red alder ranch

Busy, busy, busy!

I keep meaning to write this post before it gets too stale, and I keep being too busy to get to it. But today, I seem to have found myself with a little bit of slack time.

Last week, we ran two leadership scenario days for our guides at Columbia River Kayaking. The task was given to two or three guides to plan and lead a kayaking day trip. We invite along an assortment of paddlers, and then as the day progresses, Ginni and I come up with scenarios of different kinds for the paddlers to put into play and for the guides to respond to. These can range from wandering away from the group, unzipping PFDs, capsizing or needing to be towed.

The first day was with Josh, Katie and James as the leaders, the second day was a harder day, with Matthew and Levi leading. They have a year or two of experience over the other guides so we gave them some harder tasks to deal with.

The first day we ran through an assortment of capsize drills, including this one out in the middle of the river. My job as the “client” was to get unstable, capsize and then be too seasick to stay in my kayak, requiring a long tow to sheltered water. Here’s Josh, emptying the water out of my kayak with a T-rescue.

The next leadership day was set up to be a little longer and harder. The night before, we loosened some of the hardware on the guides’ kayaks: the skeg control and a deck line fitting on Levi’s, and a foot peg track and seat back strap on Matthew’s. If this sounds underhanded (it sure seemed that way to Matthew!), I should point out that we created no scenario for our guides that has not already happened in real life at some point. Hardware does fail!

I also set up my kayak with a bunch of loose, float-able gear in my front hatch. More later!

We set out downriver to Brookfield with our little group, and spent the morning spreading out, not listening to our guides, unzipping our PFDs and generally making pests of ourselves. At one point, I capsized, let my kayak, paddle and PFD float away and when one of the other “clients” came over to help, I capsized him as well. Things were starting to get interesting!

At lunch, we debriefed some of the issues from the morning, and then Ginni pulled out an exercise I had not seen before. “OK guys, your paddle is starting to get hypothermic and has a minor head laceration. Pull out your kit and deal with it.” As guides, we need to be able to deal with almost any contingency that might come up on the water, and hypothermia is certainly common enough, as are minor injuries. This is a great exercise for seeing right away how well equipped the guide’s kit is. Here’s Levi’s paddle, dressed in warm clothes, with a thermos of hot tea, and a bandaid on the head injury. Nicely done!

After lunch, the plan was to cross the river just upstream from Jim Crow Point. At this point in the day, the wind and tide had combined to create some very choppy and confused water near the point. I set out with my front hatch cover loose, got ahead of the group and promptly capsized in the rough water. I pulled all the loose gear out of the hatch and spread it around and flooded the front compartment before anyone caught up to me. Now things were really exciting! My kayak was half sunken, with gear floating everywhere in the rough water. Another paddler had taken off straight across the river, and when Levi went to deal with that, he found that his skeg control didn’t work. Whoops!

Matthew took on the task of rescuing me, which takes more time and effort when one hatch has been flooded. Levi gathered everyone up again and retreated back behind the point, while Matthew towed me and my partially flooded boat back to safety.

Plans were changed now and we headed back upriver to look for a better place to cross, as the wind, which was supposed to be light, instead continued to build, setting up wind waves and whitecaps over the whole river.

We ended up landing on Fitzpatrick Island for a rest and regroup session. There were still two miles to go to get back to Skamokawa, and some people were tired and others were not comfortable in the waves. We ended up portaging across the island to launch on a more hospitable beach. In the middle of the portage, Matthew suddenly stopped and set his boat down for a closer look. It seems that his foot peg track had fallen out! That certainly could have happened in a worse place…

We finally reached Skamokawa, remarkably close to the time that our guides had been aiming for, but not before a few more bothersome “scenarios” popped up.

I love doing these leadership scenario training days. Of course, I have a lot of fun capsizing and causing trouble for the guides, but I also get a lot out of watching how things develop and learning different ways of dealing with trouble. Thanks to the guides for enduring it and thanks especially to the folks who came along as “clients”. We couldn’t have done it without you!

I have been attending the South Sound Traditional Inuit Kayak Symposium since 2005. I was introduced to the Greenland paddle at the West Coast Sea Kayak Symposium in Port Townsend, WA in September of 2004, and when I got home from there, I went online and found plans for making one. It’s been a downhill slide into Greenland style kayaking ever since.

That first paddle I made lasted about a year, until I learned to roll and broke it while working the bugs out of my reverse sweep roll. I’ve made four paddles since then, and have three more partly finished ones hanging around the shop. I’ve built two skin-on-frame kayaks, one a replica from drawings in Harvey Golden’s fantastic book.

But the highlight of the year for Greenland kayaking fun is SSTIKS, held every June at Twanoh State Park on the Hood Canal near Belfair, WA. About 100 people plus organizers and instructors gather together for a weekend of classes, racing, rolling demonstrations, harpoon throwing, kids kayaking games, evening presentations and food.

I have been helping with the kid’s program for the last two years, and this year I was in charge of the kid’s program for the first time. This year was the biggest kids group ever; at one point, we had 14 kids on the water at once, from 5 year olds all the way up to teenagers. The kid’s program ends with a bang on Sunday, with the kids dividing into teams and building improvised craft from a pile of materials we set them up with, then racing their creations out around a buoy and back again. Next year, we are thinking about doing a race like this with the grownups too, since the grownups are often envious of how much fun the kids are having…

I took a lot of pictures at SSTIKS, and you can see more of them at my Flickr pages here.

The calendar says that it’s June 6th, but when I look outside, I see March, or maybe early April. Last night it rained bucketloads, and when I got up this morning, I had all kinds of new drips and leaks around the woodstove chimney. The other thing this means is that my open skiff, tied up at the dock in Skamokawa, would need to be pumped out.

When I went down to the dock, the skiff was more full of water than I had ever seen it, so I switched on the batteries, which should start the bilge pump. But today, nothing. So I went and got a bucket and started bailing out. Part way through, I realized that someone had been in my boat. The stern line was untied, and my flare box had been moved and opened. Further inspection revealed that a bunch of circuit breakers had been flipped on or off, which is why the bilge pump hadn’t come on. Someone had tried to steal my boat! The only thing that stopped them was that I had padlocked and chained it to the dock, something that I had sometimes thought was overkill for such a quiet rural area.

This is the second time in a week I have found evidence that someone has either ripped me off or tried to. About a week ago, on one of my walks up to the back of the land, I found that someone had come and stolen all of my no trespassing signs. Not just torn them down, as the slob hunters will sometimes do, but stolen them outright, leaving no trace. I also found that someone had stolen the transmission, radiator and hood off of an old pickup truck that was parked on the log landing up in back. Metal thievery has been a growing problem out here. About a month ago, someone chopped down and stole about 1200 feet of the phone line that feeds Skamokawa, leaving the whole area with no phone service for a day. A couple of weeks later, thieves stole about 1000 feet of power line that supplied a pumping station nearby. An aluminum skiff with expensive engines hanging off the back is apparently also a tempting target.

So, when I realized how close I had come to losing the skiff, I decided it was time to pull it out of the water and put it back on the trailer at home again. This sure makes it less convenient to use on short notice, but if the would-be thieves had carried bolt cutters with them, I would have no skiff at all now. So I decided to go for a little spin before I hauled it out.

This has been a cold and rainy spring, and the water level in the river shows it. The beaches have been covered with flotsam and jetsam for a couple of weeks now, and the water is fast moving and high. This channel marker has a piece of wood jammed in it at a level that is almost two feet higher than the high tide was supposed to have been lately.

Normally on an incoming tide in this part of the river, the water flows upstream, backwards from normal river flow. Today, I was out in the middle of an incoming tide, yet the river was still flowing strongly out. I measured over 2 knots of current with the GPS. This pile jetty or wing dam is choked with logs and debris.

On the way home, I decided not to buck the wind chop and I took the quiet passage inside of Price Island, called Steamboat Slough. No matter how choppy it is on the main river, it is always flat and smooth in the slough.

The skiff is safely on the trailer at home now, where I can clean the algae off of the bottom, do some repairs and get the boat ready to go ocean salmon fishing when the weather gets nice. This year’s season has been sharply curtailed and moved around on the calendar, but if I’m lucky, I might be able to pick up a few fish before the season closes.