In some parts of Canada, you’ll rarely hear someone use the phrase “whatever paddles your canoe” instead of the more usual “whatever floats your boat”– and apparently, at least for one Swede, that’s steam power. The video, linked and embedded below, is a detailed tour of a canoe equipped with a small boiler and an outboard motor that has been converted to run using steam pressure by [Kenneth Karlsson].

The canoe itself appears to be a Grumman of the “prospector” type, wide in body to hold all the gear you’d need for extended wilderness trips– or, in this case, a small boiler. Amidships is the ideal place, as it won’t affect the balance of the boat. Amidships is an odd place to put an outboard– in the North American homeland of the canoe, if you aren’t moving under your own power, it is more common to cut off the curved stern of the canoe and mount the outboard to the newly-made transom. [Karlsson]’s choice to put the outboard off one side will be less maneuverable than a stern mount, but saves the need to modify the canoe and makes for much shorter steam lines. Shorter steam lines means less hose to potentially leak and scald the occupants, as well as fewer losses, so we can’t really argue with the tradeoffs.

The engine is an old two-stroke outboard that has a single steam cylinder retrofitted to it, along with a heat exchanger to warm up lake water with exhaust steam before it heads the boiler. The water is filtered first, of course, but we do hope the new owner– who posts on YouTube with channel “Steam Canoe” is diligent about cleaning the boiler. It doesn’t look like super high pressure steam, but the vapour phase of water is always something to be respected.

If the potential of scalding steam leaks and boiler explosions put you off, but you still won’t pick up a paddle, canoes can be rigged with sails— or you can just hand the paddle to a robot arm. Though given this is Hackaday, maybe you’d rather skip the canoe and climb aboard the good ship Benchy instead.

The first known use of humans using wind to perform mechanical work with machines dates back to ninth-century Persian windmills. But if we count sailing vessels among those machines, the history goes back to sometime just before the invention of written language. Since then, humans have been sailing everything from the tiniest of Sunfish to the largest of shipping vessels, and even sailing boats like canoes that aren’t typically designed for efficient sailing. For those who already own a canoe, the conversions can be straightforward but often involve drilling into the hull. This homemade conversion kit, on the other hand, requires no drilling at all.

The first, and most obvious, part of the conversion is to add a mast and sail. [Tea]’s primary setup does involve drilling a mast thwart into the gunwales of the canoe, but he also built an alternative setup which clamps to the gunwales and the bow deck instead. The standing lug sail is then hoisted on an unstayed wooden mast. The next major component of the build are a pair of leeboards which also clamp to the gunwales and function like a centerboard, and can be adjusted for one’s preferred amount of weather helm. Rounding out the stern of the boat is a custom-built rudder with a pair of lines in lieu of a tiller which can be positioned anywhere along the length of the boat.

All of the wooden parts of this build were custom-built from common lumber with finishing touches from a router to soften all of the hard edges. Canoe sailing is fairly popular, although without the leeboards these common sailing kits are often meant for downwind sailing only. A complete setup like this turns it into a much more capable craft. Without a canoe as a base vessel to start with, though, a complete sailing vessel can be built from common lumber as well.