​WCHM held its annual canoe raffle drawing on September 24th during its Canoe & Brew event. Guest of honor Peter Marshall assisted his young son in pulling the winning ticket out of the raffle drum. And the winner is....Peder Yurista from Duluth, Minnesota. Peder came to the museum a week later to claim his prize from newly elected board member Mike Knuth, who had sold the winning ticket to Yurista when he had visited the museum earlier in the summer. Mike had sold him the ticket during one of his many stints this summer as “Keymaster” at the museum. Peder selected the 16’ cedar canvas “Duet” canoe that was built in WCHM Canoe Shop in 2023 on the MacKenzie-Yost Duet form.

          Natalie Warren, paddling adventurer and author of Hudson Bay Bound, has offered her 17.4 foot Langford Prospector, in which she and Ann Raiho became the first two women to make the 2,000-mile journey by paddle from Minneapolis to Hudson Bay and also split the continent in half by completing the entire length of the Mississippi, to the Wisconsin Canoe Heritage Museum as a collection piece. Her speaking tour landed her at WCHM in April of 2022 and resulted in more than a standing room crowd on a snowy weekday evening.