A common man recounts an uncommon paddle

Jake at the Wolf River launch.

By David Horst
sandhill7@gmail.com

Jake Stachovak was making a point about how you don’t have to be an extraordinary person to accomplish an extraordinary feat.

The video clip playing over his shoulder did an effective job of it.

Stachovak (pronounced Sta-HO-vee-ak) was addressing a crowd of 110 at Mosquito Hill Nature Center near New London on Oct. 14. He was this year’s Charlotte Bates Fenlon Memorial speaker.

Charlotte was a very early volunteer at Mosquito Hill and the first wife of Dr. Charles “Chick” Fenlon, who established an endowment fund to support an educational speaker each year in her memory. Chick, a wonderful guy, died a year ago May. I had the pleasure of serving with him on the committee that picks the speakers, through my day job at the Community Foundation for the Fox Valley Region, which also is where the endowment fund is located.

Jake’s video shows him talking about the rigors paddling in the cold early in his 5,740-mile kayak trip around the eastern third of the United States. In the background is his beached 17-foot Kevlar Seda kayak. As Jake is talking away in the foreground, the video shows his boat slip off of shore and drift farther and farther out into the water.

Year's final paddle rich in history

By David Horst     sandhill7@gmail.com

Starting Octoberfest morning with a leisurely paddle seemed like an attractive idea when we planned the Fox-Wisconsin Heritage Paddle 2011 schedule over the winter.

It must have looked even better when people threw up the blinds Saturday morning. The 6.4-mile canoe and kayak trip from Appleton's Lutz Park, through the four Appleton navigational locks and to Kimberly's Sunset Point Park, put 119 boats on the water, carrying at least 150 people.

See more photos at www.flicker.com/foxriverpaddle.

This was the last in a series of eight organized paddle trips this year on the Fox and Lower Wisconsin rivers.

The day started with a heavy fog hanging over the river. Knowing it would burn off by the 9:30 a.m. launch made it all the more beautiful. A few kayaks were in the water when I arrived, colorful ghosties floating between fog and river.

New home working for whoopers

Follow the whooping crane training and migration at www.operationmigration.org. You can watch the training from a webcam mounted above the crane pen.

By David Horst   sandhill7@gmail.com

PRINCETON -- Crouching shoulder to shoulder in a shelter made of straw bales and old two-by-fours, we wait to watch the hard work that makes miracles happen.

Five-foot-tall birds – wild birds that had no parents – follow a manmade flying machine one time for the two or three months it needs to reach Florida, and then they fly back to this very spot in spring, unassisted, in a couple of weeks. It can only be described as miraculous.

Pilot Joe Duff leads five of the young whooping cranes.
See more photos.

The birds are 10 whooping cranes, incubated in Maryland and flown in by plane. They spend nights in a well-fenced shelter, waiting to be released for their morning training with ultralight pilot Joe Duff, CEO of the nonprofit Operation Migration. We are maybe 30 yards away in a blind, camera lenses or fixed gazes peeking through an opening formed by the triangular steel lattice of an old antenna tower placed between rows of bales.

It is about 6:30 a.m. on Sunday, Aug. 28. Another beautiful day is breaking. The tight quarters chase away the hint of fall nip in the air. We’re at the White River Marsh, just east of Princeton, the new home of the grand experiment in teaching whooping cranes how to migrate.

Moonlight Paddle -- minus the moon

So we got a little wet at the end of Friday evening's for Fox-Wisconsin Heritage Paddle 2011's Moonlight Paddle from the Bomier Landing in De Pere to the Green Bay Metro Landing. The clouds being what they were, we also didn't see the moon. But we saw lots of lights on boats. Just shy of 60 boats took part, including two full voyageur canoes on loan from the DNR. We had 79 paddlers in all. Lots of them were wearing damp smiles.