Category: Kayaking

What a day!

Got an piece of beta software that I’ve been waiting for for a while, but it required that I upgrade my Linux box from Ubuntu 7.10 to 8.04. The upgrade seemed to work fine, but the kernel paniced when I rebooted. It booted on “Linux.OLD”, an older kernel, but my USB keyboard didn’t work and several other things weren’t working right. I re-ran “lilo” thinking it might get the proper kernel booted, but instead it removed “Linux.OLD” from the boot menu, and now I have no way to boot it. Downloading a Live CD right now.

Went flying for the first time in a long time. The plane is badly out of rig and with full left rudder trim, still required more left rudder to center the ball. I didn’t have any destination in mind, just flew around a bit to a couple of airports I rarely visit. My third landing wasn’t too bad.

Went with Vicki to buy her a kayak. She bought a Swift Saranac 14, which is a pretty good boat, and very popular. I hope she gets lots of use out of it.

Although the menu and other buttons on the new camera don’t work, I can still take pictures with it (just can’t change the ISO, or switch to shooting in RAW, or any number of other adjustments). First picture is here.

Fourth Race: 25.40. Paul starts to see some improvement.

I think Monday’s coaching session helped a lot – I shaved some time off this week compared to last week (but still not as fast as the week before), after a couple of the good guys complained that it was actually a bit slower this week. I didn’t get a copy of the race results this week or last week, so I can’t really compare, but I think they’re right.

Once again, the wind was blowing from the south, which meant you started off with the wind behind you, but then had to face a headwind for the entire middle half of the race. When the wind comes from the north, it actually doesn’t seem to blow on the creek part of the course at all, but when it comes from the south it does.

I started at the end of a huge group of people, so I got to pass one person and watch the faster people pull slowly ahead of me in the bay. Two of the better open canoe racers caught me right at the buoy that marks the second turn – I was trying to swing wide to see if I could do it with all sweeps and not lose too much momentum when I discovered this one guy trying to go around outside me, so I ended up not swinging as wide as I liked, and having to rudder and back-sweep, meaning a total loss of momentum as usual.

I tried to remember the lessons I got from Coach Dan on Monday, and I think I did for most of the time. I’m not sure it made me any faster, but I think my elbows aren’t hurting as much as they did last week.

Kayak Construction: Need to take some time to think

Yesterday I glued the seams on the deck of the kayak. Today I’m supposed to be taking off the wires and filling in any seams that didn’t get filled. I took a look at them, and there are some major problems and some minor ones.

Major problems:

  • The tail section didn’t go together correctly. It was so bad that I’ve had to cut the glued seams with a carpet knife. I’ve tried to slide a bit a scrap wood under it and using a combination of nails, tape and clamps tried to get it to sit right and I’ll have to re-glue it later.
  • Two places on the deck, around where the bow and stern temporary forms are, the deck has actually slumped down too low and is too wide for the hull. I’m hoping that after I glue the under side and put it back on to dry, I can somehow manipulate those sections to sit right, but I fear that I’m going to end up carving the wood along the shear line to make it fit.

Minor problems:

  • lots of glue spills on the outside of the boat that need to be scraped and sanded off
  • some HUGE glue spills on the inside of the boat, some that went down into the hull will require lots of work to get off
  • Most of the epoxy has set up correctly, but some is still rubbery. Hopefully that’s just a matter of time, and not that I somehow didn’t mix the hardener in correctly.

It’s times like this that I have to keep reminding myself that nobody else will see all the flaws.

Kayak Construction: Finishing the deck wiring

Today I finished wiring the rear deck panels, attached the deck recess plate, and positioned and taped the deck down on the hull, and tightened all the wires. I was going to start gluing the deck seams, but a thunderstorm started as soon as I was about to start mixing the epoxy so I called it a day.
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