Maine Guide Canoe

My newest acquisition and latest guilty pleasure.

I traded a solo canoe for an Old Town Discovery Sport. It's a 17 foot canoe, with a 40" center and molded hard chines almost barely like a Greenland style hull. They don't make the 17 footers anymore, but make a quite capable 15 footer. These are very reminiscent of the old Maine Guide Canoes or....depending where one is....a Duck Boat. Being stable, I can easily stand up in it. It's rock solid.

I'm a quiet water type of guy. Always have been. Started making my own boats and kayaks about 25 years ago. I'm the kid of guy who has thought nothing of paddling 4-6 hours to get to the nice spots.
My wife loves canoe camping. Although she loves straight line river trips, she is liking the convenience items and would prefer some trips NOT to break camp every day to keep moving.
So, I got this big heavy canoe. It's a beast at 94 lbs when I'm used to canoes in that 30-52 lb range for portaging. But we have a lot of big water, flowages and border country giant lakes here. There's some great places to snag an island site and set up for a few days of fishing and watching sunsets. Lots of big open rivers here with sandbar and island camping as well.

The canoe can be paddled in shallows and back bays. it also has oarlocks in place for the middle seat. It's so efficient as a row boat, with no effort, one can cover a lot of miles. It's super fast with oars.
But I bought a 2.5hp Suzuki 4 stoke for the small square stern. On idle, it goes as fast as two people can paddle. It gets going well enough and pushes us, our dog and a week's worth of gear and food impressively. The canoe is a gear hauling wonder. The motor is a self contained gas sipping dream. There are bays of these huge lakes and rivers we would like t explore, but the day has to depend on how long to paddle there and how long back. No more worries! Our favorite lake is 36,000 acres and has over 300 islands. We can now explore more of it.

The cool thing about it, is last fall I got out by myself....in my Ojibway high mocs, Stormy Kromer hat and my Dad's 1969 original Woolrich hunting coat. I swear it felt like I was living a picture off of an old Field and Stream cover from the early 60's

So this week, I'm adding two swivel seats to it after I lower the wood slats 2" to keep it's center of gravity. I bought a light, generic trailer for it which works great and you can pull it with anything. I'm adding recessed cup holders in the wood bench seats to the side of the swivel seats and a rod holder which will go to the middle seat.

This is my first "Motor Boat"

But yeah....I can get used to this thing for all that big water and bring along more creature comforts than just the bare necessities I've always brought. Maybe it's my cabin fever, but I'm exited to get back out in it.
This is a picture of what I'm describing....

 

Here's a look at how small the squared stern is on the Discovery. This motor the guy has is very loud. Mine is much quieter and as I said before, on idle it goes as fast as we can paddle even our lighter canoe.

 

Nice
I picked up a 15’ old town square stern a couple years ago. I’ve never had a motor on it but I did mount some oarlocks where I can sit on the center thwart and row backwards or sit on the stern seat and push the boat forwards.
Like you said, it’s a rock solid boat. I bet the 17’ is even more so

 

Back seat is on a slider, which just allows maybe a 4" offset. Put it on anyway.
The transom is just about 14 inches although it looks bigger in the pic.
It was nice yesterday, so I did this before a nice hike.
Lowering the seats to keep the center of gravity the same I believe will have been time well spent.
Hoping in two weeks to go exploring in a big river system and a few nights camping out.