Tanks for the Memories

Readers Sound Off About Aluminum Canoes

If form indeed follows function, then there’s beauty in some of the industrial age’s most improbable offspring. Like the Grumman aluminum canoe and all the other “tin tanks” that followed in its wake, for instance. Tamia wrote about these venerable (and venerated) craft earlier in the year, and the mail she got around the column was so interesting she figured the tin tank deserved a curtain call.
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by Tamia Nelson | June 23, 2015

Plastic is forever, at least when measured against the scale of human life. Scraps of lawn chairs, shreds of shopping bags, and fragments of soft drink bottles will be circulating around the world’s seas — and poisoning marine life — long after our cities go the way of the fabled Ozymandias’ “sneer of cold command.” But while plastic itself is almost eternal, the things that we make from it — including lawn chairs, shopping bags, and soft drink bottles — have a much shorter life expectancy. They are, in fact, almost ephemeral. This is true of plastic canoes, as well. Farwell’s and my veteran Old Town Tripper is a case in point. It grew progressively more brittle as the decades passed, succumbing at last to the combined … Read more »

Dressing for Success

Fighting the Cold War: Readers Wade In

Are drysuits worth what they cost? And which is better — to be a comfort-loving Amphibian or a safety-at-any-price Frogman? Those were the questions Tamia posed in a couple of recent articles. She outlined her answers to both questions, of course, but paddlers have minds of their own, and they weren’t shy about letting her know what they thought.
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by Tamia Nelson | May 5, 2015

Last month I penned (keyboarded?) a couple of columns on a vital subject: dressing for cold-season paddling. The first of these asked if drysuits were worth the cost. (My answer: Yes, but not every paddler needs one, and some of us who need one can’t afford it.) The second outlined the less restrictive alternatives available to the experienced paddler who prefers to “dress like a sensibly turned-out hill walker” rather than an “out-of-work frogman” — a comparison borrowed from sea kayaker and British Canoe Union senior coach Derek Hutchinson.

As luck would have it, the two articles attracted a fair amount of mail. Any notion I’d had that they (along with my earlier columns on cold-season paddling and hypothermia) would exhaust the subject were soon proved wrong. … Read more »