I Love Paddling

You can now add pumpkin to the list of materials suitable for making a canoe. J. R. Hildebrandt of Nekoosa, Wisconsin carved a small “canoe” out of a giant pumpkin recently. Last week he set off down the Wisconsin River on a 150 mile paddle to raise money for charity. There’s seeing-is-believing video of Hildebrandt’s […]

Like to paddle? Like the web? Want to make a career of the two? (You’re visiting a canoeing web site right now, after all.) Well, the American Canoe Association is looking for a new webmaster and information technology manager. The ACA says it’s looking for a “creative, entrepreneurial, pro-active individual with attention to detail, [and […]

A recent story in Minnesota’s Rochester Post-Bulletin — THIS one, actually — highlighted a favorite local paddling destination of ours — the Upper Mississippi River. The Boundary Waters Canoe Area and some of the wilder rivers in the area get a lot of attention locally and nationally, but there’s much to like about paddling on […]

Oregon-based artist Daniel Dancer, whose Art for the Sky program creates large works of art to be viewed from above, created a giant canoe with the help of 150 students and faculty in the Bangor, Maine area school recently. The art work called “Sky Canoe” depicted a Penobscot Nation Indian figure paddling a 104-foot-long canoe, […]

Minnesota’s St. Cloud Times wrote THIS comprehensive story about a local youth paddling group known as Les Voyageurs.  The non-profit organization has been sending young paddlers down northern rivers for 30 years, but this year, for the first time, Les Voyageurs went all the way to the Arctic Ocean. A six-member crew paddled down Canada’s Coppermine River which flows through the Northwest Territories and […]

Maine’s Bangor Daily News, HERE, remembers the now-defunct Conduskeag Canoe and Country Club in an interesting story about turn-of-the-20th-Century recreation. According to the Wayne Reilly piece, the Conduskeag Canoe and Country Club more closely resembled a contemporary country club or a leather-chairs-and-brandy-snifters men’s club than what we’d recognize as a modern canoe club. Instead of […]

We’re fond of the notion of paddling in the wake of history.  Hop in a canoe, push out into the water, allow your imagination to drift, and it doesn’t take much to envision the people who traveled across the water before you — natives, explorers, traders, or settlers. The New York Times’ Christopher Shaw recently retraced Samuel de Champlain’s […]

Team Bradley, winners of the Na Wahine O Ke Kai Canoe Race for the fourth straight year, established a new record with their victory last weekend in the 30th annual, all-women’s, open-ocean outrigger canoe race between the Hawaiian islands of Molokai and Oahu. The team crossed the 42-mile Kaiwi Channel which separates the two islands […]