Kathy and I headed out to Long Beach at the Pacific Rim here on Vancouver Island. There were signs of large swells heading in, and probably good weather, so it looked like the surf would be good.

It was. Saturday I taught Kathy how to kayak surf, and stood in the waves while she practiced. She did really well. The waves were very irregular, and had a large pile on them which was bad for the surfers, but good for Kathy to learn to surf a kayak in as they hold kayaks better with a pile.

I got out a little, we brought 2 boats, and full gear… Except we only brought one sprayskirt! So only one of us could go out at a time. I got a bunch of surfing in on Saturday, and tired out my abs.

On Sunday, the surf was considerably better, it was windy, but the waves had a small pile and came in with very even and predictable sets. Therefore, it was easier to get out into the really big waves. Kathy had a few tries in the little waves, but she found it harder as the waves had less of a pile, and thus are harder for a beginner to surf. They are however, better to surf on once you get on them.

I caught two large green waves that started breaking with a small curl, and I managed to stay out of the white for a bit, but still had to drop in. It is quite the feeling tail surfing about 10 feet above the ocean that you see in front of you, while sitting on a large wave that is partially under you, but mostly behind you.

I wish I had more energy to go longer on Sunday, but with all the kayaking I have done this week (5 days paddling out of 7) my body was just too tired to do more.

If you are at all squeamish, don’t watch this. It is an interactive quicktime video that is far more disturbing than a video with a doll house should be.

Drano does seem to clean the pipes though.

If you enter the MOMAR Races, get yourself a fast boat, A K1 or Surf Ski if you can…

Yesterday I entered the Alberni Outpost Thursday Night kayak races. I had missed the last two due to training and preparing for my Gutbuster race. My time improved, as I came in at about 47:50 over the 8km distance.

Alberni Outpost Race Route

Pretty good considering I was in a Sea Kayak - this means that those on Surf Ski’s have a 10 min advantage over me. It shows just how much of an advantage having a K1 or Surf Ski is in the MOMAR, as the first people in during the last one were in a K2 and Surf Ski’s. By paddling a K1 I could have shaved 15-20 min off the 10 km paddle.

For this reason, I hope to use a K1 for the next MOMAR as it will be considerably faster than a Sea Kayak. However, I will likely use a “trainer” K1 as the water conditions will be unknown, and I will very likely flip and swim if I paddle in the Stealth K1 that I have been using at Long Lake. I am feeling more and more stable in this boat, but not to enough of a degree to consider using it in a MOMAR race. The reason is that if I swim, my race time is shot!

The Pirate Bay has been back online for a bit, while seedler.org seems down for the count. The MPAA published a document claiming that they had managed to stop The Pirate bay for good, and they trumped that as a victory. A Pyhrric victory perhaps.

Within days, The Pirate Bay was back online in Amsterdam, and now, back in Sweden once again. The servers are being rebuilt, and most of the site is back to normal. To make matters worse for the MPAA/RIAA cabal, The Pirate Bay is as popular as ever, and the people of Sweden are not amused that the MPAA pressured the U.S. government to pressure the Swedish Government, to pressure the Swedish Police to seize the Pirate Bay servers.

This means that not only are the Pirate Bay servers back online, but they just got a whole bunch of free PR, and the Swedes are very unhappy at their local laws being violated on the orders of a U.S. corporation. What this means is that The Pirate Bay will become more popular than ever, and that the MPAA and RIAA will continue in their downward spiral.

Of course, you cannot blame these companies for doing this. P2P file sharing represents a direct threat to the MPAA and RIAA themselves. Much more so than the threat to the actual artists and movie studios. If online distribution of music and media takes full hold (as it certainly seems to have done) and it becomes decentralized (as it is likely to be) then there will be absolutely no need for the MPAA and RIAA to exist at all. So when you see these organizations attacking sites like The Pirate Bay to “support the artists” what they are really doing is trying to preserve their business model of being the distributors for this kind of media. But the distribution model is changing, and they will go out of business, and it looks like sites like The Pirate Bay will keep going on.

As a kayaker, this video is fantastic, forget the Tomcat, I care more about the kayak scenes in it, although the silly brits call them canoes.

I had always wondered about adding a water jet to a kayak, and what you would get. The kayak and even the design control is exactly how I imagined my own idea, right down to a Werner paddle. Fantastic thing to see, looks like it would be one hell of a ride.

(I had one hell of a time getting this post up as the damn WYSIWYG default editor in Wordpress constantly mangled the You Tube code. Very annoying indeed.)

The bottom line, you should see this movie.

Last weekend Kathy and I went to see An Inconvenient Truth, starring Al Gore. I wanted to see it on opening day as I feel that it is an important enough message that I felt that I should support the film.

I did not expect much to be honest, as it is mostly just Al Gore speaking in front of a slide show presentation. It started off a little slow, but built from there. I was especially impressed that Gore stuck to the facts, and just presented the science. Of very important note was the peer reviewed journals. Of over 900 articles in peer reviewed science journals - not one - contradicted global warming.

Of a similar sample across articles in the popular media, 53% of those articles were of the opinion that the scientists were still arguing amongst themselves.

It is an important thing to note. The scientific community agrees that global warming is a real threat, but popular media does not. Often “scientists” disagree with the evidence, yet they never publish these disagreements within scientific journals - only popular ones.

The movie is just graphs of hard data, and simple explanations of that information. It is well laid out for a layperson to understand the issues surrounding global warming. So, for me, it was not much of a surprise, but it was incredibly well done, and surprisingly funny in parts.

Everyone should see this movie so that they know the hard data, and know that things can be done. But there is an even more important reason to look at the data that Gore presents. You will be able to shield yourself from those media stories that are biased against the evidence.

Returning from my Gutbuster on Saturday, I saw a weight bench sitting out on the road by my neighbors driveways. It was a higher end weight bench - with professional weights and plates, as well as a few not so great dumbbells scattered around it.

That, however, is not what attracted my attention. It was the fact that there was a sign on it that read FREE. I talked to the owner, Andrew, and the weights were indeed free. He no longer has the room, and he has a gym membership as well. So, with Andrew’s help, I got the weight bench over to my house, where I realized it was missing a few bolts, that I was able to replace for $10 at Canadian Tire.

So, now I am the owner of a real weight bench and an assortment of professional iron plates. It is rather ironic really, as if I only purchased a few other things now, I would be able to perform all the exercises that I do at my own gym, for which I have a membership.

Of course, VI fitness really does have a better assortment of fitness equipment, and it does not take up any space in my living room. However, it is a nice advantage to be able to perform over half my workouts on a bench at home.

At the first MOMAR race in Ucluelet, I found that paddling a Necky Looksha IV I was not keeping up with the people in the front of the kayak pack. Of course, I now know that the people in front were paddling a K2, and the guy in second place was on a surf ski.

A few weekends back, I tried a V-10 Surf ski at deep cove, and found it incredibly unstable to paddle, wickedly fast in a straight line, but incredibly different from paddling a whitewater boat, or a sea kayak with thigh braces.

Ron Grant, who came in second on the paddle overall and I had an argument at dinner over paddling form. He was insisting that you should “punch out” your upper arm, which I was certain was wrong as when I took my American Canoe Association (ACA) instructors course, I failed because I punched my upper arm out. The consensus amongst all the racers at the ACA was that this is the “old” way to paddle as advocated by flatwater racers, and that it is no longer used.

However, I met even more flatwater racers who advocated that this is the proper technique, and I was becoming even more confused…

Then, I found out that right next to my house no less, on Long Lake here in Nanaimo there is the Nanaimo Canoe and Kayak Club and they train with K1, K2 and K4’s, not to mention many other boats (But no whitewater). So I thought I would sign up and give it a try. After all, a years membership is only $150 and it is on the lake right next to my house!

Therefore, on Monday June 5th I tried my first K1 kayak, and I was certainly surprised. The fitting, and seating is just like a surf ski. What surprised me though, is that everything is radically different from whitewater. That is, your knees are up, and together, and you have a small seat to sit on. So, you have no backband, hip pads, knee braces, crotch pad to push against for balance. Apparently this is because you actually move your knees while applying the flatwater power stroke. However, in a whitewater boat, you cannot move you knees, they are locked in the braces, so this probably accounts for why the stroke is so different.

The other thing is that these boats are very very unstable. I have a good assortment of braces and paddle skills from whitewater, but most of those skills go out the window when you are in a K1 because of the lack of controlled outfitting and the fact that your knees are up means that you can’t brace in the same way as a whitewater boat. It was a very bizzare feeling as I can take my whitewater boat on the same lake, and throw it around so that the bow and stern can bury themselves in the lake, and still maintain enough control so not as to flip the kayak upside down.

As I tried my second K1 on the lake, a much narrower and faster K1, I ended up flipping and swimming while talking to Savannah who supervises and teaches the paddlers. I had been able to brace to try to stay upright many times, but overall, the K1 kayak feels insanely tippy. Indeed, I have felt LESS tippy in my whitewater boat while running class IV + whitewater on the Ashnola river in flood!

I also saw that they have a K1 mould and are considering getting someone who works with fiberglass to help make the club some more K1 boats. All I can say is that I spent years learning a good whitewater power stroke, and I was able to maintain that stroke for 1:27:30 during the kayak stage of the MOMAR. I am certain that if I had a narrow K1 with whitewater outfitting that I would have been at the front of the pack. Of course, I am more than willing to learn this completely alien sport. Still, it is shocking just how different it is from whitewater, and it amazes me that people would not add in a little whitewater technology to increase the stability of the boats. But then, in flatwater K1 racing, you are always on flatwater! The MOMAR is much more unpredictable though - you race on whatever kind of water is around - flat or stormy. So, if you had a Sea Kayak or a K1 with whitewater outfitting during stormy conditions (or, probably a surf ski as well) you would have a major advantage in such a MOMAR.

During the 2005 Cumberland MOMAR we had just those conditions, windy and 2-3 foot waves which would have made paddling something like a K1 miserable. However, I am still of the mind that I could rip it up in those conditions in a K1 with whitewater outfitting… Now if I could only get my hands on such a thing.

In the meantime I will learn the radically different skill of paddling a K1 on flatwater.

I ran my third Gutbuster (and the third of 2006) on Saturday, June 3rd. My final race time for the 11km hill run was 1:22:52. Which I felt I could have done better, however, given that my time was even less than my last 2 Gutbuster runs 1:29:20, Gutbuster #1 Royal Roads 11KM and 1:37:31 in Gutbuster #2, Duncan, I feel pretty good about that.

During the first 20 minutes out though, I just wanted to keel over and die. I was going too hard too fast, and forgot that I was also running with a group of people who were only doing the 5km run, and they only had to climb the summit once. I had to do it three times. After I slowed my pace down, I stopped hurting so much. I did run into problems on the downhills. The downhills I like to open my stride on and go really fast, but the trails we were on were very narrow, so there was little room to pass people. I know for future runs that I need to get my base aerobic level up for faster times, and I also need to get far enough ahead of the main pack at the start so I can use my downhill speed to my advantage.

The irony of course, is that I have not been able to do any base training for my running as I am dealing with shin splints on my left leg. I have another MOMAR (Duncan) approaching, and I have to train for that. And, of course, the Duncan MOMAR has a running section - as well as a paddling and mountain biking section.

So, I need to find some way of bringing my resting heart rate down - that is a good indicator of how good my “base” is. That is, how good my aerobic system is functioning. Currently my resting heart rate is high - and it has always been so. However, I have not trained for marathons either… And I have a 25 KM Gutbuster here in Nanaimo on July 16th. So, that and the MOMAR means I need to bring up my base training. Kathy forced me to sit down with her and work out my training schedule for the longer Gutbuster, it helps to have a physiotherapist and experienced triathalon runner coaching your progress!

Tony Austin got a bunch of good images of me during this Gutbuster as well, so I will have to shell out some coin to get the images from him. He got a few good shots of Daisy too.

The pirate bay is back online, althought it appears that their MySQL database is under heavy load. They have changed their title to: “The Police Bay” in an ironic twist.

Data circulating amongst the internet seems to indicate that the large raid on the Pirate Bay was orchestrated by the MPAA contacting the department of foreign affairs in the U.S. Which in turn, contacted the department of foreign affairs in Sweden, and they mobilized the equivalent of the Swedish F.B.I. to arrest the members of the Pirate Bay.

However, what the MPAA does not apparently realize is that many people in Sweden have become galvanized over this issue of a corporation based in the United States interfering in copywrite law in Europe. Indeed, an “Pirate Bay” political party has formed in Sweden around this very issue. That, and according to Swedish law, the Pirate Bay is not actually violating any laws for running a bittorrent tracker, as they do not host any of the files on their servers.

It seems that there will very likely be a big backlash against the Swedish Police, who may even have to pay damages in this matter, and that despite publishing a document about their “victory” the MPAA will be worse off in the long run. The Pirate Bay was well known before this raid, and it will become even more well known after it, as it seems that it is very unlikely that any charges will actually be levied.

This does not work out in favour of the MPAA. But then, I don’t feel sorry for either the MPAA or the RIAA or any similar companies. They make their income off of controlling an effective monopoly on the film and music industries respectively, and their presence is not required for the distrobution of either movies or music. Indeed, they siphon profits off of artists, and damage what would otherwise be a free market solution to aquiring movies and music. Consumers would be better off without them around, and ironically, so would the artists.

Attacks such as the ones on the Pirate Bay will only serve to hasten their demise.