Recent content by yknpdlr

At age 74I use a couple of methods. from a low dock, I brace my single blade across the gunwales with blade on the dock. It takes practice with a Hornbeck or a skinny blackwater or a PB Shadow. One foot in, slightly outboard of center, then the other goes quickly in to balance as my butt...

At the time there were three weights. Two as listed above, standard and lightweight. Not shown is "camp weight" with thicker aluminum, as sold for rough use at youth camps and the like. I thiink most Boy Scout camps got the heavies. I really liked the lightweight, 10 pounds less than standard...

i got my first canoe when I was stationed in the Air Force in Columbus OH, 1975. I bought the lightweight Grumman, which made me very happy. Did not much like paddling in OH, the rivers were too small and flowed thorugh green mine polluted watrer on their way south. Unlike my home in the...

The Maiden flight and test of my ability to control my new drone to be used for monitoring vegetation growth in the small lake at my camp lake location in the western Adirondacks just after receiving my FAA sUAS (drone) remote pilot license. These are a couple of photos clipped from my first...

Although I have canoed since I was a Boy Scout, my adult time in the military kept it at a moderate level camping with a Grumman mainly only when I visited home, some with wife, 2 kids and a dog. Until work colleagues invited me at age 46 to partner in a woodstrip voyageur canoe project built by...

Depends on how accurate you care to be. What is your location accuracy tolerance? I doubt those cheapie plastic things will get you very close to any kind of accuracy you might find useful. If you want to be within as close as one nautical mile, your horizon elevation measurement must be...

It does take some practice. You need an accurate timepiece, knowledge of standard stars and how to recognize them, books of pre-calculated numbers, ironically called "sight reduction tables", plus the current edition of the Air Almanac with time and date. There is a list of 51 standard stars...

Do you consider the standby 'Whiskey Compass" as permanently unnecessary in every aircraft as well? If you should lose all electrical and backup power, which way is it to the nearest landing strip?

An old guide once told me to always carry 3 compasses. One as my own favorite primarry, a secondary in case something happens to the primary, and a tertiary to give to some poor soul I encounter who has lost theirs. I actually have given two nicer compasses away, one to a local guy who guided...

A little bit of befuddlement is good for the soul. And for improving your navigation skills. Never fear. When I was much much younger, my dad would take me deer hunting and he had favored spots for me to sit while he went another way to get deer to move to me. Anyway, after I learned his route...

At the time I was in scouts, (1960's) to advance from second to first class rank, a scout had to demonstate a minimm knowledge of a set of more than a few code letters, a bunch more than just SOS. So much more than that has been dumbed down over the years until now.

Did you learn from "Paddle Paul"? -PP

Time flies like an arrow. But fruit flies like a banana. :giggle:

When I was in the Air Force as a KC-135 tanker air refueling navigator, on one of our missions out of Eielson AFB, I was chosen as lead navigator of a winter flight of six other tankers leading as many RC-135 reconnaissance intelligence gathering aircraft. I felt a great responsibility to...

For the five Yukon River races I have been on (both the 440 miler YRQ and 1000 miler Y1K), I planned and plotted the entire route using Google Earth with GPS turn waypoints to transfer to my two Garmin GPS 60csX units used during the race. Many river channels can and do change significantly...