Wow - seems there's not much paddling going on lately! Or perhaps everyone's out paddling, with no time to post photos!
After following the marine forecasts, Wet Elvis and I headed out last Sunday morning to check out the gales off Oak Bay, here in Victoria. The winds were quickly strengthening and would reach 37 knots sustained (68 km/h) during our outing, with gusts to 48 kts (89 km/h). These were the strongest sustained winds I've paddled in so far, but since it hadn't been blowing very long the swells were relatively small but steep.
As is usually the case when we head out in the wind, we later found that BC Ferries had cancelled a few sailings due to 'extreme weather'. :lol:
With plans to paddle towards Trial Island, we headed out of Oak Bay Marina and battled straight into the wind. After about 20 minutes our progress was very slow, although it was fun.
We turned around for some quick surfing before deciding to head east (instead of south-west), towards Willows Beach to see what the surf was like.
We didn't quite get that far. The winds had progressed to the point that I, with no ballast in the forward hatch (mistake #1!), found it impossible to turn the boat into the wind without capsizing. Edging the boat away from the wind to turn made it catch more wind and push me over, and not having paddled much in the 3 weeks previous (along with being a bit weak from battling a cold those same 3 weeks) meant that I didn't have the strength to turn entirely on sweep strokes. More practise is obviously required in strong winds!
Getting past most of the breakwater, I soon found myself getting blown into the rocks so my only choice was to turn the boat and try getting out backwards. It was slow and tiresome work; Elvis eventually came to my rescue and towed me out backwards (we have no dignity, evidently).
I've slapped together another little video and (despite fighting YouTube for hours last night) managed to get it up on YouTube. It seems to have been butchered even more than usual, so definition of the waves is just about zero. :evil: But at least it's finally up; check it out here:
Two Sailing Wait
As an aside, a few people have asked for higher-resolution versions of some of my kayaking videos. Rather than start burning DVD's and VCD's (which I'm happy to do!) I thought I'd start hosting higher-resolution versions of them. Each one is in a 640x480 resolution at 30 frames/second with stereo sound; quality is reasonably good but the files are large (200MB to 250MB each). Expect each one to take about an hour to download with a cable or ADSL connection. They're available for download now. No fancy web site - just click the name of the file you want, and select 'save to disk':
http://www.marksnet.net/Movies/
If anyone would prefer a DVD or VCD, that's easy too.
Edit: if you're lucky (like I have been) you might get a good connection and download at up to 300Kbps, enabling you to grab any of the high-res versions in 15-20 minutes. The quality difference is worth the wait, IMO.
