Editor’snotes Count Me In
If I had to place blame, I’d blame the Count. Surely you remember the Count. “Greetings! I am the Count. They call me the Count because I love to count things. Ah ah aaah!” The purple Sesame Street puppet Count von Count has a sharp nose for numbers. He counts everything. He fears only the number zero, and he can’t stand to be around any sort of counting machine like an abacus. APalm Pilot would surely send him to infinity and back.
The actor Liam Neeson once said, “I’ve now worked with the great cinemat- ic masters: Spielberg, Lucas, Rubber Ducky and the Count. My artistic life is complete!” The Count didn’t complete my artistic life. He was a counting curse and now I can’t stop. I count the drops of water that fall from my paddle’s drip rings—always
three on the right and two on the left. I count the number of geese flying in vee formations overhead. (Did you ever wonder why one side of the vee is longer than the other? There are more geese in that line. Ah ah aaah! Count humour.) I count scoops of coffee grinds as I drop them into the filter and I count tele- phone poles along the highway in Saskatchewan. There are many things worth counting inside this issue. In our Escape to the
[Largely] Unknown feature you can count 44 locks as you paddle the Trent- Severn Waterway, explore the sandstone sea caves on 22 Apostle Islands in Lake Superior, slur in two official languages in the pubs on Quebec’s Îles de la Madeleine and count the eclectic entries in the logbook in Washburne’s cabin hidden on Cape Caution, B.C. Kayak fishing, according to those who count such things, is the fastest
growing sector of kayaking. A kayak sales guy once told me that if you con- sider the kayak sales market to be a certain size indicated by his outstretched hands, then the size of the kayak fishing segment he said, holding his hands out in front of him, would be this big. “How big?” I asked.
“This big,” he said, while slowly spreading his hands further apart. I told him that looked to be about the size of the muskie we were fishing for in the feature article, Fish of One Thousand Casts. To find out what the kayak fishing craze is all about we gave one fish finder to five guys and sat them on top of sit-on-top fishing kayaks for three rainy days in November. They pad- dled and fished 48 kilometres down the 14 rapids on the Petawawa River, a classic Ontario canoe route. Muskie are big fish—prehistoric fish. They have razor-like teeth (too scary for even the Count to count). These fish are so big and mean that the maga- zine about muskie fishing is called Muskie Hunter. Hooking them while on sit- on-top kayaks only inches from the water is exciting. Having them pull the kayaks from below is eerie. Muskie are such elusive, legendary fish that landing just one is worthy of bragging rights in any tackle shop. But we didn’t just catch one; we caught seven, seven beautiful muskie fishies. Ah ah aaah! But who’s counting?
Scott MacGregor editor-in-chief
editor@adventurekayakmag.com WRITEto: 6 // Summer 2005
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