the fact that I do not enter other folk’s campsites. But if another paddler approaches me while camped I am usually good for many furlongs with boat & gear talk and places paddled. I have been clued into some interesting, unknown-to-me paddling spots that way.

I especially love the one-handshake away encounters. The most recent example; a friend got to chatting up another paddler 5 States distant. Assateague came up and that paddler remarked about a guy she met years ago at Assateague who used to mail her trip reports.

“Named Mike”?
“Yeah, how did you know”?.

Mailed. That was back in the pre-internet days, when I snail-mailed quarterly club newsletters. I remember meeting her on Assateague.

Joel David Beckwith happened to stop by.. between guiding trips.. We spent three hours just yakking.. No beverages involved either! I learned a little more about Mr. Mike Mc Crea... ( nothing bad mind you).

I wish I could say he drinks, or makes stuff up. Oh gawd.

 

[Uncle_Skwid]

I saw someone I knew once while lugging a 16' Old Town Canoe down to the St. Joseph's River, one of the oldest--if not THE oldest--whitewater parks in the country, located in South Bend, IN. He was attending some high falutin' school up there at the time, studying the philosophy of free will, as I recall, and when I saw him I jumped up and ran after him, waving my hands and calling his name. For some reason he kept running the other way, down through the city streets and away and away, which was odd, considering he was not only by paddling partner, but my ride home.

 

[yellowcanoe]

The real upshot is when a car with a canoe passes your car and you don't recognize the car per se but you know the boat and you know who owns the boat.. Have seen Robin a couple of times on the Maine Tpk..

Also found Marc O by his truck parked with canoes I recognized in Tuscaloosa Alabama... We are both from the Northeast.....

 

[dogbrain]

Last fall I conceded defeat and cancelled a poorly planned trip to Wabakimi after I couldn't get the logistics worked out. I had just finished a 2+ week trip in the BWCA. A big part of the logistics problem was related to my cell phone not being able to call Canada and the fact that there are NO public phones left anywhere on earth. As a consolation, I decided to do a route in Quetico that I had been looking at for a few years. After about 10 days out on that trip, and after having not seen anybody for the previous 5 days I see a lone figure in a solo canoe at the other end of a long thin lake, quite off the beaten path. We are paddling towards each other, obviously travelling in opposite directions, so avoidance is impossible. We met and got to talking about where we'd been on this trip, which turned into where we had been on other trips and where we were from. I almost an hour of just drifting and talking I finally put 2 and 2 together. It turn sout I was talking to Mike Kinziger from Idaho, who has posted a number of trip reports on canoestories.com. The strangest coincidence is that I had used his route through Wabakimi as one of the sources for the aborted trip I should have been on at that very moment.

Very strange coincidence related to this story, I just found out Mike published a book about his solo adventures. It's called "Alone in a Canoe" One Man, One Canoe, Five solo journeys. Available at Amazon.