utenzi

Here's a picture from last Sunday when I was kayaking. One of the other paddlers snapped this picture of the group while we were resting near the shore, on a cookie break. That's me in the blue vest bobbing up and down in my new kayak. I didn't bother using my rudder last week but I'll probably give it a try next time. It'll be interesting to see how much of a difference it makes. Normally you don't need one in good weather but when the wind picks up it can really make a huge difference.

On Sunday I went paddling with a Meetup kayaking group. We went to Harris Lake which serves as a water reservoir for a nuclear plant . Here's the Wiki on the place: The Shearon Harris Nuclear Generating Station is a nuclear power plant with a single Westinghouse designed pressurized-water nuclear reactor operated by Progress Energy. Located in New Hill, North Carolina, in the United States, about 20 miles (30 km) southwest of Raleigh, it generates 900 MWe, has a 523 foot (160 m) natural draft cooling tower, and uses Harris Lake for cooling. The reactor achieved criticality in January 1987 and began providing power commercially on May 2 of that year. I've got two pictures that juxtapose paddlers with the nuclear plant. For some reason the appearance of the large cooling tower in the back with the kayaks and paddlers in the foreground is appealing to me. Some might find alarm in that "scary" image of the cooling tower, billowing hot steam, or maybe in the smaller but p...

Just a few river scenes taken with my new waterproof camera. Yes, no more cases of digital camera suicide for me. The days of kayaking mishaps and hiking sweat causing cameras to die early deaths are behind me!

I was out on the Dan River today kayaking. Hot sun, danger of rain and thunderstorms, serious sweating---all in a days work. It did rain a bit on my drive to the outfitting company up in Stoneville, NC. Fortunately despite some threatening clouds, we saw nary a drop while on the river. Stoneville is pretty far to the north in NC, just 10-12 miles from Virginia, and about a 80 minute drive from my house. The first picture is the 13 of us at the boat launch site, just before we started down the river. It was a 3-hour paddle and we got under way (weigh?) around 10:30. The second picture is me. Staged and it looks like it too. One of the other paddlers, probably just to get some relief from my frenzy of photo taking, offered to take some pictures of me with my camera. She did give it back. Eventually. :-( We went a little slower than I would have liked---some of the folk let the river do most of the work---but I kept busy paddling all over taking pictures and being a bother. It was a lot...

That watermelon has been sitting out in the heat for 5 days now. Between the dehydration and the insects feeding on it, the watermelon is looking a wee bit worse for wear. I took this picture around 8am this morning, before going into work. It was already 85f out and I gave my tomato plants some water since I didn't want them to end up looking like this watermelon. We're supposed to get some afternoon rainstorms for the next few days but I'll believe it when I see it. It's been over a week since there's been any rain at my house and the grass in the lawn breaks when you step on it. I've signed up for a kayaking tour on the Dan River this Saturday. It's supposed to take around 3 hours so it'll be from 10am to 1pm, more or less. I hope it doesn't rain then!

Today was another cold and windy day. As a result, what should have been a 2 hour paddle turned into nearly a 3 hour ordeal. But I did have a nice break in the middle. I turned my boat into a large inlet and explored the various streams that fed into that inlet. The above picture was the shoulder of the shore at one of the streams. At first I didn't see it, but something seemed off so I looked back again...and saw the heron. It's hard to see the heron in that picture above, but the two pictures below, taken a few yards further around the bend so that the heron can be seen in profile (and zoomed in considerably), make the heron a lot easier to see. In case you can't see the heron in the first picture, it's to the left side of center and right next to a pine on the shoreline and exactly the same height. When I was paddling, I passed no more than 6 feet from the bird. I'm amazed that it didn't take to flight. By the way, it was really cold out and so windy that I t...

I'm tired. And no, not the kind of "tired" that you see below. Those tires are there to protect sailboats from wave action at a marina, a few miles from my parent's house. I'm tired because I paddled my fishing kayak against the wind up to the sailboat marina. The fishing kayak isn't as easy to move through the water as the blue kayak and that wind was a killer. All that "wet" on me was due to the wind. My face got the spray from the paddle ends as I lifted them out of the water, my legs got the dripping water from the paddle, and my hips got the occasional wave that was higher than the sides of the kayak. And since the water wasn't much warmer than the 38 degree air, it made for a less than entertaining paddle. But that was this morning. Since then I've been laid out on the couch reading. Now I'm going to tackle a minor plumbing problem to help stay awake. Now that I've finally gotten warm, I'm getting sleepy.

I shifted location during the wee hours of the morning. Now I'm at my parent's house in South Carolina. Xmas, and all that. I arrived here just before 7am and since there was some fog rolling off of the lake I took a little paddle out there to take some pictures. My parents thought I was crazy because they avoid the water when it's below freezing---but that's when you get the best pictures. Some people have their priorities all out of whack. Now that I've warmed up a little it's time to go do some errands and hit a used book store. You never know what you might find.

I wandered over to my parent's place in SC this morning. I left home at 3:03am and arrived at my destination in SC at 6:49am. Even at that early hour it was quite apparent that today was going to have heavy traffic. I'm very glad I didn't wait until "normal hours" to make the 4 hour drive. It could have easily become a 5 or even 6 hour drive! How do you like that picture? There's an island on one of my paddling routes that I usually have to go around but today I was able to go right over it. Neat. Instead of the low lake levels I've gotten used to, all the rain the east coast has been experiencing have created unusually high levels of water. Lake Hartwell, a year ago, had plenty of areas that were completely dry . Now, instead of being 22.5 feet below full pool, the lake is 18 inches over full pool. The Army Corps of Engineers simply have no where to put all the water since the lakes downstream are full too. Usually December is pretty dry so eventually th...

This storm system is certainly covering a lot of the Eastern part of the country. It's certainly not making kayaking any fun. But at least there's still some pretty things to look at despite the gloomy gray skies. And rain. :-(

The weather is rainy and cold. Not the best time to be on the lake in a kayak. But not everyone was bothered by the weather...

I got another early start this morning and decided to try to get more pictures of the beaver in that tunnel. This first picture is of my kayak on the dock as I walked down to the lake to get under way. It was still a little dark but the sun was almost up. This next picture is of two beaver in that tunnel I mentioned yesterday. I was about 20 feet in, maybe 3/4 of the way, and the two beaver were warning me to stay back. I suspect their home was just on the other side of the tunnel. It was too dark to see the critters clearly and even with the flash only their eyes were lit up. It was a little spooky 'cause they would slap their tails in warning--which is very loud in a small concrete tunnel--and each time it was a complete surprise since I had no visual cues that the noise was about to occur. On the way back to my parents' house I met up with this Blue Heron. He seemed to be guarding a boathouse. As sentries go, he seemed quite serious. Maybe he was just scouting out the best f...

This morning I got started before dawn and reached this cove just after the sun had risen. I posted about this place last March but back then the water level of the lake was about 15 feet lower. Instead of the pretty expanse of water pictured below, instead it was a stream of water flowing between high banks. In any case, at the end of that body of water seen above, you can just barely see a concrete structure. That turns out to be a bridge with two tunnels---seen below---that allow water from the uphill side of the road to flow down into the lake. And apparently it also allows a colony of beavers to live on one side of the road and forage for food in the lake. I tried to go through the tunnel in my kayak but I only got about 3/4 of the way through before my rudder grounded and I had to push myself back out backwards. Kinda got my claustrophobia thing going a little. Funny now, not so much then! The tunnel started seeming a whole lot narrower when I couldn't get the kayak to mov...

I got an early start on the day due to Julie's help. Let's just say that not everyone sleeps silently... And as a result I got to see the sun rise over the trees while kayaking up Lake Hartwell. I had to turn around to get this shot since the sun was rising behind me. The weather was quite fickle though. While it dawned bright and clear, within 20 or 30 minutes it really clouded up quite a bit. In the picture below, taken around an hour later in a sailboat marina, the sky looked stormy and I was sure that it'd be pouring most of the way home. That rain never materialized but the sky stayed overcast and stormy looking until around 11am. My glasses kept fogging up due to the high humidity outside and the amount of heat I was giving off. There's nothing like paddling in high 80s temps when there's no wind to speak of to make you really sweaty and hot. It was a really nice day to take pictures but I sure was wishing for some wind...

Julie and I are on our first day of vacation down south. Don't let the hat fool you, we're not vacationing in Mexico---we're only a little ways south. And no, we're not at that kitschy place on the SC/NC border either. We are at my parent's place in South Carolina. For 4 days of sun, fun, and lots of heat. It's going to be in the low to mid-90s every damn day. *whew* I'm going to try to get out in the kayak every day but it's not going to be easy. And Julie insists on going with me. (ok, not so much) Julie is more likely going to be pursuing dead folk. A lot of her family is buried in this county. As far as we know, the interring was done in a timely fashion and Julie wasn't directly involved. But I'm keeping my eyes open. Practically all night long, in fact, ever since she told me. When almost all a person's relatives are dead--you get a little suspicious! And this is me coming back to the dock after a short paddle. I went out at 1pm and...

I arrived at my parent's house in SC at 7:45am and an hour later I was on the lake in a kayak. I saw these sailboats gathering at one end of the lake and paddled over to see what was going on. I never did figure it out but it seemed to involved a few dozen sailboats going around a couple of powerboats. And a very loud annoying buzzer that would go off every few minutes. I was quite happy to go to quieter waters after taking a few pictures.

These aren't really pictures of a sunset but at least it was late in the day. I metered off of the sun, low on the horizon, to give the pictures a "sunset appearance." I was getting hungry and didn't want to stay out on the water for another 40 minutes just to get "genuine" sunset pictures.

Today was my first day of vacation. Hooray! And you can see what I was doing on my first day of vacation. Installing replacement boards in my parent's deck. And who would believe that we'd have temps in the low 80s this early in March?! Let me tell you, I have a lot of concerns about construction workers. Are they nuts?! They do this stuff in the stifling heat of summer--and not for just a few hours. They do it all day long. Yikes. I was tired of the task within the first 30 minutes. But unfortunately it took a little over 3 hours. In case you're curious, the last 2 plus hours weren't so fun. These boards really needed replacing. About one in four screws didn't even come out. I had to pry the board out due to the screws breaking off while I was trying to unscrew them. The damn things were so rusted that they'd just break apart. Then once the board was off, I'd have to go back with a pair of vice-grips and unscrew the bottom fraction of the screw. See that n...

Most of the day my father, brother, and I were busy doing home maintenance tasks that required more than one set of hands so by early evening I was more than ready to hit the lake in my kayak. A couple of miles from my parent's house I found this stream. I tried calling Julie while I was there but to no avail. It was a windy day and by the time I had found this isolated bit of calm water I was quite willing to rest a bit. But after a few minutes of looking around I decided to continue on into the narrow section of the stream to see how far up I could go before it got too shallow. Normally in a kayak you don't need much water beneath you, but this kayak is built for someone 185 pounds of less---and I haven't seen that weight in a number of years. With my 215 pounds aboard, this kayak wallows like a sick hippo. I like the color though. Carolina blue, y'know? Anyway, the kayak also has a rudder so that gives it even less draft. But I continued up the stream 'til I got ...

I arrived at my parent's place in SC at 6:50am this morning after a pleasant and uneventful 4 hour drive from my house in NC. After a bit of reading while I was waiting for everyone to wake up, I talked to Mom and Dad a bit then hit the lake for some paddling. I took this picture about a mile from their house. My arms were kinda lethargic, no idea why, so I didn't go that far but still managed to stay out for 2 hours. No interesting pictures. The sun was too bright and washed the texture out of the landscape. I like taking pictures on gray overcast days a lot more. Everything looks more "artistic" when the light is subtle. At least that's what I'm telling myself. Now it's time to do some errands with my dad to earn my keep.