red alder ranch

Today was the first Columbia River Kayaking Immersion class of the 2008 season. We got a full roster of 6 students and I spent the day working with Ginni learning how to teach this class. We had a great group of people from around the Northwest, all beginners or nearly so. It is so exciting as an instructor to watch people improve over the course of the day!

Immersion is a day long introduction to the basics of sea kayaking, including basic navigation, trip planning, wet exits and deepwater rescue basics. if you are thinking of getting into sea kayaking, or getting back into sea kayaking after years of absence, you can’t go wrong taking a thorough introductory class like this one.

Here’s a few pictures to enjoy, many thanks to Pentax, for making this awesome waterproof camera.

Getting ready to kayak. It’s important to have a good fit to the kayak!

There are dry ways to get in a kayak from a dock, and then there are wet ways…

Rafted up.

Paddlers practicing handling each others’ boats.

Rescued! Here’s Ginni, demonstrating rescue techniques with me as the water dummy.

Sunday was the third annual OOPTIKS symposium, and this year it was held in my backyard, at Skamokawa Vista Park. OOPTIKS is sort of a cross between SSTIKS, the South Sound Traditional Inuit Kayaking Symposium and OOPS, the Oregon Ocean Paddling Society, a Portland area kayaking club. OOPTIKS was started three years ago, as a way to get the instructors from SSTIKS together with the folks in OOPS who were interested in learning more about Greenland style paddling.

There were about 35 attendees and about 15 instructors this year, and the weather, which has persisted in being kind of cold and cloudy and rainy lately, broke open into a beautiful sunny day for this event. In the morning, there were a variety of strokes classes and then at lunch there was a short harpoon throwing demo. After lunch, things split up into games, more strokes classes, and a very heavy contingent of people wanting to learn Greenland style rolling techniques.

As usual, I had a hard time getting good pictures in the bright light, and then loading them to Flickr, where most of my pix are hosted, seems to bleach them out even more, but here’s a few of them anyway. Enjoy!