This is the underside of the canoe carved and painted by Steven Point when he was Lieutenant Governor of British Columbia. The canoe now sits in Victoria’s Legislative Library which I visited on a recent trip. The canoe is carved with the shovel nose, eyes, scales and tail of the legendary monster Slahkum from Cultus Lake. It was presented as a gift…
I’m always amazed by the enthusiasm of the paddlers at One Mile Lake outside Pemberton. Members of this small community, practicing on a tiny lake, have consistently won Junior national and international dragon boat races for 15 straight years and are the team to beat. Perhaps their secret lies in unusual training practices such as getting a water skier up…
The Salish “war canoes” have come to the North Shore again as part of their weekend series of races throughout the summer in the Salish Sea area. This weekend they are at Ambleside Beach in West Vancouver; next weekend they will be at Cates Park in North Vancouver. Long narrow dugout or strip canoes that hold from one to eleven…
On Sunday, I helped with the re-launch of George Dyson’s Mount Fairweather. Eric Startup and I paddled over from outside Cates Park in North Vancouver to the beach in Belcarra Park near the tree where Dyson had lived for three years while researching, designing and building the world’s biggest kayak. The original launch of the 48 foot, more than 300…
I had the privilege of attending a blessing ceremony for the paddlers and canoe about to head off on the “Spirit of the Coast” paddle from Vancouver to southern Alaska on Sunday at the Kwantlen First Nation Longhouse near Fort Langley. Chris Cooper, who has travelled the BC coast 6 times by canoe and spent the last few summers paddling…
I passed another important milestone with my new book this week…the launch! Held at North Vancouver’s Community History Centre on Wednesday afternoon, the launch was a chance for me to thank the people in attendance who had helped me get to this stage of my journey with the book. They included: Daniel Francis, Ken Gill, Franz Scherubl and Eric Startup who…
Hello world! This is my first real blog post and an important milestone in my transition as an author. In 2011, I decided to write a book about canoes and British Columbia as a result of the positive feedback I had received from talks I had given on the subject over several previous years. I learned how to structure a…