Frank's Canoe: Excerpts from a South Shore Paddling Expedition
Guest Writer Tim Gallaway, part 1/3
I’m always a bit disappointed in the expedition reports that wrap up with some emotional and philosophical point that is equally heavy and whimsical at the same time. Reports where paddlers splash across a finish line with excitement and exuberance. I’m sure there are some people that finish trips with that sort of feeling, but I have only experienced it with short weekend sort of trips that end with a stop at the local burger joint on the way home.
I usually come off of a long trip with a feeling of wistful melancholy that seeps into my everyday life for weeks or months once I return home. A month away from home, camping, moving slowly and purposefully, is so disruptive to your baseline patterns it can be tough to return to them. People think travel like this brings clarity and calm, but for me it always tends to muddle the metaphorical waters.
In the summer of 2021, I paddled my sea kayak from Saxon Harbor, Wisconsin, to Mackinaw City, Michigan and spent thirty days doing so. Here I am, not wrapping anything up with profundity. Instead, here are a few stories of specific moments from along the dotted line on the map.
Frank’s Canoe
Saxon Harbor, WI to Mackinaw City, MI (2021)
McClain State Park, Keweenaw
Day 4-5 of 30
Busy campgrounds are funny places, especially so when you are traveling without a vehicle. A slow pace changes how you perceive the world. Moving only about as fast as you could walk, with only the things that you can carry. Arriving into a popular state park during the peak of summer threw the veil off of the remote, wilderness, romanticized vision of expedition life I had imagined. Rows of RVs with screened in canopies and plush folding chairs lined the winding park roads.
It was early in my adventure: day 4. I had been picked up from 20 miles down the shore after getting stuck due to strong winds. Now, my friend Danielle and I were waiting for a weather window to head north-east toward Copper Harbor. Danielle invited herself on my adventure pretty much as soon as I explained the route months prior. We’d been friends for 10 years but had never done a long distance kayak trip together, so this was going to be a new experience for both of us.
Now onshore, we didn’t have an RV or other friends with plush folding chairs to occupy our time. We had two sea-kayaks, associated camping gear, and a day and a half of windy summer weather to fill.
The first plan was a stroll to kill time. We’d gotten word that we might be able to snag a cabin for the night from the front gate but we had to wait a few hours to confirm and claim it. So we headed down the first trail we found and pretty quickly stumbled into the largest patch of wild strawberries either of us had ever found. Now this was a good way to spend an afternoon! We searched, and scanned, and crawled under pine trees searching for berries and we found them– and kept finding them. We picked until the containers that had previously held lunch were packed with berries.
We took a quick stop at the park office and we got lucky with that open camper cabin near the water for the night and jumped at the chance to have bunks and a warm evening out of the wind, even if it was just one night.
As we were preparing to shuttle our equipment the short distance to the cabin we heard about a fellow paddler, someone canoeing to the Apostle Islands.
Danielle and I raised our eyebrows.
It was common to see day paddlers along the shore in certain areas, but less so to stumble across someone else on a long trip. It takes a special alignment of the spheres to be windbound in the same place at the same time with them.
Mid-shuttle from our original site to the cabin we spotted a tent a few spaces down the road from us.
It was a large backpacking style tent, with no car, and nothing outside around the picnic table. No chairs, no coolers, no frills. A tent locked down against the blustery winds coming off the lake.
We didn’t meet our mysterious canoeist until the next day, but we did see their canoe. It wasn’t some standard river model– it was a custom, handmade, offshore racing expedition canoe. We stood, mouth agape, at the beautiful craft pulled up high on the shore and we knew we would be tracking this person down the next day.
The next day, wild strawberry pancakes cooked on the cabin hot plate led us into another windbound morning. This may sound like a weird detail but having a warm, windless, place to cook a hot breakfast that doesn’t involve a camp stove is something to be appreciated, and therefore noted.
We had to vacate mid-morning so we were savoring the pancakes and warm space to enjoy them right up until the last minute.
It wasn’t long after leaving the cabin and relocating to a new tent site that we met our canoeist, Frank.
He had quite the impressive paddling resume, including long distance races all over the country and a circumnavigation of Lake Superior back in the mid-nineties. To add another level of intensity, he did this trip really late in the year, finishing up in November when the weather over Lake Superior is unsettled and wild.
On this current adventure he was taking ‘A short trip’, stating with a wry smile, from Marquette, Michigan, to the Apostle Islands to the West in Wisconsin. On his lap of the lake all those years ago he had just cruised right past the Apostles, with their famous sea caves and cliffs, for the sake of expediency. It takes a long time to paddle around Lake Superior, so it is common to hear stories of paddlers skipping famous or crowded areas to put in a few more miles for the day.
We ran into Frank a handful of times throughout the day, the first time at his tent, the second time at the park concession. The three of us being windbound paddlers engaged in windbound paddler tradition, eating a lot and getting ice-cream. In the evening after our fourth meal of the day, we stopped over at his tent for a nice chat and tour of his striking canoe.
This canoe is unlike what you would imagine as a canoe by most definitions. The hull is essentially a racing hull, narrow, round, fast, but as soon as the hull panel breaks the surface things change.
The easiest way to describe it is that it has big hips. From the bow to the cockpit it looks like a mix of a racing canoe and a sea-kayak, complete with a sealed compartment and hatch. Then a large cockpit with a remarkably comfortable seat, setting up the paddler in a powerful forward stroke position. Immediately behind the cockpit is a massive flare to the deck shape which gives it stability on edge and in rough water but keeps the narrow fast hull. And that massive flare gives more storage in the back hatch than you could expect in some small sailboats. Frank said that it was seven feet from the bulkhead to the stern. With the rear hatch being the size of a serving platter, it is entirely possible to crawl in and sleep in there.
We took turns trying out the aforementioned seat and salivated over the massive storage capacity. While we looked it over, Frank shared the story of how it came into being. It started off as a plug of a one-off mold that a friend gave him, Frank built it all himself for expedition racing. He explained how he was so excited when he had the bare fiberglass shell shaped and in process with how light it was. But it wasn’t long before he resigned himself to knowing he would have another heavy boat once the bulkheads, hatches, seat, rudder, and deck hardware all were added and the thing turned itself into a tank.
The three of us chatted for a long time on the beach. Talking boats and adventures and weather, feeding off our collective excitement as the winds diminished and the sun faded.
We retreated to our tents as the sun dropped below the horizon and the dew came down. Frank planned on hitting the water around five am. We didn’t see him when we were up at six, so must have stuck to his plan to be on the water dark and early. That next morning was crisp and nearly calm. Danielle and I paddled northeast up the Keweenaw and Frank was heading southwest away from it.
Check out Frank’s Canoe the video on Tim Gallaway’s YouTube, Kayak to the Sea. To catch the next installment from Tim’s South Shore kayak expedition, become a free or paid subscriber below.
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Frank’s Canoe, the video
Guest Writer Tim Gallaway
Tim began his kayaking career as a guide and ACA instructor at Woods & Water Ecotours in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan when he was in college. He cut his rough water teeth on the rocky shores of Lake Superior and Lake Huron and quickly took to Greenland style paddling. In the summer of 2018 Tim traveled to Greenland to compete in the National Qajaq Championships and has a completed vlog series about his travels. In 2021 he completed a personal goal of a paddling expedition along the Michigan shoreline of Lake Superior and Lake Huron and has his sights on bigger expeditions in the next few years.
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