Category: Revelation

Kayak Construction, Shopping List part 1

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.

Wet one

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.
Continue reading “Wet one”

Construction project, Day 3.5

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.

That can’t be a coincidence, can it?

I’m reading the latest Analog (or at least the one on top of my to-be-read pile, which grows faster than I can read it down, but which usually acts as a stack rather than a queue), and came across a story “Sand and Iron” by Michael Flynn. I noticed the name “Slugger O’Toole”, and immediately started thinking of the song “The Irish Rover”. And as I read further, I realized that all of the names in the story seemed to correspond to names in the song. Here is the mapping, in roughly the order they appear in the story:

Story Song
Nagaraj Hogan Hogan, from Country Tyrone
Captain Amos January ???
Micmac Anne Mick McCann from the Banks of the Bann
Slugger O’Toole Slugger O’Toole, who was drunk as a rule
Maggie Barns (aka Maggie B) Barnie McGee from the banks of the Lee
Fighting Bill Tirasi Fighting Bill Tracy, from Dover
Johnny Mgurk Johnny McGurk, who was scared stiff of work

As you can see, I can’t figure out “Amos January”, and the only unused name in the song is “Malone”. And the Maggie B to Barnie McGee mapping isn’t exactly a slam dunk either. But everything else works so well, to the point where Mgurk hides from work as well.