About a year ago, Lake in the Hills’ Larry Kozak and Lakewood’s Ray Christe planned to canoe the full length of the Mississippi River from Lake Itasca, MN to New Orleans, LA.

Last September they attended a presentation given by John Lynn who paddled the entire length of the Mississippi River from its headwaters at Lake Itasca, MN to the Gulf of Mexico.

John Lynn’s adventure motivated both paddlers who were somewhat apprehensive of the impending physical effort.

They decided that it would be a good idea to combine Larry’s mechanical engineering knowledge with Ray’s electrical experience and come up with the design of a high-tech canoe equipped with assisted power source.

They wanted to reduce the 800,000 paddle strokes it took John Lynn to do the River!

To be “green,” Christe and Kozak choose to develop a solar-power canoe which will later be commercialized for sporting activities, fishing trips or leisure boating.

The solar assisted trimaran canoe is scheduled to be ready for a test run in the waters of Crystal Lake, IL in the spring of 2010.

If the performance results meet their technical expectations and all the logistics are ready, they will start their journey from Chicago on the Illinois River to New Orleans on the Mississippi River in summer 2010. The journey is expected to take two months.

They named their canoe “CalypSol.”

A web site will allow viewers to follow their journey from signals emitted from the on-board GPS and share some video clips of their scenic journey.

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With Crystal Lake in the background Ray Christe and Larry Kozak show off a model of their solar canoe.