Technique

A hand made wooden kayak is not truly finished until you have put your first scratch in it. The New England Rough Water Symposium is a chance to see to it that your boat is well and fully complete along with few scratches to prove it. While "rough water" may sound scary, this is a good event for a wide range of paddlers from the novice through experienced paddlers. It will give you a chance to learn from top paddler how to use your boat to full effect.

Since I sell many of the boats I make, I like to document them before I send them off into the world. While I like on-the-water shot, I often have need for studio style shots that don't have the distraction of a background. Typically a white or black background works well.

I use one end of my shop as a studio for these photos. I start out with a 40 foot long by 10 foot wide muslin backdrop that I clip to the garage door track. I put a pair of saw horses under the muslin and place the boat on the saw horses.

Over Labor Day weekend I attended the second annual New England Intermediate Rough Water Symposium hosted by Tom Bergh of Maine Island Kayak Company. Tom brought in BCU kayaking coaches from England as well as top paddlers from the US. I was there as a local guide to the waters and as an assistant coach.

The video below is something I put together giving my impressions of the event.

Tropical storm Noel swept by New England in late October and sent some fun waves towards Napatree Point. I didn't get much good footage while paddling, but the resulting video is still fun.

More video from the reefs in the passage between Watch Hill, RI and Fishers Island, NY. This is out near buoy #2 on a day with about a 3 knot ebb. I'm paddling my Petrel. Also on the water were a Chatham 18 and a couple NDK Explorers.

After teaching my class at the WoodenBoat School, I got a chance to head up to Blue Hill for some play time. There is a reversing falls that has a nice play wave popular with the whitewater crowd. I took my Petrel in for a little surfing action:

ConnYak the local paddling club is having their annual slide show tonight, so I put together a couple videos from last summer's paddling.

The first shows the trip out to Ironbound Island from Gouldsboro, ME and shows the group paddling along Stave Island and Ironbound:

I've been playing around with taking video using a Pentax Optio W10 that I have strapped to a helmet. The quality of the video is not great, but the results are kind of fun. The first is one is from a couple days paddling the reefs of Watch Hill, Rhode Island and the Race and the second is an afternoon surfing off Napatree Point.

In both videos, the boat I am paddling is the Petrel.

I hope you enjoy the action.

"If you want to turn left, paddle more on the right." This is usually the advice provided to a first time paddler. And often it is all the instructions they will ever receive on the subject of maneuvering a kayak. Next to doing a simple forward stroke, efficient steering strokes are probably the most used skill by any kayaker on the water. It is unfortunate that so little time is spent on the subject. The problem with the "paddle more on the other side" technique is that with a lot of kayaks paddling more will just make you go faster with out actually doing much to turn the boat.

He said, "I was out there and the waves must have been 6 feet." Funny, I was out there at the same time and didn't see anything bigger than 18 inches. What is going on? Estimating wave height is very difficult. Sitting down in a kayak, low to the water, waves look pretty big.

It is usually OK to be inaccurate in your estimation of wave height, after all it is you who is out there, and if it a wave looks big to you it probably is big for you. But there are good reasons why you may want accuracy. For example, if you are planning to go out and check the forecast and it predicts "3 foot waves" you want to know if their 3 feet is the same as your 3 feet.