Recent content by memaquay

My father introduced me to my first canoe trip, down the infamous Hassayampa River. The Hassayampa, a burly stream with its share of trout, rises in northern China, meanders through an Indigenous reserve in Northern Ontario, and empties finally into Elliot Lake, not a mile from where I lived in...

Looks like some people must just cruise around looking for lawsuits to file. I wonder if they can prove any damage to themselves from ingesting the approved preservatives? Back to Recep....I for one am glad there were preservatives that perhaps prevented our circular crater explorer from...

I'm not sure where the weight savings would be between an esquif t-formex and a stripper. Plus, you will not like the t-formex lite, it dents just by looking at it. Why not just build a new tandem stripper. Something in the 16 foot range, aim for a lighter build, you should be able to get it...

I built three winisks as well, loved that canoe. Debating right now about building a 17 foot prospector type canoe or a winisk for the school club. If I ever realize my plan to visit the States, I'll stop in for a day and replace your trim, lol.

Swift Quetico was my favorite, in fact, I built three of them, stretched one out to 20 feet. Took the 20 footer on many adventures, but gave it to my chum last year.

I know the whitewater guys like those cross forward strokes, but I've always found them to be useless if you are really trying to make headway in a wind. Better off just adopting a straight switch stroke and put the hammer down.

I think Swift is becoming like Garmin, with its smart watches. If you try to buy a garmin smart watch, you have to look at about 30 different models, all supposedly designed for one thing or another. Swift seems to following in a similar fashion, pretty soon there will be so many models, all...

Clipper is one of the only companies still keeping their canoes in a reasonable price range. However, the reason they can do so is probably related to the weight. They don't see to be chasing the ultra light categories like swift, where sub 40 and 30 pound boats routinely run between 5 and 10...

Think back to when you were broke, and you had a 13 foot aluminium bathtub of a canoe, and you would put two other chums and all your camping gear plus 24 beers and go on a trip. The best canoe is the one that gets you to your happy place, all the rest is semantics.

Find an old Clements paddle, the type Bill Mason used. They were made from spruce with oversized shafts to beef up the softwood's strength. I still have one somewhere, it's a unique paddle, not terribly heavy either as it is all softwood.

Clearings like that are not natural occurrences up here, and whenever we find one on a canoe trip, we know that there has been a human presence there. My guess for this area is that it might have been a logging camp that existed sometime before the 1950's. Horse logging was a thing, before the...

We are seeing incidents of winter ticks too. The moose population is declining in Northern Ontario, there is much speculation about the causes. One train of thought blames the expanding deer population and the spread of brain worm that they bring. Apparently white tailed deer can live with...

Moose do and can carry ticks, but they don't carry the tick responsible for lyme disease. Also, when skinning out moose, it's rare to find ticks up here, whereas deer can be covered in them.

Holy God Almighty, the stuff of nightmares!