Lake Michigan in a Dugout: Quiet Water Symposium

This past weekend we attended the Quiet Water Symposium at Michigan State University. It is an annual event that is centered around non-motorized outdoor sports, especially water sports. We were invited to do a presentation on our trip. We also got to walk around the show with our friend Tim and meet some pretty cool people.

The event included many displays of various watercrafts. Check out these beautiflul wooden boats!

Here we are giving our talk - We enjoyed speaking to an audience full of watersport enthusiasts! Several friends of ours from the trip were able to attend. It was great to be able to tell the full story to those who only saw parts of it. We also had a nice couple come up to us after our talk to share a photo album with us - it was full of pictures of them enjoying time in their handmade dugout canoe! Makeba should meet this fellow dugout someday. This experience was also great practice for the talks we will be giving next weekend at Canoecopia in Madison, Wisconsin.

Here we are with our friend Tim. He took a great kayak trip of his own this past summer - from the Soo to the Sea. He will actually be giving a TED talk on his journey in a few weeks!

Checking out more gorgeous cedar strip canoes with fun wood inlays.

Learning about some old Klepper folding sailboats.

We learned the difference between a Greenland kayak design and an Aleutian kayak design called a baidarka, which features a forked bow in the picture below.

There were also several conservation groups with booths. One group had several birds on hand that had been saved from various traffic collisions and/or were overcoming health problems.