Author: Paul Tomblin

Video camera battery life sucks, and this is what I did about it

Most action cameras I’ve looked at (GoPro, VIRB, etc) all have battery life somewhere between an hour and an hour and a half. Unfortunately, most of my kayak races are somewhere between 1:40 and 2:00 hours long, and plus you have to start the camera before you get in your boat, so you end up either rushing back to shore to start it after your warm-up, or you start it before your warm up and miss the last half hour or more of the race.

This is the Polaroid XS100.xs100 It’s a very nice action camera, except just like the others it has lousy battery life. I got one for a present, and was very impressed with the picture quality. It’s not as light as a GoPro, so I didn’t think I’d want to wear it on a headstrap, but mounted on the boat it did well recording some of the shorter races. But the battery ran out on the Canadian Surfski Champs, which is a bit longer race. So I decided to do something about it.

This is the cover on the back.IMG_0868. It covers the back of the camera where the USB charging port and the SD card slot live.

Here is the back without the cover. IMG_0869.

Note the curious bump on the cover that fits into the USB port. I have no idea why they put it there, but it’s kind of handy for my purposes.

The first thing I did was buy a second cover from Polaroid. I wasn’t sure if this was going to work, and I didn’t want a useless camera if it didn’t. The second thing I did was buy some waterproof USB batteries and some Sugru. Sugru is amazing stuff – it’s like plasticine, but it hardens into a waterproof rubber.

The next thing I did was drill out that bump I mentioned, and a bit more, so I could slide a USB charging cable through the hole. I “Sugru-ed” around the hole to seal it up. I did the same with the cap on one of the waterproof batteries.IMG_0870IMG_0871.

If I’m really careful, I can wiggle the cap and cover back on without disturbing the Sugru and wrecking the seal.IMG_0872IMG_0873 The battery is now semi-permanently zip tied to the side of the camera. The camera is on a Panavise suction cup mount which I can move from boat to boat. I tested it and I get more than 5 hours video with a 32GB microSD card. More than enough for any race I plan to do.

My video work flow kinda sucks

So today I used two video cameras (and of course my Garmin Forerunner 920XT GPS and heart rate monitor). Trying to make a video from all that is kind of a pain in the ass.

  1. Use ffmpeg to assemble the multiple files from one camera into a single file – this was required when I was going directly to VIRB Edit but I might be able to skip this when I’m doing my current step 2
  2. Bring both files into iMovie. Use iMovie to try to synchronize the two clips, but still get the half a second or so off. (If anybody has a better way of doing this, please let me know). Make a split-screen in iMovie. Since the battery life on the new camera sucks, there is a section at the end with only one camera, so break the clip and switch back to non-split screen. Export.
  3. Bring the new file into Garmin VIRB Edit. Overlay the GPS/Heart Rate data (what they call “GMetrix”) on the video. Try as best I can to match up the place where I can see myself hit the start button on the Forerunner with the beginning of the “GMetrix”, get it within half a second or so, and call it done. Export.
  4. Bring the exported file into iMovie again, and use iMovie to cut it into highlights and add titles. I’ve tried doing this step in VIRB Edit and it’s pretty horrible. Export to YouTube and/or another file.

The worst part is those “Export” parts. Exporting from iMovie takes over an hour. Exporting from VIRB Edit takes over 3 hours. No idea why it takes so long. So obviously I’m looking for anything that could eliminate a step or allow me to do stuff in parallel.

Alas, poor Thunderbolt, I knew him well

Paddling today on the river, about 3km downstream of where I last saw him, I came across the trashed carcass of my poor old Thunderbolt.
IMG_0857

The poor thing is completely trashed. There is no way it can be fixed. It’s also full of hundreds of pounds of silt, so any attempt to drag it off the river bank and over to the other side of the river to some place where it could be recovered (like the RIT Gosnell Boathouse, which is about a hundred meters away and does have a couple of motor boats) would just cause it to sink like a stone. I should probably go and scrape off the “Baycreek Racing” stickers though, just so no blame for this disaster accrues to Bay Creek.

On the other hand, in the picture you can see a strip of duct tape leading from the side of the cockpit and a tangle of debris under the boat. That strip of tape is the last thing holding on that “tangle of debris”, which is a half-skirt and the tie down bungies from the back deck, and more importantly, the thing to which I attached my GPS. I pulled it out and the GPS was there! Pressing the power button showed the Garmin logo briefly and then it shut off, indicating that it was working but the battery was dead. After I got it home and put it in the charger, it uploaded the data from the fateful day I lost it. It appears to be working perfectly. Anybody want to buy a Garmin Forerunner 920XT?

Death of a Thunderbolt

Today is a tale of one smart thing and one stupid thing.

  • Smart thing: I got a dry suit.
  • Stupid thing: I got too close to the ice blocking the river

Let me back up a bit.

Yesterday (Saturday), Jim and I paddled on the river, and when we got to where the river was completely blocked with ice, we could see it a long way off and turned well before it. Jim remarked that since it was going to remain well above freezing, it should be clear further down today (Sunday). And sure enough, it was.

We were cruising along pretty nicely, there was ice on both river banks but plenty of room in the middle. We were both warm and dry in our Kokatat semi-dry suits and enjoying life. There were a few chunks of ice in the river, and nothing bigger than a foot or two in any dimension, and mostly so thin that you could bash through them in your boat. I was in my West Side Boat Shop Thunderbolt, which has become my “beater” boat for spring paddling because it’s so tough and stable and because I don’t really care much what happens to it.

Up ahead, we could see what looked like a very large floe in the middle of the river. It was only about 10 or so feet long, and I couldn’t tell if it was moving with the current. But we both agreed to head over to the right side since that looked clearer. But as we got nearly to the “gap”, I crunched up partially onto ice that was just below the surface of the water. Jim and I both back-paddled. He had no problems turning around, because his Epic V8 has an understern rudder with lots of rudder authority, but my boat is longer and has an overstern rudder, so it doesn’t turn anywhere near as well. I misjudged how far back I had to back-paddle before I started turning, and I ended up crunching sideways into the ice.

Now I’ve got a problem, because I need to paddle on the right side to turn, but there’s ice there. And the ice is pretty thin, so you can’t push down on it very hard. I don’t know exactly how it happened – either the ice gave way when I was trying to push it with the paddle, or I was trying to push myself away from the ice with my hand and I overbalanced. Either way, I ended up in the water. Immediately I realize that my dry suit is working perfectly, and no water is getting in, but I also realize that the cold water is still pulling heat out of my body. Also, I’ve freed my hands from my pogies and they’re utterly freezing. The boat is upstream of me, and it’s bumping into me. I ignored it because I know that there is no way to remount it until I can get onto solid(ish) ground. I tried pulling myself along the edge of the ice to get closer to the shore, but the ice kept breaking. I also tried pulling myself up onto it, but again, as soon as I got my upper torso onto it it would break. The current was pulling my feet under the ice and I was starting to get concerned. Jim had been trying to rescue my boat, but I called to him that I was having problems and he dropped the boat and came over. He couldn’t get in too close, because he didn’t want to end up in the same predicament, but he backed towards me, and as he got close enough I left my paddle up on the ice and swam over. I grabbed the handle on the back of his V8 and held on for dear life.

My hands were frozen solid – I kept thinking of Howard Blackburn purposely freezing his hands to the oars so he didn’t let go even though he couldn’t feel them. I was in a similar state – I was afraid to adjust my hand position for fear of not being able to grab back on. Jim paddled furiously, and I kicked, but we seemed to be just barely moving up stream. Jim’s goal was a bridge that was a hundred meters or so upstream of where I’d fallen in, but it seemed like the far side of the moon to me. Every now and then my neck would go below the water and a small trickle of water would come in – that’s the difference between a semi-dry and a full dry suit – but it wasn’t enough to chill me any more than I was. Actually, truth be told, besides my painfully cold hands, the rest of me wasn’t feeling cold. Maybe I was too worried about goal to think about it.

After what seemed like forever, we got to the bridge. Jim was trying to get around to the upstream side, but there was ice in close to it. Also, the current got really fast around the abutment because the water flows around it, and with me on the back acting like a gigantic rudder he didn’t have a lot of maneuverability. At one point he suggested I swim for it, so I reluctantly let go of the boat and swam – I wasn’t moving any faster than he had been towing me, and my hands were now fully in the water. But I grabbed the nose of his boat, and then the concrete of the nose of the abutment, and managed to pull myself around the nose and get into shallower water. And once I was in the shallow water, I was able to break the ice and climb up onto the bank. I think we were both pretty exhausted at that point.

Once I was up on the bank, Jim headed back to see if he could rescue my paddle and/or my boat. My immediate problem was my hands – now that they were out of the water and warming up a bit, they were extremely painful. Just unbelievable amounts of pain. Last time I felt something this bad was the time in Sudbury when I got frostbite on my penis. I wanted to put my hands in my groin or my underarms to warm up, but I couldn’t grasp the dry suit zipper cover. I knew that even if Jim managed to rescue my equipment, I wouldn’t be able to get back to the put-in under my own steam because I didn’t think I could hold the paddle. I looked downstream and saw Jim had my paddle, but he didn’t have a place to stow it and so it kept digging into the water and falling out. He left it, and I guess he tried to reach the boat but couldn’t reach it safely.

He came back up to me and we briefly discussed what to do next. The bridge I was under was the New York State Thruway (I-90) so I couldn’t very well get picked up there. And of course, for the first time in a long time I forgot to bring my phone so I couldn’t call anybody. Jim pointed out a house on the other side of the river, and he said he was going to look for a rope. I walked over the bridge and the man in the house came out wearing a loose bathrobe and boxer shorts, and a woman was in the background looking equally casually dressed, so I worried that I interrupted something. Anyway he let me use his phone, but suggested I stand outside to do the calling because several dogs were barking at me. But of course since I was calling from a number Vicki didn’t know, she didn’t answer. (We’ve been getting a lot of calls from local numbers that are usually the “we’re calling from credit card processing” scams, so we don’t usually answer when unfamiliar numbers show up in the caller display). I left a message, hoping that she’d call back. But by then Jim was out in the water just offshore of this place asking for a rope. The guy and I went to look for one, but by the time we got back it was obvious there was no hope – you could see my boat was sitting in the water nose down with the stern in the air at about a 70 degree angle from the horizontal. Obviously the boat had tipped over and bow had filled with water, which meant that even if Jim could get a rope on it, it would be impossible to tow with several hundred pounds of water in it – West Side Boat Shop boats don’t have bulkheads, so when water comes in, they’re freaking heavy. Jim reported that he could also see my paddle had slipped under the ice. Maybe somebody will find them when they pop out the other side of the ice floe, but it’s more likely somebody will wonder what the strange shape is going over the weir near Dinosaur BBQ in a few weeks.

Craigslist “Lost kayak” listing

Anyway, Jim said he’d go back and get his car and come back and pick me up. I told the guy in the house that I’d walk to the end of the driveway (because I was already feeling like I was interrupting their Sunday afternoon). And once I got to the end of the driveway I kept walking to keep warm.

It’s now 3 or 4 hours later. My fingertips are still all pins-and-needles even though they’re not cold – hopefully it’s nothing permanent, because this is really annoying when typing.

My take away from all this? Well, I haven’t paddled in icy rivers in a number of years because I was afraid of what would happen if I got sucked under the ice. Today proved that just because I had on a dry suit, that’s still a major danger. I got over confident and got into real danger because of it. The dry suit is going to be great in the spring and fall – and if we do a downwinder at the TC Surfski Immersion weekend, but I’m not going to paddle near river ice ever again.