adventures of a canoelover

Son 1.0 is working on his Environmental Science merit badge, the last one he needs before he can get his Eagle Scout. So we’re spending a good deal of time these days going over requirements, looking for areas to complete so we can plow through this stuff before school starts in the fall.

But Son 1.0 does not live by the ES merit badge alone.  Seems the Boy Scouts did something sorta cool this year.  They brought back some retired merit badges for 2010, and 2010 only.  Carpentry (hand tools only), Signalling (semaphore and Morse code), etc.  The one Son 1.0 is working on now is Tracking.  It used to be called Stalking, but the name was changed for obvious reasons.  Or at least it should be obvious.

One of the requirements for Tracking is to make a plaster cast of a wild animal track. Of course, tracks are everywhere, except when you want to find one.  All was saw was trail runner’s tread and truck tires.  We looked for a while, but the mosquitoes were beyond vicious so we ran away to the boardwalk that sticks out into the Teal Pond.

There were hundreds, maybe thousands of odes, and consequently, the mosquito count was nil.  I could have slept naked on the end of that walkway and awakened the next day with nary a bump.  Yay, odonates!

A dozen species were present – Cherry-Faced Meadowhawks, Common Green Darners, Twelve-spotted Skimmers, Blue Dashers, Widow Skimmers, and countless Bluets of multiple varieties all zoomed around the pond, over our heads and around our faces.  One particularly audacious Darner landed on my head.  How he got any traction is totally beyond me…it’s pretty sparse up there.

What it turned into was a nice walk with Son 1.0.  We also call him Eagle Eye, because he spots things we miss,  and we don’t miss much.  Newly emergent damsels, almost invisibly translucent were no match for the All-Seeing Eye of Son 1.0.  He spotted, I took pictures.

It sometimes strikes me that I have another summer with Son 1.0.  After that, there are no guarantees.  I may get a summer here and there, but the way time is accelerating for all of us, my guess is that we’ll see less of him as he goes out into the world to blaze his own trail.  That means time is precious, and I better take all I can get, even if it means a mosquito-infested walk carrying a pail of drywall mud and other supplies for casting wild animal tracks.

Respectfully submitted,

Canoelover

P.S.  No more Latin genus and species names.  You don’t care, and I already know them.  If you wanna know, ask.

My name is Canoelover, and I’m a kayaker.  It’s been 21 hours since my last kayak.

Hello, Canoelover.

The P&H Delphin has been around conceptually for a while.  I think I saw a drawing of it last summer, and I was immediately intrigued.  For the twenty years I’ve spent in paddlesports, sea kayaks are sea kayaks, whitewater kayaks are whitewater kayaks, and never the twain shall meet.

It takes a creative mind like Graham Makereth, owner and designer for P&H, to come up with something new like this.  Graham is one of those “if it ain’t broke, break it” sort of guys.  In this case, we have something quite different.

So a week or so ago I get a call from Jim Hager, the head dude at P&H in the US, asking if I wanted to be one of the first paddlers in the U.S. to try a Delphin.  Why yes, I said, I would very much, since there’s only one of them in North America.  Turns out that Brian Day, one of P&H’s field reps, was coming to Madison for a friend’s wedding.  Well then.  Perfect.

Brian worked for us off and on for a decade or so, and he is always a welcome sight.  His old Honda Civic is battle-scarred and has spent most of its days with too many kayaks on top of it.  I think 5 is the record, about 150 pounds over the weight limit of the rack.  But I digress.

First Impressions:

From across the parking lot it looks like a compact sea kayak.  The closer you get, the more you see the differences in design.  The hull of the boat is unlike any sea kayak you’ve ever seen.  It’s fairly flat with a pronounced chine, and a strange but attractive bow.  More on that later.

There is rocker.  Oh yes, there is rocker.  Gobs of rocker.  Graham went to the Rocker Store and bought them clean out.  No one will accuse this boat of lacking in the rocker department.  Eight fingers of rocker is a fair amount.  The cockpit placement, however, removes some of the stern rocker and raises the bow, so while it might seem to be highly asymmetrical rocker, it’s not that pronounced in the water.

Like the Cetus/Scorpio family, the Delphin is a Swede-form kayak, so it’s going to be fast for its length (15’5″).

This is a pre-production boat, so we don’t expect perfection here, but it’s clear that P&H put a lot of thought into it, just as with their other boats.  The Scorpio (Brian says it like Sean Connery) has a similar deck, with a small dry hatch just in front of the cockpit, but unlike the Scorpio, the Delphin has no day hatch.  Rumor is that the Aries (composite version) will have a day hatch as well.

On The Water:

Brian and I went out in two boats — me in a venerable NDK Romany and Brian in the Delphin. The Romany is known for its maneuverability, a rock garden play boat.   Better yet, Brian and I have similar weights and heights, and the same barber too.

We took off away from the shop out into a large bay, pushing the boats close to hull speed.  The Romany is not a rocket ship by any means, but it should be able to pull away from a shorter, flat-bottomed boat with a weird bow.  It was marginally faster, but the Delphin kept up, partially because of hull design, but also because Brian’s a studly paddler.  It was a little noisier but that’s it.

We started playing around with edging and turns.  Follow-the-leader is a great way to compare and contrast boats, so we did some standard sweep/edge/counter-rotate/hold it there turns to see how the hull would react.  Three-two-one-go.  I intiated a turn with a sweep and holding an edge, the Romany began its typical turn, the bow holding fast while the stern bubbles and skids.

I turned around, and Brian was facing the other direction.  Same movements, same power.  I had turned 45 degrees, he had turned 150 or so.   Wow.  That’s maneuverability.

Then we did bow draws.  The Romany turned.  The Delphin whipped around.  Brian says it should come with a neckbrace.  I appreciate the salesman’s hyperbole, but it’s almost true.  After we swapped boats I did a typical whitewater bow draw and bang, I snapped around like I was catching an eddy.  “Try a cross-bow” said Brian.  I did, and again, it whipped around so fast I almost capsized.  A second one was a little better.

The Delphin edges effortlessly.  My feeling and observation is that it edges better without aggressive knee driving.  Just lift up one butt cheek and push down with the other.  A bit of edge goes a long way with this boat.  If you really crank it over, it doesn’t seem to help much.  Beginners can learn to edge their kayaks.  Pretty cool.

It rolls well.  Sea Kayaker Magazine will praise its low back deck to allow for layback rolls.  They always do.  Didn’t try a layback roll, but both a C to C roll and a screw roll were easy.

Carving an onside turn doesn’t have the same dramatic difference.  It works fine and carves nicely.  Yep, it turns faster this way too, but it’s not like offside sweeps and edging turns.

Philosophical Musings:

This is what I came up with.

• A surf ski is the kayak equivalent of a triathlon or high end road bike.  The Cetus is a cyclocross bike.  The Delphin is a full-suspension mountain bike.  It’s not a hybrid city bike, a short day touring boat with a little rocker.  It’s designed to be an extremely rough water boat.
• I regret not being able to surf it.
• Conventional wisdom is that sea kayaks steer from the stern.  The bow sticks, the stern skids.  This isn’t at all true here.  Whitewater paddlers will love this boat.  When edging and skidding offside, I felt like the rotation was under the bow hatch or thereabouts.  The b0w moves, I saw it.  It’s cool.
• I think a lot of sea kayak owners are going to want a Delphin for a few reasons.  First. it’s a great rough water boat and is clearly designed as a surf boat.  Second, it’s stable enough to loan to friends.  Drop the skeg and it tracks like a streetcar.  Third, it’s plastic so you can abuse the hell out of it and save your longboat for less abusive situations.
• The Aries (the composite version) will be out shortly.  I think some instructors will purchase one just for teaching.
• I want one.  It violates the 1989 Marriage Retention Boat Non-Proliferation Act, (co-sponsored by Wife 1.1).  I will attempt to introduce an amendment in the house.  Wish me luck.

Respectully sumbitted,

Canoelover

P.S.  I wrote this on 5 hours of sleep.  Typo fixes and feedback are welcome.

Governor James Doyle
The Little House on the Lake
Madison, Wisconsin

“Raw milk can cause serious infections. Raw milk and raw milk products (such as cheeses and yogurts made with raw milk) can be contaminated with bacteria that can cause serious illness, hospitalization, or death. These harmful bacteria include Brucella, Campylobacter,  Listeria, Mycobacterium bovis, Salmonella, Shiga toxin-producing E. coli, Shigella, Streptococcus pyogenes, and Yersinia enterocolitica.

From 1993 to 2006, 69 outbreaks of human infections resulting from consumption of raw milk were reported to CDC. These outbreaks included a total of 1,505 reported illnesses, 185 hospitalizations and 2 deaths. Because not all cases of foodborne illness are recognized and reported, the actual number of illnesses associated with raw milk likely is greater.”

Okay, let’s look at the numbers.  That’s what scientists do when making informed decisions.

In 13 years, 1,505 people got sick from raw milk.  Two people died.  That’s too bad.

This must be understood and burned into your mind, Governor.  Two people.  Nationwide.  In 13 years.

The data for those years is available, but I don’t have the time nor the patience to download the years, compile the data and report out.  Instead I used the CDC datasets and grabbed what I could, which was 1999-2006. 8 years was the best I could do.

Here are the results.  Do not laugh.  Death is not funny.

• Raw milk – 2 deaths.
• Volcanic eruption – 3 deaths.
• Wrong fluid used in infusion – 4 deaths.
• Marasmic kwashiorkor – 5 deaths.
• Intentional self-harm by blunt object – 16 deaths.
• Crushed, pushed, stepped on by crowd or human stampede –  33 deaths.
• Contact with hot tap water – 334 deaths.
• Rider or occupant injured by fall from or being thrown from animal or animal-drawn vehicle in noncollision accident – 619 deaths.
• Atherosclerotic heart disease – 1,695,716 deaths.

So, this means that volcanos, incompetent nursing staff, a rare African disease, crowds,  hot water heaters and horses and/or buggies all are more lethal than raw milk.  Not to mention someone clubbing themselves to death with a piece of firewood.  Then there’s heart disease.  Just for a reference.

Then, Governor Doyle, you did an equally ridiculous thing.  You did NOT veto the “pickle bill,” which allows home production of canned goods for sale so long as the amount is under $5,000. This means that a little old lady with six cats milling around her kitchen while she cans beets to sell at the swap meet is, by your logic, less of a danger than a well-managed dairy herd.

Governor, I promise you that I’d rather have E. coli from raw milk (you recover from that) than Botulism from a jar of canned beans (you don’t recover from that). In fact:

• Botulism – 27 deaths.

And yes, I used to work for the Bureau of Public Health as an epidemiologist.

P.S I must add, because of my puerile sense of humor, that Priapism (mortality code N48.3) caused two deaths between 1999 and 2006.  Yep.  Maybe we should outlaw Viagra and Cialis.

I don’t use the word hero except in rare cases.  Kurt Mead isn’t exactly a hero, but I do admire his encyclopedic knowledge of odes.

Epicordulia princeps, a Prince Baskettail

I took some pictures last week.  And by some, I mean I took over 500.  That’s what it takes to capture some fast-moving Baskettail in flight.  Out of 500, I think about 6 were worth anything, a success ratio of 1.2%.

Putting that into perspective, I would be batting .012 if I were a major league baseball player.  The lowest batting average of any MLB in history was Ron Deer at .179.  That said, Rob Deer hit a game-tying home run to give the Milwaukee Brewers a 12-game winning streak at the start of the 1987 season.

Which means that even poor batters hit a home run now and again.

Epitheca cynosura (Common Baskettail)

Kurt commented on one of my pictures I posted on the web.  I quote:

The Holy Grail of the Odonate photography world…flight shots. Nice work…BTW, I have never gotten a successful flight shot, but I am over 40 and I can embrace my limitations. I’m OK with that…

My guess is that Kurt has never shot 500 pictures to get those pictures.  The good news for all of us is that his still shots are wonderful, as is his book, one that stays with me whenever I venture out to shoot pics.  And his sense of humor comes through in the book too.

Another E. princeps

I spent a good hour on the back lawn at the shop holding down the shutter and manually focusing a range so that I could bracket the focus, knowing that only a few would end up sharp at all, and knowing there would be a range of quality in those few that were viewable.   I think it was worth it.  The venerable Nikon 80-200 ED worked great.  It’s a light bucket.

I like the shots where I feel like I’m at an airshow, only quieter. The Baskettails didn’t disappoint. There were dozens of them, but two or three in particular seemed to like hanging around me, which made it even harder to shoot them.  Framing up a dragonfly three feet from you is like shooting at a skeet three feet from your shotgun.

A mating pair of Tramea lacerata (Black Saddlebags)

Not all were Baskettails…this pair of T. lacerata are Libellulidae (Skimmers) were mating just below me.  Since they’re relatively large odes, it was hard to miss them in my peripheral vision.  A pair of them stood out like a small bird, and they were kind enough to share with me their little liaison and hovered for a few seconds.

I’m not sure how many insects have retractable landing gear.  I see bees zooming around, their legs hanging down in the breeze, and given the shape of a bumblebee, I don’t think aerodynamics are its main concern.  Hunters need speed, agility, and efficiency.  Plants don’t run away, so you can be more rotund and the flowers won’t mind a bit.  Wasps don’t suck their legs up like this E. princeps, at least not the ones I’ve seen.  They have venom, so I guess that would be an evolutionary advantage.

And yet, I don’t give a fig for vespids, especially after a bald-faced hornet (Dolichovespula maculata) attacked me (totally unprovoked) in the Boundary Waters last summer.  A mean little bastard, he was.  Nailed me 6 times on top of my head.  Yeah, yeah.  If I had hair that wouldn’t have happened. I think he was jealous.

I guess the best description of odonates is that they’re elegant. They’re graceful, but at the same time, their acrobatics put any pilot and airplane to shame.

Respectfully submitted,

Canoelover

The University of Wisconsin Arboretum is a few blocks away from Chez Canoelover.  When I need a fix of outside, it’s a little more convenient than driving an hour or two to get really out of town.  It’s hardly wilderness, but it lacks the sterility of a city park so you can find plants and animals you normally wouldn’t find.

I went to the Arb on the way to work.  I have to drive past it, and sometimes the pull of the Arb causes me to take a quick detour that sometimes turns into an hour of sauntering through the woods and prairies.  In the Winter it pulls me in for a quick snowshoe. In the Spring, ephemerals and songbirds.  In Summer, wildlife and wildflowers.  In Autumn, everything.

Of course, I was hoping for some odonates.

I was not disppointed.  Here’s a 4-spotted Skimmer, a.k.a. Libellula quadrimaculata. I love the quadrimaculata part…so practical.  But it makes me wonder why we’re called Homo sapien. Maybe we should be called Homo ovis.

But I digress. Shocking.

A Common Whitetail (Plathemis lydia) is also known as Libellula lydia.  They are common, but they’re lovely, and I dig Skimmers in general.

Here’s a P. lydia that isn’t white.  That’s because it’s a juvenile female.  This one took me for a little ride until I figured out that it couldn’t be a 12-spotted Skimmer because of the body coloration.  Kurt Mead’s little Dragonfly book is an awesome resource and helped out considerably in the ID process.

An other L. quadrimaculata.  They were golden in the sun, and I had one shot where the wings were glistening like gold spun into fine thread.  Sadly, it was out of focus.

I saw a few other species of Bluets and a few Sympetra but this was a surprise.  Sitting on a dark grey log, easy pickings or a crow or a Kestrel was this little tree frog.  I think I saved him by placing him on a green, moss colored log.

Yes, he peed on me.

And in the parking lot, this one was drinking dew from between the gravel. Not an ode, but glorious nonetheless. No idea what it is, besides it’s probably in the Brushfoot family.  Thought it was an immature Mourning Cloak.  Not even close, and too small.  I know absolutely nothing about butterflies except I like Red Admirals.

Then yesterday I found a dozen lovely Gomphus fraternus, Midland Clubtails.

They’re supposed to be fairly uncommon.  Yesterday they were not.  One followed us on the water for nearly 15 minutes.  Not sure why, but he did.  Any insights into a dragonfly following a canoe are appreciated.

I learn a lot of things walking around taking pictures.  Mostly, I learn to see things other folks are too busy to see.  When I was taking that pic of the L. quadrimaculata a couple of runners nearly stepped on her, despite the fact that I was holding a camera pointed in her direction just a few meters away.  They never even noticed.  I’m making a bumper sticker that says “Start Seeing Odonates.”

I also learned that my new lens is not nearly as sharp as my 80-200 ED.  Not even close.  But I’m still glad I got it, I just need to make sure I have the Big Guns before I head out for nature pics again.

So here’s a raise of the glass to one of the lost arts, noticing stuff.

Respectfully submitted,

Canoelover

Looks like a bee, flies like a…well…a fly.

Batesian mimicry is an awesome biological phenomenon, wherein harmless species (flies) take upon themselves the look at feel of harmful species so that predators are either momentarily or permanently confused.  Makes sense.  Look the part, play the part, reap the benefits of looking tough when a stinger is the last thing on your mind.

This little dude is perplexing me.  He has the body shape of a Drone Fly but his coloring is much brighter.  He certainly screams “bee.”  But he’s about 6mm long, that’s it.  As I said, little dude.

Recently I’ve had the misfortune of interacting with some people who aren’t what they seem to be.  I’m old enough to recognize a sociopath when I see one, that’s for sure. I trust in Karma and don’t worry about it too much. Life’s too short.

A fly isn’t being intentionally deceptive…that’s what happens when evolution renders black and yellow coloring an adaptive trait for a harmless fly.  But humans…aye, there’s the rub.

Whether it’s an Fundamentalist Congressman from Indiana who promotes abstinence-only sex ed while doing the horizontal mambo with one of his aides for over a year, or a paddlesport publisher who says nice things to his advertisers but spreads gossip and vitriol on the backside, it’s getting pretty thick out there.

That was a long sentence. Sorry.

What I think it boils down to is integrity.  Integrity is from the Latin for whole or complete. A person who is integrated has one persona, one face they show to the world.  There’s no Church Face, Work Face, Wife Face, Mistress Face, Children Face, On-line Face.  There’s just one face.

When I think of that sort of integrated soul, I often think of the Dalai Lama.

He visited Madison a few weeks ago.  Here he is wearing a Badger cap given to him by the Madison Children’s Choir.  Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama is an integrated man.  One of my former professors, Richie Davidson is to his left. Dr. Davidson is a mensch.  Great dude. Also integrated.

It’s not like you have to be a Lama to be integrated.  So was Gandhi.  So was Mother Teresa.  Viktor Frankl.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer. In my own religious tradition, I think of men like Spencer W. Kimball, a Mormon prophet who always looked for ways to bless those around him.

There’s a story about Brother Spencer that I always loved, told by his son from a letter he had received from a stranger.

“A young mother on an overnight flight with a two-year-old daughter was stranded by bad weather in Chicago airport without food or clean clothing for the child and without money. She was … pregnant and threatened with miscarriage, so she was under doctor’s instructions not to carry the child unless it was essential. Hour after hour she stood in one line after another, trying to get a flight to Michigan. The terminal was noisy, full of tired, frustrated, grumpy passengers, and she heard critical references to her crying child and to her sliding her child along the floor with her foot as the line moved forward. No one offered to help with the soaked, hungry, exhausted child.

Then, the woman later reported, ‘someone came towards us and with a kindly smile said, “Is there something I could do to help you?” With a grateful sigh I accepted his offer. He lifted my sobbing little daughter from the cold floor and lovingly held her to him while he patted her gently on the back. He asked if she could chew a piece of gum. When she was settled down, he carried her with him and said something kindly to the others in the line ahead of me, about how I needed their help. They seemed to agree and then he went up to the ticket counter [at the front of the line] and made arrangements with the clerk for me to be put on a flight leaving shortly. He walked with us to a bench, where we chatted a moment, until he was assured that I would be fine. He went on his way. About a week later I saw a picture of Spencer W. Kimball and recognized him as the stranger in the airport.

That’s what it’s all about.  Showing love where it is needed, not where it is convenient.  Because of that example from one of my heroes I try to help out in airports because there is always such a need for a little help with folks traveling with small children.  I used to do it, I know.  By the way, the people who gripe about babies crying on airplanes must have been spontaneously created as adults and never were two years old and hungry way past bedtime.

We need to be who we are, or better yet, be who we want to become.

For those who still feel a need to have multiple faces and sets of behavior, free yourselves from the exhaustive work of trying to keep track of who you are to whom.  If you’re a jerk, take it from me…all of us pretty much know you’re a jerk, and it would be so much easier if you’d just embrace it.  You’re not fooling anyone.

Better yet, decide to be who you are and present that to the public, warts and all.  It’s refreshing, and besides, if everyone thinks you’re the paragon of virtue you claim to be, when you let us down (are you listening, televangelists?), you’re likely to fall that much harder on your puffy, self-righteous face.  You talk about blessings, but all you give is words.  Words with nothing behind them.

Because, as the Dalai Lama put it, “It is necessary to help others, not only in our prayers, but in our daily lives.” Get busy. Make one difference to one person every day.  Hold a door for someone with their hands full. Share your orange (it comes in sections for a reason).  It doesn’t have to be big, it just has to be.

Respectfully submitted,

Canoelover

Interesting day.

The shop was busy, of course, but there was a little time here and there to take some pictures.  We’re right on the cusp of massive amounts of emergent life.  An occasional mayfly, a few teneral damselflies and a really cool little Phippidus audax.

I like bold jumpers.

A newly emergent Enallagma.  Don’t know the species yet, teneral damsels aren’t colorful as it takes them a few days to get their color.  Camouflage works.

…and a really cool painted turtle the size of a silver dollar.

Respectfully submitted,

Canoelover

Once the varnish is dry, it’s back to the rack for the paddles until they’re needed, except for a few of them.  I wanted to add leather wraps to some of the paddle shafts where they often rub against the gunwales.  It makes the paddles look cool and it does save a little wear and tear on my gunwales.

The leather for the wraps I got from a friend who know someone who know a guy who made the seat covers for the stools at Chipotle Grill.  Since the stools are circles, that makes for a very inefficient use of leather, so I received a garbage bag of cut offs and pieces that, while too small for a stool, work great for a host of other things.  Like wrapping paddle shafts.

The tools needed for this endeavor are quite simple.  You need a cutting surface (I prefer old poly cutting boards as they are nice to my rotary cutter blades).  You need a rotary cutter.  You need a fid.  You need an overstitch wheel.  You need a spool of B200 Dacron, and two needles.

It’s pretty simple.  Use the wheel to make marks on the leather, between 5 and 8 per inch (I prefer it finer and closer together), use the fid to punch holes in the leather, then cut a length of cord 5 to 6 times longer than your grip is, and get busy.

I like to use a baseball stitch.  A true baseball stitch requires two needles working in parallel.  You can’t really go down one side then go down the other…the tension will never be right.  It’s also a little more fun to do it the right way because you can see your progress as you go, and adjust tension if needed.

Sure, I don’t use red thread, and there aren’t 108 stitches in my paddle wrap, but still, it’s the same stitch.  If it can stand up to a juiced-up Mark McGwire it can stand up to a little gunwale rub.

The only really annoying thing that can happen is that you make a small error in calculation.  For example, 5 to 6 lengths of your seam can cover the cord needed to stitch up the seam, no problem.  Unless (this is a big unless) your holes are a little too far from the edge of the leather.  This would mean you need more cord per stitch, and even if it’s a few millimeters, you add those millimeters up and pretty soon you’re 4 or 5 inches short.

I dodged a bullet here.  I had barely an inch left on each side to tie off the seam.  I really stinks to get three quarters of the way down a seam and get that little feeling in the area of your brain that does estimation…Uh oh…uh oh…what a bloody idiot I am…please, please be enough…

Well, I’ve learned over the past few years that it’s better to waste six or eight inches of cord than enjoy the feeling that comes with knowing you get to take apart your seam and start over again.  It only takes an hour or less to do a wrap, start to finish, but it’s the principle of the thing.

Respectfully submitted,

Canoelover