The Tao of Walking Ridge

On a recent walkabout I came across a bead shop. The selection was really overwhelming. You can find beads for just about any theme you might want and assembly your own jewelry. Very easy, and very personalized, very cool.

I find very little jewelry with a sophisticated mariner’s theme.  Sure, you can find the anchor pendant, or the shark’s tooth.  But that is about it.  After wandering the store for a while, I found a string of black coral beads and finally I found some glass trade beads that made a nice contrast with the black coral.  Millefiori patterns with blues and greens were more common, but got lost against the black coral.  When I came across these yellow trade beads, their size and color worked perfectly with the 6 x 10 mm black coral beads.  After stringing them up a handful of times to check the spacing and overall length, I finally crimped the clasp on and I had my very own very unique jewelry with a sailors theme.

Sometimes you hear a quote that is cute.  Sometimes you hear a quote that makes you think.  Sometimes you hear a quote that stops you in your tracks.  Dr. Wayne Dyer on PBS had such a quote.  He suggested, referencing the Tao Te Ching, to “identify your greatest fear and become curious about it”.

Now that is a strategy.  How many times has a stressful event been worse than the dread of it?  Fear of an event causes negative feelings for a long time, even if the event is short.  Sometimes the event never happens, and then all you have is the pain of fear.  It is much harder to not do something.  Redirecting the fear to curiosity is a powerful approach for doing something about it.

I’ve always liked the colors I chose for the painting “The Club”. I chose them intuitively, by trial and error, and mixed the acrylics on the fly. Having recently discovered the color analysis tool in Gimp, I thought I’d analyze my own painting to see what it was I liked about the painting. The analysis was a bit of a surprise.

I thought the background was a shade of green, but in fact was a desaturated yellow. Thus, 80% of the painting was made up of yellow or orange hues, with some variation in intensity and value. Intensity is how much of the hue is in the mix, and value is how dark/light. A dark value with no intensity is black. A light value with no intensity is white. Maximum intensity is the most intense color, whether it is light or dark depends upon the hue. This creates a triangular description of the hues that is well represented by the Gimp color tool.

The blue-green in the lower left of the painting turned out to be 1/3 of the way around the color wheel from the dominant color in the painting.  This is a common approach to color selection in web site design.  The dark half desaturated value of the blue green also proved some contrast with the brighter orange.

Note how the tool allows for easy selection of thirds.  The orange color plot shows that upper left is a blue green at the point of the triangle.  The blue-green plot shows the variety of colors available for that hue.  The most intense color would have too much of a neon feel for what I wanted in this painting.

Understanding what worked can greatly help plan and try new things in your color palette.  Gimp is a great tool to assist in this.  And another reason to use Linux.

Magenta is a color that is a bit rare in nature.  That may be why it is especially captivating when we see it.  Sunsets with a mix of reds and magentas and oranges create as powerful a mood as any painting can. So I decided to use this color mix with a simple silhouette to inspire the imagination of the viewer.

This painting is also an example of how versatile acrylics are in recovering from mistakes.  This canvas originally held a painting that I didn’t like at all.  So I sanded it down, and recovered with gesso.  Then I laid a sunset theme that I liked, but hated the first silhouette.  So I painted over that image and tried this one of the island.

The silhouette is not black, it is a dark desaturated third from to the dominant.  In this case, a dark desaturated green to better compliment the light reds, orange-reds, and magentas.

Sunset Isle - Brian Kelly, 2008, acrylic on canvas board 14″ x 18″

The weather was great again today, so I decided to take the Kiawah out for its second voyage.  There is a 65 acre lake in a park just down the road for me and my hope was the Kiawah would be easy enough to be an impulse boat for short trips like this.

I decided to see just how long it would take to actually hit the water.  Assembly times vary wildly among manufacturers.  They all seem a bit optimistic.  They also vary because it depends when you start and stop the clock. So I pulled into the park at 11:41 and wanted to see how long before I actually shoved off.

I did pre assemble the frame back to the first crossmember.  This probably saved at most five minutes, but is easy to do if you have 5 feet of storage in your truck, SUV, or station wagon.  The frame was ready to insert into the skin in 15 minutes (11:56).

It took 10 minutes to put the fame in the skin, make sure it was aligned, snug the thumbwheel, zip, velcro, and inflate the sponsons.  Full loaded and ready to go, I shoved off at 12:14.  I was paddling in under 35 minutes from the time I pulled into the parking lot.  This was great time for only the second assembly in the field.  By comparison, it took me just over an hour with my Feathercraft Kahuna.  I’ve read that some skins are more snug than others, and this could affect assembly times of the Kahuna.  Part of the beauty of the Folbot design is that all of the boats should assemble in 20 to 25 honest minutes once you get the hang of it.  And as important, there are no knuckle busting steps and no cursing required.

I did add some knee pads by unclipping the aft end of the foot peg bars and slipping the knee pads on.  this made bracing a bit more comfortable.

I found the overall comfort of the boat to be good.  The cockpit is roomy, which is nice for these kinds of fair weather trips with cameras in hand and calm water.  The seat did become a bit uncomfortable after an hour.  A bit of padding might help.  The seat is much more comfortable than the early seats in the Cooper, but isn’t quite as comfortable as the Kahuna.  The Kahuna seat is, I think, one of the most comfortable kayak seats.  The Kahuna seat is a sling design.  It would be more of an issue if you plan on regular 6 hour paddles without exiting the boat.  But for short paddles, the Kiawah was quite comfortable, and the foot pegs did not fall down as they do in the Kahuna.

The boat did handle very well.  I paddled for a little while at full speed sprint, and the boat tracked perfectly.  There was no tendency to spin out.  But the boat really excels at leisurely paddling about.  A light breeze seems to have no effect on the boat at all.  I paddled around the lake for nearly two hours, and it was thoroughly enjoyable.

Once I was settled in to my old Kahuna, I always felt very secure.  The boat is listed as one inch wider than the Kiawah, and was quite stable.  The Kahuna comes with a sea sock as well, which is a nice accessory for rougher water as it prevents the boat from taking on much water.  The Kahuna was a very dry boat, even in conditions where waves were breaking over the bow.  Sometimes I regret selling the Kahuna.  However, the Kiawah is a great leisure boat.  The narrower beam lets it get up to hull speed easily.  I would love to find some data to compare the hull speeds.  I suspect the boats are about the same speed, but the Kahuna requires a little more energy to keep it going.  And I make few “big” trips any more, where the hour+ investment in assembly is worth the while.  The Kiawah was in the water in 35 minutes, and dissassembled in 15 minutes.  Thus, I was able to go for a 2 hour paddle and spend more time paddling than assembling.

Every boat is a compromise.  The Kiawah is eerily easy to paddle.  I think I may have figured out some reasons why.  The Kiawah is an inch narrower, therefore, it cuts the water and also you need not reach out quite so far to get to the water with your paddle.  Perhaps where the paddle reaches for the water, the difference in width is a bit more than an inch, as the Kahuna may carry its beam further forward.

The Kiawah is listed as 1/2 inch lower than the Kahuna.  This should not be enough to notice, but since it is such a low volume boat I’d say it sits an inch lower in the water.  Add this to the seating position (you sit right on the bottom tube, probably an inch lower than the Kahuna) and the water might be an inch or two closer.  There is no reaching, you can paddle with more of a side to side motion of your sternum with your hands held at a comfortable height.

The tradeoff is seaworthiness in bigger waves.  The Kiawah will go through waves that the Kahuna would pop over.  The Kiawah can take on some water as the top is zippered and velcroed.  But since it is lower, the Kiawah is less affected by wind.

Overall, the Kiawah is a great value for the occasional paddler on small water.

After my KAP flight, I walked along Water Street on the east side of the river that runs through Bay City Michigan.  The Espresso Express Coffee House is a great smoke free coffee house with wi-fi and  wide variety of coffee drinks.   They also have a bit to eat if you get hungry.  The interior is an eclectically decorated space that is cool to hang out in.  Their expresso is the largest I’ve ever been served, and I enjoyed walking about downtown as I finished it.  If you are every in Bay City, drop by for a cup-a-joe.

It was a great day with great winds for a lifting a camera with a kite.  The wind was 10 to 15 mph, so I went up to Bay City to the Middle Grounds and was able to get three flights in there.  I’m still plagued with cameras that stop taking pictures mid flight, so only one pic really caught my eye from this group.  The red building is the Bay City Rowing Club, and downtown Bay City is upper right.

But after the flights I went downtown.  The park on the east side of the river was nearly empty and the wind was from the north, creating rare and perfect conditions for a flight in the park downtown.  My soft kite was especially suited to this flying in the rather tight space and it performed flawlessly.  I was able to get two great pics out of these flights.