www.artnrugby.com/ |
Dave Mangin has a convoluted history with boats and other silent sports, starting with his love at first float at age 5 in an aluminum canoe.
While procrastinating for his college classes, he built his first cedar strip canoe in a single stall garage that belonged to his brother. Five years later he lived on the floor of a boat shop in Ithaca, NY for several months as he started building a rowing wherry for a trip down the Mississippi River (The 1753-mile trip was completed in 2007).
From 2008-2010, he managed the boat shop and taught a variety of classes at a charter high school in Central Milwaukee, where his students christened 6 boats: 3 plywood skiffs, a stitch and glue Chesapeake Light Craft (CLC) wherry, and two cedar strip canoes.
After settling in Nelsonville, WI with his young family, he rekindled the passion in 2018 with a stitch and glue CLC rowing shell that he built for a client. However, he needed a car-toppable boat that could handle the great lakes. A kayak was in order.
His cedar strip kayak was an intermittent labor of love spanning 3.5 years, starting with the renovation of a barn into a boat shop. The process was augmented with woodworking programs and helping other friends with work on their boats. He christened his kayak Endeavor in the spring of 2022 and continued a sectional paddle from his abode on the Tomorrow River to his childhood home in Green Bay and beyond to Lake Michigan.
Dave’s take on outdoor activities has been nuanced by many factors and experiences. Growing up in Green Bay, WI, he spent hours with a rod and reel on the banks of the Fox River pursuing fish too contaminated to eat. His evolving environmental ethic was influenced by writers such as Aldo Leopold, Tom Brown Jr, and Edward Abbey. He relished periods of solitude in various living situations that extended from Madison and Ladysmith, WI to Ithaca, NY, to a Peace Corps stint in Rural Ecuador. Yet in his rambunctious youth, he was the social coordinator for the UWSP Men’s Rugby team while training for running and bicycling events.
Dave is currently working on a memoir to catalogue some of his boat building and aqueous adventures. He blogs about his pursuits at https://www.artnrugby.com in hope of infecting other people with the drive to chase their passions as far as possible.
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