NORTH SEA OUTRIGGER CANOE AND SURFSKI CHAMPIONSHIPS (NOCC)

This weekend surfski- and outriggercanoe athletes gathered in Hoek van Holland for the NOCC - Europe's annual rendez-vous for canoe lovers, every second weekend of July. Tomorrow the downwind races from Kijkduin to Hoek van Holland (11 km) are scheduled. More info: http://www.nocc.be

Vlielandkamp 2009 - Kids at work...

School holidays in Woerden started this week. Teenagers are walking in and out all day. Friends of our kids are joining at breakfast, lunch and dinner, organising LAN-parties, game- and film-evenings in our home; it's a happy bunch here.

Meanwhile I am busy preparing the Vlieland-seakayakweek for the NKB. Documentation (syllabi, programm-schedules, lists of groups etc.) must be sent to the participants, guests, crew and coaches. Making this paperwork ready for sending is a lot of work. So I gratefully made abuse of all the "work-force" in the house and asked the kids to help with writing addresses, filling envelopes, pasting stamps.
With 5 helpers it took 2 hours to sort everything out. The reward for the team was a big apple pie.

Let's hope nothing is mixed up and that the coaches and participants of the beginners-, intermediate-, advanced- and touring-groups all receive the right set of information!
Just in case: the syllabi for NKB-Zeevaardigheid and NKB-Zeevaardigheid-Extra and some extra information are also available as a download on the NKB-website (discipline "zeevaren" -> downloads).

Waterproof camera group test on dpreview.com and the new Olympus Pen camera

Don't be mislead by the picture: none of the waterproof cameras floats. Dropping the camera in the water means losing your camera...

DPreview.com has just posted a group test on the current waterproof Digit Camera's. It's one of the rare serious and thorough tests. The conclusions of DPreview: performance of most waterproof digital camera's is poor compared to standard compact cameras. The Canon and Pentax cameras offer the best image quality within the group. The Canon is also the most responsive camera, leaving the rest far behind. Both Olympus cameras in the test perform disappointingly. The conclusions of DPreview match widely with my personal experiences.

And now a good word for Olympus (the maker of the legendary OM-1...): Not a waterproof, but a very interesting camera for travelling is the new Olympus Pen. It's a retro design inspired by the PEN half-frame 35 mm film cameras of the sixties and seventies. Forget history, the new concept is just perfect for light-weight-travelling: a compact-sized camera with exchangeable lenses, a (almost) DSLR-like picture quality and a video mode in HD-quality. Without the mechanical mirror concept of a DSLR the micro-four-thirds concept also promises to be less fragile. It has taken a (too) long time before anyone decided to make a digital camera with such a concept. If I had not recently invested in a complete new dslr system...


Comment of the makers to this remarkable video:
This is the PEN Story in stop motion. We shot 60.000 pictures, developed 9.600 prints and shot over 1.800 pictures again. No post production! Thanks to all the stop motion artists who inspired us. We hope you enjoy :-)

Free download of the music at http://olympus.eu/penstory/

Some of the comments we have read here suggest that we should mention the creator of "A wolf loves pork", Mr Takeuchi Taijin.
While we were looking for a way to realise a story describing "a journey through time" based on printed images, we were inspired by Mr Taijin's brilliant work. For this reason we intentionally quoted his work in our little movie while showing full respect to his original idea. We didnt mention his name because we did not want to do so without his prior agreement.
However after considering some of the comments posted here we have decided to add credits to him and his work, which we obviously absolutely love.

European Championships 2009 Brandenburg - Final K4 Women

Missed the European Championships in Flatwater Racing last week? Here is a video of the Women K4 finals - with the German ladies doing a great performance. Fantastic!

Broken Group Islands, British Columbia

Volkskrant Reizen today's issue covers a top-seakayak-destination. Keep on dreaming...