Recent content by Nick Pending

Working at the Chicagoland Canoe Base in Chicago back in the day (early '70s for me), sitka spruce was used for the birch bark replica gunnels, the boats with the high up-swept ends. The trick Ralph Frese, the boss, came up with for that problem was to slit with a bandsaw (thinnest kerf we could...

Haven't heard. We don't know the guy. My wife works at the local food bank and heard the story there. The standing joke at the time was that they should have brought the cow to the food bank so they could slice off "precooked" cuts for the people coming to pick out their items.

A farmer near us had a cow killed by lightning in an evening thunderstorm (mostly dry) a couple nights ago. I haven't heard that there were any fires started. It's dry here, but not real bad yet. It will likely get to be so soon, though.

Glenn, feel free to move to jokes thread if you prefer it there, or if potential copyright bothers you (from a 1965 collection in a book I have) feel free to delete totally.

Or an American Pronghorn an "antelope". Antelope are native to only the "old" world -- which happens to be the same age as the "new" world -- but we needn't get into that conundrum here too. < G >

Sigh. Lawyers these days! No true cedars are native to North America, but I happen to have several planted on my own property, so to be accurate (as the original poster demands), there are some cedars here in North America, just not as many as people like to think. I have some Deodar cedars...

Thanks, Benson. It was obviously not Old Town. They were just the only name I could come up with who made boats like that at that time. The boat I was thinking of would be of the style like the Prijon Dolphin on the second page, essentially a flatwater sprint looking boat that was modified for...

I seem to remember a kayak design I think back in the '70s that utilized a chopped off stern like that, and my faulty memory calls it something like the Hall effect. I can only find Hall effect via Google to refer to electrical and magnetic physics rather than nautical or hydraulic physics...

I thought I'd posted this here already, but can't find hide nor hair of it, so here it is, the ultimate in roller portages. Please forgive me if I or someone else posted it and I couldn't find it. This was at the site of the whitewater slalom course at the Paris Olympics last summer (2024)...

A quick look at the site linked above doesn't seem to cover any of the materials in use like most paddlers require them, which are mainly in composite structures. That I saw, it only mentions the fibers used in ropes and fabric weaves meant for protective clothing and automobile upholstry, which...

I'll add my own "Happy Canoe Year" to everyone, also.

i have a couple kayaks that I likely now own. Not sure of status though. They were given to me years ago (40+?) by a couple friends to store a boat out here for when they might want to paddle when visiting. Both of those friends have since died and I still have their boats. I've never gotten...

If you want to keep weight down, your described glued-in side pegs would be the lightest. If you want some versatility, though with a little more weight, the crossbar with adjustments for fore and aft would be better as they can be adjusted along the length of the hull for different paddlers as...

I wouldn't necessarily agree with this, though I was alway pretty much a packhorse on trips. I first started paddling 75-lb. Grummans and my first boat was a little heavier at about 80 pounds, I slowly gravitated (get it? Sorry!) to lighter boats and never really had any problems carrying them...

Thanks, Al. The poles I started out with were I think 10-foot wooden poles with a steel pointy shoe on one end, sold by Old Town that I bought from the canoe retailer I worked for at the time. I think maybe an inch and a half diameter? Sitka spruce sticks in my mind as the source wood, but not...