AUTHOR’S NOTE: This column is intended to be entertaining at the expense of truth and accuracy, but I sneak in some good information as well. It is up to the reader to distinguish between entertainment and reality.
Q: My question concerns what we should bring on a multi-day canoe camping trip. In the movie, “Deliverance”, I notice that Ronny Cox brought a guitar and Burt Reynolds brought a compound bow and broadhead-tipped arrows. I have never seen these items on your equipment list. Should I be looking for a more comprehensive list?
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Ronny Playing Guitar while
Canoeing Under a Bridge |
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Burt Bow Fishing
from A Canoe |
A: Yes, if you think these expensive items could be useful to you and you don’t mind getting them wet, then by all means you should expand your horizons beyond my poor minimalist list. Please keep in mind that I do not generally coordinate trips that require that kind of equipment (although you never know), so you could view my lists as fairly complete for relevant and necessary equipment to get you through the experience.
Q: What is a loom?
NOTE/HINT: Only one of these definitions is bogus
A1: It’s a type of bird in the snipe family, popularized in the movie, “On Golden Pond” which is about a canoe in Maine (that’s up by Canada), but was actually filmed on Squam Lake in New Hampshire. Katherine Hepburn mentioned in the movie that she liked the clattering sound the looms make from their shuttles.
A2: an amazing frame/machine/apparatus for interlacing at right angles two or more sets of threads or yarns to form a cloth, “the loom kept a steady beat as it consumed the threads from many spools”.
A3: the middle portion of a Greenland paddle, “the loom should be about shoulder-width, but could be longer if your kayak has a wide beam”.
A4: the dim reflection by cloud or haze of a light which is not directly visible, e.g. from a lighthouse over the horizon: “the loom of the land ahead”.
And then there are the verbs:
A5: a vague and often exaggerated first appearance of an object seen in darkness or fog, especially at sea, “the alligator suddenly loomed forebodingly in our path”.
A6: to take shape as an impending occurrence, “the problems that loom ahead”.
A7: to appear in an impressively great or exaggerated form, as when King George III in the play “Hamilton” reflects on George Washington’s stature when he hears of his intent to resign the Presidency, saying, “there’s nobody else in their country who looms quite as large”.
A8: to come into sight in enlarged or distorted and indistinct form often as a result of atmospheric conditions, “Storm clouds loomed on the horizon”.
Q: In the context of multi-day kayak camping, how long can you keep Kentucky Fried Chicken safe?
A: The short answer has to encompass a range as well as the pinning down your vague qualifier of “safe”:
Under ideal conditions, about 4 days
Under worst-case conditions, about 4 hours
So, under “typical” conditions, we can confidently assert a safety period of between 4 hours and 4 days.
There are many factors in the ideal condition:
- Already frozen (vs bought on the way)
- Transferred immediately from the freezer to a pre-frozen “Yeti®-grade” premium cooler with frozen 26 degree blue ice taking up all of the free space in the cooler
- A cold-weather winter trip under a cloudy sky with the cooler wrapped in Reflectix®
- Keeping the cooler completely sealed until the last day
Q: What is the meaning of the word “chine” as it relates to paddling?
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| Chine |
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Bodson Delicacy - Chine of Gar |
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Chine on a Kayak |
A1: Noun: The spine of an animal, often observed on gravel bars during Bruce Bodson trips.
A2: Verb: To cut through the backbone of (as in butchering), which often happens on the third day of a typical 6-hour Bruce Bodson trip (please see photo above from one of his trips).
A3: Noun: a change in angle in the cross section of a hull – this is an intentional design feature, not a result of one of the collisions one would experience on a typical Bruce Bodson “adventure”.
Q: In many of the places we paddle around Houston (the Brazos, Colorado, Champion Lake, Charlotte Lake, the San Bernard, etc.) the water is very brown. Why is it not blue or clear?
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| Brown Waters of the San Bernard |
The Texas rivers, bayous and lakes support a great deal of wildlife in the form of birds, fish, alligators and hogs, as well as domesticated cattle, goats, sheep, and the odd emu. All of these animals consume and process massive amounts of plant and animal material that is eventually recycled into the environment in the form of, how can I put this delicately, massive amounts of poop, for lack of a better word, which is often brown in color. This dissolves into the water and tints it.
Q: What words of wisdom from C. S. “Chuck” Lewis apply to the monthly Houston Canoe Club Newsletter in which this and other literary works of art are enshrined?
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| “Chuck” Lewis |
“A pleasure is not full grown until it is remembered.”
Q: Related to the question about how long you can keep Kentucky Fried Chicken safely, some of the ice pack specifications state that they freeze at 26°F or 28°F. Why do the ice packs not assume the temperature of the freezer (0°F)?
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| Second Law |
A: Ice packs work like adding salt to water to lower the freezing point. The practical issue is how long can they maintain their 0°F temperature when moved from the 0°F freezer environment to the inside of the cooler? Not very long. It takes a lot less energy to warm the ice than it took to freeze the water. The second law of Thermodynamics states that “heat won’t pass from the cooler to the hotter”, so the cold in the cooler will get hotter as a ruler (for rhyme), meaning your 28°F chemical ice pack will warm up from its new environment, and it will keep warming up as the warmer air from outside of the cooler penetrates into the cooler and continues raising the temperature of the ice pack. And after dancing around your question, I don’t know why there are no clear answers to the 0-32°F range of temperatures.
Factoid: June 23rd is National Hydration Day.
Remember that when it comes around again next year.
MUG O’ THE MONTH:
OVERHEARD . . .
