A week or so back I paddled halfway round Alameda, an island off the coast of Oakland.  People paddle all the way around the island occasionally, a trip of about 15 miles.  A complete circumnavigation is something that can be done in about four of five hours and is a good way to kill a Saturday when you figure in drive time to get to the launch point and a stop at a restaurant afterwards. 
I dont often do these kinds of paddles because they take up too much time.  Usually I drive the half mile to the boat ramp closest to my house and put the boat in the water for a short, less than an hour paddle.  The truth is that I dont much care for paddling any amount of distance.  Distance paddling is quite frankly boring.  It is like driving on the interstate across Nebraska.  Lovely, but unvarying views.  It can be done if one works oneself into a trance.  I much prefer playing around in waves, a little surfing, some rolling and just enough paddling to get warm.  Then back to the car.  But the bay has no surf, just short waves and when there are waves, there is also an unpleasant amount of wind.  Tribulation exceeds excitation.
The trick when trying to paddle somewhere solo is to get oneself locked into some sort of no-return situation where one has to finish the trip or might as well finish the trip when the temptation is to turn back after half an hour and go somewhere for a beer or a cup of coffee. 
This is how it was on this paddle.  My plan was to endure paddling for an hour and then turning back for a total time on the water of about two hours rather than doing the usual turn around after 20 minutes which would have me back at the boat ramp in under an hour. 

The view at the Grand Avenue boat ramp in Alameda.  The nose of my kayak is visible in the foreground. Beyond that, the estuary which in this region goes by the name of Oakland inner harbor. The white ship in the background is one of the coastguard cutters tied up to the pier on Coastguard Island.  To the left lies Oakland Middle Harbor and the Bay.

As it turned out, I was ready to turn back after half an hour of paddling but hung on and kept going down the estuary and in the general direction of San Francisco bay.

A nice purple boat house about two miles down the estuary.

Some more boat houses.  Jack London used to tie up the Snark somewhere around here before he took off for Hawaii.

The Snark on the estuary.

 Having paddled two miles, I would normally turn back without having wasted too much time and gotten some exercise and taken in some of the sights.  Unlike the scenery on land, the scenery on the water is always changing due to the mobile nature of the nautical bricabrac that floats in the water.

A tug tied up to a barge.  The big white thing behind it is one of the floating dry docks at Bay Ship.  Off to the right, the iconic cranes of Oaklands container port, images of which turn up on tee shirts.

The SF to Oakland ferry passing by a scrap metal carrier.  The soundtrack here is of big chunks of metal being dropped into the metal hold of the ship, creating much clanking.

 And here, in case you never read the country of origin labels on the stuff you buy is a picture of where your stuff comes from (China) and how it gets here (in containers) on top of a big ship.  Most of the ships are black (American President Lines) but sometimes also blue (Maersk). 
Returning to the journey, at this point I was about 45 minutes into the trip.  This would have been a good time to turn back.  I could have been back at the boat ramp in another 45 minutes and would not have done too much damage to the day.  Instead I kept going forward since I could see the channel marker at the end of the estuary, just another mile or so off.  Also, at this point I considered the option of paddling around the tip of the island over to where my shop is, taking the kayak out there and riding my bike home.  More paddling but I wouldnt have to look at all the same stuff I looked at going out.  And so I went.

I did it.  I paddled out into the bay and rounded the corner of the island.  Off to the left, newly installed steel pilings to prevent toxic trash from decades past from washing into the bay.  The VA intends to build a hospital here on top of the toxic soil so the deal is to bulldoze about six feet of untoxic soil over the top of the toxic soil and thats that.  When it rains, water moves in a downward direction so the toxins move down or sideways, but not up.  Anyway, thats what they claim and their lawyers approve.

The view west across the bay, about two miles distant the bay bridge and beyond that, the red lead primer painted Golden Gate Bridge. At water level, decommissioned warehouses where cargo used to be unloaded the old-fashioned way by longshoremen. Now the warehouses are home to restaurants and circus troupes.

The end is in sight.  The structure ahead is in line with one of the disused runways of the former Alameda Naval Airstation.  Runway lights were mounted atop this structure.  Now it is used mostly by aquatic birds.  Gulls, cormorants and on this day, one great blue heron. Visible in back and to the left, the Shop, where the aquatic portion of my journey ends.

So that was it.  For he last part of the journey I had the wind in my back, wind out of the north with me heading south, then for the last mile, the wind off my left flank as I headed east. 
Total mileage according to google maps, 7.6.  Elapsed time, roughly 2 hours.  After that, four miles home on my bicycle.
Since I dont get out in the kayak all that much, I was pleasantly exhausted, with my mind empty of thought, a wonderful state to be in, but came at the cost of spending two hours in a kayak. 

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December 26, 2014

The weather was up in the 50s today.  Therefore, I took the opportunity to do a little work on the boat by installing the gudgeons and locating the pintles.  After several measurements with the help of my daughter (this is a two man job), we decided the lower pintle and gudgeon were on center, and just high enough for the rudder cheeks to clear the water while under way, while giving maximum blade depth. An hour or so later, sealed the holes, bolts, and nuts with 5400.  The tiller clears the deck with room to spare, but is not too high.  It also looks as if the chosen length is just right and with a tiller extension will be a pleasure to operate.  We hope we got it right.

Tiller clears the deck.  

Vertical alignment looks ok.  

Just a nice shot.  

Length of the tiller looks good.  I like a slightly larger handle for long rides.  Most steering will be done from the tiller extension.  I will also add an uphaul in addition to the down haul.  It is not on the plans, so will need to be creative. 

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In my previous post, I described how one of my kayaks spontaneously changed shape in response to a shrinking skin.  While this type of response would generally have been regarded as mechanical failure, researchers are now trying to steer this kind of phenomenon to make it perform useful tasks, that is by creating a variable shape that can adapt to conditions.

Buckliball changing from large to small (left to right) in response to external stress

Paraphrasing here - One stress makes you larger, one stress makes you small, and the stress that mother gives you dont do anything at all. Never mind.  Pause for groans to subside.

geodesic dome assembly

By the way, if you didnt grow up in the sixties, which is likely, you probably missed Buckminster Fuller and his geodesic domes and also buckyballs which he invented and which I suppose buckliballs is a pun on.

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Recently, a friend gave me a few packages of fresh herring.  Herring were running in San Francisco Bay and he had caught and frozen about 150 pounds.  He urged me to give away as much herring as I could and to come back for more if I was successful.  Seemed like a good deal.  Just a few days earlier I had paid $5 a pound for herring at a fish market.  I also found out that herring wholesaled for $0.50 a pound.  Thats a ten fold markup from wholesale to retail.  So here was a heck of a good deal, free herring that you would have to pay $5 a pound for at the store.
I got on the phone and called some Swedish friends who I was sure would want some herring because Swedes live by the sea and are fond of eating fish, or so I thought.  Turned out my friends were not that kind of Swedes.  They told me that they didnt care for cleaning fish.  But they would ask some other friends of theirs if they wanted some of the herring.  A little later they called back and said that they would take ten herring.  I told them that they were all frozen together in a package and the smallest quantity I could give them was 20.  Reluctantly they agreed to take one package.
So much for giving away food.
I suspect the problem with food is that we have gotten used to getting it in meal sized portions, all prepared and wrapped in plastic along with instructions for how to cook it.
The average consumer with a job who can afford to buy food seems to work until very late in the day and when he or she comes home is in no mood to deal with something that needs to be cleaned, possibly filleted and then cooked, especially if they have no clue on how to clean, fillet and cook something as exotic as a herring.  Much better to pull something out of the freezer and pop it in the microwave for 2 minutes. Like breaded fish sticks with no bones in them or pictures of dead dolphins on the package or anything unpleasant.
Another problem with food, particularly at the production end is that it doesnt come off some just in time supply chain.  It tends to for the most part be the result of some natural process that delivers a particular food in great quantities more or less all at once.  Most of the year there are no herring or cherries or sweet corn or peaches and then for a short time, there are more than you can eat unless you do something unpleasant and time-consuming like canning or otherwise preparing and freezing or salting and smoking your own food.  And who that spends ten to twelve hours in a cubicle or behind the counter of a convenience store wants to do that?

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I know there are blogs out there which handle the resemblance of one thing to another whether it be film stars or funny vegetables or kittens, but just for the sake of convenience, I chose two to display two of these things right here on this blog as a relief from the tyranny of the same thing all the time.
First, a gravy spill that looks like a map of Alaska. Well, sort of, but I think it got pretty close.  See for yourself.

Number two is a sweet potato that looks like a seal.  This one you have to admit is good.

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Two nights ago, the yurt underwent a spontaneous wind test.  A front with wind gusts up to 50mph moved through the area.  The bushes and trees were rattling against the fences and roofs and making a spectacular amount of noise.  And then I realized that I had recently skinned up the yurt.  It had survived the previous winter without problems but that was as a bare frame.  With the skin on, the wind would be able to exert more pressure on it.  I was tempted to drive out to the shop and check the yurt right away but decided to wait till morning to assess the damage if any.

Next morning I drove to the shop.  The first thing I saw was the flag down on the ground.  This wasnt a good sign. 

I went to the back of the shop with some trepidation but there was the yurt, still standing, albeit with the roof cover partly blown off.  This was no big deal since I had not sewn the final seam and the cover had a tendency to get blown off even in a light wind.

A few of the roof poles had also lost their moorings and fallen to the ground. I suspect what happened that made the poles fall down was that the flexing of the wall in the wind distorted the round shape of the walls into an oval, popping off the tension band and allowing the top of the wall to bow out to where the roof poles were able to pull loose.

The tension band, the green rope, is inside the wall instead of outside, apparently just rolled over the top of the wall.

Putting the yurt back together took maybe 15 minutes. So the test was useful, revealed some more of how the yurt works.  I already knew that the wall was a little too flexible.  Now I knew another reason why it should be a little stiffer, to not distort in a strong wind and allow the roof poles to come loose.  Also the roof covering needs better tiedowns, something I just hadnt bothered with yet.

Oh, and I untangled the flag and got it back to the top of the pole.

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I have started the construction of an Eastern Arctic Kayak based more or less on the information provided by Dr. David Zimmerly in various articles.  Zimmerlys own reconstruction is, as he states in his article in Sea Kayaker Magazine, a composite of various designs.
My own construction is in turn a variation on Zimmerlys interpretation. 
Major deviation for me is that I did not want a 22 foot kayak and so shot for something more like 17 feet long and lighter in weight,  hoping to keep is under 50 pounds rather than ending up with a 65 pounder.
Step one is the fabrication of the gunwales which for the Eastern Arctic Kayak are a good deal more complex than two straight boards I normally use for building Unangan style kayaks.

Whereas Zimmerly built his gunwales from two lengths of 3/4 by 5-1/2 boards scarfed together, I started with a 16 foot two by four that I ripped down the middle giving me something like two 5/8 x 3-1/2 x 16 boards which I then built up to approximate the Zimmerly design.  Lots of clamps and Gorilla glue in use. I used Gorilla glue rather than epoxy because Gorilla sets up faster and is easier to clean up than epoxy and less hard on tools.

Here the nose piece goes on.  The design I am copying has the gunwales more or less flat up to the front of the cockpit, then rising from there forward.

After the glue has dried, I faired the lumps out of the top of the gunwales resulting in something like the above.

Here I am using a spline to draw the part of the bottom of the gunwales that I intend to remove.

And heres the whole thing with the top faired and the bottom scooped out.  The gunwales are made to rise amidships because normally, when you bend them, the middle drops down.  The rise counteracts that drop to give you a more or less flat deck.

And some additional rise at the bow to help the bow stay out of the waves.

And thats how it looks faired and trimmed.

And finally, the long view.

I am thinking I probably overdid the midship rise in the gunwales by at least an inch, but Ill stay with it since it doesnt affect the bottom of the hull at all.  Sometimes it is good to go with ones mistakes just to see how much harm they do to the proper functioning of the boat.  After that you can speak with authority on why the way you did it was not a good idea.  Still, you have to admit that what I ended up with looks pretty cool.  And by the way, when you do gunwales that are 3-1/2 inches deep, you dont need fancy lumber since small knots dont affect the structural integrity of the end product by much.

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