A lesson in humility

Every once in a while, I get one of those slap-in-the-face, undeniable "You're in over your head experiences". They're good in a way, because they mean that you're pushing yourself, but almost always demoralizing, sometimes humiliating and frequently dangerous. Today, after weeks of emails and preparation, I tried kiteboarding at Crissy Field.

As I've mentioned before, watching someone kite under the Golden Gate bridge was my inspiration for finally getting motivated to learn kiteboarding. The local that I had seen riding under the bridge five months earlier (Chris) had given me advice last week to wait until today, since conditions weren't optimal. One of the key considerations for kiting Crissy is the direction and speed that the water is moving under the bridge. During strong floods, it's difficult to get and stay upwind, and you get blown into the bay. During strong ebbs, it's easy to get upwind, but you could end up out to sea in the event of a breakdown. Today was a moderately strong ebb at 3 knots, and the wind conditions looked fine. Chris advised me to keep my kite moving right off the beach, since it was so light and that getting back in would definitely require swimming. After a lot of dumping my kite into the water I managed to body drag out past the sensor and stand up on my board. I was nervous, but elated to have made it to the wind. However, I noticed that the gusts were getting pretty strong, and soon I was way overpowered, barely touching the wavetops and going much faster than I wanted to be going. Furthermore, I wasn't making any upwind progress. Soon, the inevitable happened and I crashed into the water really hard. I went limp to avoid hurting my shoulder again, came back up and immediately noticed that my board (or rather, Chloe's board) was floating away. I body dragged as fast as I could, but couldn't keep up with it.

So there I was: in the middle of the San Francisco bay, bobbing around during a 3 knot ebb without a board. It's hard to describe how small you can feel out there, with supertankers steaming by, and how far away the shore looks. I estimate that I was around 1 mile offshore. I wasn't completely screwed because I still had my kite, and it was still in the air, so I started body dragging back to the shore. In order to not end up too far downwind, I spent most of my time dragging upwind, which meant a lot of spray in the face. After what seemed like a very long time, I finally ended up around 200 yards off shore. At this point I hit the wind line, and it started to get very hard to keep my kite in the air. I was now close enough to shore that I wasn't really that worried. Sure the current seemed to be taking me back out into the bay, but there were people everywhere: a mock-fishing boat full of tourists who were taking pictures of me and twenty or so people on the steps of the Saint Francis Yacht Club looking at me with a range of reactions from concern to pity to amusement.

I wrapped my lines up, let some air out of the kite and started swimming. I hadn't really had to swim in since my first time out at Alameda, and it felt like I was moving about a foot for every five minutes of kicking and swimming. After a long time, I finally made it in but my kite unfortunately got dragged over the rocks again. This time there were barnacles AND mussels, and I haven't gotten the courage up to check for damage yet. After pulling my soggy exhausted ass into a heap on the concrete causeway, I took a breather, wrapped my kite up, and began the walk of shame back to the lot. Chloe wasn't there so I gave her a call, and it turned out that she was watching some other poor bastard in a blue kite who was having problems. She took the loss of her kiteboard as well as could be expected, and smiled knowingly at my voicing my intention of taking a break from kiteboarding. Some guy must have overheard that I lost her board, because he said "You look like someone who lost a board!", to which we both exclaimed "Yeah!". It turned out that Chloe's board had gotten into the ebb and he had seen it floating out to Japan near the South Tower of the Golden Gate bridge. In an act that exemplifies the coolness of the kiteboarding community, he actually picked it up and brought it all the way back to the beach (it's a long way)! Chloe was overjoyed, and I was relieved. I'll be buying that guy some beers next week.

So there it is: my first experience at Crissy. The guy who pulled my board out of the water and Chris both say that I should just get back out there, but I'll have to give my sore shoulder a little time to rest first.

update: The kite had only a minor shred on the canopy, I found my valve, and I dropped off a cooler full of microbrews to Stefaan on monday.

Windows

A long time ago (15 years ago?) my parents had bought some lovely leaded glass windows to put up in the small loft that we had built for me to sleep in. After a long planning stage, I decided that the time was right for implementation. Chloe and I got right to work with our new Bosch cordless jigsaw to cut out the holes.



We attached the windows and hinges to 2x4s, then glued and drilled them into place, after a little cursing and cutting of the wrong side of the wood. By the end of the day, we had installed the windows, and they look lovely.

Bouldering via Google

After looking at some well known bouldering areas on google maps, I found two areas near the cabin which looked like they might have some boulders. It was a bit of a crap shoot, but they were in the Tahoe national Forest, so even if climbing was a bust, the scenery was sure to be impressive. After a few wrong turns down some very bad roads, which required some fancy driving and road clearing


We parked and hiked the rest of the way in. The road was littered with trees, small rocks and other things which would probably have demolished the subie if we had tried to go any further. We were soon rewarded with a cluster of large boulders, one of which had some spectacular technical problems on pristine granite features







After grating off our skin, we scoped out the rest of the boulders and headed to Lake Valley Reservoir, where I tried unsuccessfully to get my kite in the air. It was lulling to zero, and it got pretty frustrating waiting in the freezing cold water for the wind to come. I did discover that my beating at 3rd avenue had put a tear in the leading edge which will need to be repaired.

We drove back to the cabin, unpacked our things and began unlocking the cabin. Shortly afterwards, I heard a shriek and heard the patter of feet running over forest duff. Three bats had slid out of the window cover as Chloe opened it and fell to the ground.

They were motionless for about an hour (Actually, I was sure tat they were dead) before, one by one, they extended their disgusting rubbery wings,

took flight and circled the house before going off in search of a better hiding place and some bugs. Chloe, at first sight of the new airborne bat, ran into the cabin and shut me outside. As the second bat came to life I was left on the deck, looking in at my wife, peering wide eyed out of the glass doors, crouching down and ready to lock the door. In situations like this, I always seem to get sequestered on the same side of the door as the bat.

We had bought a table top hibachi for $3 at Raleys, which we used to grill corn and sausages

Races

We walked down to Crissy Field to watch the last kiteboarding race of the year (It's a series run by the Saint Francis Yacht Club). IT looks like a lot of fun, but we arrived too late to see the start. While we were watching, we saw four kayakers put in and overheard a guy behind us say that one of them was a famous kayaker named Greg Barton. The speed at which they made it out to the bridge was really impressive. I looked him up later and found this. That's a lot of Olympic medals!!

ouch!

I went kiteboarding today and unfortunately failed to realize that the tide was extremely high today. Actually, I noticed it at the launch, but the consequence of the hide tide -- namely that the so called "last chance beach" was underwater -- failed to make it into my brain. So anyway, I had kind of a hard time getting up wind, and then missed the landing and ended up way downwind looking for the beach. I eventually gave up, dropped the kite and got washed ashore along the barnacle covered rocks near Excite. I hope the kite bladder isn't exploded! I'm crossing my fingers that the Cabrinha quality assurance people had extra coffee the day they made my kite.

I had a long walk back up to the lot and along the way I saw that everyone had come in, except these two guys who were throwing HUGE tricks in the bay! It was remarkable not only because the tricks were pretty complicated, but also because no one could even ride in the dead wind, let alone jump. I watched them jump the patch of reeds, do handle passes, help eachother out (one of them tipped his kite way down so the other one could untangle a bridle -- all while both of them were riding). When the wind died even more, one of them would pull the others downed kite up into the air to re-launch it. The bottom line is that the kites were like extensions of their bodies; they had total control. It turned out that they were Cabrinha sponsored riders and are only 14 and 17 years old

Jon

Jon was in town and took us out to a wonderful meal at Acquerello.

treehouses

I've been thinking a little about how difficult it would be to build a tree house up in Alta, since there is obviously no shortage of trees up there. Some links:

construction
------------
http://www.thetreehouseguide.com/
http://walterreeves.com/how_to/article.phtml?cat=26&id=176
http://georgiafaces.caes.uga.edu/getstory.cfm?storyid=190
http://ropesandpoles.blogspot.com/2005/12/treehouse-step-by-step-main-page.html
http://www.thetreehouseguide.com/



cool examples
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http://www.palmlandtours.net/kerala/treehouse/treehouse.htm
http://cedarcreektreehouse.com/

the golden gate

kiteboarding third

I went for a little after work session today, and things were going very well until I looked around and noticed that I was one of only a handful of people left out on the water because the wind had died! Thankfully by really milking the kite I could get within 100 feet of shore, but I couldn't make the beach landing. There have been some near-accidents at third due to people flying or landing their kites over the path, so I flew my kite out over the water, dumped it and self rescued. What I didn't realize is that the mud is *extremely* deep and I was postholing up to my knees just to make any progress towards the beach. Amazingly my lines weren't a total rat's nest on shore


here are the google maps versions colored By speed and by distance

Alta

My parents and I went up to Alta this weekend (sensing a pattern?!), where we enjoyed the Nanao Rotenburo(it's not really a hot tub) and the cooling Sierra temperatures. Chloe and I went bouldering at Bliss on the western side of lake Tahoe, just above Emerald Bay. There were a lot of very fun boulder problems there, but it was a little hot, and the Tahoe scene on Labor day is a little hectic. The Truckee river was covered with an almost continuous flotilla of rafts... ugh.

We also went on a hike down to the Bear River to a rocky outcrop where my Friend Keith and I had jumped into a deep pool of water in high school and scared the hell out of my mom. It still looks like a pretty stout jump, but not quite as high as some of the jumps we did in France at Le Furon or at La Maglia near nice. Still... it gives you pause:



And now there's a big branch of poison oak to punish any second thoughts.

One things that had been puzzling me for a while is where the water came from which goes down a huge tube to the Dutch Flat powerhouse. I should back up and say that the area around Alta has a large network of hydroelectric power: there are storage bays for water, which divert water through huge tubes called penstocks and then through turbines which generate power, and out to "afterbays" and back into the river. Anyway, I had seen this one particular penstock emerge from the rock, but I couldn't really tell where it was coming from! It turns out that there is an extremely long tunnel (The Dutch Flat Tunnel) which connects the drum afterbay to the Dutch Flat Powerhouse. It looks to be at least 5 kilometers long on the map!

I cant find any information about it other than this account of a big section of the power generating systems failure in 1997 due to a whole lot of water.

Kiting

I had my first major-mishap-free session at third today, and actually remembered to switch on my GPS. I managed a few jumps and actually landed them, but I always get nervous of the bridge looming downwind, so I haven't been very adventurous. Breaking down on "the outside" would be pretty serious. The GPS data is downloaded in .gpx format with GPSBabel with this command:

gpsbabel -i garmin -t -f /dev/ttyS1 -o gpx -F waypoint.gpx

Then manually edited to put all the tracks into one master track (I also had to edit out a spurious point which put me *in* the driving range), then GPSvisualizer.

colored by distance

colored by speed


I made a Google maps interactive viewer page (highly recommended) too.

note that the GPS stopped working at some point -- probably when I crashed after an ill timed jump. I ended up on the small beach that can be seen southwest from the track in the google maps page.

I also grabbed a few webcam shots of myself
pumping my kite up
more pumping
looking around
in the channel
in the channel again
whoa!!!
about to land my kite
landing it
putting my kite down
Drying off
Checking out the poor guy self rescuing in the bay

The airplane game

A while ago, I mentioned a game I came up with, which involves taking pictures during a plane flight and then having your friends (and yourself) try to guess where exaclty they were taken. Unfortunately, there was a lot of cloud cover on my trip from OAK to San Diego, but I did grab some interesting ones which are shown below. I enhanced them all in iphoto. Click for an enlargement. The route was from Oakland to San Diego and they are in chronological order.

#0 (toughest one)


#1


#2


#3


#4


#5


#6


#7


#8

alta

I cleaned out the chimney today by climbing up onto the roof -- which is pitched just enough to be scary -- and using a special long handled wire brush. I managed not to fall of the roof and then installed a locking door knob after much cursing and drilling of holes in the wrong places. After a bath and calming down a bit we went for a walk down Drum Power House rd. to gather blackberries at Chloes secret spot. I was already pretty tired at this point so we had to turn around about halfway down to the bear river.

On the way to and from alta, we saw several decked out vans and buses on their way to Burning Man. There seemed to be a steady stream of these for the whole weekend, but on our drive back we saw all of the team trucks for the indy racing league. It was a fun contrast between the home painted vans with stacks of PVC tubing poking out of the backs with the streamlined impeccable graphics Toyota and Honda team trucks. Amazingly, there was no traffic coming back to the bay area this time!

snowshed bouldering

We got an early start from Berkeley today and headed up to the Snowshed at Donner for a little bouldering. The problems were fun, even if there weren't very many of them, but there was one beautiful and inspiring line which I threw myself at for an hour or so without too much success. With cooler temperatures and a little more power I might have a chance this fall!

We also put some finishing touches on the hot tub: specifically a lid for the heater and some hasps.







As it got dark, the bats came out and were swooping in near the deck to catch the bugs that were swarming us. I sat on the deck chair and managed to get a great picture of one of them, with the dark outlines of cedars in the background


after thirty more minutes of sitting in the dark with my finger over the shutter release, getting attacked by mosquitos, I managed to get one more bat shot:

air

After the usual out and back session at Alameda, I headed downwind to see how Chloe was doing. Along the way I noticed that the water was pretty flat, so I decided to take the plunge (literally!) and try to jump. We bought a beginners kiteboarding video called "Progression" which includes a long section on jumping, but I had been too focused on actually staying on my board to attempt it until now. However, watching the video allowed me to visualize all the steps, and I had been mulling it over for weeks. The first attempt went poorly: edge hard against the kite, steer the kite up hard... woooOOOOOP (sound of getting shot into the air)... SPLASH. IT was exhilarating, but a little painful. The second and third attempts were equally painful. Finally I managed to land one, and it was amazing. I repeated it several times, and soon I was way down the beach, looking at a long walk back to the launch.

no GPS track because I didn't press the "on" switch hard enough :(

A walk to Crissy

Some finishing touches

Chloes sister amy arrived on friday and we all went up to the cabin yesterday. We stopped at Hills Flat Lumber for our twice-a-weekend $100 Torx screw and various other parts fix. We also got a replacement for the dangerous and leaky 20 year old gas can that my parents had found. I'm no safety officer, but even I draw the line when you end up with only one third of your gas in the generator gas tank and the remaining third on the power cord and control panel of the generator. We all water sealed the existing structure, and most importantly the lower deck onto which water will spill.

While Chloe and Amy went off for a little hike (they found some really amazing tasting blackberries!) I put in some diagonal joists to support the decking around the corners of the tub. This is what the frame looked like when I got started:

Next, I cut redwood decking and attacking them until I ran out of nail and screws AGAIN. Here's the deck sans nails

I also made a pine lid for the tub as well as a pine door for the Chofu water heater. Thankfully, Chloe and Amy came back and offered to go back to Hills Flat to get some more lumber and screws. While they were away I cut the rest of the redwood for the deck and attached the final diagonal joist. When they got back, we nailed all of the decking, attached the pine lids, and water sealed everything. We also attached the pine siding. This is a shot showing the hinged lid


Today Chloe and I carried the last sheet of half inch plywood down to the cabin, measured and cut it and fired up the bath. While the water heated up, chloe attached hasps for the lids and I made a redwood railing.





I've been impatient to get the tub and platform done, so I've relied mostly on modern building techniques an materials, which has meant no Japanese style joints. All of the important joints have been Simpson Strong-Tie which have the added advantage of making leveling easy. However, I wanted to make at least one set of nice joints, and I decided that the railing was a good place for that. I didn't try anything too fancy

The only thing left now is to attach some more supporting crossbars, and make a cover for the water heater... but apart from that it's almost done! we all got a turn soaking in the tub before packing up for another four hour drive back to Mill Valley (We had dinner with Amys aunt and uncle). We were a little more careful about how much wood we put in this time, and closed the door at 95 degrees. It still ended up getting pretty hot, so next time we'll try closing at 90.

This is the almost finished deck: