I Love Paddling

We enjoyed THIS recent photo and story in the Minneapolis Star Tribune about the canoe Harry Mixer courted his wife Delores in back in the 1940s. Paddles down the St. Croix River in a 1917 Old Town canoe with a wind-up record player did the trick.

Canadian paddlers are celebrating their second annual Canadian Canoe Day today in an effort to recognize the importance of the humble craft in the country’s history and to revel in the joy of paddling.  The establishment of Canoe Day developed from a contest to determine Canada’s “Seven Wonders,” of which the canoe is one. You […]

Sean Bloomfield and Colton Witte, the Chaska, Minnesota teenagers who paddled from their hometown to Hudson’s Bay in 49 days, gave an extensive interview to the Minneapolis Star Tribune’s Dennis Anderson recently. Asked about the stunning speed of their 2,250 mile trip, the recent high school grads had this to say: “We didn’t necessarily paddle […]

The University of Nevada won the American Society of Civil Engineers’ 21st annual National Concrete Canoe Competition last weekend in Montreal. The team’s craft topped a wide field of canoes from 21 other institutions and ended the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s five-year winning streak in the competition. The Nevada boat, Argentum, had zero deductions in the […]

In 1983, Jay Thurston and Mike Kinziger set the record for paddling the length of the Wisconsin River:  eight days, three hours and 13 minutes. Twenty-five years later, the swift-paddling pair are back in a canoe together attempting to better that mark.  The Portage Daily Register, HERE, caught up with Thurston, 75, and Kinziger, 60, in the […]

Taking only half the time it took Eric Sevareid and Walter Port in 1930, Minnesota teenagers Sean Bloomfield and Colton Witte have completed their canoe trip from their hometown of Chaska to York Factory on Hudson’s Bay. The duo paddled onto Hudson’s Bay on Sunday, 49 days after starting their epic 2,250 mile trip. Sevareid […]

Ernest Oberholtzer’s 1912 canoe journey from The Pas, Manitoba to Hudson’s Bay and back to civilization via the Lake Winnipeg railhead at Gimli has long fascinated expedition paddlers. Oberholtzer and his Anishinaabe paddling partner Billy Magee covered 2,000 miles – the remotest of them unexplored by non-natives – in 144 days on trail. The two […]

The 2008 Thompson Brigade canoe caravan reached Winnipeg yesterday on its 2,200 mile trip from Rocky Mountain House, Alberta to Thunder Bay, Ontario. The Winnipeg Free Press ran THIS story and shot THIS video to record the arrival of the ten 23-foot-long north canoes at the site of Fort Garry. The Thompson Brigade paddlers are […]