As the sun slipped behind the west bluff of Devil’s Lake State Park, I dropped on my right-side into the now black water. As gravity lengthened my body into the depths, I reached down into the opaque inner space with a perfectly vertical traditional blade. I knew the lake bottom was hiding less than a meter below my blade tip, and yet it felt as if the water were a thousand feet deep. Just for a moment I hung suspended in total sensual isolation. Then my mind came outward to focus on my goal. With 3 quick twists of my paddle blade I broke the silence and I brought my head back out of the water into the still hot evening air. I only had time to register the warmth before dropping back into the water with a loud “sploosh”. Now I could sense the pressure building in my chest and my mind nagging me to angle the blade just a few degrees to the horizontal allowing me to roll easily back to the surface. Yet my rational mind wants this new roll, so I relaxed and let the boat settle back down inverted into the calm black water. Again I set the shaft vertically and forced my mind to reach out to the end of the blade. I moved it in a subtle scull to assure myself that I would bring pressure to the blade when I committed to the move. Again 3 quick skulls, again I rose above the surface, (This time with the wisdom to grab a breath) and again I came back over in a furious splash. “Screw It!”, I thought as I angled the blade outward and quickly found myself sitting upright in my boat. The only sound in the red twilight was Gryphon splashing on the beach in the distance and my hard breathing as my body sought to replenish the oxygen lost in this the 100th attempt to succeed with a solid vertical sculling roll with only 3 strokes on the blade. Sometimes the boundary between success and failure is measured in millimeters.

Saturday evening the storms cleared to allow the show to go on at Mirror lake State Park. I couldn’t help but notice how this talk about kayaking was immersed in modern technology. Here I was with my laptop and a borrowed projector talking about islands far enough off shore to make all this technology impossible to use. In fact I’ve yet to have a cell phone work anywhere off shore into the great lakes. The intimate atmosphere of the outdoor amphitheater however did feel right for kind of presentation. Over the course of the hour I we shared in images of local wildlife and distant lighthouses and ended with questions spanning local history and materials used in kayak construction.

Yesterday I drove over to Milwaukee in the intense heat to join John B for some navigation nursemaiding as navigation has always been a weak spot. When I’m out of my boat and calculating times and distances as well as the impact of winds and currents, it feels much more like homework than kayaking. Then like Bart Simpson, I find myself fighting the urge to stare out the classroom window. After some time going over charts we went out for a short paddle in the 25mpg winds that held steady from the south west. (That would be about 22 knots or a force 5 or 6 wind on the beaufort scale). The effect of a south westerly wind on a western shore is to carry the warm water away from the beach area and to pull the cold water up from the bottom of the lake. Suffice to say it was much too cold to spend much time rolling. Instead we slipped into the choppy water behind the break and browsed the large collection of Yachts and sailboats moored behind it’s protection. There, the water was again warm and I took time to roll and find some relief from the 98 degree air. Before we called it a day we spent a little time out on the lake working on turning in the riled wind. I had to keep reminding myself to lean forward to turn into the wind. It’s worth noting that if your boat is just too big for you, it may not be all that easy. For me just that change in trim caused by me leaning forward allowed the wind to push my stern over and in just a couple strokes I would be nosing directly into the wind. Then leaning back and thus anchoring by stern I could easily sweep the boat back down wind.