(no subject)

[catsittingstill]

Remember back around the first of the year I said I went on a kayaking trip with my canoe? And I had pictures? From the new waterproof camera, even? Well, now I have proof.



I'm also putting the pictures in this page as their small versions. Flickr has bigger versions that you can look at. (Though even those have been smallified from the 7 megapixel monsters my camera takes; I have to upload over dialup connection too.)

Anyway, here is the flotilla, ready to set out.


I had some trouble with my shots getting blurred. I think I should have been using the "anti-shake" mode (which just boosts the iso and decreases the exposure time, but fine, whatever will do the trick). This is most evident in the shots I took from the canoe, with the waves moving me up and down, and the other crafts up and down, and the birds moving around on their own--it was just a lot of motion to cope with. This one came out okay.


Another part of the problem may have been getting the autofocus to focus on the right thing--I had the camera tethered to my life jacket so I wouldn't lose it if it fell into the water (it's waterproof, but doesn't float), and sometimes the tether just wasn't long enough to let me get it to my eye, so I was shooting "from the hip". I was getting some practice doing this with my old camera, but my old camera didn't have zoom. You have to be more accurate with zoom. I have several shots of clouds. Probably there was a crane in the area that ended up out of frame. Here's one that I got, though



There were a lot of other people along. Unfortunately their names escape my seive now, except for one or two, but here are a few of them on the water.


Here's one of the people I *do* remember, for obvious reasons:


I've got a couple more photos of the trip on my flickr page. http://www.flickr.com/photos/catsittingstill/

Comments

[occams_pyramid]

Looks great! makes me wish I still had the canoe I built in school - but I just don't have access to boatable water here.

By the way, your cut tag looks odd on my friends page - at a guess you missed the closing quote after 'forever to load.'

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Thanks for catching this so fast. I've fixed it.

You built a canoe? Cool. Was it a wood-strip?

[occams_pyramid]

The hull was plastic-coated fabric. PVC I think? We used it on family holidays down in Wales, on the Cleddau Estuary. But living in London I don't have anywhere to use it, or to store a 15 foot long canoe, so I gave it to some friends who live on the south coast.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

It's a pity to have to give it away, but a good thing that it went to someone who would use it.

[mdlbear]

Gorgeous! I used to subscribe to a magazine called Wooden Boat until I figured out that I was never going to have the time to build one. Maybe when I retire...

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

Building a canoe is a big project, but no one step is particularly difficult. Lots of people build them in retirement.

Wooden Boat seemed to be mostly about building bigger boats, though. Sailboats and such. Now and then they have an article about canoes, but not often enough to prompt me to get a subscription. Boundary Waters Canoe Journal now, that's tempting. :-)

[mdlbear]

It's actually the sailboats that interest me most. Back before I had a family I thought seriously about living on a boat. I still might.

My uncle had a 26-foot sloop on Long Island Sound back when I was in high school.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

My uncle had a 26-foot sloop on Long Island Sound back when I was in high school.

That is so cool. I sailed small boats as a kid, and I think it would be mighty cool to live on a boat.

It's just that a canoe is (for me) an imaginable task, while a sailboat...not so much.

[mdlbear]

You can add a sailing rig to a canoe, you know!

There were, and presumably still are, a few designers who specialized in small, easy-to-build sailboats. Mostly using marine plywood, which comes in 13-foot sheets, and liberal amounts of fiberglass. Not nearly as beautiful as strip-built, but fast and simple.

It's still tempting. And I recently saw a picture -- possibly a CAD rendering -- of an "origami" boat designed to be folded out of corrugated plastic sheet. You could probably do something like that with cardboard and fiberglass, too.

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

I do realize that it's possible to add a sailing rig to a canoe. The problem is that it's definitely an add-on--you wind up with something that kind of works as a sailboat and kind of works as a canoe, but isn't terribly good at either. I don't think of myself as a perfectionist, but I'd rather have a good canoe than a so-so sailboat.

If I had more room in the carport, I'd be kind of tempted to build a small, one person sailboat. But even to build another canoe I'd need to get rid of one of the ones I've got.

An origami boat--now that sounds intriguing.