Adventures

April 2022

Umbagog Lake

Paddling in the Great North Woods of New Hampshire and Maine

Umbagog Lake straddles the north end of the New Hampshire/Maine border in the midst of the Great North Woods. Tom DeVries and company take us on a paddling tour of the lake with a freight canoe and two homebuilt sea kayaks.

March 2022

Sailing the Archipelago Sea

A father-and-daughter cruise on Finland’s coast

Finland’s Archipelago Sea is dappled with countless islands, making it an idyllic setting for a cruise aboard a faering. Mats Vuorenjuuri and his daughter Inari sailed a crooked path to an island far from the mainland coast.

February 2022

Pen Lake

Cruising Canoes in Algonquin Provincial Park

There are more than 1,500 lakes within the borders of Ontario’s Algonquin Provincial Park. Phil Boyer and friend spent four days exploring three of them in canoes that Phil designed and built.

January 2022

Thwarted

A solo row to Florida’s Dog Island

Something would be missing if every cruise went as expected and that’s the satisfaction in rising to meet the unexpected. A lot of things went wrong during Bill Hutton’s short cruise to one of Florida’s barrier islands, but the experience was more fulfilling than what he’d imagined.

December 2021

Downed Trees and Muddy Feet

Rowing the Chippewa River Floodplain

For his rowing cruise of Wisconsin’s Chippewa River delta, Tom Pamperin intended to find a loop of the interconnected waterways but found only one dead end after another.

November 2021

A Tale of Two Boats

Building the PM-38 once as a teen and again 50 years later

A 7-1/2-page article published in a 1962 issue of Popular Mechanics might seem, by any standard, to be an insufficient guide to building a boat, but Terry McIntyre built the magazine’s PM-38 twice, once in 1962 and again in 2019.

October 2021

A Quiet Time in a Big Estuary

A Columbia River cruise

Bruce Bateau takes a California couple cruising on his home waters, the tidal reaches of the Columbia River that form the border between Oregon and Washington.

September 2021

Fifteen Years of the Small Reach Regatta

A retrospective

After 15 years, the Small Reach Regatta has come to the end of a long and successful run. Tom Jackson was there from the very beginning and takes a look back at the popular Maine Coast cruise.

August 2021

A Wright Brothers Moment

1972, three friends, and a homebuilt hydrofoil sailboat

Mike Jacker, along with his friends Louis and Marty, had just graduated from high school and would have spent the summer of ‘72 sailing Lake Michigan at a local club, but a book on hydrofoils set them on a quest to design and build their own sailing foiler.

July 2021

Gile Flowage

Working with the wind

The Giles Flowage, a reservoir in northern Wisconsin, can get rather choppy when the wind picks up, but Tom Pamperin wasn’t going to be deterred from taking a weekend getaway there.

June 2021

Baker Lake

The mirror of a mountain

Baker Lake is an 8-mile-long reservoir that lies at the foot of a 10,781’ volcano in Washington. On a summer weekend it can be crowded with hundreds of boats, campers, and beachgoers, but on a midweek cruise in May, our editor had the lake almost all to himself.

May 2021

A Gulf Coast Cruise

By sail and motor from Florida to Mississippi

Two doctors, both feeling worn out by the pandemic, took a well-deserved break to cruise over 300 miles on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. They sailed open water when they could and reluctantly resorted to motoring the Intracoastal Waterway when they had to.

April 2021

Fox Islands

A Maine coast island cruise

Christophe Matson and John Hartmann launched in Rockland, Maine, to begin a wandering oar-and-sail cruise of North Haven, Vinalhaven, and the myriad of small islands and waterways that surround them.

March 2021

A River Row

Oregon’s Willamette River

Jordan, Jon, and Hart were all on the same crew when they were in college, training for years to row as fast as humanly possible. Two decades later, with their 30s now trailing astern, they were content to lower the stroke rate and enjoy the scenery on Oregon’s Willamette river.

February 2021

Don’t Tell Me I Can’t

Isabelle Heker's Greenland kayak

When Isabelle Heker decided to build a Greenland-style kayak, her friends and family doubted she was up to the task. In spite of her lack of woodworking experience, tools, and a place to work, she forged ahead and proved something to everyone, including herself.

January 2021

The Texas Coastal Bend

An escape to barrier islands

Roger Siebert takes us on another sail-and-oar adventure, this time to the barrier islands of the Texas Coastal Bend. The protected bays, mild November weather, and company of boater friends and dolphins made a memorable getaway.

December 2020

A Quarantine Cruise

Wisconsin’s West Coast by sail and oar

When travel restrictions prevented Tom Pamperin from getting to his usual cruising grounds, he looked for possibilities closer to his Wisconsin home. Over half of the state’s western border is created by the Mississippi River, so he set out to cruise a section of Wisconsin’s “West Coast.”

November 2020

Bainbridge Island

A Puget Sound solo circumnavigation

Although August is usually a month of doldrums on Puget Sound, our editor’s summer solo circumnavigation of Bainbridge Island offered good sailing as well as torrential rain and a sudden squall that put a capsized daysailer in need of a rescue.

October 2020

Swan’s Island

A Maine Coast Circumnavigation

Each summer, a group of five friends usually get together with their sail-and-oar camp-cruisers to enjoy the island-studded Maine coast. This year, the three who were free to travel during the pandemic circumnavigated Swan’s Island.

September 2020

Solace of the South Salish

A sojourn by sail and oar

Looking for a place to breathe freely in the midst of the pandemic, Bruce Bateau set sail on Washington’s narrow waterways at the southern extremity of the Salish Sea. He spent four restorative nights at anchor in coves too small and too shallow for most boats.

August 2020

Dammed

Exploring Washington's Riffe Lake

Riffe Lake is a reservoir in the foothills of Washington State’s Cascade Mountains, an idyllic setting but for the shoreline’s reminders of abandoned towns, lost forests, and an aging dam.

July 2020

A Solar Solo

Cruising the Rideau Canal

Phil Boyer takes a look back at his first fully solar-powered cruise. In SOL CANADA, a boat he built with a canopy covered with solar cells, he traveled 125 miles from Kingston, Ontario, to Ottawa, along a canal system that has been carrying boat traffic since 1832.

June 2020

Downriver, Part 2

From St. Louis to the Mississippi Delta

In our March 2019 issue, David Hudson shared with us his adventure on the Upper Mississippi River and now he’s back with his row down the Lower Mississippi to its delta on the Gulf of Mexico. The river is bigger and so are the ships, the rafts of barges, and the sand bars.

May 2020

The Race to Alaska, Almost

Trailing the fleet, keeping up with the leaks

Thor Belle found an old Swampscott dory rotting away under a tangle of blackberry bushes and decided to make it seaworthy again. He and Pax Templeton did their best to put the boat back to rights and entered it in the 2019 Race to Alaska. They soon discovered that the dory wasn’t really up to the task, but they pressed on in spite of the difficulties.

April 2020

A Red-Lantern Journey

Ontario's Lake of the Woods

Tom Pamperin had Ontario’s Lake of the Woods in his sights for years. When he finally got underway at a launch ramp on the lake’s eastern shore, he was eager to venture into the maze of islets ahead of him and in no hurry to get back.