Sunset over Quartz Lake; Camera: Leica M3, Film: Kodak 35mm, Ektar 100
Woodstock at 50
Yasgur Farm
On August 15, 1969, the Woodstock Music Festival got underway near Bethel, NY.
Three days of Peace & Music. Richie Havens took the stage at 5:07 pm as the first act that Friday in 1969.
Woodstock plaque erected in 1984
The Curator and I visited the site in March of 2018, after attending the ECAC Conference Hockey tournament at Lake Placid.
Turn up your CCR and Santana this weekend.
Alaska Wild Salmon Day
We have circled around once again to the day we officially celebrate the wild salmon here in Alaska. It can not be stressed enough how this aquatic migrator is vital to both Alaska’s economy and psyche.
Festivities can be found throughout Alaska today. Events include everything from catching & cleaning, to preparing our favorite fish. I’m sure you can even find some salmon poetry if you look for it.
So, grab that rod and get out on a river bank or climb over the gunwales and wet your line. The salmon are running.
Explorers
1895 Map of Alaska
“Explorers are not, perhaps, the most promising people with whom to build a society. Indeed, some might say that explorers become explorers precisely because they have a streak of unsociability and a need to remove themselves at regular intervals as far as possible from their fellow men.”
—A member of the Royal Geographical Society
Windmills
Going in circles
I feel like I’m spinning in circles myself writing posts on here, so I’m going to keep things short & sweet until the issues are cleared up.
Canoe Repair
Cracks in the hull, minus the moose hoof prints
Prior to heading out to the lake a couple of weeks ago, I had to do some repair work to the hull on my Old Town Discovery canoe. This past winter, I followed moose tracks over to where I had the canoe stored, and found that the moose tried to go through the canoe. I thought it was stored well enough on saw horses, but a moose does what it wants to, and I’m sure it looked like a snow covered log.
There were moose prints in the snow covering the canoe, but it must have realized that it wasn’t a log. If a moose had put all its weight on the Old Town, it would have gone through the hull. As it turned out, the moose only put a few cracks in it. To be fair, the canoe is at least 30 years old, so I have received my money’s worth, but I also like to squeeze every bit out of something I can.
So I decided to repair the hull.
Sanded hull
The first step was to get the canoe in the Rover Hut, then sand the entire hull.
Acetone the hull
I then cleaned the entire hull with acetone. Warning: Acetone should only be used in a well ventilated area**
After the cleaning, I cut alongside the cracks with a razor blade to allow the epoxy I was going to use to get down into the cracks. Then I cleaned the entire hull a second time with the acetone. Luckily, acetone dries extremely quickly.
G-Flex 650 Epoxy
After some internet searching, I found that the G-Flex epoxy was the best product out there to repair the Royalex of an Old Town canoe. I called their tech center to tell them my plan, and get any insight from them. They were incredibly helpful! I received the go ahead from them, and went back out to the Rover Hut. Side note: I did have some down time. The product is not sold in Fairbanks, so I ordered it from Amazon. They promptly sent me a box containing only the epoxy hardener, which is utterly useless by itself.
Filling the cracks with epoxy
Like most epoxies, G-Flex is a two part system. There is a resin Part A, and a hardener Part B. You mix equal parts of both together to get the working epoxy. I mixed up a small batch, and filled the large cracks. The next day, I flipped the canoe over to fill brush some epoxy over the cracks that had come close to coming all the way through the hull.
The hull completely coated in G-flex epoxy
Because of the canoe’s age, there was a fair amount of what I would describe as “spider-webbing”. A series of tiny cracks that had not gone through the hull, but had probably made it easier for the moose to cause the large ones. I wanted to coat the entire hull in the epoxy to at least buy me some time with the spider-webbing. Luckily, the G-Flex went on rather easy with a brush, and spread out in an even coat.
The epoxy can be top coated, although I have not done so. Krylon Fusion spray paint is said to work well on Royalex, but again, I have not attempted that.
The Discovery back on the water
The end result: The old canoe was back on the water, and glided just like it did when I bought it. No leaks, and the epoxy didn’t scare away the lake trout.
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