Paddling Gear You Can Make For The Do-It-Yourself And Poverty-Strricken Paddler

By Richard Johnson

Kayaking is NOT a cheap sport. Unlike hiking which you can do by tossing some water bottles and a few sandwiches in your kids school backpack, Kayaking requires the purchase of a boat ($500-$1500), a PFD ($50-$150) and a paddle ($50-$100) at the minimum! So it’ll cost you between $600 and $2k just to start the sport.

Then by the time you toss in all that extra gear you should have like dry-bags, paddle leashes, tow-lines and sop on, your support gear may very well equal the initial investment.

BUT, there is hope!

For we-who-are-poor, but enjoy the sport, this book tells you how to make inexpensive paddling gear from junk you’d normally throw away! Filled with almost a hundred ideas for kayak and camping gear covering 68 chapters and illustrated with 31 drawings and designs plus 274 photos, this book will aid the do-it-yourselfer to make kayak and camping gear that is, in many places, better than what you can purchase.

So dif out your tool-box, dust off your apron, wander through the alleys and be ready to brag about what kind of camping and kayaking gear you have made!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Richard Johnson
• Release date: May 25, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476281735

Richard Johnson

Descended from Irish Nobles and a Barbary Coast Pirate, my interests are, by breeding, strange.After 28 years as a USAF Civil Engineer building hospitals and schools around the world, I find that knowing how to say "Please" and "Thank you" in the native language and being polite to be the best PR a person can have.I've been writing since the 1970's though only recently seeking a mass market for my material. I am famous in my own circles so Smashwords is an experiment in expanding myself.I am a single father who enjoys Martial Arts, Kayaking, Geocaching, Astronomy, reading, building things, inventing, brewing Mead, traveling and dressing up. I am also a Third Degree Gardnerian High Priest (Witch) of Desert Henge Coven in Tucson.Likes include a good pizza and Godiva Chocolate.Anything else I should include? Let me know.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Note: Deliana, my ex-gf gave me this t-shirt.

Paddle explained in the next book.

BTW, getting into and out of a kayak in a kilt is a You-tube event!

Every year at the Arizona Paddlefest at Lake Pleasant, I give the lecture that turned into this book. Women love the talk because I give it while wearing my kilt. Men love it because I give them a chance to become handymen and impress the wife. Kids love it because I say ‘poop’ a lot. And the facilitator’s wife loves it because I am funny. Plus I look hot in a kilt!

The idea is that I collect whatever junk people throw away! Then I convert it to usable things.

I bought Shea a Coleman folding hammock one day and while at the TAWN Fall-Festival (a local pagan event), some kids were jumping on it and broke a strut!

Shea commented, There goes the hammock! Better throw it away and buy a new one!

[BLEEP] NO! Not after I spent $180 on that thing! Did I mention that I am poor? I looked at the hammock and saw that only one strut had snapped. So I took a broken folding captain’s chair that I had in the back yard, cut a piece off, drilled out the rivets, bolted it to the hammock and did the following:

I converted trash into something useable.

I saved a landfill.

I saved myself $180.

I proved that fixing is better than tossing!

This is my philosophy! Junk is simply something that you cannot use right now.

Friends are always dropping off those broken captain’s chairs. I fix them with parts salvaged from other chairs and use the extras parts to make other things.

So if you hate yard sales, swap meets and cannot repair a broken lamp, this book is not for you. BUT! If you are handy with the basic tools and believe in recycling, then this book is exactly what you have been dreaming about.

TAWN has a recycling program but I laugh at them. Recycling is not just tossing aluminum cans into the blue can for remanufacturing. Recycling is repairing broken gear and repairing it again and again until it can no longer be fixed. THEN using those parts to repair something else.

THIS is what this book is about. Converting trash to useful items.

I am going to make a couple assumptions and a few statements here at the beginning.

First of all, I am going to assume that you own a paddlecraft (be it a kayak or canoe or raft) or a backpack and tent and have some experience in these fields. Maybe you go out one day a month for a day hike or a day paddle on the local town lake. Maybe you are an advanced expert who spends every month on the water circumnavigating Greenland and paddling over Niagra Falls because you like white water and know 15 different Eskimo Rolls or you think hiking the Continental Divide is a great way to kill time. Or maybe you are like me, some guy who just likes to go for a weekend camping on the water for a day or two and relax in Nature.

Thus I am going to assume that you have an idea of what gear you need or want to take into the Wild! And I am going to assume that when you look at my pitiful drawings below, you will laugh and say he labeled *** wrong! What a dweeb! because you know what all these things are.

I am also assuming that you, like me, are poor. Yes, we spend hundreds of dollars on a kayak or canoe, and hundreds of dollars on a PFD & Paddle (see, you should know what those two words mean) and hundreds of dollars on an ultra-light backpack tent so with all your liquid capital tied up in your base gear and gas to actually use the thing, finding a cheap way to add gear is a good idea.

All I am doing is offering a few suggestions that I and others have found to be useful. Although most of these ideas relate to Kayaking, many also work very well for hiking and camping.

***

The statement I am offering is this!

I AM NOT AN EXPERT!

I’ve done a few river races, lost them all. White water over Class-III terrifies me. I give talks on kayaks but always learn something new from some smart-ass in the audience. And I own a fleet of boats that I am happy to loan out to anyone who will pay gas to get me to the water. I’ve done day trips and multi-day trips. I’ve car-camped by a lake and I’ve paddled up a river with everything I thought I needed in my boat. I have also had the Lt get us lost in the desert during a three-hour patrol and I had to get us all back to base safely and alive! I have slept in a tree with an M-16 in my hands and I’ve done the travel-trailer thing and I’ve slept on my motorcycle in the desert behind a bush. I take my kids and friends camping and hiking and we always manage to be comfortable and have fun, or not comfortable and miserable. BUT, I am NOT an expert.

All I am is some nerd who went hiking in High School to avoid the jocks who beat me up and later became the guy who started paddling because he needed something to do with his kids. And being a single father with a dead-beat ex-wife who paid NOTHING for her kids, I am always looking for ways to have fun on a shoestring.

Plus I am an engineer by trade (I spent 2 ½ decades as an Air Force Civil Engineer, building airbases with no equipment or supplies so I’m good at building things from junk. Ask me about the hot-tub we made in Honduras.) so I enjoy the challenge of looking at the junk I have saved and asking myself, what can I do with all this other than filling a landfill? I like to recycle, a theme you will see throughout this opus. Plus it is a great father-daughter bonding experience to go out to my driveway with my kid and build gear together.

***

I am also going to make the assumption that you have an average intelligence and at least some survival instincts so will avoid doing something stupid enough to get yourself or someone else killed. Thus, if my idea sounds dangerous to you, DON’T DO IT! We all have a line! Be aware of yours and don’t assume that mine is the same. I cannot swim but rarely wear my PFD. That is stupid and dangerous but it’s my life (and chronic depression since my divorce) and if you feel that I am dangerous, don’t paddle with me!

In other words, take responsibility for your own life and safety.

**Do NOT operate a table saw unless you know how and have all the necessary safety gear on!

**Do NOT operate a sewing machine unless you can keep your fingers away from the needle!

**Do NOT plug a drill into a power socket and drill holes in your kayak when it is raining!

**Do NOT… you get the idea.

If you are going to do ANYTHING, get the basic training on how to use that tool and how to be safe using that tool or ask someone else to help you.

In Central America we were building a [classified] structure for the [classified] when one carpenter who was cutting lumber by resting it on his boot, saw sparks and his skill-saw stopped working. He had cut through the power cord! When we lifted the lumber, we saw he had also cut through his steel-toe boots and sock, the saw stopping as it brushed his foot. Had he NOT severed that cord, he would HAVE severed his foot.

So be as SAFE as you can. Or be as safe as you desire.

I am not a Safety-Nazi so will allow you to be as safe as you want to be.

But don’t go crying to your attorney because you built a campfire on the deck of your kayak and set the boat on fire in the middle of a lake. Yes, someone did that on Lake Patagonia a few years ago. And we all do things just as stupid and dangerous!

It’s your life so you decide. Not me.

Back to Contents

FORWARD

All you need to paddle is a boat (kayak or canoe or raft) a paddle (single or double bladed) and a PFD (Type I-IV). And most people are happy with that. They go out for a day, relax, come in and quit at lunch. And they go home relaxed and happy. Most of my paddle-buddies are that kind.

Good for you!

But some of us are longer distance paddlers, hitting the put-in shortly before sunrise and returning at sunset or a few days later.

And some of us are Gear-Junkies! We like to be prepared. My daughter tells me that I pack as if a tornado will lift me off the lake and dump me in the middle of the ocean or desert. I like to think of it as listening to the boy scouts. Be Prepared! (I think Tom Lehr wrote a song about that) Which is why I carry an overnight kit in my car. Who knows? Someday I’ll go on a date and NOT be stood-up so a change of underwear and toothbrush will be useful.

When you buy a kayak, you almost always get a ‘base model’. A hull, maybe if you are lucky some bungie-cord on the bow or stern and not much else. Then you have to worry about gear to go into that boat or backpack! And that gear costs BUCKS!!! $150 for a light-weight cooking system is a lot of money! Well, I am not the kind of guy who can leave anything alone. Nor am I wealthy! (consider $900 for a boat, $150 for a decent PFD, $100 for a Paddle... how many people can afford to spend another $1000 plus for misc gear for a sport they do only occasionally?) So I look at the junk laying around my house and ask myself, What can I make? or I look at the really neat gear in the stores and think, I can make that! Basically, I am the guy REI hates!

So on weekends when I have nothing to do and cannot afford to go paddling (or during the winter for you Northern Folks), I drag the kayak into the living room, pop some lesbian vampire porn into the DVD-player …

(no plot so I can ignore most of it and occasionally glance up for the good parts without loosing sight of the movie)

…. and have fun making gear.

The result is not pretty, BUT, I have a boat that makes me happy to paddle and gear that does the job I need it to do! So here are a few thoughts of what I did and why, in case you are in a fix-it-up mood. Be aware that I invented very few of these. I listen to people, modify if necessary and add their thoughts to my own. And! Unlike the people who review gear in the mags, I have actually tried out almost everything I say here! So it works or not, and I’ll be honest with you.

By the WAY! I am assuming that you have the basic skills and tools required to do this. If you are the kind of klutz that sews your thumb to your shirt (yes, I did that on my sewing machine), perhaps you should ask for help doing these projects.

I am also assuming that you enjoy yard sales, swap meets and thrift store because these three places are the basis for my work. If you think a thrift store is ‘trashy’, remember that if you lock that door to that thrift store for 20 years, when you unlock the door, you can change the name to ‘antique store’ and triple the prices easily.

I should point out that I do not hate the camping stores. I shop at Summit Hut as often as finances allow and I am a member of REI and drool over the Cabela’s catalogue. I simply am too poor (retired USAF, deadbeat ex, single father, etc) to buy all the neat gear I would love to