pocky

Alas, I'm doing a full-moon bike ride tonight leaving from Somerville instead -- much easier commute for me!

I'm going up to Gloucester tomorrow, though! Nobody wants to do tomorrow night (or day) *too*, do they?

What kind of light does one need on one's person? or boat? for a moonlight paddle?

Different people will do different things, but you certainly don't need full nautical lights in all the appropriate colors. In fact, Christopher recommends against the full nautical lights, since it can trick traffic into thinking you're a much bigger boat than you really are.

A bright headlamp or flashlight which you can turn on and point to indicate the bow and stern of your boat to show exactly what you are to any oncoming traffic, plus a not-too-bright continuous LED light or glow-stick that you can affix to your boat or your person so other kayakers can identify you and see where you are, is plenty.

I'll go! Friday or Saturday, either one, is probably fine for me.

I'll be there!

The current forecast (8:45 PM) is for winds NE at 5-10 kts, seas 2-4 ft. Wetsand predicts swells 2ft from the east at 6 sec period.

Current forecast (4:20am) is for thundershowers this morning. Rain date?

I'd be curious to know exactly how Adam did it, but here's how I'd do it (based on poking at the moldings on my mother's Mazda 3 a few years back): pop the moldings (AKA "rails") out, look for the mountpoints, measure twice, cut once.

The moldings are flexible and simply pop out with a bit of poking.

I'll join you from Rockport Harbor. Christopher suggested I look for you all at 12:30 around the mouth of the harbor.

If anyone else wants to join up for just this portion of the trip, I'll probably launch from the kayak shop (no parking) or paddle around from Back Beach. I'll be hanging around the rocks at the mouth of the harbor at 12:30 in a blue Elaho.

I immediately thought of your hot/cold idea too, but then realized that carbon fiber is a terrible conductor of heat, so it wouldn't make any difference.

Not necessarily -- the fact that it's a poor conductor doesn't matter so much if you get directly at the joint. I did something like this on the two "seller told us they were stuck and never going to come apart" paddles we bought -- one carbon fiber and one fiberglass -- and it worked like a charm on both. These actually had a button-hole ferrule system, so I poured a couple of gallons of *extremely* hot water directly on the joint and a bunch of ice water directly *into the ferrule hole* so that it filled the inside of the paddle, and then I twisted and pulled like mad, and it came out on the first try. I had no prior experience doing this with paddles, but plenty with stuck bicycle tubing, so I was pretty sure it would eventually work. This was of course after using penetrant/solvent oil as Ern suggests.

Even if you can't get inside the tube with the cold water, just pour the hot water directly over the joint and try to "shock" the seal. The theory behind this is that the outer material, which is directly in contact with the heat, will expand faster than the inner material, which is not. If the two materials are different, such as an ABS plastic on the inner ferrule surface and a carbon fiber laminate on the outer tube inside, this will work even better because the two materials will expand and contract at different rates even if they were heated evenly, making the shock more drastic.

I'll be there, hopefully with Liane too.

Will the hobby shop allow us 80 sq feet (2 boats) of storage space for 4 months straight?

Probably not, but it might be worth you calling the shop manager and detailing the exact requirements -- tell him you're the guy from HMS who the MIT alum was talking to him about earlier. Based on my conversation with him, it sounds like they still have a bad taste in their mouths from past boatbuilding projects that took up an inordinate amount of space and never got done.

It's definitely worth trying to put together a bigger group, though, and MIT clearly couldn't accommodate that.

Liane and I will definitely be there playing in the rocks with Pintail.

I called the shop, and he said it would be at the regular membership rates of $150 (alum), $75 (fac/staff/retiree), or $30 (student) per person for a semester-long membership, and each person involved would need to have an MIT ID card. This is probably pretty easy for you to get since you're at HMS (which does loads of cross-registration with MIT) and you could probably just call up the MIT ID office and ask to get a card.

For the boats to live there, they'd have to have specific agreed-upon-in-advance space takeup times during the dead of winter, because they don't have the space to store boats during the higher-demand parts of the year. They get lots of people bringing in *parts* of boats to work on, but not leaving whole boats there for extended periods of time. They *used* to let people keep boats in there all the time, but it got out-of-hand because the projects dragged on and on and were just taking up space in the shop... He said having boats there for, say, a month during the dead of winter, would probably be fine. Kayaks are small, though, and maybe they'd be more lenient once they realized how little space you'd actually take up.

I can't get to Gloucester during the week, but if you ever wanted to run a seminar in Boston, I could get the MIT Hobby Shop for a "special group project" for quite cheap. http://hobbyshop.mit.edu/tools

Here's some more!

http://kamalic.posterous.com/moonlight-paddle-7312010

Wow, you must be jetlagged big time. You're not too late -- it's happening SATURDAY night. Right now it's only Friday (or, technically, Saturday morning.) Come join us!

damn....just got back in town last night, and didn't get around to checking till too late.

Count me in!

Are folks planning to come to Forest River today? I'll be there.

Beth M and I will be there. I'll paddle across to Magazine Beach to meet her at 4, and if anyone else wants to come and you get there late, you should see us either right in front of you, or if you don't see us there, paddle under the BU bridge to the east side and you should see a group of about 5 kayakers there. I'll be in the red-over-white Looksha III.

I launch from the Boston University sailing pavilion boathouse under the Boston side of the BU Bridge every Tuesday and Thursday at 4pm and stay out till the boathouse closes at 7pm. If anyone wants to join me tomorrow, or any Tuesday or Thursday after that, there's usually plenty of free parking at Magazine Beach directly on the opposite (Cambridge) side of the bridge. Good directions are about 3/4 of the way down the page at http://www.nspn.org/put_ins.htm .

I would love to, but my wife's got the car on Wednesdays, so I'm limited to the Charles, where I can use BU's boats.

Now, if anyone's got an extra boat...

...Or if anyone wanted to come to the Charles... I'll start a separate thread for that.

Liz, June, Beth, and I set out from Pavillion Beach and saw the first racers coming through up close shortly after crossing the channel. First boats in were double crew shells and some singles, and then the paddleboarders. Then outriggers, and the first kayakers came through not too long after. We were sad to see that NewYorkOutrigger.org beat the pants off of BostonOutrigger.com...

We went from the Greasy Pole to Brace Cove and back with a detour at Star Island to go swimming.

Results are at http://www.blackburnchallenge.com/Blackbur...e2010Timing.xls

I found some excellent photos at Jay Albert's site at http://capeannimages.blogspot.com/2010/07/...-challenge.html , and I posted

some personal photos from our trip at http://www.nspn.org/forum/index.php?autoco...um&album=80 . I believe Liz mentioned that someone from NSPN was taking photos from shore with a good long tele lens -- can you post them too?

Pintail/Deb/anyone else, I'd join you at Lane's Cove at 10:30!

Or even better, I'd be up for Walden or White Pond any time. As far as closings go, we could always hit Walden first and if it's closed, head down the road to White. They're less than 10 minutes apart... Another possibility for practice is the lagoon next to the Esplanade on the Charles, launching from Magazine Beach or CRCK in Kendall Sq, if that's convenient for anyone else. (Bob, I agree the salty stuff is plenty nice this time of year, but the warm stuff is much closer to us Bostonians than Gloucester!)

-Dan

Deb, What about meeting at 1030 at the cove? I'll be there...

Looks like you ended up with great weather, David. Now I'm all frustrated that we decided to punt. Did anyone else show up?

I'm planning to go the Forest River session tonight, thunderstorms be damned.

I'll join you! Looks like the weather is going to be beautiful -- no thunderstorms.

Have you settled on an exact launch location?

Uggh, now I'm thinking I'll call it off because the weather channel predicts thundershowers starting at 5pm. Oh well, maybe next week!