Last Saturday me and a friend went to a kind of seakayaker meeting in Mahone Bay Nova Scotia. The local outfitter hosted retailers and suppliers on his lawn and a bunch of seakayakers and tourists showed up during the day to chat and browse. Lots of tupperware and fibreglass boats on display and for free try out. Lotus design PFD's (Lola and Straight jacket) have now Canadian DOT approval, and there were 2 nice fibreglass boats from a Canadian manufacturer (not CD) for less than 2000$CAN catalogue price (both more like the british boats, small cockpits and skeg). If I would need to buy a boat I would be between one of those and the PW Capella (strong tupperware). Our 2 trusty Volkskayaks (beaten up and heavily loaded with gear, a local stitch and glue design) looked quite interesting for some people (Is that fibreglass? No it's plywood. Were did you buy them? We built them! Really???? Yes you could do it. It's 900 $CAN for the workshop and 40 hours later you walk away with your own boat.....). The most interesting boats for me were 2 skinboats, a recovery kayak and a baidarka. Boy, it was real fun to paddle those. I really should built one next winter -maybe a foldable greenlander. Still time to think about that. The boat building virus was mentioned in an earlier post. It is so easy to catch it... Oh yes, we also paddled during the afternoon and evening. Was funny to find our camp on one of the islands in the pitch dark foggy night. First time I paddled only guided by instruments (compass and GPS). Have to move the compass closer to the cockpit (Suunto Orca), since it was a bit hard to read on the hatch cover. Cheers Ulli Dr. Ulli Hoeger Dept. Physiology and Biophysics Dalhousie University Halifax, B3H4H7, Nova Scotia Canada Phone I : 902-494-2673 Fax: 902-494-1685 Phone II :902-488-6796 http://is.dal.ca/~uhoeger *************************************************************************** PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List - All postings copyright the author and not to be reproduced outside PaddleWise without author's permission Submissions: PaddleWise_at_PaddleWise.net Subscriptions: PaddleWise-request_at_PaddleWise.net Website: http://www.paddlewise.net/ ***************************************************************************Received on Tue Jul 04 2000 - 11:09:10 PDT
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