Today, I read reading about the Bill Mason Memorial Scholarship Fund on the Paddle Canada website. This $1000 scholarship is available student enrolled in an outdoor education or environmental studies program at a Canadian college or university. It is not a new scholarship having been around since 1991 when Morten Asfeldt from University of Alberta was its first recipient.

Who was Bill Mason?
Well, Bill Mason was a canoeist and an artist but he was best known for his film-making. He worked for many years in the early 80’s making movies for the National Film Board. In Canada, many of his films were shown to school kids all through the 80's with his most popular being "Paddle to the Sea" and "The Rise and Fall of the Great Lakes". He was one of the first people to use film as a medium for whitewater canoe instruction. "Path of the Paddle" and "Waterwalker" are absolute classics. I never had the great fortune to meet him, but I have met his kids Paul and Becky at several paddling festivals through the years.

Wikipedia entry.

As a fellow Canadian, I get excited when other Canadians are acknowledged on the world stage. For the 2nd time in 4 years, Paul Nicklen won first prize in the Nature Stories category of the prestigious World Press Photo contest.

Nicklen, who grew up in a small Inuit community of 140 on Baffin Island, captured the 2007 prize for his vivid photo of a leopard seal hunt in Antarctica.

It was his second time in four years that he won the prize to boot!

You can view his award winning photos.

When you are there also take a peek at their other categories. They are absolutely amazing. The sad thing is outside the nature and sports categories, they are all generally death and destruction. Personally, I put myself through looking at them to keep my priorities in check. Here I am worrying about that I am going to get attacked by an optician downstairs when in other parts of the world, people are losing their kids to wars and natural disasters...

Garth Schmeck wrote a great helpful tip today on the P&H Blog. He suggested using Arma-Coatings for a keel strip rather then the Kevlar strips that are traditionally used. Arma-Coatings is the brand name aftermarket spray-on application that is applied to truck beds to protect them.

According to Garth, it is supposed to be much lighter (1 pound) and considerably stronger and resilient against chips and bangs.

Sounds like a great idea...

Our family has been laughing really hard following the story over the past couple of days with the excitement taking place downstairs at King West Optical. To bring you up to speed, read the posting from Thursday.

Today I realized that CNN has picked up the story on their main page. Wow! We’ve hit the big time now. The new twist in the story is last night CityTV cameras caught the store owner replacing the sign of his store to a new name. What used to be King West Optical is now called Adam Plimmer & Associates Optical. Looking at it in the light of day, it is just a sticker poorly stuck over the old one.

I love Toronto...

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I found a really interesting story today. I have been following with interest the saga of the Sea Shepherd vessel in its pursuit of Japanese whaling ships south-west of Australia. The Japanese have been working hard to keep the exact location of their fleets’ top secret so they have hunt whales for "scientific purposes".

A couple of days ago the Sea Shepherd found the Japanese ships and have been attacking them so they can’t hunt for whales.

What is really interesting about this story is yesterday is a small group of protesters got lost in the fog when their zodiac broke down. As soon as they realized they had missing crew, they partnered up with the Japanese ship to help search for the lost men.

After a couple hours with both ships searching in a grid pattern, they found the boat and its occupants in good shape.

Does this foe to friend switch take you by surprise? Not to me. There is something about being on water where people will go out of their way to help anybody. Even if the person you are helping is actively trying to hunt you down. If this sort of thing happened in a land situation, I don’t know if it would have turned out the same.

Speaking about missing people, Australian adventurer Andrew McAuley is almost done his epic 1600 kilometer paddle from Tasmania to New Zealand. He is 60km from the end of the trip and there are news reports about an emergency signal from his area. To make matters worse, communication has been broken off and they can’t get in touch with Andrew. There is a glimmer of hope that the signal might be a hoax... Keep up-to-date at Derrick's blog. He is keeping an eye on the situation for us.

Play he comes home safe...