Joseph Berkovitz

The video from my recent workshop on making charts with QGIS is now available here:

Building on last year's success, Skills Practice sessions will be held July through September 2021. These events offer NSPN members a regular opportunity to improve their fundamental paddling skills. The sessions are held exclusively in coastal saltwater locations, allowing us to practice in a range of real-world conditions from protected water to open ocean and offering a complementary environment to the flatwater Chebacco Lake sessions. Joe Berkovitz ( @Joseph Berkovitz) and Bob Levine ( @rylevine) are the organizers. All Skills Practice dates are booked on the NSPN calendar. Check the calendar as the dates may shift due to conditions. Each session is dedicated to specific kayaking skills, and includes one or more volunteers (“facilitators”) from the club who can help with practicing and developing them. There will be a variety of facilitators. The learning program and venue will be decided a few days before each event, so that we can make the most of predicted weather and conditions. Skill areas are likely to include: Edging and Turning Forward & Reverse Strokes Draw and Pry Strokes Bracing Rolling Open Water Wind and Waves Tidal Currents Surf Zone Landing/Launching Surfing Rock Gardening Boat Outfitting Pod Dynamics Rescues Towing Sessions typically split into pods, each with its own facilitator. The aim is to place paddlers with compatible goals together, and for groups to be small enough for everyone to get attention. The activities of each pod are steered by its members, so not all pods will do the same things in the same way. All attendees are encouraged to contribute their own practice ideas. Skills Practice is a dogma-free zone! Who can benefit from Skills Practice? Any NSPN member, from newbie to expert, can get something out of a Skills Practice session. Practice at the level that works best for you. If you know a topic well and want to help paddlers gain that knowledge, consider being a facilitator. Is this some kind of official NSPN course on “How To Paddle”? Nope, it’s not official, and it’s not even a set course. The focus is on picking up skills from each other, without prescribing any single way to paddle. What you get at a given session depends on who is there. Facilitators do work from an existing workbook of ideas, but they are free to adapt and use these as they see fit. Where and when does this happen? Sessions begin at 8:30 am sharp on Saturday or Sunday mornings at various locations in the North Shore area, and will usually end by 12-1 pm. Want to attend a session? We will post the registration link for each event on the Trips Forum on the preceding Thursday. (Last year we used the NSPN calendar but this led to many no-shows as people's plans changed, causing some events to appear full when they were not.) There are no level requirements: all members are welcome. The number of slots will be limited depending on the number of facilitators available for a given session. What do I need? You will need a closed-deck sea kayak suitable for coastal paddling, with sealed bulkheads or float bags, and grab lines along the perimeter. Dress for immersion and a spray skirt are required (and for a few sessions, a helmet). Bring lunch, snacks and fluids for yourself. Optionally, bring a tow line, radio, and spare paddles. (Don’t have something? Contact the organizers and we’ll try to scare something up for you.) Want to facilitate a session pod? We want you on board to share your knowledge! Please PM the organizers with your availability, contact information, sessions of interest, experience helping other paddlers improve, and gear you may be able to lend. How does facilitation work? Although demonstration and explanation are part of the picture, the main aim of Skills Practice is to give paddlers the experience of performing a skill. This often involves breaking it down into clear, approachable steps. Before each session, we’ll have some online exchange among facilitators to share our thoughts. Got another question? There's a conversation thread right here!

I love this idea but I think I’m going to just wait the extra week until I’m past the 2nd shot waiting period...

hi fellow paddlers, I just read a cool blog post on Kokatat’s website by Bay Area kayaker Laura Zulliger on her favorite sea kayaking books. Some were familiar to me, some not. Either way I thought folks here might appreciate her article: https://kokatat.com/blog/10-books-every-sea-kayaker-should-read

My understanding is that leaks from wear and tear were never covered under the warranty. The only thing they will replace for, that I know of, is delamination of the waterproofing material due to manufacturing issues, which happened to me and I know has happened to others.

I’m fine with anything you and the board like, as long as it links to the original document.

A google doc isn’t really a file that you download - it’s a link to a thing that keeps on evolving. If we turn it into a downloadable PDF that will “freeze” the content which is not desirable at this point. Perhaps there’s some appropriate place to post a link instead of a file... like one of the pages on the main website?

Hi all, Bob Levine and I, together with Margo Otway of BASK, have decided to publicly share the Sea Kayak Trip Planning Workbook that we used as the basis for our recent NSPN course that concluded yesterday. This way, everyone can benefit from it including those who didn't take the course, and we can receive valuable feedback from the community. The workbook is available here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1uY8i2L7OdBwiPnkAHmg8nguez-INWV6twn5kXLqKZ3k/edit?usp=sharing It runs to about 75 pages. To quickly summarize what this is all about, I'll reproduce the first few paragraphs here: Please feel free to share it with others in the paddling community freely. Note that we have placed some commonsense licensing restrictions on sharing, to keep it non-commercial, freely available and ensure that all contributors (including future ones) receive credit. Thanks to everyone in this club who made this possible, directly and indirectly! Best, Joe

I haven’t camped at any of these but I have heard and read that Grape feels like the wildest of the bunch as a camping experience.

Jane... how about a time for this event?

The link Jane gave at the top of the post does work for signing up. It's her link at the bottom (to an old calendar post by Rob) that is bad. I'll include Jane's working signup link here as a community benefit: https://forms.gle/UPVLwbnNRybcmhpy8

You—have a used Brunton deck compass languishing in a basement bin, or stuck in a boat you don't paddle much anymore. You know, the square black metal ones with a glass dome housing the dial, like so: I–have a kayak with a nice empty square mounting that was designed for just such a compass. My boat would be happy with a used one even if it's discolored or weathered, so long as it works. If it seems like your compass would like to make sweet, sweet magnetic music with my kayak, please contact me via private message and we can work something out. Joe

And... they’re back! Mostly. The NDBC never offered an explanation but gCaptain had this to say: A statement posted to the NDBC website said the agency’s primary processing servers were shut off due to a facilities issue on March 9. A spokesperson for the National Weather Service offered some additional information about what happened in an emailed statement: “On March 9, a burst pipe caused extensive flooding at NWS headquarters in Silver Spring, Maryland, which caused an outage at the data center housed in the building. NOAA’s ocean/marine buoy data are processed on servers located in the affected data center, causing the current buoy data outage. The building is currently being dried out by the building owner/manager, Foulger Pratt. Extensive coordination is taking place between NOAA and Foulger Pratt to develop a comprehensive plan for a full damage assessment, to inspect and restore systems in the building, and to ensure the building is fully repaired and safe for employees to return to their offices. This process will take time to complete. and we do not have an estimation at this time for when the marine buoy data will be available. Alternate solutions to restore buoy data flow are being worked.”

The course is now full.

The zoom link is only on the private thread to prevent zoom bombing.

NERACOOS is a regional marine data collection consortium that owns and operates many of the buoys we use regularly, although we often think of them as NOAA buoys because they share their data with NOAA. For example, NERACOOS "A" (Mass. Bay) is the same buoy as NOAA 44029, and so on for the various other buoys that have familiar names and locations. These buoys are still up and running because NERACOOS I guess is the primary data collection point for them, whereas the buoys owned/operated by NOAA we just can't get to. Here is another link to an online map that is actually operated by NERACOOS and has some nice graphs for the buoys that are working: https://mariners.neracoos.org/

A water leak in a data center has taken the entire US weather data buoy system offline. No word on when they will be back.