I am leaving in a few days for a whole month in North Norway and Finland. The main feature of our trip is to canoe 3 rivers. Three guys in 15 ft solo PakCanoes – and one in a 14-footer that I saved for my own use when we stopped making the 140. We will put in as high in each river as you can float a boat. Actually, in the first river we will put in a few miles higher than you can paddle – except intermittently. As we work our way down each of the rivers, we will get into some excellent and fairly technical whitewater in a pretty spectacular part of the largest wilderness in Europe.
The trip is not all that long – just 170 miles or so, but the rivers drop well over 3000 feet from start to finish! I will tell you all about it when I get back about the end of July.
One special point of interest in the equipment: We are planning to change the Puffin kayaks from PVC to Polyurethane fabrics. Our first samples seem great, and we will do as much testing as we can this summer. But we need to put the new material through a real torture test – so I will paddle a canoe made of the new stuff on our Lapland trip. We will drag the canoes across the tundra, bang into rocks and lower the canoes by ropes down cliffs – all to make sure next year’s Puffins will be even better.
I can’t wait!
