Tales from the Edge of Pictured Rocks: Henry Davies on Paddling Lake Superior

In this episode of The Dubcast with Dubside, we venture into the wild and windswept world of Lake Superior with long-time kayaker and guide Henry Davies. Broadcasting from Henry’s home on the rocky shore of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, Dubside dives deep into a wide-ranging conversation about the unique challenges of guiding at Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore.

Henry shares stories from decades on the water—his approach to training kayak guides in icy conditions, the geology and hidden dangers of Lake Superior, the drinkability of its waters, how he transitioned from canoeing to Greenland paddling, and the joys and frustrations of teaching rolling to newcomers. We learn about shipwrecks, surfing inland waves, bears stranded in sea caves, and why Spray Falls remains one of the lake’s most magical and remote spots.

Whether you’re a traditional kayaking enthusiast, a guide in training, or just someone who dreams of paddling along sandstone cliffs streaked with copper and iron, this episode captures the essence of paddling culture on the inland sea.

LINKS:

Qajaq TC (Training Camp)

Traditional Paddlers Gathering

Transcript

DUBSIDE:
Welcome to The Dubcast with Dubside. This is a special guest edition of the Dubcast. I'll be talking to Henry Davies, who's worked as a guide at Pictured Rocks on Lake Superior. And we talked about the weather dangers on that lake, his work training guides in the area, how he got started with a Greenland paddle, his rolling instruction techniques, extended trips he's done on Lake Superior, the geology of the area, the drinkability of Lake Superior water, bears, fishing, the advantages and disadvantages of kayaks over canoes, the difference between the two Qajaq USA events in Michigan and Minnesota, and surfing—yes you can surf on Lake Superior—and he ends up talking a little bit about the birds in the area.

This runs about 41-42 minutes. 

So, I am talking to Henry, I just call everybody by the first names, I don't pay attention to last names, you often tell me your last names, I don't even know what it is. 

HENRY: Davies.

DUBSIDE:
Henry Davies, that's right. And you have been a fixture at, I see you at Michigan training camp as well as Minnesota Gathering, but is one of those more your thing than the other one?

HENRY:
I've been going to training camp since 2004, and the Gathering, I'm not sure when I started there, probably more like 2014.

DUBSIDE:
And so you do instruction and rolling at these events, and you are a long-time kayaker for quite some many years, right?

HENRY:
I've been kayaking, the first time I went kayaking was like one of these guided trips I went to in Bar Harbor, Maine, and so right after— I've been canoeing all my life before that—so after that, then it's like, well, this is more fun. I can do this by myself. So, then I got a kayak shortly after that, so that was like ’89 or something like that.

DUBSIDE:
You grew up in what area?

HENRY:
I grew up in Wisconsin.

DUBSIDE:
Okay, yeah. And now you're living in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

HENRY:
Yep, I've been here 10 years.

DUBSIDE:
Does that make you an official Yooper?

HENRY:
Depends who you ask. There are different rules for different people.

DUBSIDE:
Well, being here just a few times in the last few years, I see there's a whole identity of Yooper, which is, UP is the Upper Peninsula, so it's called Yooper for short, and there seems to be a whole very unique culture in this area. So, and then your occupation now, I know you are a— for the Pictured Rocks, which is a very big tourist destination on Lake Superior, right? You said, well, you're not a guide per se.

You teach guides?

HENRY:
I have been a guide for the last nine years. This year, I'm not because the company is not running trips this year, so, but, and I was also training the guides for our company for eight of those years, and I also trained for one of the other companies in the area.

DUBSIDE:
All right, so to explain, tell me about Pictured Rocks. Give me the basic tourist pitch.

HENRY:
Well, Pictured Rocks is, it's left over from sandstone that has been eroded by the glaciers, and so it's mainly formed by the glaciers and how Lake Superior has evolved over time because there are several ancestral lakes to Lake Superior that were here occupying larger and larger spaces as the glaciers receded northward, and as the land rebounded because of the weight of the glaciers, things were pressed down, and now there's something called isostatic rebound or glacial rebound where the land is coming back up still.

DUBSIDE:
Okay, and so what you see when you go to Pictured Rocks is what? Explain that.

HENRY:
You're seeing, they're named after the colors caused by minerals that get into the groundwater and seep out to the face of the cliffs and then drizzle down the face of the cliff, and then as the minerals oxidize, they come in different colors, so some blacks are from manganese, reds are iron, whites are limonite, and if you're blue or green, that's copper coming out of the cliff.

DUBSIDE:
All right, yeah, and it's a very, very picturesque place to go and look at these rocks, but what impressed me last year when I went there, and you took us out there, it's not just one section of one cliff. It goes on for miles, right?

HENRY:
It's like 25 miles of cliffs along the lake shore, and then the cliffs go inland also, but they're harder to see in the woods and stuff. It's a lot easier to see it along the lake shore with the sun shining on it and so on.

DUBSIDE:
For the woods, you have to look out over the cliff, and you can't really do it unless you fall off, right?

HENRY:
There's some of that. There are trails across the top of the cliffs, but as the cliffs go inland from the lake, then you can be walking along the bottom of it in the woods as well.

DUBSIDE:
Okay, yeah, but out on the shoreline where you watch, there is not just kayaks. There's tour boats. There's all kinds of stuff.

HENRY:
Tour boats and pontoon boats and kayaks and just people in their own personal boats.

DUBSIDE:
There are several companies that run trips out there with various watercraft.

HENRY:
Right. In one year, I think there were five kayak companies running trips, plus the big tour boats, plus the pontoon boats that people can rent, things like that, but now I think this year, there were only three kayak companies.

DUBSIDE:
What caused the drop-off? Was this a COVID thing?

HENRY:
No, actually, I think 2020 is when we had five, but a few years ago, one of the companies had an incident where I wound up calling the Coast Guard for them, and because of how they handled the situation, they basically lost their permit that day. Then we were down to four, and this year, the company I worked for, the owner decided he wasn't going to run trips. He's retirement age, so I'm not sure—he’s saying he might be back, but I don't know what to believe at this point.

DUBSIDE:
Explain the dangers of going out in this area.

HENRY:
Well, it's Lake Superior, so early in the season, I've trained guides when we've had fresh skim of ice on the lake, and we're going out doing rescues and wet exits in that with guides who haven't paddled before being with me. They've only been in rec kayaks, if that. 

We have to worry about hypothermia. It's Lake Superior, so it generates its own weather, especially in early season and late season when the air temperature and the water temperature are quite a bit different. Then it can generate winds and waves that can be significant, and they can pop up without warning. You have to watch the weather and watch the forecast.

DUBSIDE:
Say people in Denmark are far away that listen to my podcast. It's a lake, but these are serious ocean conditions.

HENRY:
This lake is 150 miles from north to south and 350 miles from east to west.

DUBSIDE:
You've got ships and things out there.

HENRY:
A few years ago, we had buoys within 10 miles of shore reporting waves of 30 feet. 30 feet? Wow.

We had hurricane force winds of 70 miles an hour.

DUBSIDE:
In going out to Pictured Rocks with tour groups and stuff, the danger occurs like the weather kicks up. Is that your primary…?

HENRY:
Yeah. We have to worry about thunderstorms. That's mostly what's going to kick up the wind, but you have to watch.

What I tell the guides, weather forecasts are always wrong. How wrong are they going to be? Maybe not a whole lot, but you have to be ready for it being wrong.

I guess if the wave is going to come sooner than you thought, that's a consideration. Are they smaller than you thought or the forecast said? That's not as big of a deal, but it's always going to be a discrepancy between the forecast and what you actually get.

DUBSIDE:
From where the kayaks put in that to where the good stuff is, you could see quite a bit of it, but you can be an hour or more away from where you come back to.

HENRY:
Yeah. Our half-day trips would go about two miles away from the beach and then two miles back. When you're paddling at tourist speeds, that's getting close to an hour, or the full day trip gets you about four to five miles out and then four to five miles back.

There may be some places to land, but there's no place that you can walk out because there are no parking lots closer than about three miles to the beach or to the cliffs at that point.

DUBSIDE:
Have you been yourself in any major disaster scenarios or close to disaster scenarios?

HENRY:
Well, that one, I wound up on the radio with the Coast Guard for a while because that company got me in that situation. They were having trouble. They couldn't complete their rescue.

We were in, it was like one, one and a half foot waves, but then they bounce off the cliffs and they wind up being two plus foot waves. I had a group of my own and we're kind of out there bobbing around.

DUBSIDE:
People come and rent a kayak without real kayak experience. You put in single kayaks?

HENRY:
Everybody uses tandem kayaks for their rental kayaks now. When I first started, we were using singles though. You'd have more incidents, more rescues then.

DUBSIDE:
Nice, big, wide, stable double kayaks. When it really kicks up, then things get...

HENRY:
I've seen a double kayak basically going along, a wave picks it up, it turns 90 degrees and goes back down. It didn't flip over. It just was aimed 90 degrees off from what it was a second ago.

DUBSIDE:
Wow. You as a single guy will take out how many people at once?

HENRY:
The park lets me take out 12 people in six tandems, but if it's a rough water day, I don't like to do that. I'd rather have four or fewer tandems.

DUBSIDE:
These could all be relatively inexperienced people. You're the only guy out there to take care of all of them. Is the weather call your own judgment or do you have other supervisor telling you you can't go out?

HENRY:
Ultimately, it's the call of the guide on the water. If the weather is kicking up and we know it before we even start the trip, then it's going to be called back at the office and they won't even get out to the guy on the water.

DUBSIDE:
How does it work with the motor boats? There's bigger vessels out there trying to get close to the rocks for the tourists to see things. Do they get in the way?

HENRY:
Not really because they usually stay further away from the cliffs than we do. I usually keep people pretty close to the cliffs, but there's a couple of reasons for that. Also, when we're out there and I see the big boat go by that throws the best wake, then I'll try and get people to surf that wake if they're up for it in their tandems.

Some people will join in, some people won't.

DUBSIDE:
I remember last year when we were out there, you showed us there was a shipwreck out there.

HENRY:
The shipwreck of the George was about 203 feet long and it went down in 1893. It's a wooden schooner. It's remasted.

DUBSIDE:
This end of Lake Superior, is this the one where all the shipwrecks are? I mean, the graveyard back here?

HENRY:
It's considered graveyard of the Great Lakes because there are no harbors on the south shore here between here and Whitefish Point, basically. There's just Grand Marais Harbor. There are no other natural harbors.

Munising Bay is a good natural harbor. Grand Marais is a good natural harbor and Whitefish Bay, but it's what? That covers about 150 miles.

You've got a harbor on each end and one in the middle.

DUBSIDE:
Even for the big ships, they've got to watch the weather too.

HENRY:
Often, if we have south winds, they'll hide on the south shore. If we have north winds, they'll hide on the north shore, that kind of thing.

DUBSIDE:
When you're instructing guides, what do you tell them? What are the important things for them to know?

HENRY:
First, I want to get them so that they can paddle reasonably. Part of their job is to be able to do a rescue. The most important thing there is, in my mind, getting to the rescue accurately, so that they can actually start it.

If they paddle up to somebody and coast past it, they're not doing a rescue yet. First, I have to get them up to speed doing that and teach them how to do rescues. A tandem like that weighs 100 pounds.

Then you put, I don't know, 70 pounds of water in it. It's a big thing to try and dump that out from a little solo kayak.

DUBSIDE:
70 pounds? That's not like 700 pounds of water.

HENRY:
Water's heavy stuff. Yeah, water's heavy stuff. The kayak by itself is 100 pounds.

The thing is, you can't just pull it up right side up onto your boat. It's too heavy. You can't lift it upside down because you have to bring it up on its edge and dump it as you pull it up, or I have to.

DUBSIDE:
So the qualification to be a guide, you start off with some ACA things or something, or it's all your own criteria?

HENRY:
What I'm teaching them is basically ACA level three skills. Some things we don't worry about. Navigation's pretty easy.

If you can see the rocks, you're doing well. If you can't see the rocks, you're too far away from shore. There are a few other…tides—we don't have tides on the Great Lakes. Lake Superior has a tide, but it's only like two inches, so it's overwhelmed by everything else.

DUBSIDE:
But the tandem rescues, you really get into that more so than the regular ACA class, I would think.

HENRY:
Well, we start out with solo rescues, but a lot of the class is getting them up to speed in how to paddle, how to have endurance, how to tow a kayak. So towing a tandem is another thing that's kind of a bit of work, depending how much headwind you're going into, things like that.

DUBSIDE:
What does a typical person pay for a trip?

HENRY:
I think they're paying like $180 for a full day trip.

DUBSIDE:
That's several hours?

HENRY:
Yeah, so it's like four hours of paddling plus lunchtime at Mosquito Beach and some of that.

DUBSIDE:
How long is the season for this class? Because it can be frozen over in the wintertime, right?

HENRY:
Right. We start trips usually Memorial Day, so that can be late May, early June, depending how that works out. Then we usually go to mid-September.

Before and after those dates, well, before that, the guides aren't trained up, but even if we were to try and run trips, the weather is more unpredictable before and after those dates. So we wind up canceling a lot more trips due to weather, due to waves and wind.

DUBSIDE:
Do you get like a turnover of people doing guiding for a couple of years and then they're off to other things?

HENRY:
Yeah, usually they're college students. So often we'll get almost everybody sticks around for two years and then we're starting over again. But sometimes we'll get half of the people sticking around.

It varies a lot.

DUBSIDE:
They're not getting paid a tremendous amount of money, right?

HENRY:
I'm not sure what they get. Yeah, not a tremendous amount. They get something.

They stick around for another year, so it must be enough.

DUBSIDE:
Well, in my experience, talking to other places, just general work in the paddlesport field, it's good summer work for people. But when they look at really what they can expect career-wise, there's no money to be made. So if they want to get some serious money, they're off on something else.

HENRY:
Well, a lot of these people are outdoor recreation majors, so they're going to do the same kind of thing as a real job. Maybe not in kayaking, maybe it'll be rafting, maybe it'll be climbing. But I don't know what kind of income those things are.

But yeah, certainly you can find things that have more income. But you don't need a vacation, kind of, because what you're doing is already fun.

DUBSIDE:
So tell me how you got into traditional kayaking.

HENRY:
Basically, I bought a paddle back in about 2001, a Greenland paddle, and started using it on my first trip that year. So I'm out paddling in amongst the ice with a Greenland paddle and been using it ever since.

DUBSIDE:
What particular brand was that paddle?

HENRY:
That was a Superior, a wooden Superior paddle.

DUBSIDE: 
Mark Rogers. 

HENRY: 
Yeah, I still have it. 

DUBSIDE: 
Cool.

HENRY: 
I still use it.

DUBSIDE:
Yeah. And did you plug into the Qajaq USA thing back then?

HENRY:
Well, I think it wasn't there quite yet then, but yeah.

DUBSIDE:
It was getting started on the East Coast in 2001.

HENRY:
A few years ago, a few years after that, I was at the Great Lake Sea Kayak Symposium, and Greg Stamer was there as an invited instructor. And he was touting Qajaq USA at that point, because he was just starting it up. So yeah, I got into it.

Maybe a few years after that, I probably got into it after I started going to Qajaq TC training camp, which really was only like three years later or two years later or so.

DUBSIDE:
I went to Michigan Training Camp, as I called it back then, in, I think the first time I was 2006 or so.

HENRY:
Okay. My first time was 2004.

DUBSIDE:
Right. You recall seeing me there at all? 

HENRY: 
Oh, yeah.

DUBSIDE: 
Really? 

HENRY: 
Yeah, early on.
Well, and you were there every year from then on, kind of.

DUBSIDE:
Yeah. Well, I missed a bunch in between for, I forget what I was doing. That's in, yeah, August.

Yeah, because I was doing more overseas stuff during that time of year for a stretch. 

HENRY: 
Your hair was much longer then. 

DUBSIDE: 
Oh, yeah. You remember that. And then the Gathering, when did you start going to that one? 

HENRY: 
I think it was like 2014.

I'm not sure. I'd have to check my notes. 

DUBSIDE: 
So you do instruction at these things, and I've seen you working with people rolling one-on-one, like I do a lot of this too.

Tell me your basic technique for somebody who's a beginner.

HENRY:
I kind of feel like there are a lot of people who are better at teaching the beginners than I am, but still, usually I'll get them to work on a balance brace. And if that, we're having trouble with that, we'll work on some sculling. And even if we aren't having trouble with that, I'm still going to get them sculling because I can get them, that scull is the tail end of the roll.

So that helps them learn what they need to do. But what I'm trying to get them to learn is how to get onto the back deck without actually putting their nose in the water yet so that they can be comfortable in breathing.

DUBSIDE:
So what are some typical problems you run into, or typical mistakes people make?

HENRY:
Usually after you get that going, and then you start going into the water and coming out, it's that the paddle stays on the side you fell in on, and then they get totally confused. So that's one of the things. And then I just wind up holding the paddle, trying to make sure it gets onto the other side.

They're still confused, but now the paddle's in the right place. Usually people just forget to hip snap, things like that. I mean, there's how many different things.

Everybody's got their own failure they can do.

DUBSIDE:
People that are very afraid of going underwater?

HENRY:
Some. Often that's not so much the case. But you do have people who just want to delay by talking to you until they decide to do the roll again, which can occupy more time than actually doing the roll, almost always.

DUBSIDE:
I remember Dan, I think it was Dan Siegel, he'd get into that and he'd say, shut up. I talk, you listen. Shut up, do the roll.

I don't quite get that abrupt with people, but that...

HENRY:
You're just stalling, you know that, right? Okay, let's roll. Yeah.

DUBSIDE:
Do you do any teaching of rolling outside of the Qajaq USA events?

HENRY:
I have done that. I used to teach rolling for a local kayak company, local shop when I lived down in the Detroit area. But since I've moved up here, I haven't really.

DUBSIDE:
Was that with the Greenland paddle still?

HENRY:
I didn't care. Whatever they brought.

DUBSIDE:
Okay.
When you just want to go out paddling for fun, I should mention here, we are in your house on the shore of Lake Michigan with a beautiful... 

HENRY: 
Lake Superior. 

DUBSIDE: 
Lake Superior. I'm sorry. Excuse me. Lake Superior, there's a big difference there.

We're in a back room, so I don't have a view right now, but it's a very, very nice place here. You got the water lapping right at your yard, actually. So when you just want to go out paddling for fun, where do you go?

HENRY:
Well, I'll go on Lake Superior because it's right here. I'm not one much for going on the local lakes because if I'm going to go out paddling for fun, I'm probably going to do 15 or 20 miles. I just got done with a trip where there were two of us and we did like 270 miles over 13 days camping out of our kayaks.

DUBSIDE:
This is along the shore of Lake Michigan? No, Lake Superior.

HENRY:
Lake Superior along the Canadian coast.

DUBSIDE:
Yeah. All right. Now, I'm understanding that they call it the North Shore up on the top part there where Canada is, is that, the… what, the layout of the landscape is a lot different from the southern part?

HENRY:
The geology up there, there's some differences and some similarities. There's a lot more volcanic rock basalts and so on, but there's also some sedimentary rocks like sandstone, but the sandstone there doesn't have the mineral streaking that we have here. It's often more of a redder sandstone where we've got a beige sandstone and even just like Grand Island is right near Pictured Rocks.

It's in Munising Bay and that one is made of a much older sandstone than the Pictured Rocks is and that's got a mixture of reddish and cream-colored sandstone.

DUBSIDE:
And does anybody do the whole circumnavigate the whole Lake Superior?

HENRY:
Sounds like several people do it a year. Like somebody did it this summer, and they said they paddled like a thousand miles. Like, well, you didn't follow the coast very closely then, did you?

DUBSIDE:
It's longer than a thousand if you go into every little nook and cranny.

HENRY:
Yeah. I think I've read a number like 1600, but...

DUBSIDE:
Yeah, I could see it'd be tempting to take shortcuts here and there. But even with the shortcuts, that's going to be, what, a month?

Is it longer?

HENRY:
I think that's what people do, is a month or... You know, it just depends how much they're following the coast and things like that. What are the goals of their specific trip?

DUBSIDE:
Yeah. Do people try to go across it?

HENRY:
People have gone across it. I don't know much of the details of that. I think I've read of people who have successfully crossed it, yes.

But like... I've been out to Isle Royale, which is a national park in the middle of Lake Superior. It's about 45 miles from the Keweenaw Peninsula and the UP.

And I've been out there and met a guy who paddled out there from the Keweenaw Peninsula. And I've paddled out there from Minnesota side, which is about 15-mile open water crossing. Right.

And that's just sort of the west half of the lake.

DUBSIDE:
Right.

HENRY:
Like I said, it's about 350 miles across.

DUBSIDE:
Are the shipping channels fairly well known?

HENRY:
They're on your charts, yeah. That doesn't mean you know where they begin and end.

There are no buoys for them out in the middle of the lake.

DUBSIDE:
Yeah. And you get fog here. Sometimes it hangs for quite a while.

HENRY:
Last year, we had a trip. We were out for 15 days and it seemed like we had fog every day. Not all day long, but you'd be paddling along.

And there was one day we were like, this island, we saw it two hours ago when we were eating breakfast, but we know it's right over there. And we just about ran into it because the fog was so thick.

DUBSIDE:
Yeah. So just careful navigation with your compass to keep you on track.

HENRY:
Yeah. I have a GPS, but usually I just use that to keep a track so I can put it on my maps. And I usually go with compass and chart.

But if we have a wind and fog, then sometimes you don't quite know where you are. So the GPS helps with that. We found shore, but what shore?

I'm not quite sure.

DUBSIDE:
Do you monitor VHF radio to listen to the ships and stuff?

HENRY:
Often not because I've only got the limit. I'm usually out on two-week trips and I've got a limited amount of battery I can spend on stuff like that.

DUBSIDE:
All right. But the Coast Guard is all over monitoring the radio out there.

HENRY:
Last time I was out on Isle Royale, I had to make a mayday call for a different group. So yeah, they picked up when I made my mayday call on my radio.

DUBSIDE:
Can you drink Lake Superior?

HENRY:
It's pretty clean.

DUBSIDE:
Okay.

HENRY:
The things you have to worry about are what washes off land. So if you're paddling close to shore, you're more likely to have problems than if you're out in deeper water.

DUBSIDE:
All right.

HENRY:
Having said that, I've had guides that work with me in the past who that's all they did, but they would drink water out of the lake as they were guiding and they're paddling along the cliffs. I'd say to them something like, so what lands on the cliffs and what do they do when they're on the cliffs? In between rainstorms, the seagulls up there.

I guess that didn't bother them, but okay.

DUBSIDE:
Well, it's a big lake. There's a lot of water to lose.

HENRY:
I know, but you're still pretty close to shore. It's true. It's true.

DUBSIDE:
Can't deny that. So do you see any big changes or milestones in the future for kayaking or for the type of stuff you do or what does the future hold?

HENRY:
Yeah, I don't know that I don't look at things very globally because Lake Superior's got a lot of interesting shoreline and I can paddle here happily for many more years and probably more than I have left anyway. And there are places I haven't been and places I need to go back to and so I think about things of how do I paddle more than the paddling world, I guess.

DUBSIDE:
So when you go do these runs along the shore for several days or weeks, do you have bears in this area?

HENRY:
Oh, there are bears in this area. When I've backpacked in this area, I've seen fresh tracks and I've also run into like, oh, look, a cub. Where's the mother?

DUBSIDE: 
Really? 

HENRY: 
Things like that. 

DUBSIDE: 
These are black bears, right?

HENRY: 
Black bears. That's what we have around here, right?

DUBSIDE:
Yeah.

HENRY:
I've never really had an issue with a bear. I've had bears that were grunting and shaking trees.

DUBSIDE:
But you've got to do all the keep the food out of your tent and hang your stuff up in a tree and all that kind of stuff. 

HENRY: 
Yeah, yeah. 

DUBSIDE: 
But no major disasters. 

HENRY: 
Yeah, I've never had a minor disaster either.

DUBSIDE:
All right, all right. When you do these camp trips, do you like fish for supplement your food with stuff that you gather or catch?

HENRY:
Um, a little bit, not much. I mean, I don't fish personally, but I've had been on my trips where one of the other people or a couple of the other people fish sometimes. But usually it's, do we have extra time in this day?

It doesn't happen every day.

DUBSIDE:
What kind of fish are they catching? Do you know?

HENRY:
Um, Susan caught a pike on one of our trips on Pukaskwa and last year she caught a brook trout.

DUBSIDE:
So they're fishing, not while they're paddling.

HENRY:
Right? Yeah. Fishing from shore.

DUBSIDE:
Yeah, all right. Cool.

HENRY:
And we've had, we've harvested mushrooms and berries and stuff on our trips too. One of the people I paddle with is knows all the mushrooms.

DUBSIDE:
What kayak do you prefer for say these trips, extended trips?

HENRY:
I  paddle the Explorer for the extended trips, because it's got room for a couple of weeks worth of gear. 

DUBSIDE: 
What is it?

HENRY: 
An Nigel Dennis Explorer.

DUBSIDE:
Oh, Explorer. Oh yeah.

HENRY:
And so, and for training, I usually paddle a Romany and then when I'm just day paddling, I'll paddle an Anas Acuta or, and I've been using that for when I go to the Qajaq USA events as well.

DUBSIDE:
Okay. Yeah. Have you built any skin-on-frames?

HENRY:
Uh, no, I have not. The only thing I built was a canoe about 30 years ago.

DUBSIDE:
What made you go from canoeing to kayaking?

HENRY:
The ability to do solo and the ability to get out on bigger water, like the Great Lakes. Right. 

DUBSIDE: 
You can't solo in a canoe?

HENRY: 
Um, I'm sure you could, but you have to worry about the waves a lot more. 

DUBSIDE: 
True. 

HENRY: 
I can go out in bigger waves in a kayak than I would be safe, feel safe doing in a canoe.

DUBSIDE:
I see on Lake Superior. Yeah. I could see the kayak was coming to its own.

Those, those small lake trips are long things. If you have lots of stuff to carry, the canoe has its advantage.

HENRY:
It's so much easier to move a canoe full of gear. You know, the kayak… “portage” is not in the Inuit language. That's the canoe language.

The French Canadians. So yeah. So my kayak never gets portaged.

DUBSIDE:
All right. Have you, have you gotten, um, interested in the, the, the rolling competition list of all the different weird roles that the Greenland list consists of?

HENRY:
A little bit, but mostly it's stuff I can't do. I can do maybe about 10 or 11 roles, but, and maybe there's some I don't even think of, but yeah.

DUBSIDE:
All right. So at the Michigan Training Camp, what is your favorite part of that weekend?

HENRY:
I like to see people learning new things and help them learn new things. That's, and just to see it when they get something to work, it's like, ah, or even if they don't quite get it to work, they have the something new, they, a new way to work on it on their own for later, that kind of thing.

DUBSIDE:
All right. Have you been to any of the other Qajaq USA events in other parts? 

HENRY: 
No, I haven't.

DUBSIDE: 
Okay. Well, how do you, how do you see the difference between the, the Gathering in Minnesota and the, uh, Training Camp in Michigan?

HENRY:
Training Camp is, it's a bigger event. Um, it, it's, it's, a lot of it I see is how it's evolved because I've been going there for so long. It's the, the different groups of participants have changed over time where early on, when I was going, it was more people who were trying to learn third, fourth, fifth kinds of roles.

And now it's people who want to understand a Greenland paddle versus a Euro paddle and how is it different? So they're just getting into it and there's a lot of, a lot more people who are learning first roles or maybe just learning how to do forward stroke and some of those kinds of things.

DUBSIDE:
All right. So when you, you first were going there, it was, it was Dave Braun, was it?

HENRY:
Yeah. He was still running it then.

DUBSIDE:
Yeah. Okay.

HENRY:
And it was a lot of the, um, Walden Pond Scum people doing a lot of the teaching.

DUBSIDE:
So, so back then you, you saw there's more, less straight up beginners and more some advanced things.

HENRY:
That's what it seemed like.

DUBSIDE:
Yeah. Okay.

All right. Well, I've always noticed all these events have somewhat of a turnover and you get some new people, but sometimes more people, more new people than other times, but it's always good to have a mix of all the, all the different things.

HENRY:
It seemed like there's been a couple of times where we had just a lot of new people come in at Training Camp and, and it changes the flavor of it for a few years after that. And then it'll happen again.

DUBSIDE:
Yeah. All right.

HENRY:
And where it seems to me, and you know, I'm, I haven't been going as long, but that the Gathering is more people who've known each other longer. They tend to live closer to each other.

They're more family. And I think that's kind of how Training Camp started, but now we've got, it's gotten bigger and more new people. So it's a little less that way.

I mean, there's still a core kind of, but there's a lot more people than just the core.

DUBSIDE:
Yeah. All right. Well, the, the one unique feature of, of a training camp is since you have Lake Michigan right there on one side of the camp and a little lake, the small lake that they do more instruction on the other side.

But, and so sometimes we do like last year, we had surfed out there on the big lake and that was fun to do. Do you do a lot of surfing?

HENRY:
I, when I'm, I, I don't do a lot of surfing on my own because it would be just me going out. Sometimes that doesn't feel like the wisest way to go, but it's not like somebody else can help you much when you're surfing. But I do, because when I'm training guides, I need to get them up to the point where they can do all their rescues and maneuvers and stuff in two feet of waves.

I need to teach them to surf too. So usually I'll get out and surfing with them earlier in the year and get them towing and rescuing and all that kind of stuff in two to three feet of waves.

DUBSIDE:
And you still use your Romany or your Explorer for that?

HENRY:
Romany usually, yeah.

DUBSIDE:
Okay. Yeah. My version of surfing is just trying to get on the wave and then rolling.

Since, since I, I, my role is fairly dependable, so I'm not intimidated by the surf, but to get it to stay on and ride the waves…

HENRY:
Yeah, that's a little tough. And I, I don't have, I can't think of when I've had a problem with rolling in surf. It's when my surf, when I wind up on shore and I'm upside down on the beach, then yeah, the roll is not as good.

DUBSIDE:
All right, all right. Yeah. So in, along the shore of Pictured Rocks, you must be familiar with every little spot, you know, the whole progression from however many miles of it is.

What is your favorite place?

HENRY:
I guess one of my favorite places is Spray Falls. Okay. And mainly because it's kind of the hardest place, one of the hardest places to get to in a kayak because it's like eight or nine miles from a beach that you can drive a car to.

DUBSIDE:
Okay.

HENRY:
So it winds up being a 16 or 18 mile trip, depending how closely you follow the cliffs. Spray Falls also falls directly off the cliff, 75 feet right into Lake Superior.

So, and it, it's all, I've never seen it not flowing.

DUBSIDE:
So this is like springs or, or melting snow or what's feeding that?

HENRY:
It's, well, it's also got to be fed from rain, but it's, it's a stream, Spray Creek, but it must have enough of an area that it collects water from that it, it never seems to dry up. I've never seen it dry up.

DUBSIDE:
So it's 75 feet off the, off a cliff. It just comes right down into the...

HENRY:
Right down into the lake. You can paddle in the water falling down on you. The problem is the water falling down creates a current flowing out and the air that it brings with it creates a current above the water flowing out.

So everything's trying to keep you from getting under the water.

DUBSIDE:
Wow. Well, I remember when we went out there, there are different areas here and there with the water coming down and falls, but this sounds like the, the most spectacular one.

HENRY:
Yeah. Yeah.

DUBSIDE:
Right. So I would gather that not very, not very many people are there compared to the other places because it's so hard to get to.

HENRY:
It's, well, so there's one of the tour companies that launches from a boat, so it's easier for them to get there.

DUBSIDE:
A motor boat.

HENRY:
Yeah.

DUBSIDE:
Okay.

HENRY:
A large motorized boat. Okay. They can launch like, I don't know what it is, 12 kayaks, 12 tandems off of it.

DUBSIDE:
But they go out there like a mothership. And then you go, oh, okay.

HENRY:
But they don't actually go to Spray Falls. It's like, they go close to it. You know, they get within two miles of it, but they don't go out to it.

DUBSIDE:
Huh. Why don't they go all the way?

HENRY:
Yeah, I don't know that. That's not how they run their business. Yeah.

DUBSIDE:
All right. Are there any wildlife out there that are noteworthy to see? I guess you don't have whales or seals, right?

HENRY:
No. We did have a bear one year that I don't know how it got there. It was at the base of the cliff in amongst the ice at the base of the cliff in spring when we were doing training.

My guess is it fell off of a low part of the cliff or something and just wound up there. And it couldn't figure out how to get out of there because it was a mile to go east to get beyond the cliff or three miles to go west to get to a beach. And so it couldn't figure out how to get out of there.

And so I came back next week with a different set of guides that I was training. The bear was still in the same cave. And so I told the park about it.

And they said, bears are good swimmers. It'll figure it out. I actually told them the first time we saw it.

Second time, bears are good swimmers. It'll figure it out. And then I said, OK, but the bear is here.

It's going to be here on Memorial Day weekend. And kayakers are going to feed the bear. And then the DNR came out and towed the bear, put a rope around its neck, apparently (I didn't see this happen) and towed it off to a beach so it could run into the woods.

DUBSIDE:
All right. And what about birds and things?

HENRY:
We get a lot of we see a lot of eagles. We see a lot of mergansers. Sometimes we'll see moons, but not too often. A lot of cormorants, seagulls.

DUBSIDE:
Well, that is a very good view of Lake Superior and Painted Rocks. And anything else you'd like to add? 

HENRY: 
Um, yeah, I can't think of anything right off.

DUBSIDE: 
All right. Well, thank you very much for being on the Dubcast with Dubside. 

HENRY: 
Thank you.

See you next year here up, I imagine. You'll be at the Gathering next week.

HENRY:
Training Camp next year.

DUBSIDE:
OK, thank you very much. 

That is Henry Davies. Interviewed the last week of August 2024.

At his home in Michigan's Upper Peninsula on the shore of Lake Superior. Thank you for listening to The Dubcast with Dubside.