Lake Michigan in a Dugout: June 2015

Sunday, June 21, 2015

The Adventure Continues...1/5 done.

You've been waiting for us to tell you the next adventure for awhile now...Well the time has finally come to spill the idea for at least one of our next big dreams. We have recently applied for a $10,000 grant that could help us make this dream a success. Now we need your votes everyday until July 21st! Please VOTE HERE!

My best friend, Amy Lukas, and I dream of finishing what we started 3 years ago: we wish to circle the entirety of the Great Lakes. In 2012, we circumnavigated Lake Michigan in my handmade dugout sailing canoe in 93 days. We didn’t know it then, but this was the beginning of something bigger. We started asking ourselves, “What if we kept going?” We plan to complete this incredible journey in our usual fashion: using creativity, ingenuity, and humor to succeed on our own terms in unconventional ways. On our nonstop multi-modal journey, we’ll adapt to the vast array of conditions we encounter by paddling the dugout, kayaking, SUPing, tandem biking, hiking, snowshoeing, cross-country skiing, rowing, and sailing with the seasons. We would travel through 8 states, 2 Canadian provinces, and pass over 35,000 islands. There is a proposed plan to make this route into the longest continuous marked trail in the world. Consisting of more than 9,500mi of shoreline, the Great Lakes Trail would be 5 times longer than the AT and 4 times longer than the PCT. Traveling such a distance of freshwater coastline could amount to 350-400 days in an ever-evolving environment. This all started because I couldn’t afford to buy a boat and things snowballed from there. We’re 1/5 of the way to our dream, but we know we can’t finish on pennies and scraps. With your support, we know we can do this. Otherwise, this turns back into a whispered dream and we’ll always wonder, “What if…”

Sunrise. Day 52 of 93 going 1200mi around Lake Michigan in our 300lb handmade dugout sailing canoe. The final four Great Lakes await us.

Help us out by voting everyday HERE!

https://www.wishpond.com/lp/718142/entries/38262371

Saturday, June 6, 2015

Walnut Ink First Friday Event and Music/Documentary Screening Extraordinaire on June 12th!

We are super excited to be joining Walnut Ink Projects for a film screening event next Friday, June 12th! Walnut Ink Projects is an innovative and creative gallery and working space in the downtown arts district of Michigan City, Indiana. It's one of our favorite local galleries to venture into from time to time and we are ecstatic to collaborate on an event with them.

We were able to promote the upcoming event by putting Makeba on display outside the gallery for Michigan City's First Fridays event last night.

Many people stopped by to check out our unique craft and talk to us about next week's music and film event.

We are happy to say that Naomi Marie will be coming down to play music next Friday before the film is shown. Musician Naomi Marie, who we met on our Lake Michigan trip when we stopped in Racine, Wisconsin, allowed us to use her songs as the backdrop for our documentary. Her vibe and words meshed perfectly with our footage, plus we love that we met her on our actual adventure!

A little bit about our lovely musician for the documentary and for this special evening:

Fueled by honest wonder and countless cups of coffee, singer/songwriter Naomi Marie writes of love, loss and life’s oscillating adventures. Performing thoughtful, acoustic-folk-pop songs in cafes, intimate theaters and local venues, she is an active musical contributor all along the 3^rd Coast of Lake Michigan.

Website: http://www.naomimariemusic.org
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/naomimariemusic
See a video of Naomi performing here!

Our documentary will be screened in full following some tunes from Naomi Marie. Amy and Mary will be around for all of your questions and Makeba will also be in attendance for the evening:

Trailer of Lake Michigan in a Dugout: The Documentary

You can expect to hear some fantastic music, watch a pretty great documentary, drink some drinks, mingle with an eclectic group of people, and have a whole lot of fun. Come on out to Walnut Ink at 5:30pm on June 12th!

PechaKucha and our scouting Kank-speed-ition

Back on May 14th, we participated in a PechaKucha Night hosted by PechaKucha St. Joseph/Benton Harbor. PechaKucha Nights are informal and fun gatherings where creative people get together and share their ideas, works, thoughts, holiday snaps -- just about anything, really. The platform originated in Tokyo and you can now find PechaKucha events in over 700 cities around the world. We are excited to see such an awesome concept take place close to home!

The event was held at The Livery, a local microbrewery that used to be a livery stable for horses. The location was fun and the crowd was lively! There were 9 presenters throughout the evening, each presenting in true PechaKucha fashion - a simple presentation format where you show 20 images, each for 20 seconds. The images advance automatically and you talk along to the images. This took a lot of pre-planning for the presenters to get their talks to run smoothly in the miniscule amount of allotted time...

20 slides each projected on the screen for only 20 seconds!

It was harder that expected to tell our whole story in 6 minutes and 40 seconds. We kept the audience on the edge of their seats!

All of the evenings presenters. Each talk will eventually be found online at pechakucha.org!

Mary does awkward showcase pointing part-time if you're looking to hire. Thank you for organizing such a unique and community oriented event!

What could Amy possibly be doing? Looking for morels of course! We took some adventure hikes throughout northwest Indiana to see if we could find any of these elusive, delicious, springtime mushrooms.

Found one!

Found two! Found three!

Another recent adventure day took us south of Lake Michigan to the Kankakee River. No Makeba this time, just an old beat up Coleman canoe! We had been planning a paddling expedition for the entire length of the river - 133 miles - over the span of a few days. The Kankakee River National Water Trail is in the works, creating a designated national water trail from the headwaters near South Bend, Indiana, to where the Kankakee joins the Des Plaines River in Illinois. Plans fell through for the week we were planning on, but we still had one free day in our schedules so we decided to take one long paddling day to see how far we could make it.

This day turned into our scouting day for the possible full length river expedition someday. Our aim was to put in at the English Lake access point by the Yellow River and take out at the State Line bridge on the Indiana/Illinois border. This route would take us over 47 miles - we had to keep a pretty steady pace throughout the entire day to finish this kind of mileage!

We called this expedition day the Kank-speed-ition. We're pretty good at coming up with names if I do say so myself.

Look what Amy found - a completely intact deer skull with antlers on the bank of the river.

And look what else we found...can you see them?

Just passed Dunn's bridge we saw a Great Blue Heron fly high up into a tree. As we looked and listened closer we realized what we were looking at...about 14 Blue Heron nests with at least 1-2 Blue Herons sitting on each nest!

The area was loud with chirping baby Blue Herons! I wonder how many were truly up there.

One more baby bird for the day. As we stopped paddling for lunch, we soon found ourselves drifting in the current past a struggling baby bird. This little guy must have fallen out of his nest that was precariously made on a branch above the river - we quickly paddled over and Amy gently scooped him up on her paddle.