SOLO CANOES
SHE AIN’T PRETTY, SHE JUST
LOOKS THAT WAY. PHOTO: CONOR MIHELL
Renaissance Man T
HOW A NEW SOLOIST SALVAGES A CANOE AND REALIZES HIS DREAMS
he online classified’s glorified details set my dreams in motion: a couple hundred bucks for a 15.5-foot, slender solo
tripping canoe; 45 pounds of fiberglass adorned with ash trim. Just the ticket for independent trips on sprawling lakes and placid rivers. I mailed the seller a check sight-unseen and had a friend deliver the canoe to me a few weeks later. “It’s a little rough,” my friend James reported, as we carefully
lifted the canoe off the roof of his SUV. Only a skilled carpenter like James would so rashly understate the deplorable condition of my new canoe. Its weatherworn, desert tan hull was webbed with spidery cracks, the worst of which were coated in ugly, snot smears of epoxy. Rotted gunwales were spongy to the touch. After a few short outings where I observed steady streams of river water infiltrating the hull, the canoe—and my dreams—were shelved and almost forgotten. But here’s the thing with a once-pretty canoe: It can’t help but
catch your eye. A year later, when common sense still urged me to look the other way, the canoe spoke to me. Its sparsely upturned stem and stern screamed speed across open water, and its graceful tumblehome cried the promise of thousands of efficient, comfortable strokes. I caressed its fractured chines and conceived of a rehabilitation plan involving orbital sanders, fiberglass cloth, polyester resin and gelcoat. I would grind, glue and paint life into this aged spectre, and celebrate its rebirth with an autumn trip. Putting my priorities in order, I thoroughly researched and
planned a 70-kilometer lake circuit months before I set about rebuilding the canoe in which I would do it. When I finally chose a late-August heat wave to begin the restoration, it quickly became apparent that my old electric sander was no match for the canoe’s craggy skin, so I borrowed a friend’s stone-wheeled angle grinder. The grinder fervently tore into the job, creating clouds of caustic dust and ripping holes in the rotted fiberglass. In 30 minutes of hot and dirty work I managed to obliterate most
of the cracks. The result was a heinously holey, splotchy and morale- crushing canoe. I threatened to dump it in a landfill or, better yet, scuttle it with a final rock-bashing run down my local class III river.
48 SPRING 2011
HERE’S THE THING WITH A ONCE-PRETTY CANOE: IT CAN’T HELP BUT CATCH YOUR EYE
Unwilling to accept defeat, I summoned visions of gliding across
steaming lakes rimmed with fiery forest and silent stone. Intent on the objective, I laid strips of resin-saturated fiberglass cloth along the inside of the canoe wherever I had gored the exterior. Then I sealed the hull with gobs of milky gelcoat, and chopped out and replaced the punkiest pieces of gunwale. Figuring it would be wise to travel in the company of a capacious
tandem on my solo’s maiden voyage, I recruited my wife Kim and friend Brad to come along. Kim, who’d been privy to all the peaks and valleys of the reclamation debacle, expressed her doubts when sunlight shone through the clear-coated hull as we affixed it to my truck’s racks. “But think of how fast we’ll travel three to a canoe,” she teased. Shoving off from a sand beach on Lake Wanapitei, kneeling
amidships, I gradually heeled the gunwale closer and closer to the water, growing accustomed to the tender stability. Bow pierced morning mist, trees burned with color and, amazingly, the canoe remained dry. For the next five days, canoe and I followed a J stroke course across the lakes, rivers and streams of my dreams.
» Conor Mihell is a freelance writer and guide. His latest project is a battered cedar-canvas Prospector, also purchased sight-unseen.
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64