The kayak arrived in boxes last Wednesday and I only had time at lunch to unbox the parts, stow them in their bags. My wife noticed them in the garage when she got home in the afternoon.
I got the kayak at a bargain price. Mark had sewn a new deck on a customer’s hull but the fellow found it unsatisfactory – had to do with the rubber bash-pads either side of the cockpit – he thought they leaked, over-applied Aqua-Seal to the seams. Looks awful. Mark, the manufacturer, hypothesized the rubber pads stiffen up and form concavities with deck fabric inboard their inner edges allowing some water to pool there and seep in through the deck seam. Since I’m not an ocean going paddler crossing several miles between mainland and island fairly often, the hullskin will probably suffice for my uses. And the keelstrips on that hull – keelstrips on top of keelstrips.
Again, regarding the bargain price – Mark assembled the frame from odd parts remaining in his workshop. So they don’t all match – I’ll post some photos when I get a chance to illustrate what I mean. A few Klepper parts mixed in. Some had been finished with Line-X versus varnished. I have a maroon seat. Yellow spray deck and a gray skirt to go with it. Klepper rudder modified slightly.
Because I have been working from home, when there’s a hole in my schedule, as long as my documentation’s caught up, I have some freedom relative to time use. Yesterday, in my spare time and during my lunch hour, I assembled the Mark I for the first time. I think I’ve got the rudder pedals further forward than is going to work well, and I’ll have to correct seat placement. Hopefully will get a couple of hours on the water today.
Lately, instead of Star Wars expanded universe novels, I’ve been reading the Galaxy’s Edge series. From the Star Wars universe I first read the work of one Karen Traviss – Republic Commandos series, a few others, a lot of thought put into the Mandalorian background, language, culture, history, planetary dispersion, etc. Good character development, not too preachy. A good friend of mine refers to her characters as “the Fett Brothers.”
A few weeks ago, I had a look at her blog and saw an entry about a novel she’d published in late 2019 entitled The Best of Us. I’ve reviewed it on Amazon. Like a Mitford novel with actual peril, guns, spies, spaceships, aliens, artificial intelligence – by “like Mitford” I mean not alarmingly fast paced with good depth of character development, a “richness” (although I don’t like using advertising copy words) to the novel’s “texture” (another one of those words) that is unusual for Science Fiction and is an element of Traviss’ work that sets it apart.
Since Ms. Traviss’ next installment has not been published yet, I’ve passed the time reading a lot of the other novels from the series. I’ve reviewed on Amazon Anspach and Cole’s “Madame Guillotine” – can’t figure out how to get the blog posting software to underline. Pretty good critique of contemporary political culture in the U.S. and Western countries, particularly. If I have any criticism of Anspach and Cole’s work, it is they tend to over-use elements of contemporary popular culture. For instance, the “Ready Player One” thing from their “Gods and Legionnaires” novel – second in the Savage Wars series. That said, whichever of them wrote the parts about Southern California in the 70s to the 80s got it right. I remember it from my own childhood and youth.
Christov_Tenn 