For those who have been following V.Balaji’s trip along the coast of India might have noticed that he is paddling an Easky 15 by Venture Kayaks (P&H). I recently asked him how he acquired his boat as I don’t know any other paddlers in India.

This is his response:

Yes, it has been in my dream to make an adventurous journey in the sea, after I saw the program of Justine's kayak expedition in the east coast of Russia in National Geographic Channel (if you know her, say my hello).

In 2005, when I went for a mangrove conservation training program, I met Mr. Dominic from International Tree Foundation, UK. After my seminar on coastal conservation he was impressed and we had a few minutes chat - I told him I wish to make a kayak expedition, but i did not know how to ride it, roll it, its cost and I never seen before except in the TV. I was confident that the kayak will surely attract the people here as a tool to talk about the value of protective fragile, coastal ecosystems of tamil nadu (coral reefs, mangroves and sea grasses).

When I was in Germany in July 2006, I spend some time to rent a kayak in an enclosed bay at Baltic Sea and paddled it for a km myself - which was like a child walking first time.

Then, Dominic took a great effort in UK - he made a car rally with his friends from UK to France to collect money, I selected the sea kayak through websites and started to read the kayak lessons through internet.

Dominic (690 UK pounds +300 UK pounds) and I paid nearly 24,000 Indian rupees for Indian customs clearance. October - November 2006 is the training session and December 2006 the expedition start.

I am very grateful to Mr. Dominic and his friends, I have to be responsible to teach the children in the village on marine conservation, and paddle the kayak to next village - as a way to prove it.

Going to a village school today afternoon...

Yours truly,

v.balaji

V. Balaji is almost finished his trip. You might remember him as he as been paddling almost 650km along the shoreline of India to raise awareness for shoreline conservation.

He wrote me last night and said that he has finished 500km and only has 144km to go. Keep it up, you are doing great!

He was recently interviewed and there was an article posted about his trip in The Hindu, India’s national newspaper. You can read a copy of it here.

Learn more about his trip here.

As promised, I wanted to write about the night paddle on Sunday night. Sorry it took so long for a report. Working 18 hour days leaves very little for much else.

Sean and I met up to do some paddling. Just as we were heading out we met up with two other good friends who were coming back in. It didn’t take much work to convince Jaq and Liz to head back out with us.

The game plan was to work on some night navigation. We wanted to practice following bearings and dead reckoning to find the half way point between two unlit buoys.

Like any other major city, the Toronto shoreline is quite bright; you might as well be out in the daylight. We decided to circle around the Toronto islands counter-clockwise.

On the south side of the islands it was finally starting to get dark. The buoys we were looking for were about 1.5-2 km offshore.

I brought along a GPS that we programmed in the half way point to see how accurate we really were. We set off on our bearing towards the other buoy which was just less than 3 km away. It was dark enough that we couldn’t see it. Very long story short, when we figured we were sitting right over the half way point, we were only off by 100 meters off the north. We were quite pleased with that.

With hardly any wind it made it a little easier then we wanted but we were all talking and zigging and zagging so we figured it was our artificial wind to knock us off course...

Sunday night a couple of us are planning to go out for a night paddle to work on our navigation skills in the dark. Not sure how dark it is going to be as we will be paddling just outside of the Toronto Harbour. We will need to make it a little bit more challenging but aiming for some of the unlighted bouys out there. I will let you know how it goes...

Well, Sean and I survived our kayaking trip this past weekend. We originally planned to go north to Tobermory, Ontario but as we were watching the weather during the week leading up to the trip, a huge storm came in. There is a fantastic website out there called Weather Underground. They do a great job displaying weather. See the graphic to the right. It displays wind speed, barometer, water temperature and wave height in a stacked graphic. The best part about it is that you can easily see the relationship between the four factors. Very cool.

Alright, back to our story. As you can see by the clip the wave height for the Northen Lake Huron buoy peaked that day at 3.9 meters (12.8 feet). A touch big for our liking so we decided to head to the eastern Georgian Bay and put in at Snug Harbour just north of Parry Sounds, Ontario. The waves over there were only peaking at 1.5 meters so it was a little bit more manageable.

We went out for Saturday night giving us two solid days of paddling. For those who know the area, we paddled out to Franklen Island and set up shop in a nice sheltered area as the wind was blowing consistently at 30 knots and gusting up to 40 all day.

We jumped back on the water and decided to play around the savage rocks on the southern tip of Franklen. The savage rocks is a large area of shoals where the swells rise up and crash. There was some great surf and lots of really fun rockhopping.

Weather was interesting. Lots of hail, lots of rain and lots of sleet.

Don't have a clue where I am talking about? You can download a mini tour of Franklen Island for Google Earth. Get it here.