If you’re wondering why the title of this blog is about open boating, perhaps you didn’t know that ‘paddlesport’ in the UK consists of 10 official disciplines – sea kayaking and open boating are two of them.
When I first took to a canoe I swore never to do it again; 18 months done the track and I’m actually enjoying it (clearly I got into one again!).
It’s about elegance and finesse, so I’m told, and once you get the technique right it’s kind of fun…
Who would have thought, a mystical world of sea creatures below us as we kayak along the Thames?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-15215335
Yep, that’s right, next time I’ll be out with my snorkelling kit searching for those sea horses.
#Taking the need to roll to the next level.
An issue close to the heart for many of us – making the world more energy-efficient in order to preserve our natural resources.
If you’ve kayaked under, cycled over, walked across or taken any form of transport near or under Blackfriars bridge sometime in the past 12 months, you *may* have noticed something going on.
Read this article to find out what we can expect to see in 2012.
An interesting article on exercise and creativity. Nothing ground-breaking, but the information is put across with a focus on activity fueling creative processes.
Just another reason why we should all get out and kayak this weekend. Not that we needed one, given the weather forecast!
The regular adult fitness and young people drop-in sessions are on at the usual times, plus there’s the last of the summer Pizza Paddle trips happening on Saturday afternoon. Visit the Kayaking London website to sign up.
Tonight, ‘What I found on the Thames today’ is more about ‘What I found out’ than what I found, although what I found out came about because of what I found.
During a recent trip to Putney bridge, a six-pack of diet coke tins floated by, semi-submerged. I was unfortunately too far away to grab them to a) add a photo to our ‘what I found on the thames today’ documentation and b) see if they were empty or full.
This made me think – do cans float when they’re full? Would they float better in a ‘rafted’ six-pack than they would individually? Nick (a fellow Twilight paddler) promised to go home and experiment. I got off the water and promptly forgot all about it.
Earlier this evening I was pleasantly surprised to hear that he had the answer for me, and it turned out to be an even better answer than I could have expected. It turns out that full diet coke cans do float. More interestingly, however, is that regular (full fat) coke does not*. Bizarre, right? Not really, given the physics of density and the composite nature of regular coke versus diet coke…
“The artificial sweetener used in diet coke is hundreds of times sweeter per unit volume than regular sugar. Classic coke has about 11 teaspoons of sugar in each can, which is taken up by water in the diet coke can. Since sugar is more dense than water, the diet coke will be less dense than classic coke.”
So, next time you’re deciding which soda to take on your kayaking trip, don’t choose diet coke just because it has less calories – consider that it might be useful as an emergency flotation device too, but regular coke is just going to sink like a full fat stone.
*For those sceptics who don’t believe everything written on the internet, rest assured that Nick tested the theory for himself with a can of each, and he confirms that diet coke does indeed float, whereas regular coke sinks.
The other day I stumbled across theRiverthames on Twitter, which is a pretty cool way to monitor the Thames’ tides online, so follow it if you’re tweeter.
But what I want to know is, can tweets be automated? Or is some poor soul tweeting about the state of the tide at Tower Bridge every six hours? And, if there is a poor soul doing that, is he/she doing it for fun, or cash?
But really, can tweets be automated?
If you’ve read the last couple of posts on this blog, you’ve most likely picked up on a common theme – the excitement of spring. Turns out we’re not the only ones looking forward to the long-awaited arrival of this most amazing season.
A fellow paddler appears to be so excited about the season that she can’t wait for it to come to her and she is chasing it down. Right across the country: www.chasingspring.co.uk Follow Izzy’s journey over the next two months as she chases spring from Land’s End to John O’Groats.
Why two months you ask? Well, apparently that’s how long it takes spring to get to John O’Groats from Land’s End. Sounds bizarre, or at least that’s what I thought until I realised it was snowing in Scotland round about the same time I was paddling in a t-shirt on Saturday morning…
