I upgraded my blog to WordPress 2.6. It was extremely painless – I didn’t even bother to deactivate my plugins. So far, it looks pretty much the same. I do like the new plugins page, though. One of these days I’d like to see if I can get the Gallery plugin working – I had it working for a while, but it broke after a couple of upgrades of both Gallery and WordPress.
Category: Revelation
Kayak Construction: Finishing the underside of the deck
Today the glass tape under the deck was dry, so I took the deck off the hull again. I cut two 9×23 pieces of fibreglas cloth. (The instructions said to use scrap cloth, but since the previous time I was using cloth it didn’t mention keeping the scraps, so I had to use “good” cloth.) These were used to reinforce the deck recess area behind the cockpit.
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Kayak Construction: All that work and it looks exactly the same
Last weekend I ran into trouble trying to epoxy when it was too hot. So on Tuesday night I went down to the local distributor for System 3 Epoxy and picked up some “slow” (aka “hot weather”) epoxy hardener. I also bought a box of Nitrile gloves, because the cheap-ass no-name rubber gloves let some epoxy through and leave my hands sticky afterwards.
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So…Oshkosh?
Oshkosh is surprisingly close. And the guy who had the club’s Dakota booked cancelled so I switched to it instead of the Archer I had booked, giving me a bunch more load capacity. So I guess it’s time to start getting my shit together.
The extra load capacity means I could bring another person and still have 200 pounds or more for camping gear and luggage. I’ve put out a call on the club mailing list, but no takers so far. Anybody here wanting to experience the greatest aviation show on earth? I’m currently planning to fly up on Sunday and back on Thursday morning, but I’m flexible.
First advanced lesson
I got invited to train with the Baycreek team, but then was told that I needed to take some private lessons with their coach first. That was fine with me, because I really need to improve my stoke and hopefully stop hurting my elbows. So last night was the first session. Coach Dan and I worked on getting good torso rotation, keeping my upper hand up at eye level, and getting a good glide on each stroke. During the course of the lesson, we paddled 4 miles.
After the lesson, the team showed up and I paddled with them and Dan’s young son Tom for their warm-up. Of course they’re all in Epic V10 surf-skis, except Tom who was in a KayakPro Jet, another nice racing boat. And the warm up was to paddle up to the same bridge we’d made it to in the lesson. Then Tom and I paddled back together. Towards the end, Tom was getting solicitous – I’m not sure if he was worried that I wasn’t going to make it, but he offered to let me ride in his wake, and assured me that when we got back he’d help me put my boat on my rack.
That part of the canal has a boat-house for rowing shells and sculls. Evidently they’ve got a lot of money for their programs, because there were a lot of boats out, most with an accompanying motor boat with a coach on board. There were a lot of coxed eights, some obvious high school teams but some with a mix of adults obviously from some night class “learn to row” thing. My boss was on one of them, and he seemed very surprised when he waved to me. One thing I thought was interesting is that the coxes now have microphones and loud speakers instead of hand megaphones. One of the kayakers I was with joked that was so they could have longer boats.
After the paddle, Dan cooked up hotdogs and hamburgers and a couple of the team members brought out coolers full of beer. We chatted about lots of stuff, but mostly how the US doesn’t have a good paddling program like Canada does, and how there is obviously a lot of money going into rowing development here and too bad we don’t have that sort of money in paddling. I observed that rich people go to expensive prep schools that have rowing teams, so that’s what they’re likely to sponsor rather than paddling.
Anyway, it was hard work, interesting, and fun. I can’t wait to see if it helps my time at Wednesday’s time trial.