John Day River Trip, Post 2.
While I try to summon the courage to start working on the 20 hours of video we shot, here’s a few more pictures from the trip.
I’ll spend more time going into detail on the video posts but basically the point of this trip was to push last year‘s nesting canoes past their intended capacity, use, and durability and examine the results.
If I was building boats specifically for this sort of thing I would use a heavier skin, stronger longitudinal wood, and more coating on the bottom. I would also make the canoes shorter and more full-figured. I have a rule though that I won’t ever build heavier until I see what it takes to break light. The reason for this is because the failure points of any structure are usually quite specific and I can save a lot of weight by reinforcing only where it’s actually needed.
Normally my food and gear combined for a week is about 40 pounds per person but we packed an extra 30 pounds apiece to handicap the maneuverability, and add some extra mass to increase the destructive potential when crashing into things.
Most of the river is pretty mellow but we lined past the two biggest rapids less for durability reasons and more because the maneuverability of overloaded flat water boats in rapids was so comically poor I was doubtful that I could hit the lines, and whether it’s a class five drop it in a creek boat or a class two rapid in a canoe, I never run a line that I’m not absolutely certain I can nail.
Every landing was a crash landing and we weren’t particularly shy around rocks, so I feel like the amount of wear we accrued is a pretty good representation of what the average person could expect after years of bumps and scrapes using these in a flat water context.
We weren’t able to actually break any frame members or even scrape through the coating down to the cloth, but I can say that the brass stem bands got a healthy workout, and if I actually cared about these canoes I would choose a heavier layup for this sort of activity.
The canoe catamaran was a blast as usual, with significant upsides and downsides that I’ll talk about later.
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