Wednesday night race: not getting any better

My boat is still broken. The skeg came in, but it turns out that the wire in the boat is too big for the hole in the skeg – evidently Valley made the skegs narrower in recent years and used a smaller gauge wire to fit it. So I’m going to have to wait while Dave at Baycreek rewires my boat.

I tried a Cobra Eliminator, which is a pretty fast sit-atop kayak. It was a bit tippy, but nothing I couldn’t handle. Unfortunately it had a couple of problems:

  • It had a tendency to turn left unless I held a bit of right rudder
  • the venturi self-bailer only bailed when I was going full speed, and tended to fill the boat if I went even a little bit slower
  • Even with full rudder, it couldn’t do a u-turn in the width of the creek
  • Most importantly, when I went out into the bay the water started coming in faster than it was going out – I ended up trying to balance the boat with the entire cockpit full of water
  • The cockpit was a bit too short for me, so my inner thighs were burning after a few minutes, and when I got tired my paddle kept hitting my knees. We tried taking out the seat so I could sit back further, but then I started sliding from side to side, which was a real treat when the cockpit filled with water again

So I decided not to use the Eliminator. The closest equivalent to what I’m used to was a Valley Nordkapp. It’s a little narrower than the Skerry, but it has almost no rocker, so it was very difficult to turn. Going out on the bay, it wasn’t bad, but when it came time to make the turn I discovered that the combination of narrowness and my unfamiliarity with the boat, and a new set of rollers coming from 90 degrees to my course, I dissolved into a quivering lump of “oh god, please don’t let me tip out here”. Needless to say, that didn’t do much to help my time. And the paddling I did before, and the bad technique during the quivering lump part of the course, meant that my second half wasn’t very good either.

Soon after I finished, and while others were still on the course, we got a brief thunderstorm. Those of us not on the water waited it out under the tarp, but the wind was coming pretty hard so we got wet anyways.

I need to work on my technique, conditioning, weight, and get a better boat. But other than that, I’m perfect.

“How many other unknown bugs did you fix?”

My main task for this release has been to rewrite large swaths of the database code. Along the way, I had to rewrite a lot of code. Well, evidently in the course of rewriting the code, I fixed a couple of bugs that some people in QA don’t consider bugs. And now they’re hassling me because there weren’t bug reports (PCRs) for the things I changed, and want to know what else I’d changed. I told them that I didn’t stop to document every bug in the subsystems I rewrote, I just wrote the new code to work correctly. But that isn’t good enough for them – evidently I was supposed to spend years doing their job (documenting what was wrong with the sub-system) before I rewrote it so that the bugs they liked could have been reproduced exactly.

The worst thing about this is that yesterday we had a 1 hour meeting with managers, customer service people, installers, QA and developers because QA had freaked about another behaviour that I had never liked and I’d fixed it on purpose, at the end of which every person present except for a couple of the QA people had voted that they like it the way I made it now, instead of the way QA wanted me to put it back to. And this new discovery is in almost the exact same area.

Well, that kind of sucked

Today I was supposed to have another private lesson with Dan, and then attempt to keep up with the team while they trained. But Dan couldn’t get there until nearly the time the team was supposed to show up, so I went out and tried to practice a bit before he got there, and then paddle with the team. But without a skeg, my boat was damn near uncontrollable on the bay – there was a tiny bit of wind coming from the west, and my boat kept wanting to weather vane into the wind. And then a boat would come along, producing a wake coming from the east, and my boat would try to turn into the waves. I’d be trying to practice a good forward stroke, and end up turning in circles. Then I’d try to keep up with the team but in order to paddle in the same direction as them, I’d be doing sweeps on one side for 10 or 20 strokes before I dared make even one stroke on the other side. I can’t really practice my forward stroke when I’m only able to paddle on one side at a time, so I yelled to Dan that I was heading back as they disappeared in the distance.

As I turned back to the dock, I got a long series of wakes coming at me, and by sweeping on the upwind side I actually got a good surf going, and about a third of the way back was assisted very nicely by that. That was the only fun part of the whole evening.

Gaming the system. Gaming the gaming of the system.

My employer has recently gotten all into “employee health”, mostly in the form of nagging us about what we’re eating. Probably they’re hoping to save on health care costs, but they’re spinning it as “we’re concerned about those of you we haven’t laid off or outsourced yet”. One of the things they’ve done is put “Healthy Choice” stickers on the least objectionable things in the vending machine.

The other day, I noticed that beside the vending machine, they’d put these redemption coupons, where if you collect 3 “Healthy Choice” stickers and stuck them to the coupon, you could redeem it for a free Healthy Choice snack. Hey, I thought, one free snack every 4 days, that sounds like a good idea. Then I read the fine print: you can only redeem the coupons on the first thursday of the month, at the cafeteria, between 11:30 and 12:30. I’m surprised there wasn’t a “beware of the tiger” sign involved in the process somewhere. I’m sure the process was carefully designed to discourage people from redeeming them.

So rather than save up my coupons, and suddenly one day a month having a vast armload of free snacks, I started peeling my stickers off at the vending machines, sticking them to coupons, and leaving them there for others to take. My lead was soon followed, and now every day there are several of these coupons full of stickers, waiting for somebody with a different sense of time spent versus reward gained to try to redeem them. I hope that person walks in on that appointed day with hundreds of these things.

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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