MARCH 26th 2007 What an amazing first day of kayaking at Point Pelee!! The weather was outstanding
especially for March. This is the earliest I have had the boats out and it was a
balmy 85°F at East Beach in the lee of the beach line, however at the park gates on
the West Beach there was still literally tons of shoreline ice and it was COLD!
There was a STRONG southwest wind that really brought the temp down on the west
side but east in the lee was down right tropical.
Another first was the Beaver! Take a look at this photo. I thought someone had
taken a hatchet to the tree but looking closer it probably had to be a Beaver,
otherwise someone had a really sharp chisel and some free time. Also notice there
aren't too many shavings at the base either.
I also saw two small Racoons on a recon mission through the Catails probably
looking for eggs no doubt.
If you're going to be touring the Detroit River by air you might as well be in a B-17G Flying Fortress! Ever since I was a little kid I have been fascinated by WWII military aircraft and the B-17 was always one of my favorites. Of course I had a huge Revell scale model of the 17 hanging in my room, long since "downed" by firecrackers, but I never imagined that I would actually get to fly in one!
"Remember the 'Sick Stick' from Minority Report? Once again science catches science fiction... i always knew there had to be some kinda electromagnetic way to make people hurl on demand..."
"The "Funniest Joke In The World" is a Monty Python routine, from their first movie "And Now For Something Completely Different."
As your commenter said, the joke is so funny it kills -- and it has to be handled in pieces, so nobody will see the whole joke all at once. It's finally assembled on the battlefield and delivered to the enemy (Germans), who die laughing."
Seems we can "flush" BILLIONS of OUR tax dollars down the toilet on failed foreign policy that lines the pockets of the already rich but its OK to poison the Great Lakes. If just a fraction of OUR money that is being spent on this manufactured war that was designed to, AHEM, protect us, was spent on keeping the largest body of fresh water in the world clean, then we could say we are being protected.
The human body is 70% water
Roughly 33.4 million people in the Great Lakes Region in 1991
6 quadrillion gallons of fresh water; one-fifth of the world's fresh surface water
Spread evenly across the continental U.S., the Great Lakes would submerge the country under about 9.5 feet of water.
"But once again, short-term political and economic interests have over-ridden commonsense."
In 2004, a report compiled for the World Conservation Union (IUCN) and other environmental groups concluded that bottom-trawling was "...highly destructive to the biodiversity associated with seamounts and deep-sea coral ecosystems and... likely to pose significant risks to this biodiversity, including the risk of species extinction."
In the same year, 1,100 scientists put their names to a petition supporting the demand for a moratorium.
All this scientific evidence could not convince enough UN delegates that a moratorium was needed.
Quote from the BBC News article titled "Ban on 'brutal' fishing blocked"
Friday, 24 November 2006
Not as early as last year (April 06 2005) but it was an incredible day. Launched from the Point Pelee Board Walk marsh and kayaked to the point, then back to the marsh again. Not bad for the first paddle of the year - 11 miles.
I am soooo glad I got the new boots and Neoprene gloves this year! It was a South East wind coming off that cold water and man it did not feel like 70 degrees! I made pretty good time down to the point only stopping twice. But at the point the wind really picked up. I had a choice - take the short calm warm west beach route or take the long cool windy wavy east beach back ... So I took east beach baby! It was a wild ride back man! There were two different sets of waves - one set angled into the beach at 45 degrees and the other set pushed straight in parallel to the beach. The sets came in in threes - so I'd ride three of the parallel waves 45 degrees away from the beach then turn and catch the 45 degree waves back towards the beach. They were awesome waves too - quite big but not yet breaking. They kept getting bigger all the way back too!
Usually the wind lets up the further the sun goes down but not yesterday! I'm glad I chose to paddle the whole way back to the portage beach at the marsh cause if I landed I might not have been able to launch again! I had at least 4 gallons of water in the cockpit by the time I got back to the marsh beach! Thats like 33 pounds of water man! The water in my boat was so cold too that I had to put my gloves on before I could finish sponging it all out! I would NOT want to dump it in the lake in the near future! Especially more than 20 yards offshore!! Its wetsuit weather BIG TIME!
250 days til BUSH IS GONE!!
-415 til Kayaking resumed
-209 since Blue Kayak
36 days til Summer Begins
-1005 days til We Were Outta Here
224 days til Christmas
86 days til Thunder 'o' Michigan
