Is Sea Kayaker mag relevant any more?

When I started paddling about 5 or 6 years ago I would pick up a copy of Sea Kayaker magazine every time it came out, or nearly every time, and read it cover to cover. Cover. To. Cover. A couple weeks ago I picked up a copy of Sea Kayaker magazine. It was my first in a year and a half, maybe two years. I don't read SK mag anymore, but a friend of mine suggested I peek at this issue because it was pretty offensive (my word. I forget what he said exactly but he meant offensive.).

I can't tell you exatly what caused me to stop reading SK mag. I suppose that, as with any longish term relationship, it's never one thing. Rather is was sort of a growing loss of respect. A disinterest in the others point of view. I remember, when I was shopping for a boat, I started to go back though my several back issues reading reviews and concluded they were all the same. All boats were equally good, varying only in degrees of initial stability, from excellent to not so good, or whatever same-every-time words the 3 reviewers used. I recall starting to become less and less enthralled by the nearly form-pace-tone identical travelogues. Not that they were bad, more like "dude we've had this conversation a whole bunch of times before.". Just...worn. Ya know?

I do remember the thing that finally caused me to stop buying SK though. It was a technique article about some rescue that involved climbing on the front deck of a boat. It talked about conditions, like you could actually pull this thing off when it really mattered. There were pictures, of course. And one of these pictures shows some kid grabbing an upside down boat, and the next picture shows him lifting the bow of the upside down boat so he can empty it!

Now I'm not (yet) an expert on rescues. But I knew wrong when I saw it. I knew that nobody had done that rescue in what I would call real conditions. Nobody had gone to Yellow Bluff on an ebb, or Cattle Pass on a flood, and really tried it. Because picking up an upside down boat, in real conditions is hard. Climbing onto and balancing upright on a boat, especially in conditions, is hard. And I knew that because I'd tried it. A bunch. And so I knew calling this an "appropriate for conditions" rescue was misleading. So that was it for me and SK mag.

Anyway, like I said, this friend of mine calls and says to check out the latest issue of SK mag because it's offensive (again, my word). So I head out to pick up a copy 'cause, this friend of mine and I, we're pretty similar in our principles so I usually listen to what he's telling me. I mean, not that he isn't often wrong and needs correction or anything but, in principle, pretty similar. And I cracked open this issue of SK mag, flip the pages, same mag, nothings changed, so to business and head right for the editors column called foredeck. Which directs me directly (heh) to the letters section. And it was, as advertised, offensive (my word).

In a nutshell some knucklehead went out in conditions he was, at least in equipment and mentality, entirely unprepared for. No radio, no food, in a fog that prevented him from seeing a break he capsized in. Just really stupid, patzer issues that my regular coach would beat me with a stick for ignoring. But that, evidently, was a topic for an earlier issue. In this, the offensive (my word), issue it's letters about the column describing aforementioned knuckleheads stupidity. One guy calls knucklehead "arrogant" and "egotistical". And, to be honest, I'm with my unknown 'bro here.

In response to this, I think, totally justified name calling SK mag publishes what I'd say are letters from the least skillful apologists I've ever read. First up some guy starts off thanking my new 'bro for his insight, then says he wants to offer a feeble defense of knucklehead. Feeble indeed. He talks about "the history of the human race". He tries to draw parallels to surgeons and astronauts. He talks about "adventurous risk takers", mentions "we need them", and says that if their attitudes grate on us we should "look to ourselves, our inadequacies". I'm pretty sure surgeons don't go into surgery without knowing what the status of the patient is. Really, do you suppose the surgeon is in the OR apologizing because he decided he didn't need his scalpel that day and so didn't bring it? And the astronaut thing? Those guys don't forget stuff or decide that, "well hell, space isn't looking too gnarly to me today, I'm gonna head out without my radio". And talking about my limitations? First, look up ad hominem. Second, I'm gonna work as hard as I need to so nobody has to put their lives at risk to come get me. This isn't about my limitations, it's about some knucklehead selfishly taking more than he's entitled to because he lacks an imagination and has undeserved feelings of superiority.

(I am, if you can't tell, seriously disgusted with this horrible excuse for meaningful elucidation of an issue).

We're then treated to a letter from knucklehead saying (my interpretation), "well shucks, I promised my wife I'd pick her up, and it wasn't that bad for a couple days before so I just, you know, figured it'd be ok. But I hope you learn from my mistake". I'm not gonna beat knucklehead up here. He at least wrote this whole thing up, which I think shows some real serious integrity. I'm gonna stick with calling him knucklehead here though since, when I make mistakes like this that's what I call myself (but I work really hard to not make his kind of excuses).

Right, so I'm red faced at this point but turn back to where this ridiculousness started, the editors column, foredeck. I take a breath, pour a glass of wine, and start reading. And I'm told by the editor of SK mag that "It's safe to say that Michael Powers (the knucklehead ed.) is an expert kayaker.". Expert kayaker, says the editor of SK magazine. Lemme think...hmm...nope, don't think so. I'm gonna have to stick with knucklehead.

I didn't get much further. Essentially SK gave knucklehead the chance to take the high road, which he sort of did, and then tells us explicitly that he's an expert and implicitly, by publishing the he's-like-an-atronaut letter, that if we don't chalk this up to boys being boys it's due to some innate inadequacies of our own, and, again implicitly by publishing knuckleheads response, that this error is understandable because he promised his wife he'd pick her up.

That's just spectacular. God forbid I ever have to call the Coast Guard for a rescue, but if I do SK mag has well prepared me. I can just say, "sorry you had to jump out of the helo from way up there, swim to me in the 50 degree water and otherwise risk injury and death on my behalf. But I'm totally late to pick up my wife so I had to chance it and, besides, it's not that I was arrogant it's that you have inadequancies. Now take me home.". Hell yeah! Thanks SK mag!

So that's it. My friend was right I think, it was offensive (my word). SK mag has taken the editorial position that an "expert" kayaker is one who hits the Oregon coast with no food or radio and in fog. Their position is that if I feel this was caused by arrogance then I'm really not accepting my own inadequacies and should be grateful people make stupid, dangerous mistakes so I might learn a lesson that I don't need to learn in this way. And that if I have a prior engagement then it's ok to take terrible risks so as not to be late. That last might perhaps apply only to family though. If you're late for, say, a job interview and it's foggy and you forgot your most basic kit, best to stay on the beach. Maybe. I dunno, you'd have to ask SK mag.

These are not my perspectives. I define an expert differently. I think arrogance is am entirely reasonable conclusion to arrive at when doing a root cause analysis. And I'm sitting here hard pressed to think of any type of engagement that would have me say it's ok to put in without the proper gear just so I'm not late. I'm pretty sure, at the least hopeful, that my wife would rather have me late than dead. Nope, SK mag is really not at all relevant to who I hope I am and strive to be as a paddler.

But that's just me.

Paddling Science: Tale of the Tape

I've been thinking about the contents of my repair kit recently and that's perhaps a sad commentary on my life. In any case, one of the things that should probably be in a repair kit, says I, is some sort of tape. I happen to have a bit of Denso tape in my kit, which is really good for fixing things like a hole in a boat. But Denso is pretty expensive and can be terribly messy to work with. You really wouldn't want to use it for, say, well, anything but patching holes in boats probably. Honestly, it's a helluva mess to work with. So when someone in my club announced a surf zone play day (SZPD. I love acronyms) I thought, "Sweet, this is a great time to test some tapes. And to surf a bit.". An SZPD is, not surprisingly I hope, a day to play in the surf zone. This particular day turned out to be surprisingly beautiful. Blue skies, reasonably warm temperatures and gentle 2s and 3s that were only a little dumpy. I even put sunscreen on.

I'd chosen two tapes to test. Here they are:

I picked Duck tape because it comes in cool colors. There was hot pink, red, green, the orange you see here, and a bunch of others. If it worked I could get several rolls of different colors and make special tape designs on my boat or something. The other one, as you see, is Gorilla tape. I got that because the glue (Gorilla Glue) by the same manufacturer claims that it's 100% waterproof and for a couple of things I've used it for that's been true. I guess you could say I got the Duck because it was cool, and the Gorilla because it was pragmatic.

What with this tape testing being really scientific and all I didn't want to limit my tests to a single boat. So I enlisted one of the people who showed up for the SZPD and happened to have a plastic boat. Here are the test subjects:

The Romany there is mine and it's a fiberglass boat. The Necky is the volunteers and it's some sort of plastic. I decided I was going to simulate patching a small hole under the seat of each of the boats even though I wouldn't use the tape for that if I had some Denso with me. Here's the tape on the volunteer boat:

You can see there that the tape has been measured and cut with some precision because, as I said, this is a scientific endeavor. 

Here's the tape on my boat:

Note again please the extreme care with which the tape has been measured and cut. Also, it was agreed that in terms of Rippability(tm) the Duck tape was far easier to rip. That said the Gorilla tape was easy to rip, just not as easy as the Duck tape.

With the tape applied it was time to get on the water. Note that the tape was applied to dry boats. This being an SZPD the owner of the volunteer boat wanted to practice launching into waves. Here she goes:

Despite what you're seeing the waves actually did get a little bigger than what's in the picture here. I should also mention that I didn't get explicit permission to use the volunteers name, so I'm just going to keep calling her Volunteer. To protect her privacy and stuff.

Here our nameless Volunteer is after getting out:

For myself I carried my boat into the water and plopped in, so the tape on my boat didn't have the more real world treatment that Volunteer subjected her tape to.

In the event we were out for about 2.5 hours or so. I only got put on the beach once, meaning I only subjected the tape on my boat to one knuckle walk on the sandy beach. Volunteer swam a couple times and so ended up putting her tape through rather more harrowing circumstances due to trips to the beach to empty out her boat.

By way of demonstrating the really gentle conditions of the day, as well as my suck ass timing when it comes to taking action pictures, here's one of the participants breaking through a wave:

Suck ass timing.

I guess I should have mentioned this before, but the SZPD took place in Monterey, CA. Monterey is a pretty nice place I think. Here's a picture of our view from the water:

I've never been to the Mediterranean but I've seen pictures and I think they look like Monterey. Or vice versa. Whatever. It's awfully nice.

While I'm at it, take a look at this:

That's a rainbow and, at the end of the rainbow, are two coast guard boats. They were doing some sort of exercise. There were a heck of a lot of folks in life jackets on the white boat. The other boat kept zooming in, then out, then in. No idea what they were doing, but I've never taken a picture of a rainbow before so I'm glad this sort of came out.

Right, enough of that, there is science to be done here. Like I said we were out about 2.5 hours or so. Upon arrival back at our put in, here's the results:

As you can see,  the gentler treatment the tape received on my boat resulted in the Duck tape remaining affixed and the Gorilla tape actually looking pretty darn good. Meanwhile the Duck tape has fallen of of Volunteers boat and the Gorilla tape is barely hanging on.

So there you have it. What conclusions can be drawn from this experiment? Well I'm not a scientist so who the hell knows for sure, but I'm going to keep a little Gorilla tape in my repair kit. Many thanks to the unnamed volunteer for her assistance and to everyone else who was there for making it a nice day of science on the water.

Kayak Kamp with B&S

Ben Lawry runs this multi-day class he calls Kayak Kamp where, evidently, he travels to various places and, through the auspices of a local paddling shop, sets up Kamp. You can read about it here. One of the local joints near me, California Canoe and Kayak (Cal Kayak), organized Ben coming out my way and paired him with Sean Morley for the duration of the Kamp. Sean is a not bad, now local to me, paddler you might have heard of.

I'm always (always) on the hunt for what I consider to be good coaches. Last year at the Golden Gate Sea Kayak Symposium (jeez that's long. Just think GGSKS) I got to spend an hour or so with Ben. That's insufficient of course to decide if we (he and I) could work effectively together, but I really got some useful stuff out of that hour so I jumped at the chance to spend some quality time with Ben. Not like, you know, quality time. We didn't have dinner or anything...

The way this Kamp thing works is pretty interesting and, I suspect, pretty difficult to get right. First off there is no syllabus for the class. When you get there you're asked what 3 things you want to work on (e.g. navigation, forward stroke, rough water skills, etc) and that is written on a white board (NB: I believe it was 3. I might be wrong in the count, but it is a bounded list). This list ends up being what's taught in the class. Secondly, at least in this Kamp, the students are not interviewed to determine their skill level. There can be people who've paddled for years along side folks who've been paddling less than a year and struggle a bit with a T rescue in the calm. And there was. Finally, Ben is not a local. He's been to the San Francisco I don't know how many times, but he very clearly is not yet intimately familiar with the area. For that he relies on knowledge provided by the person from the local joint he works with which in this case was Sean, as I mentioned.

All of those combined challenges made me really curious as to how it was going to work out. I'm just a beginning coach but I have an inkling of how hard this stuff really is and this sounded damned difficult. But it all seemed to work out. I, at least, was satisfied. Of the, what, 9 or 10 things in the syllabus the only one not covered at all was navigation. But we did cover topics as wide ranging as surf landings to reverse sweeps in flat calm, to rolling. It was pretty impressive I thought.

I do like Bens style. He does a fair bit of this-then-thating. An example. First day and we're still not in our boats. He has everyone hold their paddle up in the air, blades high. Everyone close their eyes. Point at your blade. Open your eyes. Who got it wrong? So we don't need to look at our blades to know where we are, do we? I really liked that.

He also blurbs out some really intriguing stuff using this style. Everyone sit on the ground like you were in your kayak. Ok, have your partner try to knock you over by pushing on your shoulder. Ok, now put your knees together. Have your partner try to knock you over again. Which is more stable? Knees together right? So you're more stable with your knees together...any questions? . This kind of mind blowing unexpected stuff keeps coming for a little while at a pretty fast pace in bite size chunks. Blurbs as I say. But not blurbs in a bad way. I didn't really get a chance to experiment with most of this stuff, but it's interesting as hell.

Despite the fact that there is no before-you-get-there syllabus for the class, it's really obvious that Ben has one set up in his head once everyone get's their preferences on the white board. I've been in classes, sometimes with the very best of coaches, where they've pretty obviously run out of things to teach or don't quite know where to go from here. This didn't happen much at all here. I mean there were a few bumps. We went looking for an eddy line that wasn't there for example. But the recovery was really good I thought and continuity was well preserved.

I guess out of pure necessity Ben has to individualize quite a bit. I'm not really at the new paddler end of things any more but I very rarely found myself doing something I would consider myself reasonably skilled in. For example instead of doing T rescues in the calm me and Matt spent time with a scoop variation in which the victim is able to minimally assist. Ben checked in every now and again as one would expect and require. Really well done I thought. I did get a glimpse of the potential difficulties in this format of class though. At one point a portion of the class was identified as been more skilled than the others. They were taken aside and asked if they wanted to move into more challenging conditions. In the event the answer was no, but I could see how it would have been a touch less than optimal to have to have to split the class. Note that I'm talking from the coaches perspective here. I don't think the students would have suffered at all.

There was a bit of a mistake made during the class I thought. As I suggested there was a wide range of skills represented in the class and we ended up getting into conditions that were too uncomfortable for some folks. So instead of spending effort moving forward they were spending effort staying up right. Pretty classic issue. Ben had myself and a couple of others do some towing to help out. From a purely mercenary perspective it was a good thing since I got to do my first real life tow, so that was cool. The cause of the (I say) error was, I think, Sean being too optimistic about everyone's skill level and/or fitness and, I think, Ben perhaps not being conservative enough with respect to Sean's choice of venue at that moment. (Side note: I have a little more to say about this below).

Lawry is, I think, a pretty good coach which is really just a way for me to say I was able to learn from him and in my estimation others could as well. Umm...let me put it this way. I was talking to someone a little while ago and I said I can tell anyone how to do a forward stroke but, at this point, I can teach only a select few. One of my criteria for the good coach label, if you will, is that they don't need the "select few" qualification. So Lawry, I think, falls into that camp.

Hopefully they'll run this Kamp again next year. Or at least one on this coast. My impression was that there's a fair bit of depth that I haven't gotten into with Ben yet. You know, the subtleties of the sport that lead you towards elegantly effective simplicity on the water. So, yah,  I hope he runs a Kamp out here again. I'll go.

Circling back to the paragraph above about the mistake. I wrestled a bit with putting that in. Despite the fact that there are, maybe, 3 people who read this drivel I write, I still don't want say stuff that's hurtful or whatever. The internet never forgets. But I decided to include it and here's why. First I do conclude that the need to tow was caused by an error. Second I'm frankly sick to death of "best coach ever", "learned so much", "had a great time and learned a lot" type of comments (reviews if you prefer) when it comes to classes, symposiums, coaches, etc. There's another, third, reason also but it's a really big topic on which revelation of my perspectives will be offensive to one, insulting to another and redundant to the third of my 3 readers here. So that's for another post.

I'm where?

"Did you feel that? The wind changed direction to off shore.", I said to Katherine, my paddling partner that day.

Katherine, who is also the president of the kayak (or is it kayaking) club I'm in, had called for a short little coastal paddle. The plan, roughly, was to head out of Santa Cruz harbor, go right, and head down Capitola. It was a nice day, 4ft swell at like 8 seconds or something, winds like 5kts, patchy clouds, slight chance of rain. Just, you know, nice.

Now it turns out that I am, with very little doubt, an exceptionally well trained sea kayaker. This is not arrogance as there isn't much credit I can take for the circumstance. All I've done is seek out and train with the best coaches I could find and afford in terms of money and time. And while, in many regards, my on the water skills do not do justice to the quality of my coaches and training, when it comes to the non-motor skill bits of the sport I feel rather the opposite.

One "skill", if you can call it that, that I practice vigorously is dynamic risk assessment. Different coaches and instructors of mine have called it different things. Situational awareness. Environmental awareness. Attention to detail. Probably a few others. For various reasons I think dynamic risk assessment (DRA, because I'm really down with TLAs), is the most useful nomenclature and that's what I use. And DRA is something my regular coaches pretty much constantly talk and question about. Regardless of what one calls it though, all this is about is constantly evaluating the conditions in which you are immersed for changes that might demand a change in what you are doing or had planned to do. So if you're paddling along and hear thunder, maybe you'd want to think about getting off the water. For example.

So when I felt the wind coming from the shore I noticed. In fact the forecast had called for NW winds at 5 and, given our orientation, the wind was now NE. Still around 5 but, as I say, offshore. And offshore winds, as I'm sure you know or have been taught can be a really big deal. Not at 5, but if wind is offshore it's worth paying attention to regardless of speed. And it was this that caused me to make mention of it to Katherine. But I'm not at all sure what made me do what I did next.

I always (always) carry a compass in my PFD (life jacket, whatever) and I pulled it out and took a look. And I looked up and sez to Katherine, "Katherine, which way are we heading?" to which she replied, quickly and without much thought because she was watching some boardies, "West". Which is totally what I had thought because Capitola was directly behind us, it's on the Pacific coast so, sure, we were heading west. But she stopped watching the boardies when I said, "We're heading south." and looked at me for a second with a how-did-you-get-that-wrong look. So I paddled over and showed her my compass and damn. South.

On the one hand this was really good. The winds weren't NE and offshore, they were NW just like NOAA called for. On the other hand this was pretty bad. I didn't know where we were. I mean I knew where we were I the sense of, you know, there's Capitola right there for chrisakes. But in the sense of like mayday mayday, we're at such and so location I was pretty fucked. Had I been asked to swear on my life as to our location, I'd have sworn about one and a half miles west of Capitola. And since, at some level, mayday mayday is nauticalese for I-swear-on-someones-life you don't want to get what you're saying wrong very often.

So much then for my feeling good about my non-motor skills. Sure, I pay attention to the wind, the water, who's looking nervous, where the boomers are. All of that DRA stuff. But I couldn't have told you correctly where to find us if someones life had depended on it. Which, as I mentioned, it probably would have if I had had to tell someone at that moment. In my defense, this isn't a place I've paddled very often. Maybe once or twice. To my great chagrin though I didn't bring a chart.

It was an inexpensive lesson this time. I hope I learned something. I wonder what I'm gonna learn next and hope it's as inexpensive.

Too damn nice

I decided to paddle around Treasure Island and Yerba Buena Island this past weekend. I wasn't expecting serious conditions but I really wasn't expecting this:

This is just outside the Berkeley Marina at about 10AM and is also the place we have done several rough water rescue practices. It looks a little different then. Here's why:

This is directly west of where the first picture was taken. I just rotated about 90 degrees from the first picture and shot it. It's hard to see but that's the Golden Gate bridge there. Just past that is the Pacific Ocean, and just past that is Japan. So when a west wind is blowing there's a decent fetch and you get some nice sized wind waves.


Despite the overly calm conditions it was of course great to be on the water. In general the San Francisco bay is a pretty nice place to paddle. That said it's a populous place and with that comes a great deal of human impact. Like this:

See that cloud right there in the middle? It's not a cloud. It's something to do with refining or chemical operations there in Richmond. All of those white dots towards the right are tanks. There's a bunch of other tanks but they painted those brown and from this distance you can't actually see them, but they're there.

To my eyes at least not all human artifacts are terrible. Here's San Francisco from the north west corner of Treasure Island:

That sloping down bit on the left side is the actual north west tip of Treasure Island (TI). TI is actually an artificial island built in the 1930's for some reason or other. Umm...right, Wikipedia says 1939 for the Expo, whatever that is. At some point it became a navy base. I know that because I spent two weeks there waiting to go to Okinawa while I was in the navy.

Since we're doing tourist stuff here:

Almost exactly between that island on the left (it's Alcatraz by the way) and that ship there on the right, to the right of the right hand tower of the Golden Gate if you can see it, is the venue for the Golden Gate Sea Kayak Symposium.

This here is just south of the west side of the Bay bridge:

This is the side of the bridge that didn't fall down in the 1989 Loma Prieta earth quake. The water is a little jobblier here because of currents. This was about 11:16 which was max ebb that day. The current was only about 1.4 knots or so, but I'd stayed close to shore to take advantage of the little bit of eddy current that was available. Why fight?

Ok, this is the south east corner of Yerba Buena (YB) island:

YB is controlled mostly or entirely by the Coast Guard and they have a bouy repair facility there and that's what this picture is of. Or at least a part of it. There's not much to indicate scale but those bouys are seriously big. Maybe the life ring towards the right hand side of the dock is a decent indicator. Actually here:

That's a little better. You can see that sea gull there on top too.

Up above I talked about the part of the Bay bridge that didn't fall down in the earth quake. The other side, the east side, of the bridge did actually fall down. So they decided to rebuild it. It's only 20 years later so it's still not done, but it's close to done. Here's a picture from down below of a portion of the old bridge that was modified to accomodate construction of the new bridge:

It looks kinda odd for a highway doesn't it? That's the S curve portion of the Bay bridge. They put it in to make room for the new bridge. Here's what it looks like from above:

So one night a while ago someone was going the speed limit, which turned out to be too fast, and went zoom, right over the side. Poor guy died.

Not too many people get to see the new bridge construction up close like you can from a boat. It's pretty interesting to see. It's just so big. Gigantic really. But of all of it I think I enjoyed this part the best:

Can you see that there? It's a ladder. Do you see that next to it? It's a two story building. I can totally hear the conversation that resulted in that ladder being built.

Manager type: ...and then a ladder. From the ground to the supporting structure.


Engineer type: ...Ok. Why?


Manager type: And yellow. It has to be yellow...What do you mean why?


Engineer type: I mean why. Do you know how tall that ladder will be? At least a hundred feet.


Manager type: So?


Engineer type: But who's going to climb it? It's a hundred feet straight up! Would you climb it?


Manger type: Well, no. But we want a ladder. A yellow ladder. It'll look really cool and you never know. Maybe the electricity will go out or something and we'll need to climb up manually to work on the bridge.


Engineer type: <stunned pause> If the electricity is out there's going to be a lot of other reasons why work is going to stop besides just not having a ladder right?


Manager type: <considered reflection> Maybe. But it'll still look cool. It's gotta be yellow though ok?


Engineer type: <sigh> Yellow ladder, more than 100 feet tall. Sure. No problem.


Several weeks later:


Manager type: I gotta fever! A fever for more 100 foot yellow ladders!

Manager type: Look, I gotta have more yellow ladders!

Manager type: Yah! Now we're rockin!


I'm not really a sports fan but  I do enjoy football season. It seems like there's a lot less traffic on the bay when there's a game and that's great. The bay can get seriously busy some days and it's entirely not pleasant to be a lone paddler then. So I was happy to run across basically no traffic at all during my little trip. There were a couple of boats but no big deal and everyone was sticking to channels and seemed to be well behaved. A little further north though it looked pretty crazy:

All of those white things are sails. For sail boats probably. I'm guessing there was some sort of sailing event going on but who knows. In any case I was happy to be as far away from them as I was. Oh, and I'm not sure if you can make it out, but see that red blotch towards the right of the picture? About a third of the way in from the right edge, right on the water? That's Red Rock. It's an island and it's for sale. Seriously. For $20,000,000.00 you can own it. I don't think you can build anything on it though.


So that's it. A an uneventful trip on a warm, calm day on a part of the bay. There are worse ways of spending ones time.