Kayak Cookin'

Unless you're on a long expedition there is no need to eat dehydrated crap while kayaking. Lots of real food keeps just fine for 3-4 days including most vegetables and smoked meat products. Every year I have a substantial proportion of my venison made into pepper sticks at Jim's Meats in Iron River, WI. They are so good at it and the products are so popular among hunters, that Jim has become "the Venison Nazi". "Have your trim here on January 14th or..........no sausage for you!" Also, everything weighs the same once its floating in your kayak. Freeboard is highly overrated.

The one indispensable cooking tool is my trusty cast aluminum dutch oven. I learned how to use on while in the Boy Scouts in the late '60's and have been a fan ever since. We would car camp at state parks when the boys were young and dine on roast beef, potatoes and gravy or curried chicken breasts with onion and red and green peppers. Our neighbors would be looking over and inhaling, as they charred their weenies on a stick, wondering where the hell this bounty had materialized from. I hate to aggravate the 'Leave No Trace' crew but I need a campfire, both intellectually and emotionally, when I'm camping. There is always plenty of deadfall available if you walk a bit and I don't think Our Mother the Earth minds if we burn a little dead wood.

There are a number of sizes of dutch oven and two are pictured in the photo. This was a venison stew with fresh veggies on the bottom and brownies in the top one. Fresh homemade biscuits during berry season are a hit also. The cast aluminum is lighter and seems to work just as well as the cast iron. The big one on the bottom comes along when we have both a large crew and a double with some extra space to stow it. The lid can be used as a frying pan and the bottom as a boiling pot or also a fry pan. Get the camping style ones with the lip to hold coals on top (remember: twice as many coals on top as on the bottom) and the feet to hold it up off the coals and allow air to circulate. Once you play around with this venerable and wonderful utensil you will wonder how you ever survived without one.

New York, New York

My Madison, WI associates and I survived a trip to the Big Apple over the Easter weekend. One of the elements in my blog description was beer drinking. If the implication was that it was only beer drinking on Lake Superior I apologize for the deception. One of the goals of the weekend was to sample every cask conditioned ale on Manhattan with a couple in Brooklyn thrown in for variety. I'm sorry to say we missed achieving our goal but only by a couple. The selection was OK but not great and most of the establishments had more than one beer engine but usually only one cask ale tapped.

I know that at least a couple of the folks that read this blog have a passing interest in aircraft so I included a shot of my son Ian (aka SSgt Olson) on the bridge of the aircraft carrier USS Intrepid, which is tied up on the Hudson River, north of Chelsea Piers. They have turned it into a static display with several aircraft, including the Concorde which you could tour. Now that plane IS a flying tube. It does however, simply reek of speed.

So its back to Minneapolis, slightly the worse for wear, and off to northern Wisconsin this weekend. A couple friends are taking a chainsaw course sponsored by the Living Forest Co-op, (of which I am a member in good standing) and I thought it would be a good idea to retire some bad habits. Unlike the stereotype of the tree hugging kayaker, I have been known to cut down a few. I guess I'm an old fashioned Aldo Leopold-style conservationist rather than a Wilderness Society type. The looks of confusion I get as I head north on 35W with two kayaks and an ATV trailered behind my car are classic. My boat will be on the roof and I hope to sneak in a Meyers Beach sea caves or a short hop out to Basswood early Sunday morning on the way back. Dipping the boat in Gitchee Gumee will be the true kayak opener! Paddle smart.

Folding Boats

One of my friends at Canoecopia asked me why I have three boats. My response was because I sold two. I'm down to my Valley Aquanaut HV, a CLC 17 LT that No. 2 son and I built, and my Feathercraft Big Kahuna. This is the boat that that Dubside, noted Greenland afficianado, learned to roll in. I am heading out to New York City tomorrow for a long Easter weekend with some buddies from Madison and to visit that very same kayak building son . I'd like to take the Feathercraft but the cold weather, a Yankees home stand, and the certain pursuit of some good cask ale will not leave much time to paddle. I always thought it would be cool to paddle around Manhattan and plan on doing it sometime, just not this time. Manhattan Kayak Co actually does a 3.5 hour paddle tour around the Statue of Liberty, http://away.com/tripideas/new-york-city-new-york-trains-300896.html, which I would really enjoy assuming the anti-terrorist forces out there recognized us as friendlies. I've taken the kayak on a number of business trips and its worked well to get me some exercise, attitude adjustment, and to keep me out of the hotel bars after the days work is done. The most interesting and exotic trip was Puerto Rico. The photo is from a beach on the La Cordillera islands off Fajardo, PR. I had paddled out there from the harbor and kicked back on the beach for the afternoon. Putting the thing together is a definite conversation starter since most of the kayaks there, if there are any, are sit on tops. I was fairly cautious since my knowledge of tides and currents is rudimentary at best but there were plenty of boats and people in the area so my behind was covered.

While at Canoecopia I also checked out the new Trak folding boat. I don't need anther one but this thing has some very interesting characteristics. It fits like a regular kayak, seems very strong, has no sponsons to blow up, and you can change the shape of the rocker like an trimming an airplane. Very cool. Derrick Mayoleth tested one in the pool at Canoecopia and has some video on his blog. http://209.18.66.66/labels/kayaks.html The Trak website is http://www.rethinkkayak.com

Let the paddling season begin!

Cold hands and Inaugural Antics

We Minnesota types, excited that the water had softened up early this year, organized the inaugural paddle of the year yesterday. RonO, ChrisE, and myself headed for Lake Waconia. I was accompanied by the VoiceOfReason and her nifty blue and yellow Avocet. When we hit the landing she took one look at the 37F registered on the car thermometer, the 20 knot wind, the whitecaps, and the horizontal rain and said simply, "I'm out. I want my first paddle of the year to be fun". Sage wisdom which we menly men failed to heed. We battled out and back around Waconia's only island and pretty much had enough. Ron took my photo in front of the last big pile of ice and snow to be seen anywhere on the lake and we agreed that some of the horizontal raindrops that hit us were kinda hard....sleet maybe? As we neared the landing I noticed Chris practicing his high brace. No, he's gone over! Some very steep and close together 3' waves, combined with being rusty were the culprits. This won't happen to me I thought as I maneuvered to land and was shortly in the water too. Ron, not one to be odd man out, shortly was upside down also. Moe, Larry, and Curly could not have done it better. The VoiceOf Reason stood on the shore and didn't say anything. We did, however, receive "The Look". And we deserved it.

Which beings me to cold hands. I tried out my new NRS neoprene Toaster Mitts and was not impressed. NRS, a fine company which has provided me with many a functional piece of gear says these, "Toaster Mitts offer the warmth of Mambas with the feel of gloves". Well kinda sorta. You can't get your spray skirt on easily and, when used with a dry suit, you need to do the double velcro, overlap cuff, more velcro dance which makes it impossible to get them off if you need any fine motor control with your fingers. Like for properly securing your spray skirt. Once you get one of them lashed on to your hand getting the other one on is problematic. I have a pair of gloves that uses the same setup which is a similar pain in the ass only with colder fingers. I have some much looser gloves that tend to fill up with water quickly. I had water sloshing around in the mittens after about 10 minutes of paddling. I pretty much use a Greenland stick and gloves/mittens limit your ability to do a sliding stroke effecively. I love to use pogies since you have great paddle feel and your hands are toasty. However you ain't sliding anywhere with the pogies strapped to your paddle in a fixed position. A veteran Greenland paddler from Duluth said he just took his hands out of the pogies to get out on the end of the paddle. I don't see this working well in any emergency situation however. Reed makes a glove that comes up over the elbow and, since I have a tuliq on order with them (It won't look nearly as good as it does on Freya....and thanks to Greg Stamer for letting me try his out) I could easily tack one of these on to the VISA but I'm still torn. Rather than buying a pair of every kind of kayak hand covering on the planet, I'd welcome some feedback, epecially from folks who use those funny looking 2 x 4 paddles. What do ya'll think!?

Official kayak season opener

At an informal gathering of the SKOAC Renegade group at the official SKOAC pub (Grumpy's in NE Mpls, it was decided that the crew would hit Lake Waconia today for a 10 mile circumnavigation. This will be the initial shakedown cruise that will officially start the 2007 kayak season and, for me, be the end of the hated chlorine season. It has been raining here for a couple of days and with any luck it has been raining in the Lake Superior basin also. Tom P, a lifelong Ashland, WI resident, says that the lake is the lowest he's seen it with flats visible in Chequamagon Bay that have never been exposed before. This time of year the north flowing streams in Douglas, Bayfield, Ashland, and Iron counties can reach a raging flood stage in a matter of hours with the rain and snowmelt combination and we hope that will erase some of that 18" deficit.

The photo is of the Sibley peninsula and the Sleeping Giant, taken from the window of my Mpls bound jet on the way back from London Gatwick. Tee Harbor is clearly visible and you can just make out the contours of the Sleeping Giant at the end of the peninsula. Lots of moving ice which will soon be gone as well. Time to hit the water!