Last September, a group of us paddled the Bois Brule River in northern Wisconsin. I’ve slowly been getting around to posting photos from that trip and another from that same week. One item of interest from that river trip was this ancient little canoe. It’s kind of fat and awkward looking, but it’s got history. The text on the title page of the album and some of the photos provides a few more details.
Wow…! I’ll have to resurrect my CD with all the Old Town catalogs to ID it
Previous life as a flower planter? Wow. What a gorgeous boat!
That’s a very pretty-looking boat by my eye.
I actually did a couple of canoe runs, really for the first time since I started really paddling (sea kayaks), over Thanksgiving.
I can’t remember the name of the maker, but it was bought around 1980 by the owner, aluminum, lined with foam between all of the ribs on the inside. So not a traditionalist canoe, but seemed unique and somewhat thoughtfully laid out in its own right. It was wide and very stable. Hunting and fishing was its original purpose, and it seemed aligned well with that.
We did a couple of runs down the French Broad River in western NC. Flatwater runs, with a couple short boney spots that could probably be called class II due to the drought there. It was two of us in a tandem canoe that have done some good paddling together in a tandem kayak. We had the puppy-dog along, and I have to admit, we really enjoyed it. We knew we hadn’t any real experience with the single-blade forward stroke , but we seemed to maneuver that canoe almost as if we knew what we were doing. Lots of fun, and a great way to work up our Thanksgiving dinner appetite.
Thanks for sharing the pictures.
Thanks for sharing, Eric! Nothing like a W&C canoe.