After my wife and I went canoeing in northern Minnesota a few months ago — on a lake near the town of Ely, where we had gone to visit the giant neutrino detector of the Soudan Underground Mine State Park — I became strangely obsessed with canoeing.
For a land-bound Brooklynite, however, it’s not as easy as you might think to just up and hit the high tide in your own boat and go paddling around the city for a spell, so I’ve learned to live vicariously — primarily by drooling over amazing canoeing equipment online, at premier retailers like Sanborn Canoe Co., from Winona, Minnesota.
Just look at the Billy Magee.
Their absolutely gorgeous paddles are thus today’s craftmanship and colour combos alone, these are unnecessarily high on my want list, as I don’t even own a canoe and I would have very little to do with a pair of these beauts except gaze in awe at every detail. But that’s what I would do.
Like staring at the handles of the Gunflint.
Or the colours of the Mufferaw and the Gitchi Gummi.
They aren’t cheap — let’s be realistic — but they’re only slightly to the north of your average sports outlet. And just try to resist the Coddington or the Dalles des Morts or the Hivernant.
Hopefully next summer, in some insane alternate future where everything is awesome, Gizmodo will be reporting to you live and direct from the middle of a lake somewhere, Sanborn paddles in hand, drifting peacefully and quietly across the waters during the world’s most relaxing editorial retreat, whittling wooden ducks at night and telling tall tales of Facebook privacy settings, describing GIFs to one another around campfires, maintaining our boats under starlight, and, slowly but surely — unexpectedly, for sure — no one will even have noticed the change, but we will have morphed into the world’s most paddle-happy canoe blog, never found more than 50 feet from the shore of a lake… [Sanborn Canoe Co.]
