Camping as Space Travel

Camping is often lauded as a way for harried urbanites to re-connect with nature.  Well maybe. Decades ago, I used to go on canoe trips to Quetico Provincial Park in Ontario, Canada, sometimes with friends and sometimes with family.  To do these trips, we had to pack all the food we would need for the length of the trip.  Not packing enough food would mean going hungry since there are no stores in the park.  Then at some point, I took along a fishing rod and caught fish to supplement our meals and surprisingly, my experience of the camping trips changed.
The best way I could describe the new relationship was that it no longer felt like space travel where you had to bring absolutely everything with you that you needed to survive.  Once I was able to catch fish, my environment took care of some of my needs.  I was not entirely reliant on my environment to provide me with food, but I was not entirely reliant on what I had brought with me either.  I felt a new bond with my surroundings.  My surroundings now provided for me.  My presence in the wood and lake country was in a sense approved of by my environment.  I could say that I now filled an ecological niche, that of a fish eater.  I was no longer simply a tourist on a life line that led back to the civilized eco-niche that I had come from.
Yes, I was by no means living off the land simply because I caught a few fish, but the fact that the land I traveled through provided me with at least a part of my sustenance changed my relationship with it.

Camping in Kings Canyon, NP.  The yurt dwarfed by tall pines and the canyon wall.

Fast forward to the recent past.  My wife and I spent a few weeks camping in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California.  We started out at Kings Canyon National Park but were kicked out because of the government shutdown.  After expulsion, we moved on to the Sequoia National Forest where they allow dispersed camping, that is, camping somewhere other than at a designated National Forest campground.  We were now entirely on our own for amenities since the NFS wasnt providing any.  That is, other than a spot to park your car and pitch your tent, the forest service wasnt  providing anything, no toilets, no water, no garbage cans, no bear boxes, no pavement, no wood. Worse yet, because of a prolonged drought, we could not build fires either. We had to stick with our propane fired camp stove.  We were able to manage without toilets and had enough drinking water to get us through a few days at a time before needing to replenish.  But in a way, we were back in space travel mode.  Absolutely everything we needed to survive had to come out of our space module, the family car.

The yurt after our relocation to Sequoia National Forest. 

Not that camping in a  National Park was any better.  If anything, under normal conditions, it was even more restrictive and artificial an experience than camping in a national forest.  In a national park, you are not supposed to interact with the environment in any way.  You cant burn the wood, you cant pick the plants.  You cant hunt the animals, nor feed them, though apparently, you can do some fishing where there are fish.  Mind you, I am not criticizing National Park policy.  I am simply stating the effect it has on the experience of being there which is that it is not meant to be an environment that will support human life. It is an environment that tries very hard to minimize human impact. Any self sustaining activity other than fishing is in effect prohibited.  To return to the space travel metaphor, I dont know whether Star Trek with its prohibition of modifying alien cultures came up with this idea on its own or got it from the National Park Service, but there we were, camping without modifying the environment.  For the most part, its great to be in a national park because they manage to preserve the landscape in a state that resembles the state it was in before Europeans showed up.  That is, besides some of the most stunning scenery, you also get to see what trees looked like before people cut them all the big ones down.  And unlike the national forest, nobody is using the national parks as cow pasture.
So far I havent even mentioned backpacking.  Backpacking gets even closer to space travel than car camping.  For backpacking, at least the way its done these days, you need all sorts of specialized gear that you can only get in a high end camping store.  Everything needs to be light weight, including your food which resembles the food of astronauts.
But you can still have some sort of camping experience that doesnt resemble space travel if you are willing to be creative and accept the fact that you cant have humans invading an environment without having some impact on it.

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Fire as an Alternative to TV

I dont want to make too much of the making of and sitting by campfires mainly because it is something that most people who go camping have probably experienced for themselves,and that sitting by a good camp fire is vastly superior to watching TV.  Still, it is something that needs to be said. And I have some theories about why a campfire is better than TV and I will share them with you.  Feel free to disagree.
First of all, the obvious - fire is entertaining in and of itself.  There is drama in a fire.  One knows the plot well enough but never the details.  Wood, at first reluctant to burn for a variety of reasons like wind, lack of kindling, moisture, etc. eventually is made to burn.  Then the fire burns, produces coals and maintenance of the fire becomes easy, one simply throws more wood on the fire and at some point becomes tired of the process and lets the fire die for lack of fuel or actively snuffs it out.  This is the plot of the entertainment known as fire. And there are many variations on it.
The primary reason I prefer fire over TV is that fire has no political or social agenda.  It does what it does. It burns according to various basic rules and thus is educational about the laws of thermodynamics.  Not that looking at fires is what inspired thermodynamicists to come up with their theories, but looking at fires does give one a sense of how fire works and that in itself may give rise to many useful metaphors.  TV on the other hand is almost entirely agenda driven.  Someone is selling you something constantly, obviously through commercials but also in the content that the commercials enable.  Implicit in all story telling is a viewpoint, a lesson, a moral.  Even if nothing obviously new is being communicated, the very fact that the TV portrays some activity is some kind of endorsement for it or a polemic against it.  If you dont agree with the lifestyle choices of the people portrayed on TV then TV watching is a chore.  So fire, much better.
Finally, sitting by a fire with other people is a social affair and as such, becomes a lab experiment in social dynamics.  For one thing, the progress of the fire needs to be managed and as someone once famously said, no two people can ever agree on the right way to poke a fire.  If more than one person wants to manage the fire, a struggle invariably ensues, covertly or overtly.  Words will be said about the management of the fire and a winner in the struggle will emerge.
Enough for now, I have found that the internet has lots of campfire pictures.  I will comment on some of them in future posts since the pictures raise specific points such as preferred ways to arrange the logs, what to wear to a campfire, safety issues around the campfire, what to talk about at a campfire, how to cook on a campfire and more.

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Ventilation Air Subduction other reasons why paddles dont work as well as they should

One of my readers recently informed me that what I called air subduction already has a name in the field of boating, namely, ventilation.  OK, there we go, the internet once again comes to the rescue and dissipates darkness by spreading light, at least in the linguistic domain.
The original post, the one just before this was all about ventilation diminishing the efficiency of paddles.  Ventilation, the sucking of air down the back side of a paddle blade is a problem but can be fixed by appropriate modification of ones paddling technique.
But the problem, fundamentally of getting the best bang for ones paddling buck is that there are too many variables to the deployment of a paddle by a human and inadequate means for measuring input energy vs. forward propulsion, the two key numbers one needs to measure efficiency.
I thought the problem was more or less insoluble.  But perhaps it isnt.  Quite coincidentally while launching my kayak to do some paddle testing, I fell into conversation with a painter who has been commissioned to do paintings of some of the Americas Cup boats. He told me that the boats have a person on board whose title is tactician and he advises the helmsman, the person who actually controls the boat.  The tactician sits at a computer which gets constant inputs from a variety of sensors and then suggests ways to wring additional performance out of the boat.
Thats all I know, but I suppose that as software and sensors get more sophisticated, some of that learning paid for by sailing syndicates might also be used to increase the efficiency of lowly kayak paddlers.  I havent done any serious research on the topic, but who knows, paddle design might be advanced from art to science, assuming of course that someone cares enough to spend the money to do the research.

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So that didnt go quite as planned

Tilting the rear thwart upward so that epoxy would run into the gap between the 2 pieces of plywood seemed like a good idea. The only problem was, after the epoxy cured, the gap remained.

The effort wasnt without merit, however. Several different parts did get encapsulated with another coating of epoxy. Still, the gap needed to be filled.

This time, I placed the rear thwart vertically in my bench vise. I drizzled epoxy into the gap until there was no question that it had been filled.

Now the gap has been filled.

I also put another coat of epoxy on the top of the forward thwart, and squeegied it meticulously. And, I brushed a second coat of epoxy onto the underside of the sheers at the back of the boat.

2nd layer of epoxy on the top of the front seat.

Sheers taped off for epoxy & painting.

Sheers taped off for epoxy & painting.

Forward thwart placed back into position.

Marking the position for the forward thwart prior to installing it permanently.

Now, the forward thwart is ready for installation. The rear thwart is ready to be trimmed, and the sheers are ready for primer.

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