Finally got to take the baby canoe on its first trip, whereupon I promptly fell through the old cane seat. Hm. Since this was a camping trip with a fair amount of stuff that one might want to attach to a canoe, I was also a little bothered by the lack of bow and stern thwarts. Fortunately, for that there is “drill”.
“Ow, my butt” – Me.
Like a lot of ’80s-’00s canoes, it technically has a handle, but this arrangement sucks for tying to the car and there’s no place to hang a throw bag and whatever quickly. I had made little loops of line in these holes, but that’s hokey.
I can appreciate a cane seat, but I feel like a teal 25 year-old canoe isn’t the place for it. Rather than re-caning the one it had, I just used a spare that I got for my Wenonah Spirit II and thankfully hadn’t yet chopped down to size. I don’t really have any interest in using the nice backrest part, so this’ll do fine.
And for the bow and stern, I put in these rather nice handles. They were about six bucks a pop from Ed’s Canoe. They had about 2.5″ of extra material on each side, so there was a lot of flexibility on placement. Of course, for my purposes, the closer to the bow/stern the better.
Much better. I’ll need to refinish the factory thwart so that the woodwork is at least bicolor rather than tricolor, but that sounds like a January project to me. I now dub this “acceptable”.