More cheesy DIY gear

I bought a broken Olympus Stylus Tough 6000 camera and repaired it enough that it's useable, and now it's my on-the-water camera (see shots I've taken with it at flickr.com).  The camera's supposed to be waterproof, but it doesn't float, so I made a PFD for it.

The camera's PFD

The float is an inflatable arm band for little kids to swim with.  It has two independently inflatable chambers that can be easily separated at one end, which makes it more versatile for DIY projects.  A pair of these cost 50¢ at Thriftown; the plastic snap was from REI (< $1); the snap is attached to a split ring which is attached to a grommet that came from a salvaged grommet kit.  (The grommet wasn't such a good idea--it's already starting to corrode.)  The snap can be on the camera's leash or on the camera case's leash.

A cheap watertight box

The case is for a Snap Sights 35mm camera, re-purposed to be a simple watertight box.  It keeps the camera from getting knocked around, and keeps the camera from getting any wetter than it has to.  The leash that came with it wasn't long enough to be useful, and was replaced with a nylon boot lace and a spare cord lock.  The Snap Sights case could also be used for the emergency cell phone, snacks, a first aid kit, a small towel, or whatever else needs to be kept handy and dry.

Kayak camping on the delta, and boat-in campsite maps

I've started making a Google map of places to camp in and around the Sacramento--San Joaquin River delta.  The object is to make it easier to plan a multi-day paddling trip thru the delta or down the Sacto River, and like that.  So far I've plotted about four dozen potential campsites (both public and private), but I still have to verify most of them.  Since it seems likely that some have gone out of business, are closed or offer limited services because of budget cuts (e.g. Brannan Island), have stopped catering to the non-RV crowd, or are too far from the water for portage, etc., I suppose the list will become shorter.

Cropped screen capture.  This is the link to the actual map.

The map also includes a few marinas, wrecks, places to stop for a break, grocery and convenience stores, bait shops, and other places that might be of interest to me, and maybe to you.  I haven't included "stealth" campsites--yet--because I don't know where any are, and, of course, I don't want to encourage irresponsible paddlers to camp there.  If you know of a stealth site on the map, let me know (maybe using Google map coordinates) so that I'll be able to warn campers away from them.

A few of the spots ones listed were swiped from Dan Arbuckle's Google map at his Delta Dreamer blog.
To make up for that I'll include a link to Headwaters Kayaks, his shop in Lodi.

Let me know if you can't access the map, or if the icons don't show up, or if I've got some things wrong.  And please let me know if it's useful.

There's a second map for boat-in campsites of northern California.
This one is even less complete than the other map, but it may be of use to someone.

Boat-in campsites

Various delta-bay-kayak-paddling-whatever links:
Petaluma Paddlers
BASK (Bay Area Sea Kayakers)
A Sac Bee article about a project to photograph all of the Sacramento River
Nautical charts for the bay and delta areas --the links you want will be about half-way down the page
The new location for the SF Bay area wind map
Kayak Fishing Magazine's California resource list

Some local paddler's Meetup groups:

the Lodi Paddle Club
Northern California Kayaks - Suisun City
Sacramento Paddle Pushers
Sacramento Sea Kayakers
I'll add more meetups, yahoo groups, etc., if there is any interest.

On the Petaluma River

Mark Twain, Jack London, John Steinbeck--none of them wrote about the Petaluma River, but only because they hadn't gotten around to it.

Petaluma, The City of Industry

Modified Yakima roof rack

I wanted to keep the kayak from sliding on the roof rack, and I wanted to make it easier to tie down two kayaks--if I ever had a chance to do that--so I tried a modified bar on my Yakima rack.

The roof rack modified for the kayak.

All of the wood is either fir or pine, some of which was already hanging around, and a couple of pieces from the cull bin at Home Depot. The horizontal pad is pipe insulation glued on with Goop; I don't expect this to last a long time, since the insulation isn't all that tough and the Goop-to-wood adhesion doesn't seem to be very good.  The vertical pad--not really a pad, but a high-friction surface to make the kayak stay put--in the middle is rubber from an inner tube, glued on with Titebond II. 

The two clips to the right of the vertical part are PVC conduit brackets, cut and then melted slightly with a heat gun, that ought to be able to clamp a one-piece paddle to the rack.

The thing on the left side is removable.  It was meant to be a load stop, and to provide a place to wrap the lashing straps.  I haven't used it yet, since I haven't come up with a convenient way to lock it onto the load bar.

Political Science: John Calvin and Thomas Hobbes

John Calvin and Thomas Hobbes, by `spacecoyote at deviant ART.  There seems to be a lot of Calvin and Hobbes fan art at deviantArt, some done in anime and manga styles, some with Calvin as a teenager, some of popular scenes done in the artist's own style, I think there are some with Lovecraft tie-ins, and so on.

Homemade hatch cover for the Looksha Sport LV

The kayak has a hatch aft of the cockpit, but there was no hatch cover, and I couldn't find a replacement.

Hatch cover number one.

The inside of cover #1.

 The first hatch cover was made from an exercise ball that I bought at Urban Ore to make into a flotation bag.  It has a skinny inner tube glued into the rim of the cover; the tube was cut to a bit more than the circumference of the hatch, one end was glued shut, and the other end has an NRS air valve.  (The valve is glued into a piece of vinyl tubing, which is jammed onto a PVC hose barb, which is glued to the end of the inner tube.) 

The idea is that when the inner tube is inflated the cover tightens around the hatch rim and seals it.  It seems to work, but the tube has a slow leak and the cover becomes loose after a few minutes.

I made a second cover from part of an air mattress that I had cut up to make a flotation bag.

The second cover on the hatch.

The inside, with a temporary coroplast insert.

It has another inner tube glued into it, and this time I checked the tube carefully for leaks first.  It still needs a valve (the white thing on the tube is a hose clamp that doesn't work too well), and the edges have been left untrimmed to make it easier to wrap a bungee cord around it as a temporary fix.

(Update, October 2012:  The hatch cover I've been using the last few months is a sheet of 1/4" marine plywood shaped to the hatch and covered with a rubbery plastic material that's held on with a a loop of elastic cord around the outside.  This has an 8" plastic deck plate in the middle, which makes it easy to get stuff out of the hatch from the cockpit without removing the whole cover.

This setup is heavy [and kind of ugly] and I'm thinking of making a fiberglass cover to replace the plywood, and adding a fiberglass rim to it to secure the rubbery material, which is difficult to glue to anything.)

(Later update: a fiberglass cover would have been fairly easy to do, maybe with part of a refrigerator door gasket, or a car door gasket, to make it somewhat water tight.  I don't really like working with epoxy and fiberglass, so I might try a neoprene cover made the same way as a neoprene spray skirt.  I can document and post it here if I think there's any interest.)  

Recent kayak gear DIY projects

Here's a bilge pump, made from about $2 worth of salvaged materials.  The main shaft is made from 1-½" PVC or ABS pipe--I'm not sure which it is--and the other parts are standard PVC fittings.

The pump body, made from 1.5" pipe and fittings.

The inlet valve for the pump is made from a 1 ½" PVC slip-to-threaded adapter from the junk box, a piece of a mountain bike inner tube, plastic mesh (from a craft store), and a plastic retainer thingy from the top of a juice bottle.

The bilge pump inlet valve.

The inlet valve before assembly.

The parts are glued together with Goop, and the assembly seems to work.  I might replace the inner tube rubber with some thin neoprene.

The plunger and the plunger valve.

The plunger is a ½"-diameter acrylic rod that had been hanging around in the junk box for a long time.  The inside end of the rod is attached with a screw to a plastic disc with holes in it, and a rubber washer from the hardware store on top makes it a valve.  It  works, but it seems to me that it needs to be more robust--a fiberglass or phenolic or brass or aluminum (etc.) rod would be less likely to break, and less affected by moisture; the disc ought to be thicker, and more securely attached to the plunger.

Another project is the hand paddle, which will (so rumor says) allow me to to take a photo and maneuver the kayak at the same time--that is, I won't have to try and handle the full-size paddle and the camera both at once.

The nashba hand paddle.

A smashball paddle from the junk store.

I bought a couple of "smashball" paddles from Urban Ore (from which all blessings flow) for $1 apiece, and I cut one down to what seemed like the right size for a hand paddle.  The edges were sanded down and coated with some epoxy that I wanted to use up before it went completely bad (and which, two days later, is hard but still tacky).  The plastic grips were pulled off and replaced with a tight-fitting length of old inner tube, which was glued down at either end with Goop.

The super-cheapskate emergency paddle.

The super-cheap emergency paddle is a thin plywood paddle-ball paddle that might work as a hand paddle for a while: it probably won't stand up to any hard paddling, but might be sufficient for maneuvering.  If it isn't good for either one then I'll be out of  10¢, but I think I can cope.


I began making a sorta-new roof rack and a couple of hatch covers for the Necky Looksha LV kayak that I obtained a few weeks ago...
I'll save those for another post.



Updates: the ABS body of the pump turned out to be not quite round, and so the plunger assembly tended to stick.  I've never got around to finding a different pump body.

The plies on the Nashba paddle's handle began to come apart after months of usage, probably because I hadn't sealed the wood first and it tended to stay wet under the inner-tube part.  I'll try gluing the plies back down with Titebond III or epoxy and sealing with epoxy or something.