Dec 04, 2005
Boat maintenance and black helicopters.
Photos, videos and paddle blanks.

June 27, 2006. Flotsam and Jetsam

My daughter and her boyfriend came to visit us from Wisconsin. The day before they had to leave, we took a trip up the coast to Drake's beach on Pt. Reyes. It's quite a long haul, 60 miles, but worth it. The sky at the beach was overcast and the general ambiance of the place was gray and gloomy, but once we got walking, we warmed up.

Anyway, this is a place that abounds in flotsam and jetsam. Not surprisingly there is a fair amount of wood accumulated at the edge of the beach, lots of stuff that looks like sections of telephone pole. But more likely it's sections of broken off piers. But perhaps not quite as intuitively, there was also lots of plastic washed up, plastic with a sandblasted, sunbleached look to it, making the otherwise bright primary colors look pastel and 50ish.

Tim found a Barbie all covered in tar, at least her face and legs. How her trunk was spared, I don't know.

The other thing there was lots of was tennis shoes. Unmatched singles of course, not pairs. How these all end up in the ocean, I have no idea, but they like to float and end up on beaches. This particular shoe still had the working lights so if you smack it down, the lights blink. Unfortunately, the shutter delay on the digital camera made capturing of the lights impossible. But I did capture the motion blur.

And perhaps not so surprising, there were lots of ropes and net floats washed up on the beach. Of course the net floats are no longer made of lovely handblown glass in various shades of bottle green, but rather chunks of pitted styrofoam with vestiges of paint clinging to their exterior. The ropes are handy for hoisting spare kayaks up into the rafters at the shop.

June 10, 2006. The Pelicans are back

I was just talking to someone about how I like to watch the pelicans fishing in the seaplane lagoon. They've been gone all winter. Now they're back as of yesterday.

June 9, 2006. Canoe Restoration begins.

I started to restore a wood and canvas canoe. The fabric is on order. I have the paint remover and am ready to strip off the varnish. I still need to remove some of the wood trim that went over the canvas. The construction is curious. Most of the fastenings are brass, although the canvas seems to be held on with a mix of brass tacks and iron nails. The iron nails are rusted and hard to pull out of the wood. I suspect they may not be an original part of the boat. The boat has a little brass plaque that indicates it was made by the Thompson Canoe Company of Peshtigo Wisconsin.

June 1-5, 2006. A Trip to SSTIKS

I went up to SSTIKS, the South Sound Traditional Inuit Kayak Symposium in Towanah State Park, Washington. Heck of a drive. Took two days to get there. I carpooled with John Petersen who came up from Ventura on a Wednesday. We meant to leave by 9 am, but that didn't happen. We had to load up gear and then head over to my shop to load up my boats. And then John talked me into bringing my two hole baidarka which required unloading a bunch of kayaks off his truck and then reloading and relashing the rest. Oh boy. But we made it and took off at noon sharp.

We got as far as Salem Oregon by midnight. We had planned to camp. But it was raining and the supposed campground turned out to be an RV park. So we ended up staying at the Tiki Motel. No palm trees. In the morning we took off and made the symposium site by noon.

The symposium itself was pretty good. Got to meet a bunch of people in person that I knew about from internet exposure, like Harvey Golden, Dubside, Brian Schultz etc.

During one breakaway session, (left to right) myself, John Petersen and Harvey Golden discuss how to get more skinboat people to wear pink.

I also met lots of nice people I hadn't met before or heard of like Woddy Woodside and Warren Williams, two WW's. And met some people I already knew but don't see much because of where they live, like Jim Mitchell.

Woody Woodside walking the dog. No offense to other people with dogs, but this was probably the cutest dog at the event.

Jim Mitchell with his boat.

Deck toggles in the shapes of animals by John Petersen.

So what do people do at a traditional kayak symposium? The usual. Rolling, paddling, trying out boats, taking lessons etc. What was missing was the commercial aspect of kayak symposiums with vendors hawking all sorts of gear from pfd's to boats to paddles to footwear.

Dubside on the beach in his tuilik getting ready to demo various Greenland rolls. I have no pictures of the rolls, but he will soon have a video out.

There were also demos and classes. Jack Beal did a paddle making class. Brian Schultz demoed boat building. Somebody else did a class on how to make sprayskirts, gloves and tuiliks from neoprene. Cool.

On Sunday it rained so Brian Schultz's boad demo moved into the park shelter. Brian's website.

At the other end of the shelter on Sunday morning, Dubside demonstrated Greenland rope exercises.

Dubside on the ropes upside down

And I got to paddle my double with John Petersen. It actually worked pretty well. That is, it trimmed ok and wasn't too tippy as I had feared paddling it with an inexperienced paddler. We went and rolled it too without sprayskirts, because we didn't have any that fit.

Part 1 of the roll, the inversion.

Part 2 of the roll where we come up for air on the other side.