Kayaking

It’s likely my father’s fault that I love being on the water. Dad was happiest in or on a boat – a sailor, canoeist, and kayaker. He was also an aspiring boat designer and builder. One Christmas, when I was 9, dad gave me a lovely yellow kayak he had designed and built in our basement from plywood. When it was warm enough that the ice was out of the lakes we tried out the boat. Unfortunately I could not keep it upright and dad took the boat home, sawed it in half, and put the pieces out at the curb on the next garbage day. I suppose he did this because he did not want to be responsible for anyone's demise. To his dismay, someone in a pickup stopped in front of our house and tossed the two halves into their truck, probably planning to glue them back together. I think now that the kayak he made me may have been just fine. I was totally inexperienced with narrow tippy boats and could probably have learned to keep it upright with some practice.

The next year, over a long weekend in 1975, we built my first real kayak. It was red and made of fibreglass and polyester resin. Being amateurs, we built it good and strong with lots of extra glass and resin. The 14 foot whitewater slalom design ended up weighing well over 40 lbs – about 10 lbs more than it should have. I still remember the enormous wooden loft at the Banook Canoe Club where we set up the much used moulds. We were helped by a man who had built his own kayak from the same moulds a week earlier in another part of the province. Because they were at the end of their useful life, mine was the last kayak to come out of these moulds.

I vividly recall the pungent and probably brain damaging smell of the resin and the itchiness of the fibreglass sanding dust on my arms. I was 10 years old. I must have been highly motivated, for I gave up 35 weeks of my one dollar allowance, deferring comics and candy, and depositing my savings each week in my Royal Bank account. Dad had promised to match each dollar with one of his own so that I could afford the 70 dollar building cost. My first paddle was made from a set of red plastic oars designed to propel a cheap inflatable boat. Dad cut off the ends and sleeved and used fibreglass to join the oars to make a kayak paddle.

Over the next few years, my father took me on kayak camping trips in the Kejimakujik wilderness. I remember the desperate effort of trying to keep up with his lighter homemade wooden boat in my heavier, slower kayak and with my much weaker paddling muscles. In retrospect, my kayak, though I loved it dearly, was not particularly well suited to camp touring. Being overbuilt, it was low in the water and acted like a submarine in rough conditions. It was also very difficult to keep going in a straight line, being conceived for white water and manoeuvrability with a lot of curvature to the bottom. After the first outing, dad made a skeg, a kind of fixed rudder, using electrical circuit board and aluminum right angles glassed onto the after end. This helped enormously to keep the boat going in a straight line.

In the following years, dad built a fleet of lighter wooden boats from English kits for himself and my mother and brother. I have them to this day, but the overweight red fibreglass slalom kayak is gone now – given to a friend many years ago.

 It was years later when I was in my mid 20s that I first took the little red kayak out into the ocean. What a revelation! Lakes and rivers have a life of their own, but the ocean seemed so much more alive, with its waves, swells, currents, surf, and fog. We lived near the shores of Halifax Harbour and many afternoons I would talk a friend or two into leaving work early for an adventurous paddle to one of the islands in the harbour. I took to using the wooden boat dad had intended for my brother and lending a friend the red ‘submarine’. It was in this wooden kayak that I had my longest ocean paddle – a 5 day 100 mile trip along the south shore of Nova Scotia. To be continued...