For travelers with canoes, a 20 rod portage is a fairly painless operation in which you make a couple trips down the trail, drop your portage bag in the boat, and continue on your way.
Not so easy for Pit Boss and his kayak, though. If you’re me with your trusty Feathercraft kayak, you look at a 20 rod portage and start brooding about the time, tedium, and sweaty effort you’re about to invest. More than once in this situation, contemplating a portage, I have turned around and manufactured reasons to just stay on the lake I’m on (“The fishing is just fine here.” “I bet there are great camps in that sheltered area just around the point.”) – or, more honestly, I have at times admitted that I’m too damned old and worn out to carry all my shit three times over a hill and repack it again, only to unpack it yet once more when time comes to make camp.
These three factors make portages harder with my kayak:
Efficient loading of my quite hollow Feathercraft Kahuna involves using numerous small to medium dry bags arranged carefully inside the boat, instead of one or two big portage bags like you’d use in a canoe. I gather them together into a bigger bag for the actual carrying over land, but it always ends up being two trips in the awkwardly packed bag, plus one more trip for the boat.
While removing the dry bags from the packed boat is inconvenient and strenuous (picture reaching way back into the stern to retrieve a fuel can, a camp chair, and your crocs), unloading is a relatively quick process. Loading back up, however, has to be executed carefully and slowly to get the load to fit efficiently into the limited space. It can seem to take forever when you are spoiling to get going while being chowed by mosquitos.
Carrying a Feathercraft kayak over your head (while presumably carrying a backpack at the same time) is just about impossible; you can’t see enough of the trail with your head buried inside the cockpit that way, and you invite slips and falls and breakage of gear and possibly even parts of your person, either of which would be bad news on a multi-day trip in the wilderness. After trying some foam pads and such, I’ve settled on a sling-like strap that helps a bit but still lets the coaming dig into my side and hip on a portage of any length.
But you can’t get much of anywhere in the watery wilderness without at least a little bit of portaging, so I do of course do it. One time in the boundary waters, sitting on the rocks at the top of a nice, steep, slippery portage of 20 rods, having a snack to fortify myself for the upcoming chore, I watched a curving yellow shape appear and grow larger up the trail. This shape was of course a canoe, and under the canoe was a grey-haired man with a backpack. With a brief greeting, he walked by and quite gingerly placed the boat onto the shallow water and then carefully lowered the backpack into it. He held the boat there with the end of a paddle and shared some typical pleasantries with me – the weather, how’s the fishing, headed far today?
As he prepared to sit down and launch, I couldn’t stop myself from blurting, “That’s it? This is all your gear?”
“It is! Traveling fairly light I guess.”
“How heavy is that canoe?”
“Around 27 pounds.”
It feels ungenerous now, but I actually only about half believed him. Many of the aluminum canoes you see in the boundary waters are closing in on twice the 35 pound weight of my Feathercraft, but this canoe had me beat by nearly 10 pounds.
Before he could escape, I extracted from him the make of this feather-light canoe: it was a Northstar Magic. Consciously, I took a note not to forget this name. Subconsciously, as I watched this lucky fellow paddle away after making 10 minutes’ work of a portage that was about to eat up about an hour of my day over three trips, I resolved to git me one of them magically light boats and try doing a boundary waters trip like most sane folk do it: in a canoe, not a kayak.
And this is where I gratefully find myself, after more than two years of putting it off: at last, the happy owner of a magically light canoe. It was delivered in mid-November, which is pretty close to the time of year when I have the least real use for a canoe. Nonetheless, I quickly got it on some water at Elkhorn Slough a day after picking it up, and then took it out the next day after that to introduce it to its future friends, the fish!
What can we say; you gotta start somewhere.
There’s a lot of prep still to do before this boat travels with me out to Ontario this summer, to fulfill its real purpose on boundary waters trips. We need a rod holder, a portage yoke, portage bags (I think I will need two for my usual program, one large one small), a comfortable seat cover (let us not speak of the blister I got while casting flies for three hours), a cover for the boat itself, and so on. But I’m very happy to say that the first step has finally been made in the direction of more and better portages. After spending so much on the boat and gear, I’m going to feel like I have to do it!!