Poling a Canoe Upstream

I've been working on the chapter covering human-powered watercraft this morning for my book project: Bug Out Vehicles and Shelters and one of the topics I am covering are the different methods of propulsion for such watercraft.  Everyone thinks of paddles and oars when it comes to moving small boats, but the simple pole is often forgotten. While poling may be the most primitive way to move a boat known to man, it can also be extremely efficient in certain conditions.

I first began to appreciate the value of poling when my canoeing buddy, Ernest Herndon and I traveled downstream for several days on the Rio Coco, which forms the border between Honduras and Nicaragua.  On that trip, we hired some Miskito Indian guides and one of their long dugout canoes carved from a log to travel downriver, but all along the way we passed other locals poling their dugouts back upstream between the widely scattered villages along the river.  The Rio Coco has a considerable current and some treacherous rapids in some places, but despite this, once they dropped us off at our destination, our three guides would have no way home but to pole their way back up river, staying in the shallows near the bank.  I don't know how many days it took them to get that heavy, 30-something foot canoe back to their home village, but it couldn't have been easy, considering that it was a four-day journey  with all five of us paddling it downstream with the current. 

But in places like Mosquitia, where outboard motors are still rare and gasoline for them is rarer still, if you would use the river as a highway through the jungle, you must be able to travel upstream as well as downstream.  This is also true if you plan to seriously contemplate bugging out into remote wilderness areas where no other boat but a canoe or kayak can go.  On my own long-distance kayak trips, I have had to travel some stretches of river upstream for a few hundred miles in order to reach a divide and cross over to another river where I could go downstream.  It's slow going and a work-out, but an efficient sea kayak can be paddled against the current, especially if you know how to play the eddies.  A canoe is not so easy to paddle against the current as a sea kayak though, and the bow will frequently get swept around when you least expect it, making for frustration as you lose ground you worked so hard to gain.  By standing up and using a long pole to push off the bottom, you are able to put your entire body into the effort and the result is that you can make remarkable progress, even in swift water.  The experts make it look really easy.  I especially like this video I found YouTube, and watching it makes me want to shut down the computer, throw the canoe on the truck racks, cut myself a long pole and go!  Have a look for yourself and see if you don't feel the same way:

Bug Out Boat: Folding PakCanoe

If you've read my Bug Out book, you know that a lot of the prime roadless bug-out locations that I describe are along rivers or in swamps, lakes or coastal marshes - especially in regions like the Gulf Coast Southeast (Chapter 5), the East Coast (Chapter 6) and the North Woods (Chapter 8).  Many of these locations will be inaccessible to you if you don't have a boat of some sort, and some of the most remote areas are only accessible by the smallest boats such as canoes and kayaks that can be carried over or around obstructions.

The folks who are most likely to need the bug-out strategy in the first place are those in some of the larger urban or suburban areas of these regions, many of whom live in apartments or other situations where storing boats is problematic.  There are many solutions to such obstacles, but it occurred to me that many readers here may not be aware of some of the options available, like the PakCanoe, a folding canoe that I have personally had quite a bit of experience with in some really tough conditions.

Folding kayaks have been around for a long time, based as they are on the original kayaks from the Arctic that were built with a skin-on-frame construction.  Folding canoes are more difficult to engineer because of the lack of decks, which add rigidity and tie the hull sides together.  But Alv Elvstad, the designer of the Pak Boats line of folding canoes and kayaks, has overcome the difficulties and has been producing a proven folding canoe for quite some years now. 

These canoes range from shorter solo craft to the 17-foot tandem expedition canoe like the one shown above.  They consist of a take-down aluminum frame that assembles much like the aluminum poles in a modern tent, and a skin of tough PVC coated fabric with a Hypalon bottom like those found in a Zodiac inflatable dinghy.  These canoes are not fragile as you might think at first glance.  Instead, they excel in handling whitewater rapids and absorb the bumps and blows of rocky rivers better than many hard shell canoes.

The best part about these boats is that they can be disassembled and stored in a closet in your apartment or kept in the trunk of a car or otherwise carried on a larger bug-out vehicle until you get to where you need a boat.  My experience with the 17-foot PakCanoe began in 1995 when my friend and fellow Mississippi writer Ernest Herndon and I decided we wanted to canoe the remote Patuca River in the Mosquitia Region of Honduras.  If you ever saw the movie or read the novel, The Mosquito Coast, this is the river part of the story takes place on.

You don't get to a river like the Patuca by driving to the boat ramp. The upper reaches of this river are surrounded by mountainous jungle.  To get there, we hopped a ride on a missionary bush plane out of La Ceiba, on the coast, to a Rus Rus, a Miskito Village near the Rio Coco, which forms the border with Nicaragua.  There's a dirt road that leads from Rus Rus a bit farther up the Coco to the village of Auas Bila, and from there we had to travel by motorized dug-out up the Coco to a place where a foot path leads through a pass in the mountains separating the Rio Coco from the Rio Patuca.  We could not have carried any sort of rigid canoe on this trip, the first obstacle being the bush plane flight, and then the trip up the Rio Coco, which has many rapids, then the two day trek on a muddy trail through the jungle to the Rio Patuca.  But with the PakCanoe stored away in two duffel bags in addition to all our camping gear and food supplies, the trip was doable with the help of some Miskito guides we hired at Auas Bila.

Here's a photo of the giant dugout we took up the Rio Coco, along with our guides and the bags containing the canoe and gear.  The village outboard for the big canoe is not yet mounted here:

The assembly site at the end of the trail connecting the Rio Coco with the Rio Patuca.  The guides had to use their machetes to make a clearing big enough for us to camp and put together the 17-foot boat.  There was no sandbar or other opening on the river bank here.  You can barely see the rolled up red canoe in the photo below, almost swallowed up in all that tropical greenery. 

We said goodbye to our guides and set off paddling down the Patuca, our destination the village of Brus Laguna, on the Caribbean coast of Honduras.  Once we started moving downriver, the scenery opened up like this:

Here's a shot of Ernest Herndon with the PakCanoe somewhere on the Patuca.  We made it all the way to the coast without issues with the boat.  It carried the load well, handled minor rapids we encountered, and allowed us to make a decent daily mileage, though not as much as we would have made in a sleeker fiberglass or wood canoe.

At the end of the journey we disassembled the boat on the beach at Brus Laguna and once again loaded it in a small plane for a flight back to civilization. The trip was a success, made possible by this well-designed and well-built folding canoe.  Ernest ended up keeping the boat and we later used it on a trip down the rock-strewn Ouachita River in Arkansas, among other places. 

Everything has downsides, of course, and the PakCanoe is no exception.  For one thing, it's expensive, as are all quality folding boats, whether canoe or kayak.  The other drawback is long-term durability, which is going to be less than most hard-shell boats.  Ernest patched the hull time after time over the years, but eventually gave up on it after it reached the end of its useful life.  It wasn't too much of a loss as we didn't have to front the expense of buying it for our trip because the designer sent it to Ernest for free, as he was seeking reviews at the time and we gladly obliged him by testing it.

In many bug-out situations, long-term durability may not be as important as having a boat right now when you need it.  The main thing is having the means to reach an inaccessible location until  you can do better, so if you live somewhere that doesn't accommodate a rigid canoe or if you drive a vehicle you can't carry one on, you may want to look into the PakCanoe or one of the similar folding sea kayaks.  I'll be writing about those here as well in a future post.

A Look at Hybrid or "Crossover" Canoes/Kayaks

A Wilderness Systems Commander rigged for fishing:

I'm interested in just about any type of watercraft that can be paddled, as long as it has a practical application in the real world and is not specialized for purposes like playing in whitewater rapids and such.  Canoes and kayaks in their many variations have lots of advantages over other types of boats for a bug-out survival situation as well as for ordinary wilderness travel, hunting and fishing.  Small, lightweight, easily driven by single or double paddles, silent and low profile; a canoe or kayak can get into some of the best wild places accessible by water, unnoticed by other people or wildlife. 

For long-distance travel by paddle, there is no question that the best canoes and kayaks are the "touring" designs with a long waterline for speed and glide, relatively narrow beam, and good load-carrying capacity for gear and supplies needed on a long journey.  I've owned  many variations of such canoes and sea kayaks, and have paddled them thousands of miles on rivers, lakes, coastal waters and open ocean.  For their design purpose, touring boats are superb.

But there are other situations, such as negotiating small, confined waterways like creeks, where long hulls designed to track straight are not optimal.   Also, for some activities, such as fishing from a kayak, the enclosed deck touring boat is not the handiest choice.  It is the surge in popularity of kayak fishing that has launched a whole new breed of boats that excel for this purpose - both in the form of sit-on-top kayaks for rough open water, and hybrid canoe/kayaks that provide a drier ride in more protected waters.

I've taken an interest in this latter category lately because I am looking into options for a canoe or kayak that can be carried across the deck of the 26-foot catamaran I am building.  With so much open deck space, I would much rather have a craft such as this that can be paddled swiftly and silently than a traditional dinghy that requires rowing backward with oars or propulsion by small outboard.  For a kayak that can serve as a tender to my bigger vessel, I don't need the long-distance capability or complications of a touring sea kayak.  What I need is a boat that can be stored on deck with little regard for maintenance, launched over the side with ease and loaded with jerry cans for shuttling water and other supplies between the anchored cat and the shore.  Because of the low maintenance requirement, the only boats that make sense for this use are the "Tupperware" plastic kayaks that are not only tough but relatively inexpensive compared to boats built of materials like fiberglass, Kevlar or wood-composite construction.

While the sit-on-top fishing kayaks with drain holes (or "scuppers") are more seaworthy for tasks like negotiating surf or a rough chop, in most cases a dinghy to a larger craft is not called on to do this, as the larger craft will be anchored in somewhat protected areas in the lee of an island, reef or other breakwater.  The hybrid type of boat is more appealing to me than the sit-on-top kayak because there is more open space inside for larger items, and in addition, many of these designs have enough stability to allow standing up for flyfishing and other activities.  See my post on bowfishing to understand why the ability to stand would be a distinct advantage.  Although at first glance it seems unlikely that such a narrow craft only 12 feet long would be this stable, especially to those of us who have experience with short canoes and pirogues, the designers of these new hybrid boats achieve this stability through the use of a tunnel-hull type design that almost creates a mini-pontoon hull. 

Speaking of this remarkable stability, here's a video of a professional wildlife photographer who trusts his Native Watercraft Ultimate 12 enough to paddle it with a $10,000 camera and lens combo sitting on a tripod in front of his seat.  That kind of trust says a lot about the confidence these boats inspire:




I can see a boat like the Ultimate 12 or Ultimate 14, or the Wilderness Systems Commander serving well as an individual bug-out vessel in places where there are lots of small, twisty creeks like here in Mississippi, in swamps and in small lake country.  

Since I have yet to inspect either the Wilderness Systems Commander or the Native Watercraft boats, I plan to drive down to New Orleans soon where there is a retailer that has plenty of them in stock.  I'll probably take the most interesting ones out for a demo paddle, as the dealer can arrange that, and may end up buying one if it lives up to the advertising hype.  Here's a more detailed look at the Ultimate 12, which seems best suited for my purposes and is also less expensive than the Commander.  Of course it comes in more subdued colors that would blend in better with nature: