Hi Doug, and Craig (the dogs doing OK?)! On Friday 28 September 2007 02:27, you wrote: > Luckily for the list we have wise old guys like you (not "wiseguys", > okay). I learn from almost every technical post you make, or at least > shift perspectives enough to always see a different facet to a > discussion. Ditto, ditto, friend! > As for "dying young," we just lost a BC university student last week off > Lumli Island out solo kayaking, I believe. Very sad, to say the least. Solo kayak means you have to be extra careful, but as usual just sheer bad luck is a factor, as usual! > Way too young. Indeed! At the lake we usually paddle there was, for several years, a Laser chained to a tree - if I remember correctly the owner, a young kid, had fallen off and drowned, probably in cold water, and out on his own! > Weather hasn't been that great. Again, ditto - one of the wettest summers on record! And we have records going back hundreds of years! > Hope Steve Holtzman and > his wife had a good kayak trip amoungst the San Juans, et al, recently. > Still waiting for summer. Bought mt girls their own SOT's - dind't get > much use. Today lovely weather, but have to work - the wind is strong, south-easterly, usually bringing bad weather from Russia! We'll see ... Global warming and over-use of fertilizers is killing our marine flora and fauna here in Europe - overfishing doesn't help either! The coastline here isn't too different from west-side of Vancouver Island, but the water is warmer (all that heat from the Gulf Stream, you know), and, I guess, it is windier (the aneometer at the city airport blew away one day, after having registered 62 m/s (124 knots!), so wisely that airport is now closed down and have been turned into a golf course, model airplane field, villas, and a highway!). On the other hand we don't have any tides to worry about, the water level varying only as an effect of weather, our tides being in the decimeter range, while constant gales at times pile up the water in the river downtown over 2 meters, flooding the surrounding streets and blocks. The negative side of having no tides is that the water becomes more stagnant, so the Baltic only gets its water replaced once in a few years, at best. The best idea for saving the Baltic, before it goes totally dead, is to make much of it into a freshwater lake, by building a dam across it, from close to Stockholm to Ebo (Turkku, in Finnish). That way the north half will be a controlled environment - very alive and thriving, while the south would be left to the claws of commercial transport and others. One problem is the hydroelectric damns that release their water in an unnatural way, all through the year, while real rivers release their water mainly in the summer, adding lots and lots of nutrients, and oxygen, when it is needed the most by the normal creatures and plants in the sea. Alas, they don't get it (most of the nutrients have settled in the dams, and the oxygen is long gone), so at summertime the Baltic is becoming an oxygen-free, putrid pond, filled with poisonous algae. But here on the west side, things are little better! Sadly, the sea is mostly dead, a process that started over 200 hundred years ago, when the coral reefs off shore died. Now you rarely see any fish in the coastal areas, while the jellyfish still seem to thrive. The number of spieces of marine life is rapidly dwindling, and in the Baltic the situation is far worse, the bottoms being totally dead, just dead muck (that one day will turn into oil, no doubt). The coastal zone is still fairly OK, but not well. Recently a lot of auks and similar spieces (most of them rare visitors) have ended up on our coast, dead, after having starved to death out in the Atlantic, so something real bad is going on. Sigh! Off to work, Tord *************************************************************************** PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List - Any opinions or suggestions expressed here are solely those of the writer(s). You must assume the entire responsibility for reliance upon them. All postings copyright the author. Submissions: PaddleWise_at_PaddleWise.net Subscriptions: PaddleWise-request_at_PaddleWise.net Website: http://www.paddlewise.net/ ***************************************************************************Received on Fri Sep 28 2007 - 05:28:06 PDT
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