This was the 17th annual symposium and was sponsored by L.L. Bean and held at the Maine Martine Academy in Castine, Maine USA.
I arrived around 5pm, registered and then set up camp at a nearby field. That night in one of the auditoriums, Olaf Malver of Mountain Travel - Sobek gave a slide show on sea kayaking in Panama, Viet Nam, Portugal and some other places. I think I had recently seen a rock climbing expedition along the Viet Nam coast on PBS. Olaf's job is to travel around the world, looking for neat places and things to do for his company. Tough job. Apparently there are hundreds of islands near Panama.
There were 5 different lectures, including one for kids, and on water demos each hour. Unfortunately, some hours had more than one interesting lecture while others had less interesting things going on. The on water demos were a couple of miles away so it wasn't feasible to try to include them in your schedule. There were also a couple of lectures especially for women.
On Saturday I went to Packing Your Kayak, Back Country Medicine, Repairing Drysuits (by a Kokotat rep), Wind and Waves, Tides and Currents and Dressing for paddling.
Before a big lobster and steamed clam dinner, they showed two episodes of the.Anything Wild' PBS series featuring Derek Hutchinson and the Farne Islands in the North Sea. They were experimenting with a new program format and 3/4 of the show was historical information and 1/4 was actually about paddling. We took a survey and I indicated I wasn't thrilled with the new format. Derek was there to answer questions afterwards. He's quite a character, a good story teller and pretty funny. I was kind of surprised to see that he's in his 60's now.
That night we were presented with a slide show entitled. In the Path of Giants' by Steph Dutton and his wife Heidi. Steph has paddled the west coast from B.C. to Baja and another trip along the Oregon coast in winter. Heidi is a licensed captain, (tug boats?) and used to work the Columbia River in Oregon. They have some kind of funding and/or sponsors (such as Necky, Kokatat, Werner and others) for tracking gray whales from Alaska(?) to Baja in sea kayaks for the next couple of years. www.graywhale.net. Steph is out there in 30+ foot seas, 80+ miles from shore and had a few interesting stories to tell. They are exempted from the 100 yard range the rest of us must keep from certain wildlife.
Sunday, I attended lectures on Rough Water Paddling by Steph Dutton, Reading the Weather by a local meteorologist (I missed Advanced and Localized Weather for Kayakers), some more Wind and Waves (too many formulas, etc) and Kayak Cookery. My last lecture, Kayak Cameras & Care was cancelled so I headed to off to Rockport, ME where I had a Surf Zone class scheduled for Monday.