Monday, June 22, 2009

A week of Kayaking

I just spent the last week doing almost nothing but kayaking and learning about kayaking skills. Although I was the oldest student in the class I had a great time and learned a lot. The week started off with learning some classroom stuff before heading out on the lake (really a glorified pond) and learning water skills. Tuesday was more classroom stuff followed by more pond time which also included filming us as we demonstrated the skills we learned on Monday. Wednesday was more classroom time, followed by pool and pond time both with more filming, followed by a creeking run. I think this is part of the GW loop I have heard about and it was a lot of fun. Thursday we managed to get in more water time before we watched the films. I have to work on keeping my head down when rolling and I don't turn my wrist back enough. Friday was a really big day as we had to paddle up the canal, we jumped off canal falls, which is an eight foot drop. We ran the river down through the gorge and it was quite high and a bit gnarly. I managed to remain upright until Center Chutes when we started surfing the waves. Then we did more on the water skills. I did very well, which made me happy. I could have done a bit better if I had more confidence in the class III water conditions we experienced. I was just happy that I managed to ferry across and back without flipping. Saturday I took out a class for the Meetup group and another class on Sunday morning which was a river run. I surfed a little at Offut, missed my first roll, then was back up. Seven days of kayaking. Today really sucks. I think I officially hate my job. Time to plan another river run.

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Monday, June 01, 2009

New reviews site

I have been working like crazy on a new website based on the gear testing I do for the backpacking group I am a part of. This site is for kayak gear reviews and hopefully testing in the future. Right now the site is still really young but I have been working hard on both the front end to make it look good and the back end to make it stable and useful to the people who would be using the site. The site can be found here http://kayakgearreviews.org. I hope that this site will eventually get up and running as I really do believe that it can be a useful resource to people who are looking into buying kayaking gear. Not only that but I also hope to build a community around the site that the members can use to interact with. I have a forums and a social aspect to the site already set up and the reviews will be listed on another part of the site. I am really psyched up about this and hope it will work out well. I am going to the Summer OR show this year and hope that I will have time to approach companies about the site and see if I can generate some interest in getting manufacturers to test gear with the site. So rather then get outside and enjoy myself this Memorial day weekend, I actually put in many hours of work getting the site up and running and tweaking things to look just the way I want them too. I actually had to wait a few days for all the DNS servers to populate with the address and figure out if I had all the setting set correctly. Everything looks really good and KGR is live and ready to go. The site went live today which is really cool.

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