Rants and Revelations

First thing this morning I went for a paddle. I made the mistake of asking to try one of those KayakPro Marlin boats that I mentioned seeing speeding up the creek a few days ago. It was nice. At first it felt quite tippy, but after a few minutes I was paddling pretty hard and not having any trouble staying upright. But there was a bit of an undercurrent of “if you don’t pay attention, it can turn around and bite you”. I was paddling as hard as I could, and it was hardly producing any bow wave at all, unlike the Skerry. When I go hard in the Skerry, I usually find the point where the bow wave gets “big”, and then slack off a bit from there, but without that cue, I wasn’t sure how fast I was going. They told me only to take it for 15 minutes, so I did this little circuit that you can make out of alternate channels in the creek. Towards the end, I was getting tired and I found myself having to think about staying upright more again. I’ve also never paddled a boat with a rudder before, and I had to think about how to use that - evidently the idea is that you can concentrate on doing a power stroke and use the rudder to steer rather than doing a less efficient sweep to steer.

The guy at Baycreek suggested that I come to the Wednesday night racing series and do the course one night with my Skerry, and come back the following night and do it with the Marlin to see how much faster it is. Oh, this could be dangerous - I could really fall in love with this boat. I wonder which boat, the Skerry or the Pgymy, I’ll end up selling to pay for it?

Anyway, 15 minutes wasn’t enough of a workout for me, so after bringing back the Marlin I went for another paddle in my Skerry. It was a beautiful day, and I got a bit of a sunburn on the top of my head.

Ok, evidently I lied about it not getting warm enough to do any gluing today. I went to work and did all I can despite the VOB being broken, and when I came home the thermometer in the car said it was just over 70 degrees. Hey, that’s gluing temperatures, I thought to myself. So as soon as I got home I finished trimming and sanding the top side of the left side panels, and then flipped them over.
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Today I took the weights and the mylar sheets off, and it doesn’t look too bad. The first one I did (the lower one in this picture) has some areas where the fibreglas weave shows through because it didn’t get enough epoxy, and it trapped some dirt in the epoxy in the part that wasn’t covered by the mylar. I tried sanding out the dirt and I think I got most of it. I’m not sure what I can do about the weave showing through, although it’s a lot more visible close up than if you stand back a bit.

The second one (the upper one in this picture) also has a bit of weave showing, but much less. It’s very smooth and shiny and I could almost be proud of it.

The rest actually came out much better. I think you can see a bit of weave on one or two others, but for the most part you can hardly see that there is fibreglas under there.

Today isn’t warm enough to do the other side, but I’ve got to go to work anyway. Tomorrow should be good. I’ll definitely use more epoxy, keep clean bricks close to hand, and use the brush to dab rather than brush the epoxy on the tape.

The temperature is finally over 65 degrees, so it’s time to start gluing. And it did not go well.

As per the instructions, I mixed up an ounce of epoxy. I painted some on the boards around the seams. Then I cut some of the fibreglas tape and put them down on the wet epoxy and painted some more to wet the tape. Problems:

• As I painted the epoxy on the tape, the tape kept moving around. I ended up having to hold down the tape with my fingers (in the rubber gloves, of course).
• As I was painting, one of the boards popped up a bit as a nail came lose. This made gaps and bubbles to painstakingly paint out.
• Bits of fibreglas frayed off the edges and ends of the tape, and had to be carefully picked out of the epoxy.
• other random dirt got into the epoxy and had to be picked out.
• I ran out of epoxy in the middle of it and had to run inside and mix up another ounce.

With that all done, the second part was to cut some strips of mylar and put them on top of the tape, then squeegee it flat, and put weights on them. Problems:

• I’d put the nails in the boards too close to the seams, so I had to remove them and move them back so the mylar would fit. Several times that lifted one of the boards, ruining all my previous work.
• The instructions had said to weight them down with bricks. I didn’t think I had any bricks, but I figured all the scrap 2×4s I had could be piled on top. Unfortunately, it turned out that the 2×4s weren’t heavy enough, and things were popping up. With the glue hardening quickly, I had to improvise. I found a pile of half-bricks in a dingy corner of the garage and pressed them into service. Unfortunately they were filthy, and got dirt all over everything. I’m hoping none of it got below the mylar sheets.

I’m not looking forward to tomorrow’s reveal to see just how ugly these joints look. Hopefully it will be like my canoe, where I know where every blemish is but everybody else just sees the overall beauty of it.

It’s too cold to do epoxying, but that’s probably a good thing. I did some more shopping, and then did a couple of small things.
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I’ve given up trying to decide if a day of doing nearly nothing counts as a day or not, so subsequent posts on this project probably aren’t going to have day numbers any more.

Today I made a first whack at getting the stuff on the shopping list. I didn’t get all I need, mostly because I couldn’t find a bunch of stuff at Home Despot and didn’t reach our local hardware store until just before closing.

After that, I started laying out the boards to do the end butting, but I can’t actually do the gluing until I get a few more items on the shopping list. I also discovered that I don’t have enough space on the table to do both sides at once. That means wasting some epoxy, but on the other hand it means taking it slower and that’s probably a good thing for me.

I’m currently doing the two hour hot water soak that they recommend for your epoxy to undo any crystallization that might have happened in transit.

And I’ve got a roll of wire to cut into 3.5 inch lengths, so I’ve got the roll of wire, a pair of “dikes” (diagonal cutters), and a juice glass which just happens to be 3.5 inches deep, and I’m cutting like a mad man.

The boxes arrived. Even the one that was supposedly stuck in Hodgkins. I suppressed the urge to rip them open and immediately start to glue things together.
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I’ve said some nice things about UPS recently, but it appears that my streak of luck with them is running out. My delivery from Pygmy Boats is in three boxes, two of which are around 30 pounds, and one that is around 7 pounds. I’ve been tracking them eagerly on the UPS web site. All three of them showed as arrived in Hodgkins very late Thursday night. Hodgkins is a city that seems to be in quantum flux because some entries on the UPS web site say “Hodgkins, IL” and others say “Hodgkins, IN”. One of the two heavy packages hasn’t updated since it got there, and is still showing that although it’s there, it’s scheduled for delivery on Monday. The other heavy one and the light one, however, showed travel to Buffalo, NY on Friday via Middleburg Heights, OH, which is good because Buffalo is almost right next door. But for some reason, those two also say “Rescheduled for delivery” and Tuesday’s date.

I’m kind of at a loss to understand why it’s going to take them from Friday to Tuesday to get these packages here from Buffalo. Hell, I’d offer to go pick them up myself if it would help. Especially since the other package is evidently going to be dropped off via wormhole as Hodgkins makes its transition between its Illinois incarnation and its Indiana incarnation. Yeah, yeah, I know, it’s probably a matter of scheduling low priority room on the truck or something, and the package whose status hasn’t updated since Thursday is probably going to be late as well. Still, it sucks.

I went kayaking for the first time in 3 weeks today. The weather wasn’t looking great, but I figured it had been too long. I was right about the weather - it started raining when I was about 2/3rds of the way to the weir, but it wasn’t a cold rain so I kept going. I was alone, so I was paddling as fast as I could. Probably too fast. Mostly I wanted to see how far I could go without pausing, and then after I had to pause, how few pauses I could take and still keep up a decent pace. That’s sort of how I built up my fitness when I first started cross country skiing and again when I started mountain biking - go fast, and work on increasing the range, instead of doing the more conventional starting with long slow distance and building up the speed, which is how I started running.
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I had a phone call from a very nice person at PygmyBoats. She was calling me because I’d ordered the wrong size spray skirt for the kayak kit I’d ordered, and she wanted to know if I was ordering them for the kit, or for another boat. It turns out that the Arctic Tern 14 is a “medium” size boat, but the Arctic Tern Hi Volume is a “large” size boat. Also, when I saw the “1 hand toggle” on the order form, I’d actually ordered 1 pair. Oh, and I got the UPS tracking number - they said that I should get it Friday or Monday. I’m hoping it’s Friday for obvious reasons.

Another day of interesting discoveries:

• Our drill SUCKs. It’s a not incredibly old Skil 4.1 Amp corded drill, and it doesn’t have enough power consistently to drill 3 inches into the end of a 2×4. It also has a standard old chuck instead of one of those new quick ones - I must have spend 80% of my time switching between drill bit and nut driver bit.
• In spite of having a degree in structural engineering, I forgot that a parallelepiped with non-rigid joints needs cross bracing or it will collapse. I guess I’ll go get some strapping or something tomorrow.
• This is probably going to end up being a fair weather project. After finishing the two parallelepiped, I put the particle board sheet on one (and attempted to put on the second one, but that one collapsed), and there is almost no room to move around the garage. I might rip a foot off the edge of the sheets to give me some room.

Anyway, the work surface is nearly done, and I can probably safely go ahead and order the kit.

In spite of the existence of my cedar strip canoe, which still looks pretty good 25 years after I built it, I’m not good with my hands. But for some reason, I got it into my head that I really want to build a Pygmy Boats kayak kit.
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I went kayaking after work today on Irondequoit Creek. The carp were mating, and there were lots of dead ones floating around, thus my little perl joke in the title.

It was a great day to blow off work a bit early, and Rob and I went upstream from Bay Creek Paddling Center up just past the Elison Park dog beach. I was pretty tired on the way back, and it didn’t help that the wind shifted around and got cold, so we ended up with headwinds in both directions. According to the thermometer in my car, the temperature dropped about 10 degrees in the course of the hour and a half paddle, although it felt like the temperature change happened all at once when the wind shifted.

The weir was a bit of a challenge, but nothing like it had been last time I took a look at it. I nearly dug a rail under, and was grateful for my spray skirt. Rob took about three tries, but mostly because he tried hitting it from one side or the other instead of coming right up the middle.

A couple of times we saw a bird that at first we thought was some sort of Loon because it was so low in the water, but it had no white markings, only black, with a bit of red or orange near the base of the beak. When it flew, we could see very long pointy wings. And when it swam it held its beak up at a 45 degree angle to the water, rather than parallel like a Loon does. I guessed it was a Cormorant, and after looking it up, I’m sure of it.

We also saw lots of geese. At one point, we heard a lot of honking up ahead, and as we rounded the corner this goose left the shore and paddled out in front of us, and did a bit of a fake take-off, presumably to try to lead us away from his nest. But this annoyed another goose, who then flew into the first one and attacked him until they both flew off.

Lots of people and dogs in the dog park, including two people who kept asking us all sorts of questions about paddling and seemed put out that we continued paddling instead of stopping to talk after we’d answered a couple. And one canoe coming upstream just as we’d flushed the Cormorant downstream for the last time. They asked us what the bird was, I said Cormorant, and the woman in the front of the canoe said “See, I told you” to the man in the back.

Lots of fun.

It’s rare for me to get my second paddle of the season so quickly after the first (first was Sunday, second was today, Wednesday), but the weather cooperated and today was chicken wing day in the cafeteria so I wasn’t hungry when I got home, so away I went.

The creek was quite deserted by other boats, except for one flat bottom dinghy that two guys were fishing from. I’ve seen carp mating in that area, so that’s probably what they were after.

Considering that Sunday I saw almost no wildlife except geese, today was a bonanza day. I saw male red-winged blackbirds staking out their territories, several kingfishers patrolling their sections of the river (and raising their crests in alarm when I got too close), a few pairs of ducks, and I finally saw the famous Irondequoit Creek bald eagles. I rounded a corner and saw two soaring birds, one quite high and one just above the ridge line, nd immediately said “oh, turkey vultures”, but then the lower one spread his stunning white tail and I noticed that the head was bright white as well. I never did make out for sure if the higher one was a bald eagle as well, but I think it was. One thing that impressed me was that while it was soaring, it seemed to be moving back and forth much faster than a turkey vulture does. Maybe it’s anti-vulture prejudice, but it just seemed more, I don’t know, purposeful or something.

I also saw a crow or raven down fairly low, but he flew away rapidly as I got near so I didn’t get a good look. There were very distinct primary feathers curling up at the tips, which I think means it was a raven.

I went a little bit further than I did on Sunday, and I wasn’t as tired when I reached the weir, probably because I paced myself better. Probably just as well, because on the way home there were two stretches where I was paddling into a very strong wind. My weather widget says that the winds at the airport are 21G33 knots, or 24 to 33 mph, which I can easily believe. And when the wind is blowing in my face like that, my old canoe trip instincts say “paddle as hard as you can for the lee of the upwind shore, and don’t rest until you get there”, so that’s what I do.

Well, I got out earlier than last season, but not as early as the previous year. The sun was shining, the air was warm (just a little over 60, I think), the water was freezing cold. All in all, a great day to be out. And obviously I wasn’t the only one, because the creek was crowded with boats, some who looked like they knew what they were doing, some who obviously didn’t. Three teenagers in a canoe lurching from bank to bank with no clue what they were doing (sort of a “sub-prime” canoe), a large gaggle of kayaks coming downstream together, a guy with his feet up on top of his kayak deck and a fishing rod between his feet, people in spiffy paddling jackets and wet suits, and people in t-shirts and shorts.

I wore my wet suit because I knew the water would be cold and I didn’t want to get cold legs on the bottom of the boat, nor did I want to get hypothermia if I tipped. I had planned to only go as far as the weir so I wouldn’t overdo it. But in hindsight I probably should have turned back sooner - I was tired and my elbows were sore by the time I got there. And when I turned back, there was a strong wind in my face countering any assist I was getting from the current.

The weir was impassible - the smaller gaps were jammed with debris, so all the water was flowing through the middle channel, and there was about a foot and a half or two foot drop there. I bet it would have been fun to paddle down, but as tired as I was, I wasn’t going to try paddling up it. I wasn’t even going to try portaging around it so I could shoot it. I just looked at it and said “no f-ing way”. There were a couple of people fishing the eddy below it. So avoiding the lines, I did an eddy turn and turned down stream. I was glad to see that the big mud flat that had sprung up last year just downstream of the weir had submerged again. Hopefully the spring run-off will scour the stream bed a bit deeper this year so it won’t re-emerge in the lower water season.

Not much wildlife in the marsh yet, except some sparrows and lots and lots of Canada geese. Most of the geese looked like they were getting ready to nest, but there was one on a dead tree that lies on its side in the middle of the creek who was playing dead as I splashed by. I wonder if she had eggs? Last year I noticed that a goose had tried to lay eggs on a semi-flat spot on that tree, but most of them had rolled down into a crack, and I guess she’d abandoned the nest. I hope she has better luck this year.