Denniston is a former coal mining area situated on an alpine plateau about 30km North of Westport on the West Coast of New Zealand (Wikipedia here). It was actually an active mining area right up until the 1960’s. In recent years it has fallen under the ambit of the Department of Conservation. Along with the Buller Cycling club they have been building out a bunch of Mountain Bike tracks around the area.

You can pull details on the cycling area from the DoC site and from the Buller Cycling club.
http://www.doc.govt.nz/parks-and-recreation/places-to-visit/west-coast/buller-area/denniston/activities/mountain-bike-tracks/ 
http://www.cyclebuller.co.nz/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&layout=blog&id=19&Itemid=3 

Dave and I decided we’d try and visit the tracks as part of our summer South Island road trip. We drove in via Murchison as we did some paddling along the way. We had a couple of days in the Murchison region where the water levels were well up. Paddled a few runs that I’ve done before as well as a new run down the mangles that started with about a 2m waterfall- pulled quite a crowd when we ran that one for some reason… didn’t seem that difficult.

We drove into Westport the evening before we planned to ride and found ourselves a nice motel (Buller Bridge Motel) with free WiFi. Got up early and headed up the hill. This place really is quite the plateau. The hill rises steeply off the ocean almost to an altitude of about 650m at the carpark. The views were pretty good for us; on a really fine and still day I can imagine you’d be able to see all the way up to Karamea.

Once we got to the top we had a bit of a potter around looking at some of the old mining ruins. Denniston is famous for the Denniston Incline which is a frighteningly steep, two pitch, coal railway that literally goes straight up the side of the hill. Check out this video from the NZ Archives for an idea of what it was like.

Then we headed up the hill to the Museum Car park which is the designated starting place for the Mountain Biking trails. While getting organized we saw the Google Car driving around- yes, even in the middle of bloody nowhere there is Google!

We started out with the Ropers Hotel Circuit.
http://www.cyclebuller.co.nz/attachments/011_MTB%20-%20Denniston%20-%20Ropers%20Hotel%20Circuit.pdf 
Straight away the riding was quite different to anything we’d ridden before in New Zealand. Lots of slick rock and ledges. Was quite fast riding and reasonably hard on the suspension. A 6” trail bike is ideal- we had a Trance and a Mojo. The last part of this track before it hits the road is walking only- for ecological reasons rather than ride-ability. You definitely want to do this track in the predominant direction indicated on the map as it would be a pain to walk up that hill.

Next we rode out on one of the longer trails. This was nominally on 4WD track but I’d challenge most people to take their 4WD there and get it back in one piece. The track was Sullivans Circuit and it went off the other side of the Plateau back down towards Westport.
http://www.cyclebuller.co.nz/attachments/011_MTB%20-%20Denniston%20-%20Sullivans%20Circuit.pdf 

This track had plenty of challenging riding. Lots of large rocks and ledges. it was all too easy to go far faster than 0.1mm of lycra really should justify.

Finally we rode the Miners and Drill track circuits. Again, lots of hairy riding with a bunch of sketchy single track, some of which we both had to walk.

There was still plenty of sign of the old coal mining stuff and indeed the coal itself.

Despite only doing about 30km (in 3.15hr!) we were in need of a beer once we got back to the car.

Here’s the GPS dump

And the full TCX file of my Garmin 310XT is here:
http://connect.garmin.com/activity/21786909

Thought it would be interesting to do a blog post of my stats for 2009.

It was a pretty hellish year for travel. It’s the first full year that I’ve used TripIt which has proved to be a really useful tool. TripIt also provides travel stats.

Now not all of this was work travel (I had a couple of overseas holidays) but it was still a pretty full on year.

This is borne out in my exercise stats. Obviously my most exercised location was Wellington, but, I also did a whole heap in Issaquah, Washington and also in Bangalore, India.

I remained pretty steady over the course of the year in terms of the amount of exercise I did. It was still really hard to maintain anything approaching a good training program though.

Once again it was a shitty year for me skiing wise, though these stats do miss out a bit of skiing I had in January. I also did far less mountain biking than I would have liked to.

I did do over 300hr of exercise over the year and travelled 2700km. I also burned 65,000 calories.

Will be interesting to see what I can manage this year.

Got out for hills this morning on the road bike. Turned into a shorter ride, but, I pushed the 2nd interval really hard (100% MHR) and in doing so smashed about 7% off my PB up the short pinch climb I do.

The average power was 450 Watts over the 4min 31 seconds. Pity the hill wasn’t a touch longer as it meant my new PB 5 minute power ended up being only 431 Watts i.e. 30 seconds of my rest break at the top was included.. Goal for the next few weeks is to really work on lifting my power profile. I think I’ll probably look at doing Peak 1’w and 5’w on Happy Valley road as it certainly appears to help going up a hill. At the moment my 1’w isn’t even on the chart and I’d like to work on getting my entire profile into the Cat 4 region over the next few weeks in the lead up to the K1 race. Means I need to be targeting 350 Watts for 60 minutes which I think is going to be the hardest bit.

The other interesting thing is to see just how much temperature variation affects my (supposedly temperature compensating) barometric altimeter on the Polar s625x. All 5 of those intervals should be the same height, but, there is a definite trend downward over the set.

So it’s 1830hr in Durban South Africa and today was the last day for TechEd Africa for 2009. This was my first TechEd for this year and the second time I’ve spoken at TechEd South Africa.

Before I give you links to the demo code I’m going to bore you with some photos of my trip down the Zambezi last week. There’s actually quite a story behind it that you can read all about over at the Intergen Blog.

Thoughts I’d start a post of some of the grades of the various hills (Road Cycling) around Wellington.

I’ve pulled these off various rides around the place. Have noted where some are averages. All data recorded on a Polar s625x

Hill	Map	Distance	Height	Grade
Makara Saddle. Karori Side. Cnr Allington Road and Apex of Saddle Average of 3		1.05km	87m	8.5%
Makara Saddle. Makara Side Lamp-post in front of Church to Lamppost at top of Saddle Average of 2	Map	2.61km	186m	7.15%
Takarau Gorge Road Intersection to Top of J’ville Intersection Makara Rd and Takarau Rd to top of Johnsonville on Cortina Road	Map	11.07km	268m	2.2%
Aro Valley Up Raroa Road From Traffic island at bottom of hill to top of hill on Raroa Road	Map	1.96km	107m	5.7%

So all was quiet for me with a big travel load the last couple of weeks. Spent an amazing week in Redmond last week and kinda wish I had my bike with me- Seattle in Summer is rather alluring to be honest!

Got out for a MTB ride with my brother today. Not far, but, we got a couple of hours in. We did a lower loop of Makara Peak then up to the top, down Zacs and Varleys and home along the road.

The Yellow Mojo got really filthy. You can at least still tell it’s yellow.

Adventure Sports | Gettin Fit|Sunday, July 05, 2009 7:35:26 AM UTC|Comments [0]|    

Way cool. @RotoruaNZ Tweeted me the other day after I posted some photos of Mountain Biking up here.

Asked if they could use one of my photos on their Mountain Biking page. Check out Phil Ross on the dipper with the *loud* strobe action going on.

http://rotoruanz.com/ 

If you’re one of my overseas readers I can’t comment the City of Rotorua to you enough. I’ve dreamed of living there since I was at highschool and it’s still 100% on my 5 year roadmap. It’s close to the ski fields, has phenomenal mountain biking (the Redwoods), great kayaking (Kaituna and Wairoa) and great air links for frequent business travellers like me (Can go direct to AKL, WLG, CHC and ZQN).

The only query/quibble I have with the Destination Rotorua site is why on earth is it hosted on the other side of the world!?! See the trace-route below. Looks like it’s in Orlando!
Looks like their site uses PHP so they’ll probably be a good candidate for the Apache version of the Runtime Page Optimizer http://www.getrpo.com/Product/Apache. Running the RPO site tester it reckons it should knock a couple of seconds off the New Zealand load times.

C:\Users\Chris>tracert www.rotoruanz.com

Tracing route to rotoruanz.com [66.7.213.144]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

  1    13 ms    <1 ms     1 ms  …
  2    <1 ms    <1 ms    <1 ms  …
  3     1 ms     2 ms     1 ms  wlgrtr1-65.intergen.org.nz [202.126.87.65]
  4     4 ms     1 ms     2 ms  ihwrtr1-129.intergen.net.nz [202.126.87.129]
  5     2 ms     5 ms     3 ms  32.114.216.13
  6   158 ms   150 ms   148 ms  165.87.71.190
  7   150 ms   148 ms   148 ms  12.127.33.6
  8   150 ms   152 ms   158 ms  cr2.sffca.ip.att.net [12.122.136.74]
  9   148 ms   148 ms   156 ms  ggr3.sffca.ip.att.net [12.122.136.17]
10   150 ms   149 ms   154 ms  att-gw.sanfran.level3.net [192.205.33.78]
11   157 ms   162 ms   161 ms  vlan89.csw3.sanjose1.level3.net [4.68.18.190]
12   176 ms   152 ms   160 ms  ae-83-83.ebr3.sanjose1.level3.net [4.69.134.233]

13   151 ms   155 ms   167 ms  ae-2.ebr3.losangeles1.level3.net [4.69.132.10]
14   148 ms   157 ms   148 ms  ae-63-63.csw1.losangeles1.level3.net [4.69.137.3
4]
15   160 ms   163 ms   161 ms  ae-62-62.ebr2.losangeles1.level3.net [4.69.137.1
7]
16   183 ms   181 ms   192 ms  ae-3.ebr3.dallas1.level3.net [4.69.132.78]
17   202 ms   181 ms   180 ms  ae-93-93.csw4.dallas1.level3.net [4.69.136.166]

18   190 ms   197 ms   181 ms  ae-91-91.ebr1.dallas1.level3.net [4.69.136.133]

19   215 ms   214 ms   224 ms  ae-1-14.bar2.orlando1.level3.net [4.69.137.153]

20   220 ms   218 ms   210 ms  ae-9-9.car2.orlando1.level3.net [4.69.133.69]
21   212 ms   210 ms   211 ms  hostdime.car2.orlando1.level3.net [4.79.118.38]

22   211 ms   211 ms   213 ms  dime151.dizinc.com [66.7.213.144]

Trace complete.

So I spent last week Mountain Biking in Rotorua and generally recovering from my 3 months of travel.

Got out with the Canon 5D MkII and some strobes for a bit of run in the Redwoods.

Photos were taken by a variety of Myself, Phil Ross, James Ogle and Sarah Bolland.

Phil Ross on ‘The Dipper’.
5D MkII, Sigma 14mm F2.8 EX DG + 580 EX II on ‘Ebay Triggers’

Chris Auld on ‘The Dipper’
5D MkII, Sigma 14mm F2.8 EX DG + 580 EX II on ‘Ebay Triggers’

Canon 20D and Canon EF 50mm F1.8 II

Chris Auld on the Dipper
Canon 5D Mk II w/ 70-200 F2.8 IS L 1 x 580 EX 1 x 580 EX II fired by ST-E2

David Addison
Canon 20D and Canon EF 50mm F1.8 II

Chris Auld and David Addison on The Dipper
Canon 5D Mk II w/ 70-200 F2.8 IS L 1 x 580 EX 1 x 580 EX II fired by ST-E2

Getting the strobes setup
Canon 20D and Canon EF 50mm F1.8 II

Canon 20D and Canon EF 50mm F1.8 II

Canon 20D and Canon EF 50mm F1.8 II

With all this travel I keep forgetting just how lovely Wellington can be on a great day.

Did a fantastic road ride today. Out to Johnsonville (past the murder scene at the Mobil), back into town via Ngaio, around the bays and the Miramar peninsula and the I cut home @ Kilbirnie as I was pretty stuffed by then. Rode a bunch of the peninsula with a guy from Mercer comparing notes on hotels to stay at that actually have proper spin bikes.

Did about 70km all up.

My peak 20min power was up to 300 Watts so I’m defn. seeing some improvement in my Functional Threshold Power (up from 280 Watts last time I did a proper test) . Even more pleasing was I maintained 290 Watts for 20min and 255 Watts for 60 min. Just have to get the body weight down and should be caning it.

Nikki Kelly Nikki is a paddling friend from way back and her son Sam is about the same age and Anna Kaituna Calder, the daughter of some other great paddling buddies.

Almost inspires me to jump back in a slalom boat…. if I had time

I pine to go and live by the Kaituna river!

Nikki Kelly Shows Why She Is So Inspirational

So one cool thing I’ve noticed on my morning walks/runs is they’ve started putting biciyle compatible cattle stops on the Skyline walkway. These allow bikes to pass, but stop stock moving between paddocks. Thus far I’ve seen one on the actual Skyline track and one where the track drops down into Karori Cemetary via the new track that’s been built.

So I watched a few Snowsports videos while I was skiing in Banff last week. There is an increasing focus on avalanche education which is a good thing I think. I watched the Biography flick on Craig Kelly called Let it Ride and The Fine Line which is a sort of Hybrid action+education flick on Avalanches in the back country.

All go through the big three avy safety tools you should never be without:

1. Beacon/Transceiver. With fresh batteries and a user who knows how to use it. I’ve got one of the older model Barryvox beacons.
2. A probe- that’s long enough for the sort of locations you’re hitting. I have a 300cm G3 probe.
3. A shovel. I’m personally not a big fan of polycarbonate shovels, they may be lighter, but the wet snow here in NZ is just too likely to break them… You want a nice big alloy shovel for digging your friends out pronto like!

Something that a bunch of them missed was helmets. Back when I was a ‘grom’ skier Helmets were totally ‘uncool’… but that’s all changed, I wouldn’t be without mine. Several of the case studies in The Fine Line talked about severe head and facial injuries so a good Helmet is number 4 for me.

Check out this email that the guys from Shred Ready received about how one of their helmets helped in an avalanche situation.

http://shredready.com/team/2009/02/we-are-happy-our-friend-eric-zuaro.html

So I hope you’re all having a great holiday break. I’ve been paddling and kayaking in Rotorua which is always great fun. Photographing a friends wedding today.

Some paddling photos…. if you’re ever keen for a bit of kayaking let me know!

Chris running the Roller Coaster on the Wairoa River near Tauranga

A friend running the top Waterfall rapid on the Wairoa River

My friend running the bottom waterfall (Auto Huck styles) on the Wairoa

Running the Kaituna 7m waterfall in a double kayak for Dave’s stag-do… Chris in the back, Dave in the front about to get a Sinus rinsing.

Feel free to take a look at the comments to the last post as this is a followup. You may want to ignore the snipey content devoid comments from our friend in the NZOSS community.

Herewith a follow up post that hopefully addresses the substantive questions that were actually raised (thanks Stu)

Sorry for the delay. I've been busy trying to get a high quality specification progressed through the ISO standards process. Oh and I've also managed to get outside to do some skiing in the Montana backcountry.

The issue is that the GPL aims to enforce the distribution of any derived work under the GPL also.

I do not want to release my applications under the GPL and inparticular I do not want to release any Open Source code I write under the GPL as I do not believe in the 'Copyleft' philosophy to which it subscribes.

Now that's fine. As a general rule I avoid GPL code like the plague (we do use LGPL code in some of our products). In fact our contracts at Kognition included a clause requireing neither party to the agreement to provide GPL code to the other.

So the question then comes to can I implement ODF without having to derive my work from any GPL based code.
My feeling is that even looking at the code for say OpenOffice will get me into trouble.
Likewise decompiling the code will be problematic.

I am actually comfortable reverse engineering by observation for features like 'blink', I do not believe that is going to breach copyright in the work.

But the question is, will reverse engineering by observation be sufficient. And to be honest I just don't know the answer to that question. I don't really see myself spending that much time working with ODF as I tend to agree with The Burton Report as to its likely levels of adoption and indeed the likely market segments to adopt it- selling software to people who are philosophically opposed to paying for software is unlikely to be a sustainable business. That said I did find a very interesting bit of commentary on the web about just this problem quite recently.

http://www.gnome.org/projects/gnumeric/announcements/1.8/gnumeric-1.8.shtml

"The Gnumeric team does not envision using the OpenDocument Format as its native format.

The spreadsheet part of ODF, in its current form, is ill defined and has many, many problems. For example: (1) there is no meaningful discussion of what functions a spreadsheet should support and what they should do. Without that, there is little point in trying to move a spreadsheet from one program to another; (2) there is no provision for sharing formulas between cells; (3) there is no implementation -- writing an ODF exporter consists of reverse-engineering OpenOffice to see what parts of the standard it can handle. (Note: the preceding comments relate to the spreadsheet part of ODF only; we do not have an informed opinion on ODF for word processing documents, for example.)

We may revisit this decision in the future, should the situation improve. In the meantime, we will strive to maintain a reasonable importer and exporter."

Those guys look to have actually broached the problem and to be honest that kinda answers my question. If I can't realisitically use ODF without reverse-engineering OpenOffice then I'm pretty much stuffed in terms of writing a GPL free implementation.

Went paddling and mountain biking in Idaho today.... had a blast.

Photos here:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=13989&l=97e3a&id=585345751

That *should* be a public link....

I got myself a nice new yellow trail bike...

Frame Mojo Large Custom Pantone P109 Yellow Paintjob by Roy Hassler Autohaus in AKL RP23 rear shock
Fork Pace RC41 Custom Pantone P109 Paintjob by Roy Hassler Autohaus in AKL
Stem Thomsom Elite 90mm x 5deg
Seatpost Thomsom Elite 31.6 x 367 (Trail setup) and Easton EC90 (Race Setup)
Brakes 07 XTR 185/160mm
Race wheelset (DT Swiss 4.2d, Hope ProII Silver, Silver Wheelsmith Spokes, Nobby Nics 2.25/2.15)
Shifters and Ft/Rr Mech 07 XTR
Cassette SRAM PG-990
Cranks XTR 07
Seat Selle Italia Tri 2 Matic Yellow
Grips Syncros Deep Relief Yellow
Skewer Hope Red
Bars LP Composites Carbon/Kevlar Yellow/Black Weave
Cables Nokon Anodised Red Cablepearls
Chain SRAM 991 Hollowpin (I have an XTR chain in my bag as well... which may be a better choice given my larger stature....)
Pedals Crank Candy Yellow

Ready, Steady, Go!

Stuff has details on the refloating of the fishing vessel Kotuku.

Looking at the photo you can see what looks to be a Liferaft still strapped to the roof. Most vessels have the straps setup with hydrostatic releases so the lifeboat is released automatically if the boat sinkz. I wonder why this one did not.

OK... who's keen for a bit of a dogfood install fest this weekend?

We could combine some beers, a BBQ and some mountain biking for a cool afternoon.

Get a few people around to my house and we'll all go through and switch our machines from smelly old XP to shiny new Vista, all the while drinking fine New Zealand beer. Then while the installs are humming away we canall take off to Makara for a bit of Mountain Biking.

Anyone keen? Comment here of email me chris@kognition.co.nz

[UPDATE]

OK. It'll be at my place from 1300hrs on Saturday.

We'll do some installing. Then do some mountainbiking.
Bring:
Yourself
Your bike
Your laptop PC
Your external HDD if you need to.
Your Office and Vista product keys so you can activate your Beta
A towel and a clean change of clothes (if going biking)
Some beer

We'll all go to the supermarket after the ride for some BBQ goodies and then we may watch the Super 14 final as well

[UPDATE#2]

Takers so far

Nic Wise
Nick Head
Phil Cockfield
Chris Auld
Tim Haines (doing a VPC install)
Ivan Towlson (Office only)

Phil, Tim and I went for a MTB ride @ Makara on Saturday afternoon. Had a blast.

Went up Koru, along Sally Alley, out onto the 4WD track then down the bottom of Ridgeline and Swigg. It was a pretty leisurely pace but we all had a hoot of a time and got filthy muddy.

Here's the profile of the ride- I really have to get myself a watch like Darryl B's... So it can talk to a wheel sensor.

If you're keento come on any of our rises do et us know!. Phil has some photos here.

I trotted off to the LVM site to get myself some 'oh I hate travelling' whitewater fix video... I get there and find that one of the key guys behind Penstock Productions, Daniel DeLaVergne, was killed by a train (8 March). I've only known Daniel via email... but this is a real bummer- one of those nasty twists of fate.

I had forgotten that it was bike to work day. As I rode from the Gym (Thorndon) to the Office (Willis St) I stumbled upon the free breakfast (well the end of it) @ Civic Square.

Anyway- IU've got right back into riding to work having shifted to Wellington. Fuel is too expensive, m car drinks it (Turbo Subaru), and I'm really liking my new bike.

I think that Phil is keen for a Makara Peak MTB ride soon. So, if you are keen for a bike ride in WLG post a comment here and we should all heahis weekend sometime.

It's funny how you really only start to vlue something if you might lose it. So it is with the Awesome Gorge section of the Kaituna River. OP Energy want to build YATLHS (Yet Another Tiny Little Hydro Scheme) on it. It's not in the guide book and from experience the first place people are going to look for some indiction that it's actually run is in Google. So.It is run. Herewith my section notes in the style of Graham Charles' great New Zealand Whitewater book.

Class: III
Level: As per the Okere Falls section
Gauge: Gates on Lake Rotoiti outflow
Length: About 2km
Gradient: Not Sure
Time: 25mins
Put In: Continue on from Kaituna Play Hole or Putn below Trout Pool Falls
Take Out: Sharp Left Hand Bend. Orange Spray Paint on River Right. Take out River Right. DO NOT MISS THIS TAKE OUT!
Shuttle: Walk back over farm tracks- see hot tip.
Character: A bit oike what would happen if they trippled the flow, halved the width and added 100m high gorge walls to a theme park water ride. A mixture of meandering bends and continuous roller coaste ride class III whitewater. Awesome Scenery and character- hence the name.
Hot Tip: Take a seak kayak ortage trolley to wheel your boats back along the portage.

The Aweome Gorge section of the Kaituna  is one of the most unique pieces of whitewater that I've paddled in New Zealand. It is wilderness paddling little more than 30 minutes from Rotorua. It is like a rollercoaster ride through lush native bush and a deep and narrow gorge. It's not difficult wite water, but, gie that Gnarly Gorge (a place you really don't want to go) is just around the corner from the take out you DO NOT wnt to go swimming in Awesome Gorge.

It starts out from the Trout Pool falls as a meandering arm stram and then slowly picks up pace through a few class one riffle rapids. Then the river backs off again before slowly pickng up pace as the gorge begins to narrow. The gorge narrows, the corners becme tighter and everything starts to push along and then suddenly the gorge tightens righ up and you're into a section of about 300m of continuous Class III white water. There are no real eddies to speak of and it's a great place to take paddling tourists without giving them too mch background. By the bottom their eyes are just wide open.

Once you exit the fast paced section you will roud a couple of corners before the rar of Awesome Gorge falls beckons. This is a drop of about 3 meter that is very similar in nature to the top drop of the Powerhouse rapid. Run it just off river left with a big boof.

A couple more corners and you are at the take out. Look for the bright orange paint. You do not want to miss this take ou.

Had a morning surf session @ Do Little Do Nothing (Kauwarau River, Dog Leg Run) on Sunday morning. Herewith the photos.

Some rock towers @ the takeout. Wish I had my SLR and 50mm f1.8 for a better depth of field.

Me looking bright and 'butt' bouncy......

Me doing something in the foam pile. I have no idea what... but it must have been something cool.... honest.....

Nikki having a romp.

Nikki spends some time in the white room......

Robin throwing down a Helix.

Nikki putting the pedal down.

”Back Up!”

Robin Blunting.

Liz out on the green

Yup... unfortunatly Didymo has been found in both the Buller and Hawea catchments.

Details at the NZRCA site.

http://www.rivers.org.nz/

the didymo issue for kayakers

OK. So the week started out pretty well for me with my first sub 104kg weigh in. But then it kinda didn't really spark. I didn't do a heap or exercise (Gym Mon, Canoe Polo Tue, Run Wed, Run Fri) and so come this weekend I needed a jump start!

I got up this morning, went to the farmers market, had an apple strudel and some yummy russian deep fried pastie for breakfast...... and then ran/walked up Mt Cargil 5 minutes faster than ever before.... that's like 10% off my best time!

Just to prove it, here is my chart....

Chris Sinclair and myself and a few others have put together a paddling porno night next week.....

But of curse I'm gonna not be here and be in Redmond. But it's still gonna rock so if you are in Dunedin get on down....

Before you ask... I didn't do the poster too........

Wifey and I went to the Reef for our Honeymoon recently.

Here are some photos of our trip with Pro Dive Cairns. Second trip with them... good operation.

I've only ever had one composite lay up helmet and that was a home made glass/carbon jobbie I built away back in about 97. But when I found that Grateful Heads were flicking seconds stock on EBay for 1/2 price I snapped one up. I'm not sure what denotes a cosmetic second but I couldn't for the life of me find anything whatsoever wrong with it. Arguably there may, just may, possibly, if examined with a magnifying glass, be sme dry spots on one side... but they took several minutes of finding. The helmet is Red/Black marbled color- it looks cool. Feels really stabe on my head, the fitting system is good, nothing fancy, but good. The layup seems pretty strng but I still reckong I'd go for the heavier layup in a creeking helmet. I got the bird shape which is a Snyder design with a slight peak at the front. Looks cool even on my fat head. THe helmet has not drainage holes but the liner pretty well seals off when on your head- still wouldn't want to be in a foot pin swimmer situation wearing it though. A nice thing about the lack of drainage holes is you can use the helmet a as adrinking vessel!

Shipping to NZ was reasonable and Julie from Rain and Snow was really helpful in that she transshipped my IR Shorty Cag with the helmet to save $$$. Next time I think I'd buy a few and bring em over for frinds. All in all a great lid- it's got a few scratches already.

So my getting back into whitewater kayaking has meant some serious splurging on new gear. Back when I was relativly good I was but a poor student I had to rely on the generosity of others for nice gear. Now I've got a little more of the disposable folding stuff so I can afford to get a few nice bits of kit. So herewith my run down of the Kokatat Gore Tex Drytop- picked it up @ www.nrsweb.com for US$279 which I thought was pretty good.

As a general rule I don't like wearing a drytop- I'm somewhat of a minimalist when it comes to outdoor body adornment and I'd generally much rather just wear a shorty cag or a rashtop. So this was a bit of an adventurous purchase for me. But, my intention is to paddle all winter this year and that'll mean paddling in snowy weather- a bit much for a 3 season top even with my hi tech sub dermal insulating keg pack midrift.

I've paddled the drytop for a few sessions now- all runs down rivers but with a bit of park n' playboating along the way. It is the first drytop I have owned that is actually dry. I suffered no leakage through the seals whatsoever. The Gore Tex really does work- I think that far more than say with a moutaineering jacket you really notice the breathable fabric- when you are hermtically sealed in latex you can't healp but sweat your ass off. The workmanship and materials on the Wave are top notch certainly up there in terms of paddling gear companies and equipment vendors in general. Seam sealing done well, no lose threads. Can't speak to the durability of the fabric and jacket yet but everything indicates that it will be durable.

So what are the downsides. I think that the design is a little long in the tooth. In particular the inner tube in the double tunnel is only a draw string. This means that even though the seals keep the jacket dry you end up with any water in ya boat running up through the inner tunnel and then wicking it's way through your polyprop undies. Others have commented on the outer seal on neck being somewhat tight- I have a BIG neck (like had to trip about 5 rings off the latex) But I didn't find it too bad- smaller than might be desirable but not the end of the world.

So would I get another one? Well, I think they may have discontinued this model, replacing it with the Rogue. But, next time around I think I'll probably look at an Immersion Research Entrant Competition LX. I have the Competition short sleeve and it's not too bad. I'm also dead keen to have a look at the 2005 Bomber Gear models as they too look pretty sweet. ALl in all a good bargain was had and I'll be happy t wear the Wave all winter long. I got some Polyester base layer stuff from Krapmandthu which is great as well. I've always been a fan of Polyester garments- never been sure what drives kiwi paddlers to keep wearing filthy smelly polyprop- and then leaving it in their wet gear box in my car!

Oh... only other downside was I couldn't get red- only mango yellow.

Check out this INSANE video of some river surfing in Montreal....

Includes obligatory half naked surfer babes.....

http://www.2imagine.net/blogger2005/endless.html

Note: it turns into a somewhat lame Drago Rossi Squashtail add halfway through :-( Still they throw the odd flip turn and helix.... but I reckon the Orbit Fish looks like a nicer boat- yet to try it on a big wave though and it's a bit small for me anyway.

Over on rivers.org.nz there is a discussion about power stations- we kayaker care very much about power stations.

here is my response...

I always get my ass kicked for this answer. But IMHO Nuclear is not a bad option. Only problem with it is it is BLOODY expensive.
But, for a clean green country like ours it is ideal.

Minimal emissions (Coal/Gas to some degree), just Nuke waste which is pretty manageable or at the very least exportable. Minimal visual polution (wind farms), no damming rivers (hydro), small in size (solar), reliable (all of the above save for Coal/Gas).

The other good thing we could do is stop selling Comalco electricity at below market rates. Comalco is basically just an electricity exporting mechanism. Ship the bauxite in, use the cheap power, ship the aluminium out. Export electricity.

Remember Spokey Dokeys? The little plastic beads you put on ya bike spokes- I used to have some on my downhill bike (and my toddler trike when I was 3)...

Anyway. Gizmodo has the latest in Spokey technology- LED Spokey Dokes! How cool is that. You can program them with your Palm- now if they would only choose a decent mobile computing platform I could be tempted to splurge on some- write them off as a company marketing expense!

Here is a good wee thread on how to make your own play kayaking hole....

http://www.rivers.org.nz/forums/read.php?f=5&i=32&t=32

Kinda just blogging it so I can find it again later.....

This is a great wee playboating run. We could have done with a bit more water but we still had a great play session... lots of ends. Was a bit shallow to do anything too silly like loops though.

Seth on the hole at the bottom of the run.

Me busting out some nasty ass facials... and a few ends.. in the bottom hole.

It was a long day- about 20 hours. DUD to Queenstown and back in a day. Seth wasn't even driving!

Looks like Contact Energy are going to front up and pay for an artificial Slalom and whitewater course on the Hawea.

Details @ http://www.rivers.org.nz/

$850k doesn't seem like enough to me.... but we'll see...

If you want to import a drytop there is a duty free concession Tariff Item 6201.93.01 Ref#999063B see this document for details.

Hopefullly this will be Google useful for someone later on.

P.S. Hopefully this entry will also prevent you from having to go through the 'eye opening' experience of searching for WATERSPORTS jackets with LATEX RUBBER seals on Google..... My Word it is interesting what some people get up to!

I have a sore bum this morning- did 110km on my MTB on the weekend- raced in the Rail Trail Duathlon.

We shaved a few minutes off our last year time... I had a puncture about 10km into the second day bike leg which kindaq stuff everything up a bit.

Feel a whole heap better than I did after the event last year though. Heading up signal hill with Garry the the Mad Scott and Toby (Dogblog Dog) for some downhill action after work.

Check out this sweet pic of Stephen Wright Air Looping.... that is just such a cool shot!

More @ www.jacksonkayak.com

Spent the weekend kayaking in Rotorua. Had a blast... been a while since I did much whitewater kayaking- I used to be a national representative and pretty competitive freestyle paddler, but work got in the way.

Caught up with one of my old friends Donald Calder who owns what has to be NZs best Kayak Shop- Sunspots http://www.kayakshop.co.nz. Paddled the new Necky Orbit Fish which I reckon would be a KICK ASS boat on a wave, but probably a bit small for me in a hole, especially a little hole like that on the Kaituna. Thinking about a Jackson Super Star- had a sweet bottom hole session with Stephen Wright and Devon Barker from Jackson Kayak and Nat from Sunspots. Steve was throwing so many airloops it looked like childs play.

Defn. gonna get a bit more paddling under my belt this year. I wasn't actually too bad on the weekend- hit sweet lines on the main Kaituna Waterfall- first time I've run that river in over 4 years. And could still throw down half a dozen or so cartwheel ends with a split left to right.

Was fully clueless when they all started talking about Space Godzillas and Tricky Whu moves.

Also got out on my mountain bike last night for a good session down Signal Hill here in Dunners. Had to walk a couple of small sections and passed up on most of the big jumps and drop offs. But, still had a good time and it was sure better than watching TV.