Historic Paddle Photos: Maliseet poling and and paddle pics

Nicholas Lolar Poling a Canoe on the Restigouche River, New Brunswick

NBM Collection (1987.17.674)

Running the Dawsonville Rapids, the Worst on the Restigouche River, New Brunswick

NBM Collection (1987.17.669)

Paddle Closeup

Modified pole garbage spear

This year, I was quite shocked at the amount of garbage and human-created debris polluting our cottage lake. Every quick jaunt in the canoe revealed sunken aluminum cans, floating plastic bottles, golf balls thoughtlessly shot into the lake for entertainment with the shoreline marred by abandoned debris of all kinds. I ended up signing up for a program called Clean Muskoka Together, a district wide initiative where volunteers are provided with safety gloves and specially marked bags for collecting recyclables and waste. These bags can then be left at various municipal waste stations at no cost for proper disposal.

As part of my own kit to tackle the garbage problem, I adapted a piece of homemade equipment to make extraction of items from the lake bottom a bit easier.  Back in 2017, I had made a 12 foot, two-piece canoe pole out of some spruce lumber and a carbon-fiber ferrule.

The top half of the canoe  pole contained the hollow, female end of the ferrule with a roughly 35 mm inner diameter.  This formed the basis for the spearing tip as a scrap piece of plumbing tubing fit nearly perfectly in this space. A bit of hockey tape was used to create a friction fit so that that this second inner tube is tight enough to hold but can also be removed to return the pole back to its original intended use. The actual metal spear tip was created with an old pair of emergency ice picks which I used to carry years ago when snowshoeing on frozen lakes in the area.  Mine were a similar set to his stock photo:

I removed the straps from the set and jammed one of the ice picks into the inner grey tube. The foam handle of the ice pick itself fit tightly within the diameter of the grey tubing for another friction fit. A bit more hockey tape and the whole thing was quite secure.

The second ice pick can be secured to cover the sharp point so I don't damage the canoe when the spear is not in use.

The spear worked great. Here it is in action collecting a sunken aluminum can...

The spear has also been useful to extract plastic bags tangled up on shoreline rocks and branches as well as broken fishing lures snagged on rocks. I was also able to extract a half buried, six foot long piece of vinyl siding from where a boathouse was under construction. It is likely this bit of debris was never retrieved from the lake when new siding was being put up. Here's a photo bringing the construction waste out from its watery grave....

On subsequent trips I removed floating real estate signs which had been nailed to trees and broken off, 2 five gallon buckets awash on the shoreline, a floating plastic kids chair, multiple abandoned floating toys, discarded rubber dock edging and even some sunken scrap metal.

But by far the most disappointing find was the incredulous amount of golf balls simply shot into the lake. While there is a lakeside golf course at one of the resorts where a small bay forms a water hazard, these balls were found in areas no where near the course and had obviously been shot into the lake for just the heck of it. Scooping the balls out required a proper golf ball retriever tool. In the end, a total of 46 were removed from multiple regions of the lake.

Online research into golf ball toxicity reveals that they take centuries  to degrade all while shedding irretrievable microplastics into the watershed.. Well before then,  heavy metals (especially zinc) leach from the inner core and add toxicity to the aquatic ecosystem, poisoning plants and fish. 

As part of final message to our cottage community, I laid out all the debris onto a tarp on our property so folks could visualize the unnecessary amount of human created rubbish just one person could remove if an effort was made. Hopefully folks will be more conscientious of their waste production. The final tally of litter collected in just 8 trips on the lake weighed a staggering  69.75 pounds! That's over 20 pounds heavier than the 14 foot cedar-canvas canoe used in the collection!

Items included:

• 3, five-gallon buckets
• 11 pounds of sunken scrap metal
• 6 foot piece of vinyl siding
• 46 golf balls
• 6 tennis balls 
• 35 sunken aluminum cans
• 13 single use plastic bottles
• 2, five-litre water jugs
• 2 glass wine bottles
• 31 feet of sunken line / rope
• broken real estate signs
• 2 waterlogged PFDs
• a punctured 2 person inflatable raft
• broken 40" foam bodyboard
• sunken buoys and rubber dock edging
• numerous bits of food wrappers, plastic bags, snagged fishing lures, bits of dock foam, punctured inflatable vinyl floaties, plastic beach toys

Calculations revealed I paddled approximately 66 km during these multiple trips effectively travelling 3 times the perimeter of the shoreline as part of the cleanup effort.

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How I Spent my Summer Holiday

Historic Photo: Sault St. Marie Poling Rapids

From this Ebay seller comes a steroview photo of a man poling up the rapids near Sault Ste. Marie. Just behind the poler is a paddle resting on the thwarts. The stout paddle shaft has a short, flattened bobble style grip ending.

Title: 7992 Breasting rapids at Sault Ste. Marie with an Indian guide 

Underwood & Underwood, New York, London, Toronto, Ottawa

Unfortunately, there is no date associated with the photo description, but the photographic company,
Underwood & Underwood, were major publishers of stereoscopic photos until 1920.

Historic Paddle Photo: Department of Mines Exploration Paddles

Found some more vintage pics from Archive.org. These two images are from 1904 Report of the Ontario Bureau of Mines. An exploration party in Northern Ontario were searching for coal and other mineral potentials in the Moose River Basin. The first image showcases the exploration party posing on shore with their gear...

Image Source Link 

The second includes a crew on the Upper Nettogami river poling their canoes. The canoe in front is a sturdy looking birchbark. Poling is hard enough to balance with a single person. Tough to imaging the skill of these canoemen working to tandem upriver...

Image Source Link 

Canoe Poling Art

Here's a nice bit of poling artwork that accompanied the article "The Sportsman Notebook - Climbing the Pole" by (Field and Stream March 1974). The brief write up was written by well known outdoorsman and canoeist, Bill Riviere.

In fact, the image might be an artist's rendition of Riviere himself. One of my favourite canoeing books is Pole, Paddle and Portage (A Complete Guide To Canoeing) authored by Riviere.

My hardcover copy was an ex-library book dated to 1964 and is missing the cover sleeve, but the inside of loaded with wonderful photos of Riviere in his trusty Chestnut Prospector. The chapter on poling features photographs of him confidently poling up rapids, snubbing down some swifts and peacefully poling through some stillwater with a packbasket in the canoe and a pipe in his mouth.

Billy Rioux Canoe Poling

Billy Rioux is a hilarious and adventurous character with a love of history and some serious bushcraft skills! He recently posted a video of canoe poling on a Quebec river. Thought I'd repost here as well...

Billy's channel has some additional vids that make great viewing. They include making a basic leather tumpline, a crooked knife with an antler handle, even a great one on making a functional emergency canoe with a poly tarp! He's also experimented with building a spruce bark canoe and a dugout from a huge Poplar trunk. Awesome stuff! I've subscribed to Billy's channel and look forward to learning more from his wonderful adventures.

A quick thanks to Robin on the  CanoeTripping.net forums for directing me to Billy's great YouTube videos. 

Vintage Canoe Poling Photo (Florida)

A beautiful image of canoe poling in Florida from the American Museum of Natural History Image Collection...

"Harrison canoe poling, Cape Sable, Florida, 1906,"

Dimock, Julian A. (Julian Anthony), 1873-1945,

American Museum of Natural History Library

AMNH Image Collection, Image # 48388

http://images.library.amnh.org/digital/items/show/11655