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from the airport.

Paddling

The emptiest map on this site

This site measures what the open map holds. For paddling, on the whole island of Newfoundland, it holds nothing — and that sentence is a counted, dated, repeatable finding rather than a figure of speech.

Swept 2026-09-21, from the whole island

  • 0 put-ins
  • 0 take-outs
  • 0 mapped paddling routes
  • 0 stretches of water tagged as paddled
  • 0 slipways a paddler is told to use
  • 0 canoe or kayak rentals
  • 0 rapids, falls or hazards tagged for paddlers

Not a sample and not an opinion: every element in the open map for this province was read, looking for the tags paddlers actually use. The whole of it is in src/data/paddling.json, and the sweep that produced it can be run again by anybody.

What is actually there

2 things on the island carry the open map’s tag for canoeing, both of them buildings in St. John’s, and neither of them is a place on a river:

A slipway is not a put-in

The map holds 61 slipways around this coast, 13 of them named, and it would be easy to publish those as places to put a kayak in. They are not the same thing. A slipway is where a trailer backs a boat down a ramp: whether a person can carry a boat down it, what the bottom is, whether it ends at a working wharf and whether anybody minds you parking there is exactly what the tag does not say.

Not one of the 61 is tagged for paddling. So this page does not claim them, and does not list them: they sit in this site’s data as the reference set a recorded water crossing is checked against, which is a job that does not care whether a kayak fits. The one place a slipway earns a mention here is the day somebody tells us a paddler actually uses it.

What this page will never tell you

No grade. No flow. No season. No “runnable”, no difficulty, and nothing a reader could mistake for clearance to get on the water. The sweep reads the grade tags where they exist and throws them away on purpose, keeping only the count.

That is the same line this site already holds for a trail’s difficulty, a road’s winter surface and a dive site’s depth — a river is simply the one where getting it wrong drowns somebody. A grade is a judgement about water on a day; it changes with the rain and with nobody editing anything. If a club or an authority publishes one, this site will cite them. It will never be the source.

What one run from you changes

A paddling entry here is the same shape as everything else on this site: two places, and what the road does when it reaches them. Where you put in, where you take out, where the car goes at each end, whether the last bit is a carry — and the name of whoever it is right to ask about the water, which is the one answer that stays true.

Send a put-in and a take-out →

Better still, put it on the open map

Then it is not only on this page — it is in every app built on the same data, for good, and it is what makes a zero like the one above stop being true. It is four tags, and they are worth knowing because almost nobody in this province is using them yet:

  • whitewater=put_in — a node where you get on the water. Despite the name it is the standard tag for flat water too.
  • whitewater=egress — a node where you get off it.
  • canoe=yes — on the stretch of water itself, saying it is paddled.
  • route=canoe — a relation joining a run together, once you have both ends.

Add what you have seen from where you were standing, and nothing copied from another map or a guidebook. How to edit the map, step by step →

OpenStreetMap, swept from the Geofabrik newfoundland-and-labrador extract of 2026-09-20 with `scripts/osm-extract-sweep.py <extract.osm.pbf> paddling`. Rebuilt from the extract rather than Overpass because Overpass is unreachable from this machine — every public endpoint and mirror fails to connect. An Overpass port of this sweep is owed the day it is reachable again. Read the file yourself before trusting this page: how contributions work.