It’s still a little cold for most people to be paddling in Wisconsin since most of the water is still frozen.  But it won’t be long now.  Temperatures going above freezing and the shrinking snow piles incite almost terminal cases of spring fever.  The only real cure for paddlers is the coming of warmer air [...]

I was going to work on the fourth video in my series on different types of kayaks, but as I was doing my usual check of blogs and Facebook this morning, it became clear that this might be the time to give another reminder about the dangers of paddling in cold water.  Dick Silberman’s blog [...]

I know that I tend to focus mostly on gear for sea kayakers in many of my posts.  Partly that is because I do a lot of sea kayaking myself, and partly because there is a lot of gear used by sea kayakers.  Recreational paddlers often get overlooked when it comes to gear discussions.  I [...]

In my last post, I stressed the dangers and risks associated with paddling in cold water.  I hope that no one feels like a am being an elitist, “holier than thou” kind of kayaker when I tell people that they shouldn’t be out on really cold water without wearing a drysuit.  My intent is to [...]

In my last post, I mentioned a garment called a “rash guard”.  Apparently, this is not a piece of clothing that everyone is familiar with.  I think it might be wise to include some definitions in  my post today.
Rash Guard – a short or long sleeve shirt made of relatively light-weight lycra material intended to [...]

A couple of the students in my class today referred to my previous blog post as the “scary blog”.  Well now that I have your attention, I’ll move on to the particulars of how to dress in order to avoid the kinds of problems I talked about in the “scary blog”.
The first thing you need [...]