I have outfitted my kayak as a canoe. I am now on my knees, with half a paddle, a C-boater for reasons C-boaters won't admit. For dark reasons middle-aged men won’t admit. I have switched to C-boating because I am headed into a florid mid-life crisis and want to be good at something, anything, before it is too late. Too late for what, I didn’t know, and it is the not knowing that has motivated me to paddle my kayak as a canoe. My C-boat is floating proof of my failure to improve as a kayaker. C-boating gives me permission to be mediocre in front of my paddling peers, who have to cheer me on because, well, everyone is impressed by a C-boat—at first. Like a three-wheeled car. No one notices whether I am paddling well; they are impressed that I’m paddling at all. Like a dog that can dance. They can’t help noticing me coming downstream. Paddling a C-boat is like suddenly becoming British. I immediately go up in status no matter how second-rate I am.

I followed everyone into short kayaks in the ’90s, and then watched in horror as virgin boaters crowded the eddy next to my play spot and learned rodeo moves before I did. Their playboating improved every day while mine plateaued with a few cartwheels. Then my longtime paddling partner, Steven, started getting better while I got, well, more right-handed. I love Steven like a brother and all that crap, but he is five years older and has been paddling three decades fewer than I, so watching him surpass me in a kayak stretched my patience. It was one thing to watch twentysomethings out-paddle me. It was quite another to watch Steven do it. I have a great job and great wife and children, so all this shouldn’t have meant anything to me anymore, except it did.
I made a last-ditch effort to up the ante on the iPod generation by running sphincter-tightening drops, only to find myself the day after Christmas on the shore of the Pigeon River in sub-zero weather with a broken kayak paddle. I ran the rest using only half a paddle.
And a light went off in my head.
Two months and a retrofitted kayak later, I came over to the bright side.
Now I know that C-boating is to kayaking what snowboarding is to skiing. Once you try it, you may never go back.
I’ll never go back.
C-boats have a history of resolving mid-life crises. Verlen Kruger left his wife and kids behind and canoed from Toronto to the Bering Strait. He more or less did nothing but design canoes, plan trips, and paddle for the rest of his life, setting records for all the longest canoe trips in history. He did 100,000 miles in fully decked touring canoes like sea kayaks, using a canoe paddle, kneeling on the bottom, and leaning his butt against a modified tractor seat. As he told me by phone before he died in 2004: “I don’t understand how kayakers can sit in all that water in the bottom of the boat. You will love the difference when you get off your ass.”
So I got off my ass.
But I have had to overcome some persistent myths about C-boating, especially the idea that it is a subset of kayaking, a fraternity I have only been allowed to enter after suffering through enough lower-back pain, wrist-twisting, and winter water sloshing into my crotch. I like the challenge of handling different boats. Great tennis players can play squash, racquetball, and even badminton. Great golfers can play well with borrowed clubs. And river cyborgs like world champion Eric Jackson win rodeos both in kayaks and C-boats. Does it matter that Eric Jackson and I are the same age?
Yes. Like I said, a florid mid-life crisis.
The first myth is knee pain. I sit on my feet for a few minutes each day while I watch television or read a book. This pain is nothing compared to what I endured to stretch my kayaking body: aching hip flexors, callused ankles, cramped arches, and blackened toenails. Sitting on my feet is known in yoga as the Thunderbolt Pose. Instructors earn millions each year twisting clients into this pose. I can strike a Thunderbolt Pose and watch Mythbusters at the same time, hoping they’ll dedicate an episode to C-boat myths.
Of course, my entire switch to C-boating is a pose, the Mid-Life Crisis Pose.
The second myth is that the C-boat roll is harder than the kayak roll. It’s not. It may be easier. I have never been confident kayaking on my left side and I’ve never liked rolling over there. That’s why it’s called the weak side, after all. In a C-boat I bring all the fun over to the strong side. I have nothing against lefties. I find them fascinating, like redheads. But I was born right-handed and a righty I shall remain.
It took me more time to unlearn a kayak roll and all those confusing axes of orientation than it did to lay my canoe paddle flat on the surface like a kickboard and just push. Yes, push. Like I said, it’s hard to unlearn a kayak roll. The kayak roll requires hip snap and layback, the Half Lord of the Fishes Pose. Ouch. The C-boat roll requires hip snap and lay-forward, like the Moon Pose. Ahh, that feels nice, and it apparently aids digestion. Unlike rolling in a kayak, as I complete the C-boat roll my body becomes less, not more, exposed. In a C-boat I no longer have to literally bend over backward.
The third myth is that I’ll get trapped. Instead, I find that because my feet are tucked under me and centered over the cockpit, I fall out if I don’t strap myself in. I did install a drain plug and always use float bags because I spend a lot of time upside down and wet exiting. Rolling and wet exiting are signs I’m still pushing myself. I’m getting old, but not that kind of old.
The fourth myth is that I need to learn a lot of new strokes. Since I’ve been paddling a kayak properly, more or less, there are very few strokes to learn specific to a C-boat. The offside stroke is not difficult. It’s just unnerving because it demands a committed shift in weight and the handy lower brace is no longer available. This takes getting used to, but I embrace the challenge. Like my marriage, the key to enjoying my C-boat has been commitment, though I still have trouble committing my weight to the left side. I giggle like a schoolgirl in my C-boat when I can execute a continuous stroke from behind my left hip, around the front of the boat, and back to my right hip. If I’d tried that in a kayak I’d break my wrist or knock my teeth out with the other end of the paddle.
The fifth myth about C-boats is true: it is harder to run rivers. But, I enjoy picking lines that preference my strong side. Formerly simple runs become gut-wrenching; difficult runs terrifying. It seems like rivers are out to get me and that every key rapid requires an off-side move. To use the skiing-snowboarding analogy, I’ve been bucked from double-diamond back to the bunny slopes. But I love it. My C-boat puts the fun back into my home river years after I’d assumed there was no more to be had. Side surfing holes on my offside makes me howl again with delight.
In a C-boat, old rivers become new.
It is also difficult to back paddle a C-boat. In a kayak, I like pausing with a backstroke before a set of rapids or to change direction midstream. I have thus changed the way I run rivers. I am positioned much higher in my C-boat and can scout things kayakers can not. Still, as I approach unknown rapids, I now do something apparently too retro to even admit: I get out of my boat and scout. I’d forgotten how much I love exploring riverbanks. And I get intellectually stoked reading water and matching with a solid run the left-right image I just scouted from the shore.
The final myth is that it is difficult to convert kayaks to C-boats. My mid-life crisis did make me good at one thing: outfitting C-boats. Outfitting C-boats brings me closer to my late grandfather, who made wooden canoes for a living. It also brings me closer to my father, who taught me a J-stroke before I could even write a J on paper. He approved when I converted my kayak to canoe, and I approve of him approving.
I have converted a dozen makes and models, toiling away in my basement on winter days shaping foam and plastic the way my grandfather used to shape wood. I have very few handyman skills but I have lots of boat builder pretensions. Converting kayaks to C-boats is one of the few things in life I don’t rush. Like gardening. I have friends who spend two hours each day commuting, but tell me they don’t have time to convert some old kayak to a C-boat just for fun. Any boat can be outfitted as a C-boat, especially a sea kayak. There is a three-year waiting list for Kruger canoes, now made by his children, so it might be easier just to convert a sea kayak. Better yet, convert your river kayak, especially your rodeo kayak.
The most satisfying part is stripping the hull of every bolt and screw, then lifting out the seat and pillars. Kayak designs have advanced so quickly that it’s possible to be nostalgic about boats from only a few years ago. But not the old seats; they were terrible. Still, I always keep the seat so that I can resell the boat as a kayak. I love the look and feel of the bare hull, especially the glossy inside. I give the hull a shampoo and blow dry before I start gluing in foam. I don’t really feel like I own a boat until I disassemble then reassemble it. This gives me confidence on the water. I worry that such intimacy with boats has been lost.
When I convert a C-boat, I shape minicell into a foam pedestal I can straddle. I insert an aluminum rod between the existing minicell pillars to keep the pedestal from shifting left or right and coming unglued from the hull bottom. I shape foam slots into which I put my shins and knees and I shove the tops of my thighs under the former kayak knee braces. I hold my hips down with a quick-release airline seatbelt running across my lap. Since I’m kneeling, this keeps me from falling out when I’m upside down being thrashed in a hole.
I love the smell of minicell foam in the morning. It smells like victory over life’s pettifoggers. I love its feel and texture and the way it squeaks when I slide my knees into place. C-boating demands an understanding of minicell that I could never have imagined as a kayaker. I love shaping it with a box cutter and a cheese grater, for it is very much like cheese—gruyere, to be exact—and smells the same after a while.
So I’ll admit what few others will. In fact, you may not want to read this: I don’t mind the smell when I pull my sprayskirt. A C-boater’s body comes into more contact with foam than a kayaker’s body does, so the odor, nay, the stench, is more intense. If I’m unwell, I’ll know it when I burp the skirt, especially because my Thunderbolt Pose means the miasma blows directly into my face. I think of it as a low-cost lab test, a way to estimate my general health. After all, physicians smell ears and noses to detect infection and certain dogs can smell cancer.
Yes, it all comes back to aging, battered me, checking my body at midlife for odors more common to hospitals or retirement homes.
At midlife, I also smell sadness in the last sprayskirt burp of the day. It reminds me that I’ve given myself permission to escape from my job and my weary, ironic worldview. It’s the end of the few hours I’ve taken to terrify myself in a rodeo hole. I can take solace in the faux machismo of having been the only C-boat out there, mediocre still, but looking pretty good swirling around the eddy on my knees, me and my ego. Move over tattoo-on-the-shoulder. Move over stud-in-the-nose. Make room in the lineup for gray-at-the-temples. Half the paddle and twice the man and all that crap that shouldn’t mean anything to me anymore, except it does.
Golfers and paddlers share a common pang: the clubs rattling into the car trunk, the boat hull rumbling onto the roof rack. I still like it when young paddlers in the parking lot criticize me with their eyes for strapping my boat with the cockpit facing upward, only to double-take when they see the jutting pedestal of minicell. And as I drive away they hear the tag-end of the lap belt flapping against the hull. It makes them think, at least until they see the bumper sticker that says my daughter is an honor roll student at the local elementary school. Alas, they probably grew up in everyone-gets-a-trophy America and started paddling in boats so short and well designed that they were able to roll and cartwheel during their first lesson.
What they are really thinking is that a C-boat looks unnecessarily difficult. Good. The best things in life are hard; that’s why they’re the best. The twentysomethings will wonder why I converted my boat and, ultimately, myself to a C-boat.
In a C-boat, old men become new.
Driving home I see on the roof of a car in the opposite lane a boat of the same make and model as my own. I feel cheated. Then at home I lower my C-boat from the roof rack and I know that this boat is mine and only mine.
The lower half of centaur-me.
An oversized talisman.
Part of the story I tell myself to help with the burden of knowing that each day is one day more and one day less of my life.
Through the bay window I see my daughter who also wants to paddle, if only to be with her aging, battered father.
I think I’ll start her in a C-boat.
On the bright side.