John Day River Trip, Day 7 on the water.
Having fun with the music on this one.
… continued from yesterday, the canoe catamaran system has gone through several evolutions since that first trip. For my pack canoes I put boards directly beneath the self rescue loops that are attached to the top of the gunwales. Functionally, this provides a much stiffer connection that can still flex enough to absorb shocks. From a paddling perspective, it feels nicer but it’s more work to create and more frustrating to assemble and disassemble.
For my full-size canoes I’ve gone back to a simpler ball bungee attachment method but using flat boards instead of the square section hardwood I was using initially. This latest configuration was invented by a student, and I have to admit that when I first saw it I was like: “There’s no way that’s gonna work.” But I tried it anyways and it turns out that it works quite well and the whole set up is so easy to assemble and disassemble that I can do it on the water. So we can be soloing one moment, and catamaraned the next. It doesn’t paddle quite as nicely as my other system but the convenience is fantastic.
In addition to making a fun platform for river running the canoe catamaran provides great stability for sailing. In the summertime when the wind blows hard here we raise the sails and blast downwind with this setup. I don’t have kids, but I imagine they would have a lot of fun with the canoe catamaran as well.
I went 12 inches between boats this time and due to physics the maneuverability suffered significantly, but we also didn’t get soaked with water spraying up between the boats, I could easily paddle between the hulls, and we frequently past right over sleeper rocks that we would have gotten stuck on with a narrower spacing.
Back to the river, any time we land the canoes we try to walk a few hundred feet into the desert because you never know what you might find that time has forgotten. This decaying piece of farm equipment is a seeding machine called a grain drill. It was built in St Louis by The Monitor Drill Company in the late 1800s and cost the equivalent of $2000 in today’s money.
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