We bought a canoe!!!

We were not in the market for a canoe but within one week I heard about Backcountry Custom Canoes in two separate places (overheard a woman talking about them at an info session at Sail and read an article in Canoe Routes). Jon builds the canoes in Guelph (my town!) so we went for an impromptu test paddle. 

Welp, that was the end of our, "we'll just rent indefinitely, we don't need to own a canoe" mindset. We got the Laker canoe that Jon had already built. It's 36 lbs and paddles beautifully. It's faaaast!

Jon's boats are totally different from anything I've seen in the wild. They most remind me of the old Inuit seal-skin kayaks I saw at the Canadian Canoe museum. It's a wooden frame with a ballistic nylon skin that's been heat shrinked to the frame. He says they are just as durable as kevlar and having watched Camper Christina's youtube videos where she treats them less than delicately (kinda like I treat my own stuff), we're pretty confident in the durability.