THE CRAFTSMAN BRIAN SHIELDS
PHOTO: ROB FAUBERT
BRIAN SHIELDS WILL NEVER FORGET the moment he was smitten by the aesthetics of a whitewater canoe. “It was a Dagger Caption with wood trim and Tennessee cherry decks,” he says. “It was like looking at a sports car, the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.” In the late 1990s, Shields was an aspir-
ing open boater, having recently retired from a career as a commercial airline pi- lot and residing north of Toronto, Ontario. The canoeing community is close-knit, and Mike Yee—the inventor of modern whitewater outfitting in the 1980s and the only one doing installations at the time—sensed his friend Shields’ interest in a retirement project. “He had the time to do installs,” says Yee. “I didn’t. More importantly, he’s a great woodworker. I knew he wouldn’t cut corners.” So Yee recruited Shields for a one-day
crash course on whitewater outfitting. “It was like drinking water from a fire hose,” laughs Shields. By the end of the after- noon, the pair made a deal: Yee would supply airbags, saddles, straps and an- chors, and Shields would install it—often along with graceful wood trim—to canoe- ists’ custom specs.
“HE’S A GREAT
WOODWORKER. I KNEW HE WOULDN’T CUT CORNERS.”
Shields became ingrained in the open
boat community. He doesn’t have a web- site or promote himself on social media. For Sheilds, business is generated through glowing word-of-mouth reviews. Shields especially loves the thrill of putting his “beautiful machines” to work and pad- dling the gates with his wife, Gail. Last year, he and Rapid Media publisher Scott MacGregor won the senior men’s tandem title at Ontario’s Gull River Race—vindica- tion after years of second-place finishes. Shields has customized countless open
boats in his 16 years of outfitting, but he remains as passionate about the canoe’s simple elegance as the day he started. “Installing wood is like cabinetwork,” he says. “Sometimes people ask for ash gun- wales and grain-matched cherry decks. Those are the boats I hate to give back.”
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