Blast From the Past - A Canoe Earns a Name

When I was a kid, my father never had a canoe of his own - they were always borrowed from someone else when we used them. My mother decided one year to get my father his first canoe. She went down to the local sporting center and picked one out. It was a bright yellow 16' Lincoln fiberglass canoe with a black interior much like the one in the picture below. My mom was very happy with the color, mostly, and my dad was very happy with the canoe itself. As a matter of fact, my father still has the canoe although sadly, we haven't paddled it in years as there are too many other canoes in his livery to choose from. This past winter, we moved it out of the basement of my grandparent's old house for the installation of a new furnace and put it back a few weeks ago.


I remember several things from the first time I paddled the canoe. It was:

• Fast (Hot rod fast - for a canoe.)
  
• HOT! (The interior is black, like the one above.)
• 'Slippery'

I guess that I should explain the last item. The canoe is a "laker" in that it has very little rocker, a molded-in keel and a cross-section that is a shallow arch with tumblehome. Boats with this type of cross-section usually don't have very much initial stability (they feel 'tippy'...) but generally have good reserve stability once the boat starts to heel. (It 'stiffens up' as the boat heels.) However, i would describe this canoe as very 'slippery' in that it lacks both initial and reserve stability until you put a load of gear into it. Paddlers in this canoe have to be co-ordinated fairly well to avoid becoming swimmers.

We belonged to a Boy Scout troop and had planned a canoe trip to the Grand Lake Stream area in Maine. One of the parents of a fellow Scout has a cabin at the south end of Third Machias Lake and we were to start the trip there. After dinner at the cabin, my father and one of the other Assistant Scout Masters decided to go for a little paddle. With the bow of the canoe in the sand of the beach, this fellow made his way to the back of the empty canoe, crouched low, paddle in hand making his way along the center of the canoe to the stern. He managed to turn and sit down on the seat. He made one sudden move to adjust himself on the seat and the next thing we knew he was in Third Lake's frosty water and came up spluttering.

"THAT @#*$&! KEEL-LESS WONDER IS A HAZARD!!!"

And, keel or no, the name was cast in stone.

The Keel-less Wonder.

I should point out the fact that the Overboard Brothers happened to be paddling the Keel-less Wonder on the day they went into the drink.

What's in a Name?

As you may have noted in one of my previous posts, one of the traditions that we have in the canoe building class that I teach is that each boat "earns" a name.

I picked the idea up at a lecture I once heard at a local college. A man (I think it was Keith Nyitray - if it was, the information that f0llows is about him. See the April 1993 issue of "National Geographic") had made the decision to traverse the Brooks Range in Alaska. The Brooks Range itself is above the Arctic Circle and is 700 miles long and the man's trek was about 1500 miles total. When I say "across", I mean "across" - he made the first continuous traverse of the range from Fort McPherson, Northwest Territories, Canda, to Kotzebue between 1989-1990. He travelled by dog sled, snowshoes, foot, raft, and canoe. One of his more interesting pictures (other then the ones with bears and caribou) was the one of him hauling a canoe laden with gear over a snow-covered mountain.

At any rate, the dog that he made the trip with was on the stage with him. It was one of the biggest and best behaved dogs I have ever seen: a husky/wolf blend. He got the dog as a puppy at the begining of the trek from an Inuit man (Inuk). When asked what the dog's name was, the Inuk looked at him rather strangely and told him that the dog hadn't earned a name. Apparently it is tradition among the Inuit for babies and animals to go without a name until some momentous event in their life causes the name to "stick".

After a particularly difficult day early on in the trip, he and his dog were sitting around the campfire after dinner. The dog was exhausted and had fallen asleep very close to the fire. Pretty soon it got too hot near the fire for the dog and he sat up. The fur on the top of the dog's head was singed and smoking. The name? Smoke.

During one class a students announced that he had come up with a name for his own boat. I hated to shoot him down, but all of my student's boats have to earn a name (like Smoke) during the class. Over the next few posts I'm going to talk about some of the boats and how they earned their names.