Phil Allen

As Sal said, thanks for starting this thread Leon. Peoples responses bring a smile to my face. best Phil

Careful Katherine, I can tell you from personal experience that term doesn't go over too well. ;-) best Phil

Took a paddle with ERBA for some b-day or another. Thought it was fun even though no one could control the boats. So took lessons with CRCK and discovered I liked going up/down and sideways with some degree of control. It's been a ten year plus ride since then, and taken me to some amazing places. Nothing quite like it. best Phil

To really answer the question Leon, I'd need to know the expectations on the "time till help arrives". He was solo, no distress signal was sent and I don't know how long it would be before anybody raised the alarm flags that he was missing. He probably had some sense of those details however. Given what I know of the story (solo, no distress call and unknown "missing" time), I'd swim for it with the PFD (easier resting when necessary). Clothes would be situationally dependent (tight T-shirt and shorts, probably keep; Tuxedo and dress shoes, lose them). best Phil

Very sad indeed. I had the pleasure of working with Mickey at CRCK. He was funny, loved working with students and an al around nice guy. Phil

Congratulations! All well deserved.

Just to be obvious, the CG gaskets are latex, but with a different shape and thickness. I find they work well for me untrimmed. Best Phil

upside down or backwards? There's a skill drill for backwards. best Phil

https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=882243388473137&set=vb.188300241200792&type=2&theater (let's hope the FB linking works) best Phil

my first thought is "why", but I guess an easy answer is "why not". Though I'm not going to be running across Maine's barnacle and black slime ridden granite if I can help it. best Phil

Rob has a good point about the consequences of overly tight gaskets. My suit came back from Kokatat with a new neck gasket and I trimmed it tight thinking I'd adjust as needed. Well never got around to trimming until after some big water training where I was consistently nauseous to the point of retching. Trimmed one more ring and haven't had this problem since. best Phil

Had a long discussion with Carl before trying it myself. That's where it will go if my repairs didn't work.

Recently I noticed a significant increase in the water in my rear hatch. Long story short I'd broken the deck at the bottom of the recess for the recessed deck fitting (RDF) at the stern most position on the boat. It was probably my fault as I'd replaced a lost screw with one with both a slightly longer shank and a different shape head. It was all my hardware store had and I was in a hurry before heading out for a week of kayak camping back in August. Since the nut was broken out of the deck, I had to use a dremel tool to be able to remove the screw and nut. So now I've got the capture nut and screw and a hole in the deck that I can't reach by hand. What to do? First approach was to use two-part epoxy putty (plumber's putty). I rubbed candle wax on the screw threads, ran the screw into the nut and pushed the putty around in the hole from the outside trying to seat everything in the appropriate places. It held the screw and nut in place, so I let it harden to see if this would be enough. The next day I gently move the screw and it seems appropriately stuck in place (I could back it out, thanks Osprey folks for the candle wax suggestion). I then stick my head and a flashlight into the rear hatch and can see that most of the capture nut is exposed and not covered in putty. Damn. Pieces are in the right place, but not sufficiently well anchored. So how to anchor things? First try was cover it with resin. Mixed up a bunch of polyester, filled a syringe with it, anchored the syringe on a 3/4" square piece of wood to get things back behind the skeg box and used another piece of wood to push on the syringe plunger. ~2 ounces of resin delivered. Result the next day; almost all the resin had run off the nut and cured along the deck farther aft. No good. So how to better anchor the nut? Back to plumbers putty. Found a small plastic cap several times bigger than the nut and filled it to excess with more putty. Used a small piece of putty to anchor the cap to another long piece of wood. Manuevered the putty filled cap back behind the skeg box to the rear RDF. Then I used what leverage I could to forcefully embed the anchored nut into the putty and force the putty to spread out along the deck. Hopefully it made a tight connection. So far this seems to have worked, though I haven't really put it through it's paces. I'm waiting for a pool session or a nice day to see how well this really worked. I'll bring a float bag in case it really didn't. Guess I'm posting this in case others have issues outside their reach and to see if others have any other ideas on how to fix it. best Phil

Insulated poncho liner? http://wiggys.com/moreinfo.cfm?Product_ID=252 best Phil

Another great TR. You guys are definitely more ambitious than I in this weather. About this time of year I give up on my cag and instead use an oversize puffy coat. XXL fits over my PFD and dry suit and keeps me toasty on beach. Best Phil

K. Beckwith for separating the rear of his boat from the rest at the rear bulkhead. Best Phil

Nice.

Hi Dan- If you're blue-skying ideas, I'd start with a TOPO map, and find a way to add near shore features and depths. Land features are often more useful to me in piloting and navigating than deepwater channels and the like. Orienting chart top to magnetic north is a nice feature. Flexibility in chart scale might be nice. For example, a complicated piece of coastline plotted out with grid features at 0.5NM (~1km) at 1:10K or 1:20K and also a larger scale of 1:50k for the entire area. And the last think i've got for now is a printing organization such that a larger chart/map is readily broken down to useful overlapping sub-maps with user defined two sided printing. best Phil

Hey Rob- For analysis sake, I modeled a perfect sine curve spread out over six hours. As I understand the "rules", the perfect curve doesn't have to be 6 hours. If that's the case (say a 4 hour slack to slack period), you'd just break the time into sixths. If the change in current speed has two peaks or isn't well modeled by a sine wave, everybody's projections fall apart. And I'm not sure why you say the modified 50/90 rule doesn't work? The traditional 0/50/90/100 rule predicting current flow at times 0, 1/3, 2/3 and 3/3 between slack and max current is derived from taking the sine of 0, 30, 60 and 90 degrees, and 0%, 50%, 87.5% and 100 % are the exact values. The modified time averaged (+/- 30 minutes) 50/90 method, gives average flows of 0, 50.2%, 86.9%, and 98.9% of max current. In contrast the average current flow calculated using the rule of third time intervals 0-1, 1-2 and 2-3 hours are actually 26.4%, 70.5% and 95.7% of max current. best Phil

Blue curve is the average of the black curve from 0-1 hour for point 1 (at 1 hour), 2 min to 1h2min for the next point, etc. best Phil

Ok, let's see if I can include the plot that raised my questions. What I did was plot out the a sine wave from 0-180 degrees (which is always positive) and just converted the axis from degrees to time assuming a 6 hour period from slack to slack. That's the black line in the plot. I also did a running average of the sine data in two different ways "the rule of thirds" way, where each point is the average of the 60 minutes of current (sine) data before it. That's the blue curve. I also averaged the sine data over a range from -30 minutes from the point to plus 30 minutes from the point, which is the red curve. As you can see, the +/- 30 minute average provides a much more similar to the instantaneous current curve (black) even though it represents an average of an hour of time. If you were to look at 1 hour, 2 hour and 3 hour time points in detail, it's exceptionally close to the 50, 90 100 "rule". So do I have a novel insight, or have I messed something up in my math? best Phil

Hey Rob- That was how I'd learned to use them as well, But to my question, the Rule of Thirds seems to do a worse job of estimating average current speed between 0 and 1 hour (for example), than 50/90 applied to the interval +/- 30 minutes of the hour.

Ok folks, I'm not the mathematician that John Huth or Leon are, but I did spend some time playing with current estimations this stormy weekend. There are two basic "rules' for estimating a current speed from knowing the max current, time of max current and time of slack; the rule of thirds and the 50/90 rule. As I remember them, the rule of thirds gives the hourly average current speed through out the cycle between slack, max current and back to slack. Specifically, 1/3 of the max speed in the first hour, 2/3'in the second, 3/3 in the 3rd and 4, 2/3 in 5 and 1/3 in the sixth. The 0, 50%, 90%, 100% (50/90 rule) describes the actual speed of the current at slack, 1 hour into the flow, 2 hours into the flow and at 3 hours into the flow. All this is assuming a "normal" six hour sine wave shaped curve. So why this post? I made the silly mistake of not taking things for face value and actually calculating the average speed of a 1 knot current (my example) over the cycle at various time intervals. If I do the average speed from 0-1, 1-2, 2-3... (the rule of thirds case), I actually get 25, 70 and 94% of max current. In contrast if I average from 30 min before to 30 min after, I basically get the 50/90 rule (0%, 50%, 90% and 97% for the average speed at -0.5-0.5, .5-1.5, 1.5-2.5, and 2.5-3.5 hours. While for the rule of thirds, 94% and 70% are really close to 3/3 and 2/3, 25% is pretty different than 1/3. I used max current speed as 1 NM/hour for the math, but some real life situations currents could be 6 NM/hour or greater. So getting it right can be kind of important. So my question is, which 'rule' do folks use, how do they use it and have I made any major mistakes or bad assumptions? best Phil

I (kinda) agree with Lisa, in that it looks very similar to the finish of a "taco" re-entry. The vertical body position with the stiff arms elevating the body enough to drop the butt into the boat is different though. Definitely worth exploring in a pool session. On a separate note Scott: you need to start posting trip reports about all your NZ paddling to give us cool places to add to the bucket list! best Phil

Hi Suz Good of you to help out and stick around till the CG showed. Did you consider offering the folks on the boat the radio, or going up on the boat to use the radio? Better line of sight from the extra height might have made communication with the CG better. Best Phil