Giant voyageur canoes coming to a lake near you
Richard Wells and Eric Dysarczyk build canoes. The boats they’re constructing aren’t like the 16 or 17 footers you see on lakes and rivers. Compared to those, these are fiberglass giants – 34 feet long and designed to carry 22 paddlers. When my neighbor, Sallie Childs, told me about the project, I had to see it for myself. Sallie, a retired college professor of outdoor education from Lake Superior State University is one of a group of volunteers assisting Wells and Dysarcxyk in the canoe building project out at Wells’ farm located north of Lake City.
While the crew was getting ready to work, Wells gave me a tour. In the horse barn, which currently serves as the production center, there’s two boats. One is just a shell still sitting in the mold. Another is in the process of getting the trim and gunnels put on. The third canoe was out in the yard being prepared to be painted. The project is labor intensive. Wells told me that It takes a hundred C-clamps to hold the gunnels in place while the adhesive dries. The work is all in-house. With help from other volunteers, they do it all – fashioning the thwarts, seats, and gunnels as well as crafting 20 paddles. The paddles,made of lightweight cedar, are based on the design used by the Michigan Ojibwa tribe.
Dysarczyk, pointing to a stack of boards leaning up against the side of the barn, told me that, “The wood comes from nearby forests and is processed at a local lumber mill. The only thing we will have to buy that’s not made in Michigan is the life jackets.”
When I asked Wells about what got him thinking about building canoes, he replied. “I saw my first one of these big canoes at an event in Ontario put on by the Lake Superior Watershed Conservancy (LSWC). I thought ‘how cool it would be to actually have one of these and be able to put it on our local lakes.’” When Wells inquired about getting the plans for building a canoe, his search took him to Ralph Friess, a canoe builder out of Chicago. Friess explained that he was getting out of canoe building so Richard Wells decided to build them himself. To get started, Todd Tyler and Dave Cadwell created a mold for the boat hulls and worked with Wells and Dysarczk teaching them how to make fiberglass canoes.
The day I was there, the goal was to paint one of the canoe hulls, using a mixture of paints put together by Dean Sandell, to replicate the look of birch bark. Although the building material was fiberglass, the canoe’s design is based on the birch bark voyageur canoes used three hundred years ago by the French fur trade in North America.
To get the canoe off the ground and onto a platform, Wells used a front end loader. It took six of us just to tip the boat over so the loader could reach under and pick it up. Theses boats are not fragile. They’re designed for rough use.
Then using sandpaper, we began to roughen the outer surface so the paint would adhere to it. The group that were working that day would toil nearly 12 hours carefully applying the paint so that it would look like birch bark.
Wells hopes to launch their first canoe in Lake Mitchell or Cadillac around May 21st. By summer, the boat building operation will vacate the horse barn and move into an 40 X 80 pole building on Well’s property. The new facility will be winterized so production can continue throughout the year.
When I asked Wells what made him decide to dedicate himself to building these giant canoes, he said, “We live in the Great Lake State, our pristine waters are a treasure. I just want others to have a chance to experience the beauty of the lakes and the purity of the water. I can’t think of a better way to accomplish this than by getting people into these canoes. Our goal is make these boats available so visitors to parks, camps, and lake shore communities will have access to them.
As more specifics become known about upcoming launch of the voyageur canoe, I will pass on that information. It should be quite an event to see.
Canoe photo caption:
When moving a canoe this large, a front end loader is an asset. Photo by Dave Foley
There is a lot of surface area to sand or paint on a canoe that is 34 feet long. Photo by Dave Foley
