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Rapier 20
The reading of the testreport about the Rapier20 in the most recent issue of Seakayaker triggered me to think back to my discussion with Willem Molengraaff, a couple of months ago, as well to rolling sessions with all kind of different seakayaks in the years past by.
The trigger was the following text-passage about rolling the rapier:
Following our discussion, We think of rolling a seakayak as an importanty issue because, when a kayak can be rolled easily, this adds to the safety by a bigger chance of succes under difficult circumstances.
Difficult to understand is: "WHY is a long, slim kayak like the rapier not easy to roll?"
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In one of our outdoorshops I stumbled a few weeks ago over a leaflet mentioning the "Uribag".
What´s a Uribag?? Well this is a device, in the form of a latex bag, with which you can urinate under circumstances where is less privacy. Such a bag exists in a male- and a female-version:
The moment I saw the leaflet, I instantly thought about the practical use for seakayaking. Honestly I can not see practical use for using the bag in a train or during backpacking or whatever sport. But in a seakayak this could be handy, supposing you have a wetsuite or drysuit with a release-zipper at the right place.
As the leaflet did not mention much information, nor an website-address, I did some searching with google.
And yes, they have a website!
The URL is: www.uribag.com
I am very curious if one of you, readers, heard before of the Uribag. And even more if anyone already tried it in the seakayak.
You are welcome to give your comments.
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This was a wonderfull day.
Because: I had not been in this area for a long time; the weather was interesting and challenging; the sea was very varied; there was a playspot with breaking waves AND my companions were happy with this tour.
The plan for today was to paddle in the Voordelta, departing from Springersdiep.
The windforecast was perfect with 3-4 Bft SW.
The difficult thing however was what to think off the occasional chance for "rain & thunder". The whole week already this was mentioned in the daily forecasts in the area, resulting only in rain without the thunder.
We discussed this with the coastguard and they said to contact us in case they noticed thunderactivity on the radar.
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A little rescue-team, consisting of Tiny, Hans, Peter and Axel, pushed and dragged me out of the hole I dropped in.
They assured me it was nonsence to take my site, being more or less a piece of work of a lifetime, out of the air.
Axel even wrote a post in his weblog about it: The art of seakayak reviewing
So there I am up and going again: I needed quite a few hours to repair things. But the site is in the air again.
The future is not yet clear to me, but during the holiday to come, the mountains we are heading for, are a good background for thinking things over.
The problem is wether:
- how to convince a monopolist-retailer, who does not need nor like reviews, that testing seakayaks is a sensible thing.
Or
- how to find other ways to get relevant seakayaks for reviewing.
thx, my little rescue-team
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Seakayaktour 9 juni 2006: Huisduinen - OudeSchild vv.
As it was already 4 weeks ago that I "tasted" salt water, the "sea was calling" me to come again.
4 Clubmembers joined in for a tour to Oudeschild (Texel).
The day before the weather seemed a bit doubtfull as there was heavy rainfall with thunderstorm.
Predictions however said this to be on saterday mainly in the South of Holland. So we took our chance being cautious while looking at the sky and choosing a short crossing over the Marsdiep, paddling mostly along the coast.
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We would have loved it to meet the Humpback whale (NL:bultrugwalvis)(Latin: Megaptera novaeangliae) navigating the Dutch waters these days: A whale which is very seldom seen in Holland.
We didn´t know anything about that it was navigating already there for a few days. But on our way back, from circumnavigating Noorderhaaks, Wieger heard on his radio there was a whale swimming near Huisduinen. So we crossed the Marsdiep in that direction, only to see, when we were halfway, a policeboat and a fast speedboat starting to cross the Marsdiep at full speed back to Texel. Afterwards we heard that the whale has been seen in the Mokbaai; with us crossing at about 2 miles from there without seeing. Grmpfffff....! 
Otherwise this already excellent day would have got a golden edge around it.
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The ultimate book for tidal heights in Holland is" HP33". This detailed book on tidal heights offers also some information about the tidal streams: Each hour the directions and speed.
This year I discovered that this book is also available in a digital version " NLTides", offering much more possebilities AND information.
The CD introduces itself with this text:
HP33-NLTides provides the official height predictions for all significant porsts from Nieuwpoort in Belgium to lIST in Germany and tidal streams for the Southern North Sea, the Netherlands part of the Waddenzee, Schelde, tidal river area and main port approaches.
Compared with the Paper HP33, NLTides provides more ports, however the predicted tidal heights for the Netherlands ports ans streams information are consistent. The tidal height predictions for Belgium and Germany ports in NLTides are equivalent to the predictions of the UKHO tidal prediction software TotalTide.
HP33D-NLTides is an anual edition providing tidal predictions valif for one calender year. This software is available through the agents of the Royal Netherlands Navy Hudrographic Service (see www.hydro.nl)
What is there more to say after this introduction?
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Yesterday I had my weekly 20km paddle-tour to the kayakclub and back. The weather was very beautiful so I decided it was safe enough, regarding the crossing of the Alkmaardermeer, to paddle my old K1-racer today.
After having started I, developed the target for this evening: "working on my body-posture". Especially the position of my head&neck, as well as keeping my upper body straight while paddling.
This is related to my visits last months to a Mensendieck-therapist because of neck-problems. It turned out to be that pushing the head forward (something I clearly did so for years already) puts an enormous strain on the neck.
By reducing that, with help of Mensendieck and exercises, I managed to solve cq. reduce the problem in daily life. However while kayaking this turns out to be more difficult as it is not so easy to ban out the habits of a lifetime of paddling. As I noticed last years that I had a very tired neck after a heavy paddling day, sometimes even resulting in severe headaches 
, it is necessary to improve my paddling style as well. I am proceeding gradually however and evenings like this help a lot.
It feels a quite bit contradictionary, while pushing and pulling your paddle, to straighten your backbone, to push forward your breastbone and, as a result, hold your head higher.
I got the impression tonight that working on my posture also results in higher speed. But after realising sometimes ""Hé men, you´re cruising at 10km/h now
often the "FLOW" was gone immediately with a dropping speed as a result.
However focussing on posture helped quit a lot in getting "flow" again.
This is what I concluded:
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Being virtually attacked, I worked hard last weeks to move the whole blog and all the posts to another system.
Apart from a better functionality, my aim was also a better protection of the blog.
I hope the blog does what you expect from it.
It if does not function well, please let me know.
Fortunately it was possible to maintain the current weblog-address. However it was not possible to have the same RSS-feed.
So if you follow my blog with a feedreader, please find the new RSS-feed at the bottom of this page.
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Click on the map for an enlarged version
At 9.00h it was high tide, but leaving then would mean that we had to leave even earlier from home. And today I had to wake up at 5.00h already, for we planned to start at 10.00h.
We were with a nice group of experienced paddlers (Rob, Wieger, Wietse, Henk, Annet, Jos, Maarten and myself; all members of KVU) and the weather was perfect for this tour: the sky was blue and the wind only NE3Bft. The only thing is that you are not yet used to this kind of summer-conditions in april......................................>>