A new member of the crew

Officially, at Skimate, we have five dogs and two humans. Since Tuesday evening, we also have a canoe. We chose it from [Oskar, at Canoe Adventure North](https://canoeadventure.nu/) — the only specialized canoe shop in Norrbotten, at Kängsön near Råneå, an hour and a half from us. Oskar has been doing this since 2002, he knows everything that floats north of the 65th parallel, and we asked him for advice. He delivered the canoe himself. At 11 p.m. It's a red Esquif Prospector 15, in T-Formex. The Prospector is to canoes what the Siberian husky is to northern dogs: an ancient breed, robust, made for long distances and waters that hesitate between lake and river. For a hundred years it's been used in Canada to cross the Canadian Shield. T-Formex, for its part, is younger — and its story is worth telling. For forty years, almost every expedition canoe in the world was built from Royalex, a material patented by Uniroyal in the 1970s (hence the name). In 2014, the last Royalex manufacturer decides to stop production: not profitable enough. For canoers, it was the announced end of an entire family of boats. Esquif, a small Quebec company based in Frampton, goes bankrupt the following year. But its founder, Jacques Chassé, buys back his company and spends four years developing his own replacement material — T-Formex. That's what we have today, in our red canoe. We're already using it — not for covering distances, just to get the dogs accustomed to it. For now, they're all terrified.