Very minor scratching on the bottom, only visible on careful inspection. The hull is in excellent shape inside and out. We picked up the MR Solo north of Detroit yesterday. Later I found out I could build them as well but that's another obsession for another time. I live an area where the only canoes are seemingly aluminum tandems so if I wanted to try different hulls about the only choice I had was to buy them. If I decided the boat wasn't for me I could sell it the next summer. Fall was a great time to buy because people wanted to sell before putting them in storage and not many people were looking to buy at that time either.

Unless it was a specific hull I was looking for that I already knew I'd like I only bought canoes at what I thought was under market value so I knew that if I had to resell the boat I wasn't likely to lose any money. I got a bit out of control there for a while but it was really fun and I learned a lot about different canoes as well as a lot about my preferred paddling style. I bought lots of canoes that involved similar drives. If you don't mind driving, have the money to spend, and won't be terribly disappointed if it doesn't work out it seems like a good deal. Or perhaps you're looking to be encouraged. We feel good about what we achieved and we hope our neighbors will notice, and begin to take better care of this special spot.You're probably asking the wrong group if you want to be discouraged. The wetland could still benefit from more management - hauling away of the organic debris (primarily the bamboo) and the remaining trash, and additional restoration - but that will have to wait for another day. We carted the trash - two truck-loads worth - off to the landfill. By the time we were exhausted, the flow was much improved. I raked dead leaves from the stream bed up onto the banks and graded the bed to a more gradual descent. Then Dobbs used a ryoba to cut a swath out of the wrecked boat, to allow the stream to flow through. We cut and raked out the dead bamboo and piled it off to one side. What do you know? It was! The ponding area was a couple feet higher than the outflow stream. We'd noticed that area becoming wetter than usual - like the beginnings of a mill pond - over the last year. In the course of the clean up, we found that the stream that feeds the wetland had been blocked when neighbors cut down bamboo and then bulldozed it, along with trash and the boat, into the stream bed. We extracted: 5 tires, 1 wheel, two 55-gallon steel drums, 1 copper oil tank and piping (good cash-for-scrap find), rotten wood decking from a floating dock, 3/4 of one giant chest freezer (the door is almost entirely submerged and trees have grown over it), a plastic slide, a 'No Wake' marker, a steel ladder, 3 footballs, 2 basketballs, 1 baseball, 1 tarp, half a car dolly, an engine block, a steel car fender, a porcelain and bronze marine head, 4 RV window frames, a slew of plastic flower pots, a plastic barrel, and about 1/8th of a fiberglass power boat. To get loaded into our truck, each piece had to be carried or rolled up hill from the marsh to the road in front of our house. Almost every item was water-logged and muddy. Today, we took advantage of one of the 'Extra Credit Points for Stay-at-Home Century Club Members' and took clean-up into our own hands - literally.ĭobbs and I donned waterproof boots and work clothes and, over the course of six hours, hauled out several hundred pounds of trash. No one wants to separate the single marsh lot from the other eight. We've made offers to buy the land from three different owners over the last twenty years, hoping to protect it, but to no avail.

The 1/10th of an acre of marsh land is privately owned - part of a 9 lot collection, though the owners are seasonal visitors and, instead of cleaning up trash this year, they cut down about 10 big beautiful shade-giving trees instead.

Old habits die hard, and in the case of our neighborhood the habit is dumping trash and debris into the wetland behind our cottage.

Rottenwood river clean up