Canoes in Winter: One Family’s Solution
16 Jan
In baseball, they call it the Hot Stove League — when fans enjoy the sport in the winter off-season by talking about it around the “hot stove.”
Canoeists, the ones in more northerly climes anyway, have their own Hot Stove League — their season when participating in their favorite activity may not be practical, but preparing for it “around the hot stove” still is.
A family in Fort Kent, Maine embodies canoeing’s Hot Stove culture as well as anyone we found. As the Bangor News reports HERE, Andre and Norma Landry along with their daughters Kelsey, 24, and Sam, 16, find a way to keep canoes in their lives even when they can’t push out into their beloved Allagash River: They build boats.
Andre builds cedar strip canoes from scratch — starting with about 50 board feet of 1-inch-thick cedar boards from a local lumber mill. He’s building his latest creation, an 18 1/2 footer, with daughter Kelsey. The effort will take some 150 hours of work, beginning with ripping the cedar boards into quarter-inch strips.
Andre, a registered Maine guide, started down the canoe-building trail when he restored a 1942 Old Town Guide some 25 years ago. A little over a decade ago, thanks to a mold given to him by Norma, he starting making boats of his own.
“I learned a lot by trial and error,” Andre told the News‘ Julie Bayly. “I read a lot of books on canoe making, but I tend to do things differently from what the books say to do.”
When the hot stove cools and the ice on the Allagash melts, look for the Landry’s to enjoy canoeing regular season in their fleet of handsome, homemade boats.
