WINDVINDER

UNMANNED VESSEL OF THE EXPEDITION TO THE ORIGINS OF THE WIND

Somewhere in the Pacific Ocean an unmanned “windship” makes its way through the waves - almost transparent, people say, wings everywhere… and it is headed, without a doubt,  INTO THE WIND !         
With three prows pointing straight into the wind it is underway across the world’s vastest ocean, following every windshift. No one knows how long it’s been travelling. People laugh at fishermen who talk about having seen it.

But there it appears again; all but silently it moves through the swell, as if drawn by an invisible string: on an impossible course....

This is the Windvinder, unmanned vessel of the Expedition to the Origins of the Wind: a satellite on the ocean. It is steered by wind alone and driven by headwind.  A windmill drives the ship’s propeller; a tail fin in the wind keeps the vessel on its never changing course.

From time to time an island pops up in its path.

For anyone who finds it there, instructions are engraved on all parts of the ship  (translated into more than 45 languages):  People are asked to mend what is broken, improve what wasn’t working, and to relaunch the vessel on its voyage – to where the wind comes from.

Please report date, position, and any changes in the construction to the Expedition Headquarters (contact here) .

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Old Town Sailing Canoe With Amas and Akas

2010 ICF Canoe Sprint World Championships

Thursday, 19th August 2010
Difficult Weather Conditions but Good Racing Action in the 1000m at the
2010 ICF Canoe Sprint World Championships in Poznan, Poland

After a superb Opening Ceremony, athletes woke up to strong and gusting winds
creating difficult racing conditions for all the compcompetitors in the 1000m heats and
semis on Day One of the World Championships.

Morning Heats
There were no surprises from the morning’s heats but two classes gave much interest.
The Men's C2 1000m welcomed the new exciting Russian pairing of Alexey
Korovaskin and Ilya Pervuhkin. They won their heat in style to progress directly to
the final, though the honour of the fastest qualifying time went to the Azerbaijan crew
of Sergey Bezugliy and Maksim Prokopenko. In the Men's K4 class, the French got
their World Championship campaign off to the best of starts with a good win, making
the final directly. Belarus and Germany joined them there, each looking strong.
Semi-Finals delivered some surprises

The afternoon semi-finals threw up a few surprises. Perhaps the biggest of the day
came in the third of four semi-finals in the Men's K1. Adam Van Koeverden (CAN)
and Ben Fouhy (NZL) were pushed into the B final by Maximillian Benassi (ITA),
Tim Brabants (GBR) and Marko Tomicevic (SRB) who all finished ahead of the two
Olympic medal winners. Van Koeverden seemed to get off to a bad start, he recovered
and looked comfortable in the mid part of the race, but faded just before the finish.
Meanwhile, Max Hoff retained his winning streak and was the fastest qualifier for the
final. He will be alert to the strong threat from Aleh Yurenia (BLR) the young
pretender to his crown who has continued to impress throughout the 2010 season. The
comment regarding the racing difficulties were summed up by Barry Watkins of
Ireland (who finished third behind Max Hoff) while waiting to see if he was a fastest
qualifier:

“It was little bit wavy, hard to control the boat and I’ve just finished 3rd I’m just going
to wait and see if I can get to the final. That’s the plan. It's hard to race in this weather
but it's the conditions and you better get used to it.”

In the women’s classes, the highly fancied Katalin Kovacs (HUN) dominated her
semi-final here today as did Sofia Paldanius (SWE). Paldanius reflected after the race:
“I felt very good in the beginning then in the end the conditions were so hard but it
was under control.” Franziska Weber (GER) and Rachel Cawthorn (GBR) will join
her in the final and these three will be the medal favourites.

In the Men’s C1 there was a better performance from Olympic champion Attila Vajda
(HUN) who has not performed this year to his normally high standards. Weiyong
Xie’s (CHN) win in the second semi-final showed yet again that the Chinese have a
great habit of producing talented canoe athletes. Cuba produced some good results
raising their world profile having achieved a final place in both C1 and C2. The one
surprise of this class was that Mathieu Goubel (FRA), who has been consistently
medalling in the World Cups this year, lost out in the fight for a final spot to Polish
favourite, Tomasz Kaczor (POL).

In the Men’s K2 Hollstein and Ilhe (GER) are on track to win another K2 1000m
gold. They looked very comfortable on the water today. The day’s action concluded
with the K4 semi finals – so who will join Germany, France and Belarus in the final
race for gold? In the first semi-final Great Britain was squeezed out of the top three
by Romania, Italy and Poland. The European silver medallists, Hungary, suffered the
same fate in the second semi-final with Russia, Australia and Czech Republic beating
them to the line. There is no doubt, come Saturday morning and finals day, this one
will be a ‘classic’.

Paracanoeing Suspended
Paracanoeing racing got underway in front of an enthusiastic crowd late in the day.
All was going well with some good performances with the crowd cheering on the
winners. However, increased wind and incremental weather meant Paracanoeing had
to be suspended until tomorrow due to safety reasons.

Keep up to date here with the results and watch the live webcast at
www.canoeicf.com.

Feature Story: Quetico Park - 12,000 Years in the Making

Rocks embedded in the ice left linear scratches (glacial  striae) that are visible on the shores of many of Quetico’s lakes,  including Sturgeon Lake, shown above.

Quetico is celebrating its 100^th Anniversary. Quetico was originally set aside in 1909 as the Quetico Forest Reserve, became a Provincial Park in 1913, logging was banned in 1972 and it was declared a wilderness park in 1978. Quetico is characterized by towering cliffs, rocky islands and sandy beaches in a watery landscape of clear water lakes, rivers, creeks and bogs. These compelling attributes that attract canoeists to Quetico are primarily the results of the actions of glacial ice and glacial meltwater at the end of the last Ice Age.


Read: Quetico Park - 12,000 Years in the Making | CANOEING.COM Nature & Environment

Four Aces: The Unbeatable Chestnut Wood-Canvas Canoes

i

by Mike Elliott, Kettle River Canoes
Ogilvy, Bob Special, Pal and Prospector: These four canoes from the Chestnut Canoe Company set the standard for the industry and are still held up as icons more than thirty years after they went out of production.
 
The Chestnut Ogilvy – Although never as popular as the other three, fishing guides on the salmon rivers of New Brunswick helped create a working canoe that was unmatched for its purpose.  They needed a river canoe they could stand up in all day long.  They were often poling the canoe upstream through shallow rapids, so the canoe had to be stable and tough with a shallow draft so as to avoid many (but not all) of the rocks.  They came in six models that ranged in length from 16’ to 26’ – real, honest working canoes.
The 16’ model had a 36” beam and 13½” depth at the centre.  The ribs were 3” wide and had only ½” space between them.  This created what amounted to a double-planked hull.  The rugged nature of the Ogilvy comes with a price in terms of weight.  The 16’ has an average weight of 84 lbs. and a carrying capacity of 850 lbs.  It has a flat-bottomed hull with full entry lines and moderate rocker in the ends.  This makes for a canoe that is slow and steady.  It is exactly what you need when working shallow, rapid rivers.
 
The Chestnut Bob Special – Before I talk about the canoe, I’d like to clarify the name.  According to Roger MacGregor in his book “When the Chestnut was in Flower”, Harry and Will Chestnut were real history buffs.  The telegraph code for the 15’ 50-Lb. Special was BOBS and made reference to Lord Roberts, a major figure during the Boer War in South Africa. Over the years, as this wide, light-weight canoe became more difficult to keep under the weight limit of 50 lbs (the average weight is 58 lbs. while the carrying capacity is 700 lbs), they changed the name.  I have seen a variety of Chestnut catalogues call it “Bob’s Special” or “Bob Special”.
Many outdoor enthusiasts were looking for a lightweight, stable canoe that would allow them to enjoy fly fishing or just a quiet paddle on the lake.  With a 37”beam and 12½” depth at the centre, the Bob Special is very stable.  At the same time, this canoe is surprisingly quick and maneuverable in the water.  Unlike the Ogilvy, it has a shallow-arch to the bottom of the hull.  This combined with moderate rocker and fine entry lines in the ends made it a pleasure to paddle.
 
The Chestnut Pal – It is no accident that this canoe was the one that Bill Mason turned to for use in most of his films.  It is stable, yet quick; steady, yet agile.  At 16’ long with a 36” beam, 12¾” depth at the centre, weight of 72 lbs. and a carrying capacity of 700 lbs, the Pal is as close to being a perfect recreational canoe as you will ever get.
The bottom is a shallow-arch hull and tumblehome extends through the entire length of the canoe.  The fine entry lines and moderate rocker make it very easy to paddle.  In his film “Path of the Paddle: Solo Whitewater”, Bill Mason demonstrated very well that the Pal is not designed for Class 3 rapids.  That said, it is a great general-purpose canoe and is the canoe of choice for many generations of canoeists – even if they do call it a Chestnut Prospector. 

The Chestnut Prospector – This is the real deal – often copied, never matched.  A quick search on the internet produces at least ten modern canoe companies with a “Prospector” in its catalogue.  However, the Chestnut Canoe Company found the winning combination.
They were made in five lengths from 14’ to 18’.  The 16’ model has a 36” beam and a 14½” depth at the centre.  It is a large-volume canoe (the 16’ model weighs 76 lbs. and carries 850 lbs.) that dances through rapids and laughs at rough water in big lakes.  It is a fun canoe to paddle solo, but it really comes into its own when loaded for an extended wilderness trip.  The hull has a generous arch to the bottom and although there is good tumblehome at the centre, the hull flares about 4’ from the ends in order to throw water away from the canoe while hitting big waves in rapid rivers.
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And it looks so easy...

by Avery "SwinginFish" Ellisman

I was born and grew up in So. Cal, and lived close enough to the Pacific to ride my bike to the Ventura pier where, in addition to tormenting seagulls, I tossed “shiny sinkers” for bonito at a very early age.  As time passed, my interest in the ocean broadened, and at 14 I was trolling jigs in the local marina from my own little 10’ O’Day Sprite.  Not surprisingly, the sailing interest soon gave way to surfing, which became an obsession that lasted some 20+ years, saw me through - and extended - my adolescence, and aside from shaping me into the chick magnet I never was, helped me develop a fairly appreciable respect for the Ma Nature.  Read More

The 10 All-time Greatest Sea Kayaking Expeditions

By Dexter Mahaffey

 To take to the sea in a kayak is to know humility. To cross the sea in a kayak alone is to know God. It’s no wonder then, that sea kayak expeditioners are, by and large, a modest bunch. They’ve been there and back, and are a different sort from the rest of us. Undoubtedly that’s why so little is known about the great sea kayak expeditions: The practitioners aren’t all self-promoters. But the tales bear telling: surviving for months on cans of condensed milk or staving off starvation by eating toothpaste; crossing the ocean alone with no radio; facing a heaving slurry of sea ice in the surf zone. The greatest sea kayak expeditions brush up against the limits of human endurance and mark the frontiers of the human experience.

They are:

1. Franz Romer’s Atlantic Crossing, Portugal to Puerto Rico, 1928
2. Hannes Lindemann’s Atlantic Crossing, 1956
3. Paul Caffyn’s Australia Circumnavigation, 1981 
4. Ed Gillet’s California to Hawaii Crossing, 1987
5. John MacGregor’s Rob Roy Expeditions, 1860s
6. Derek Hutchinson’s North Sea Crossings, 1975, 1976
7. Frank Goodman et al., First Circumnavigation of Cape Horn, 1977
8. Peter Bray’s North Atlantic Crossing, 2001
9. John Dowd’s Indonesian Journey, 1969 
10. Jon Turk’s Japan to Alaska Expedition, 2000

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Cool Stand Up Board Vid

Sailing a Tin Can

My first time sailing a canoe: the naïve approach 
Ed Maurer, Dunedin, Florida

It has been almost 40 years since I first sailed a canoe, and now is the time to share the experience. I’ll ask the reader to do the same when the time is right, especially if it’s a good story.

I was with my Boy Scout troop out of Miami. We went for a canoe trip into the 10,000 Islands area of Florida, a place where the land and sea fight for preeminence over the very southern tip of the state.

We paddled a mélange of canoes out to an island, maybe just a couple three miles or so. We made camp on ground barely above the high water mark, scattered with coral and transient soil. Plants consisted mostly of sea grape and whatever weedy stuff grows in such inhospitable conditions good only for crabs, mosquitoes and the ubiquitous sand fleas. Read More

Capsize Your Boat ~ Bailing and Flotation

An all too likely event can be controlled with the right knowledge and gear
Hugh Horton, Contributing Editor, Harrison Township, Michigan 

After I gybed back to the swamped sailing canoe at the Killbear Canoe Rendezvous in September ‘05, I thought of Roger Taylor’s series about seamanship. The swimming sailor’s tube style pump wasn’t getting it done. Wavelets instantly refilled what dozens of pump strokes had squirted out.

I sailed up, held her against my boat, Walela, and used Walela’s bailer. In two dozen scoopfuls, she was left with a quart or so under the floorboards, along her ribs and lapstrake planking. Wind was offshore, and I drifted a couple boat lengths away. Her canoeist, a young man, tried again to climb in over the stern. But the boat was still too unstable, so I came back and steadied her. Just the afternoon before he’d gone over in a lighter, onshore breeze. But Lake Huron was warm, and he swam her in. Read More