It wasn’t the clouds that had him worried. Storms come and go. After all, you can always run for shelter from an oncoming storm. Usually you get there before the rain begins to fall. Sometimes you don’t, but that is the joy of life. No, what had him worried was where it all began. How the storm had formed off in some distant land. He imagined that day when a bit of water vapor congealed into a single white puff, a cloud so small that it offered no protection to beach goers below as they laid out under a laser sharp, yellow sun. How simple it would have been then for a small airplane or jet to fly through that tiny bit of cloud and scatter the vapor once again rendering it harmless. “If you knew a killer storm would come of a tiny cloud,” he wondered, “would you not destroy it?”

Each day on the equatorial line the sun draws water into the sky. Clouds form quickly into steep pillars that reach high into the blue until their tops are sheared off by upper level winds. The pillars dance around like tops, some faster, some slower. Some merge together and turn thick and black. Little storms are unleashed. Often as quickly as they are formed, they release their energy and evaporate into blue skies again. If not for the wet ground and the few broken leaves on a palm, you’d have never guessed that a short time before the sky had been opaque and threatening. Of course this is the nature of storms. They never last. The sky turns blue once again while the humans below are left to clean up the damage.

Lying in the cool, wet grass his mind returned to the coming clouds. “A storm cannot be helped.” he thought. The responsibility for the storm lies with it’s creator. What truly had him worried was his own perception. He had missed something. He was too busy daydreaming, staring at the clouds.

There was a silent streak of white in the distance as the rain began to fall.

Kayakers should never complain about the weather. The roots of our sport of course come from parts of the world where cloudy and 40f would be downright tropical! The picture above is from a collection of kayak images at the library of congress. There are a couple of this guy. One is a nice brace with his “canoe” paddle and another is a roll. One image I found interesting was a shot of 20 or more kayaks gathered in Berlin for the 1936 Olympics. I guess I never realized there were that many German kayakers in 1936. Maybe G-Style has been around much longer than we thought.

In the big picture paddling is just paddling. It would be grand to attach some great significants to it, but it would be self inflated for paddlers to try. Kayaking is after all, recreation. No big shakes! Sometimes I bristle at that thought, even though my logical brain knows it’s true. When something, even a “recreation” takes up a large part of our lives it certainly seems like more than just a past time. Of course we take our recreation pretty seriously. We have dedicated shops, magazines, gatherings, message boards, books, you name it. It can make it seem much more important. I’m reminded of a bible scripture that says “Of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh.” Sometimes, you just have to accept it for what it is and get out and paddle. Sometimes you just have to leave the kayak in the garage and go do other things.

When I got up this morning and read about a group called “Unity Resources Group” killing two innocent Iraqi women (Unity??), Blackwater, The slaughter of monks in Myanmar and the 1o,ooo other things going on in our world it’s hard to think about sea kayaking. Then of course the sheer scope of the madness created my one lone species of naked ape can crush you. At that point I suddenly feel the urge to load up the kayak. After all there is a long tradition of sailors leaving the madness of the land to throw their lot with the sea.

Yeah, I changed my mind. . . Go Paddle!

Yeah, it’s cool. I have a Pentium 4, hyper threaded 3Ghz CPU running Windows XP professional on a duel monitor system with a fancy black box with all sorts of red light bars on the face. The sides of the box are transparent so you can see the glowing blue and red fans spinning away to keep it all cool. Sitting on a shelf beside me I have 3 external hard drives that sort gigs and gigs of photos, data and video. Much of my software is a dead give-away of my computer geekdom. Yep I have Firefox to browse the web and WinAmp cranking out the tunes on my surround sound system with the big bass box thumping at my feet. As a graphic designer and web guy, I have all the fun editing programs as well; Flash, Photoshop, Image Ready, PS Premiere, Dreamweaver, Frontpage (now extinct), Propaganda for when I want to do podcasts, and a billion other little specialized audio and video editors and converters that get me through my day.

Now everything was going just swimmingly until I began to work getting all my PR video into my internal hard drive which only had a measly 4.6 gigs of space left. (Yeah I remember when 20mgs was a lot.) So off I ran to buy a fancy new SATA drive with 300 more gigs of space. That should let me get this video done. Well, if I was going to have a new faster drive I figured, I may as well move the OS. I can use the old drive as a scratch disk. Surprisingly I was easily able to ghost the old system to the new drive without playing too much inside my bios. (Ghosting basically means copy the old drive to the new one). Of course it was not until I got all that done that I realized that with my new 3CCD camera, I had to buy a new 4 pin to 6 pin firewire cable and a new internal firewire port! Ok then, no problem. One thing is sure, when my son, Julian, and I built my “Imperial Death Star” computer we made it to take a million upgrades and not sneeze. Now of course if I was really a geek I’d have a Mac.

The truth is, I hate the technical workings of computers. To me computers I like cars. I use them everyday but I’m not all that interested in looking under the hood. Just like a car of course, you often have no choice. So you learn.

Sometimes wanderlust starts like this. . .

I got up this morning and poured my first cup of coffee. Off a stack of old paddling magazines I grabbed the June 2007 issue of Canoe Focus which is published by the BCU. Flipping through the pages I stopped at a gray 2 page spread featuring part three of an article by Phil Clegg about the record 80 day circumnavigation of Great Britain he did with Barry Shaw & Harry Whelan in 2005. My eye was drawn to this bit;

“The strain was starting to tell on our bodies. Harry took only six days of resting recovery after dislocating his shoulder and was paddling phenomenally well. He had to adapt his paddling style to cope and his body was showing it, muscle around his damaged shoulder was wasting away as he tried to favour his good side throwing out the symmetry in his body and his stroke. In addition the pain was causing him to lose sleep and he was taking painkillers that would knock out a horse. Barry was suffering with suspected stomach ulcers and had lost weight that he could ill afford. His back was also causing problems and carrying the heavily laden boats was a big issue. . .” – phil clegg

I had visions of my time in PR when after injuring my ribs, I would eat acetaminophen and wince every time I put the paddle in the water. I thought, “Yikes Phil, you’re the man!”.

I remembered writing about this expedition in a past blog, but I couldn’t remember the year. So of course I came back to my office to find out. A quick search brought me to a lost page on the old SeaKayakingUK.com website. They started in May. May, 2005. On the page was a link to an interview with Barry Shaw. Barry was interviewed by Simon Willis who as you know has been producing amazing podcasts. “That’s Right!” I remembered I’d been wanting to do a write up here about Simon. That would have to come another day.

Suddenly I had a loose idea of what I wanted to write about. I was thinking spending a bit more time talking about Barry Shaw might be a great idea considering he and Justine Curgenven are planning to attempt to circumnavigate the South Island of New Zealand soon. Ok, then.

So as is my habit when I work on my blogs each day I opened my photo collection in a really cool program called, Adobe bridge which works like a file browser and light box all in one. I thought maybe I’d find a picture from Wales today. For some reason the image above, one I took while standing on South Stack, caught my attention. It was nothing really. Just some rocky cliffs heading out into the north Atlantic.

I remembered that day. I had taken the day off from the symposium and took my little rented Vauxhall Astra up the winding road along the cliffs. I really had no idea where I was going other than I was trying to soak in that I had finally actually made it to the UK. A dream since I was 14. The little road was just a single lane, walled in on either side by stone fence rows. If you met a car along the way, you, or the other driver would have to back up until you found a little spot where you could get over just enough for the other to go by. Eventually by taking every left turn, I ended up at South Stack.

Staring at the image on my screen, I began to feel a bit sad. I thought how nice it would be to be there right now, working my way around that low head. I thought to myself, “I wonder what it would take to get around Great Britain in 79 days!?” I thought of the work load I have to meet today and noticed the chill of the cold Wisconsin morning. Wanderlust was gnawing at me. I realized the line of loose thoughts that had brought me here. In my head I heard Jethro Tull’s “Skating Away”.

Funny the places your mind goes. I opened my browser and began to write.

- More Pictures of Wales? Check out my Wales Gallery