New Year New Promise New hope Ill get this thing in the water this year

Progress is coming along steadily, if slowly on the Utility. The fiberglassing work continues. Its fortunately not difficult. It just takes time... working in sections, feathering edges, sanding, etc.

You know.... "boat building."

At this point, Ive got all of the bottom fiberglassed on the Utility, and Ive begun encapsulating frame # 5-1/2 on the Zip.

Here are a couple of progress photos. Happy New Year to you!

Zip frame #5-1/2, "glued and screwed," and awaiting encapsulation with marine epoxy.

Here are the Zip (L)  and the Utility (R), side-by-side. As you can see, theyre at very different stages of completion.

Zip frame #5-1/2, partially encapsulated.

Hull bottom is fully fiberglassed, but needs to be sanded.

Starboard bottom, forward at the chine transition joint.

Sanding / Feathering the fiberglass cloth at port aft.

Overlapping the fiberglass cloth at the bow.

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The Water We Eat

One of the things that traveling does is give one a broader perspective on the world than is available from staying in one place.  My recent trip to Kings Canyon National Park was no exception.  One insight I had on this particular trip was about water, where it comes from and where it ultimately goes.

We spent most of a week camping right next to Kings River which drains all the water that collects in Kings Canyon. The river at this time of the year, October, does not carry much water since it hasnt rained all summer and the melt-water from glaciers higher up in the Sierras is minimal. 

Still, he water of the river is cold and clear even late in Summer when temperatures during the day still rise into the nineties.
And as is usual for me when staying in a place for a while, I become curious about it, specifically about the Kings River.  Where does it go?  I dont remember where I got the answer, but the answer is, into a reservoir downstream in the foot-hills of the Sierra from which the water goes to the city of Fresno and to the surrounding farmland for irrigation. And so, the water of the river next to which we camped never reaches the ocean. And even before the reservoir was built and before the land in the valley was farmed, the river seldom reached the ocean. Most year it drained into the shallow Tulare Lake which most years had no outlet. Only in unusually wet years did the water of the lake overflow into the San Joaquin River which flows into San Francisco Bay.
But now, the Kings River irrigates farm land and the water that first fell as snow in the Sierra Nevada range ends up in almonds, peaches, plums, oranges and other produce, much of which is trucked out of the state via interstate highways and gets consumed far from its origins by people who have no clue that the water in the peach that they are eating may have also cooled my body on a hot day in October.

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Google Maps Water Policy

As residents of the Western United States are probably aware, there have been a number of drought years with negative results on both the crops that need irrigation and on recreational users that like to go waterskiing on the states reservoirs.

Just recently we returned from a vacation in Sequoia National Park and on our way out we passed Lake Kaweah, one of the many reservoirs at the edge of the Sierra Nevada mountains.  What we saw at the east end of the lake looking west was this. A mostly dry lake.  The remaining water was mostly near the dam.  The whole reservoir looked like it was at no more than 20 percent capacity.

Back home, I went on google maps to see what amount of water was actually left.  Surprisingly, on google maps, the lake looked 100 percent full.

In a way, it made sense for the map makers to fill the lake with virtual water since on maps, the convention is to show lakes up to design capacity.  So it also make sense to make the pictures match the maps. But on zooming in, I also found that while map makers wanted to show water where it was supposed to be and not where it actually was they did at the same time have a desire to show the latest road data.

And here it is, real roads under virtual water.  The deal is, if people are going to be able to launch their boats, youre going to have to build roads up to the edge of where the water actually is, that is several tens of feet below the surface of the virtual lake.
So map makers past fake water on top of the dry lake bed.

Curiously, in this particular case,  the surface of the virtual water had a cool vortex right in the middle of one of the bays.
I was intrigued and curious if Google followed the same policy of topping off reservoirs with virtual water all around the state of California.  I moved over to San Luis Reservoir just west of Los Banos.  This reservoir was also way down the last time I drove by it. 

The long view again showed a lake topped off to the brim.

But the closeups showed an un-doctored view, bathtub rings showing previous lake levels and trees growing on former lake bottom.
Research on this topic is continuing.

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