Inflatable Kayak Blog

Jim Schutze is a writer from Texas who purchased a Puffin Kayak from PortableKayaks.com. He was kind enough to allow us to share the story of his paddling trip to Quetico Provincial Park in Ontario in August of 2009.

We planned our six-man canoe trip into Quetico Provincial Park in Ontario for a year before assembling in Ely, Minnesota at the end of August, 2009. Quetico, the Canadian half of the boundary waters canoe area, controls entry much more strictly than the American side. You have to make reservations months in advance just to get in. Then you must persuade the Canadians to give you a “remote area border crossing permit.” You had better hope you have never had a drunk driving conviction, or they won’t give you the pass. (That eliminated some of my favorite candidates for the trip.) Then on your day of entry you must keep an appointment with provincial park authorities at a remote crossing point on the international border.

Our group – four old guys and a middle aged guy — was thrown for a loop when one member had to bail at the last minute because of a blown-up knee. He was to have been my canoe-mate. The normal solution would have been for three of us to go out in a Minnesota three-man canoe. I just didn’t want to do that. Some of my distaste for the idea was based on a misunderstanding of the “Minny Three,” which I thought would weigh a third more than the two-man Kevlars. Our age range in the group was 57 to 83, not counting the guide. I thought the three-man would be difficult to portage. I was wrong. They weigh only a few pounds more, maybe 47 pounds instead of 43 or 44. But, ehh … what can I say? Rub-a-dub-dub. I still think three men in one tub is too many. So I told everybody I had this kayak I could bring on the plane. I did not tell them that I had just purchased my Pakboat Puffin 12 from Portablekayaks.com and that it had never been in the water. They only learned that fact as the sound of the outfitter’s motorboat was fading in the distance, with the wilderness looming ahead. I detected signs of consternation.

I zipped the deck off the Puffin, pulled everything out of my 45-pound portage pack, stuffed all of it into the boat and in deck bags, and away we went. We had headwinds to buck, white caps and cross currents coming out of the river we were trying to get up into. The guide looked plenty concerned about me and my boat. The end of the story is this: the Puffin 12 did a yeoman job of carrying me out into Quetico. Especially when it was heavily loaded, the boat handled all kinds of water and wind very well.

Quetico is thousands of lakes separated by rocky portage paths, with granite shelves and outcroppings lurking beneath the surface of the water everywhere. I did my best to protect the hull of the Puffin, but I couldn’t avoid a few bumps and scrapes, which it shrugged off with barely a scratch mark. At one key point, the guide had to get out and line the two canoes up a rapids by rope. I was able to paddle up the rapids with one small assist from the guide where I had a tight corner to make. I think I would have made it on my own had he not helped. On the way home I shot the rapids while the others tramped through the woods.

Portaging was a challenge. I took the deck off and tried to carry the Puffin over my head, which meant on my head. A younger man might have managed this better. I found that at 63 years of age I was not comfortable clambering over rocky trails wearing a 21-pound hat. Eventually, however, I devised a system by which I carried the boat on a shoulder, balanced by a bungee cord to one of the forward d-rings. I tied socks around the frame joints where they dug into my shoulders. It didn’t occur to me until I was on the plane home that I should have carried the boat while wearing my portage pack, which has thick padded shoulder straps, instead of carrying it with a smaller lighter duffel bag in one hand. My fellow travelers got tired of waiting for me to pack and unpack the boat at portages. One of them wisely suggested I not do that and just dump my Duluth pack in their canoe instead. That worked well and speeded up the portages, although my boat handled less well, at first, without the weight.

Every boat and paddler must come together over just the right stroke, and I didn’t work that out until the last days of the trip. When I did – a longer stroke, sweeping back closer to the hull – the handling problems went away and I made good speed with good tracking. Before I got the stroke down, I had trouble keeping up with the canoes, sometimes lagging a full lake behind them, which meant they had to wait for me at the portages. Once I got my stroke, I kept up easily.

As gentle as I tried to be with the boat, I still dropped it and banged it on trees and bumped it on boulders on the portages. No element of the frame ever popped out of place. It sat upside down in the sun for three days at our base camp, after which the sponsons were deflated very slightly. I pumped them back up, and they remained taut.

I got lots of comments from other canoeists, mainly along the line of, “What is that?”
All in all, I was very pleased with the Puffin 12, extremely proud of it for carrying me and my gear so well on a nine-day expedition with lots and lots of portaging. I am tempted to go back out into Quetico on solo trips, which most people do by paddling a Prism one-man Kevlar or similar canoe. But I sure am fond of my Puffin 12, and I’m thinking seriously of trying a solo in it.

The other question I got from the other people who saw me carrying the Puffin kayak on the portages was, “How much does that thing weigh?” When I said, “‘21 pounds’ (without the deck),” I could see obvious envy on their faces – especially the ones anywhere near my age. Envy and a big light bulb. I predict in years ahead there will be more gray-beards in Pakboats in Quetico. I would say, “more girls,” also, but all the girls we saw out there were stronger than us.