GOLDSTREAM A job well done
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Wednesday, March 04, 2015
Pearson International College students Emil Toft of Denmark and Astrid Berge of Norway got the forward positions for this particular journey in the school’s new 26-foot voyageur canoe, built over this past winter under the guidance of physics and mathematics instructor Mark Wheen. The group will soon take the vessel around the Southern Gulf Islands on a five-day trek. Mike Davies/News Gazette staff
Paddling at Pearson: the crafting of a canoe Contingent of international students combines to create a typically Canadian icon Mike Davies News Gazette staff
In the fall of 2013, Mark Wheen, a physics and mathematics instructor at Pearson International College, took a group of students on a four-day canoe trip around Salt Spring Island. By the end of the second day on the water, he began to see how valuable the experience was for them and how much they were enjoying it, and the gears started turning
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in his mind. They had rented a 26-foot voyageur canoe for the excursion, and he thought, “What if we had one of these at the school? Better yet, how cool would it be to build one of our own?” He took some measurements of the vessel they were using, just in case he ever got the chance to do it. Standing next to it now, glistening in the sunlight beside the water on the shore of Pedder Inlet, he beams at his students who put in the effort to bring the project to fruition, and the pride is evident on his face. When the team began, they could only get a general idea of what it could become from other sources, because there just simply isn’t a lot of instructional material out there for building a vessel like this. While Wheen had the measurements from the canoe they’d rented the previous year and a few books and YouTube videos as resources, some of what they were going to do had to be calculated
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carefully and developed on their own. “In terms of rigging the seats and scaling the boat itself, there were some unique problems to solve while building it, but that’s what made it fun,” Wheen says. “Normally, when you build a canoe, it’s typically 16 or 17 feet long, and so the strips (of wood) you use are that long, but this is a 26-foot boat, so we’d have to glue two or three strips together first before we actually constructed the hull from those strips. There was a fair bit of preparation that went into the building before the actual building took place, that’s for sure.” They also constructed it so that it could take a sail, which the instructor is looking forward to trying in the near future.
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