adding a line of tutorials for ipad and phone

The thick of paddling season is up on me here in sunny soWI. Algae blooms and weeds are in all the Madison lakes (I think) like usual, but my favorite lake near Cambridge is spring fed and it remains pure pleasure. If you're a local, Lake Ripley is a diamond in the rough, hidden away just a few minutes outside of Madison. Nice little beach and pleasant paddling. It's not wilderness, but it is swimmable and remarkably weed- and algae-free. The beach remains a favorite memory from our days as the parents of little kids. Back in the day, I would also ride to Cambridge in the early morning on Saturdays and then swim in the lake for my triathlon training. Good stuff. Still never managed a high finish though. I hated running then and still do now.....

On another note, we continue selling paddlesports DVDs on Amazon and to a lesser extent Createspace, but the world seems to be migrating away from DVDs. I know our household has. So I am porting all of our DVDs over to a video tutorial format that works nicely for phones and tablets. DVDS obviously do not work on those devices. So I'm thinking it might be time to get up to date as far as display devices go.

I am curious what the market might be for paddling instruction on these devices. I think the demographics are different, but I am unclear if that works in favor of paddle instruction topics or not. I would love to read your comments on moving to these new formats and devices!
thanks!
Jeff Bach
Quietwater Films

an Advanced Solo Canoeing DVD and Something New

Hi paddlers! A few years have slipped by since things started moving along here. The Solo Canoeing DVD was our first production back in the day. I think it's time to add to the collection a bit. I would like to do an Advanced Solo Canoeing DVD this spring/summer and I need your help convincing Darren Bush to hop in a canoe and paddle it in front of the camera again. Darren and the shop he owns, Rutabaga, remains one of the best paddling and canoe loving shops you'll find in the USA. Rutabaga puts on Canoecopia every year, which is the best paddlefest, canoefest, "spring into spring" event you'll find in the country! I hope you'll consider emailing the shop or possibly calling Rutabaga and letting Darren and the staff know you're interested! Or you might consider attending Canoecopia this spring and tell him in person :) Contact info is in the video. I didn't want to write that out in text in the blog....Even better take a drive to Madison and walk the aisles of the shop. It's an awesome place. He's usually there! I think Darren did a fabulous job teaching his craft in the first DVD. Every good thing thing deserves a followup right? Help me convince him!

PS - Times have changed. I would love to hear or read from those of you that would be interested in an online video series - in addition to a DVD. thanks all Jeff Bach Quietwater Media

Z is for Zoomify

Zoomify is a neat set of code snippets that make it easy to rotate something and show a 360° user-controlled view, or a view that can be zoomed in and out. Other options are available as well. Interesting stuff if you need to show a variety of different product views that show details and capture viewer interest.

Y is for Yarpha

Another tough letter for relevancy to Quietwater Films. I have to go back to the strange words source, but again I find some relevancy. Yarpha is a peatbog with sandy or fibrous peat. Just like all those I walked around the edges of in Minnesota as a kid growing outside of Duluth. Most of these peat bogs were little swamps, likely in a kettle carved out by a glacier. So you could walk around them, or at least the one in the front of our property. Yarphas are always cool and dark. You can feel the cold humidity even on the hottest summer day. The hardest thing about yarphas is walking in them. The spruce trees are densely packed. The branches are very stiff. Tough walking, especially when you can only see about six feet in front of you.

So there it is. Yarphas, a word sure to delight lovers of swamps. Enter at your own risk.

X is for xylopyrography

I thought X would be a tough letter for relevancy to Quietwater Films. I had to step out of bounds and use a source of unusual words. So I did. Xylopyrography is the art of engraving designs on wood with a poker. Basically this is wood burning, which I have done. It might even be relevant. My very first canoe paddle back when I was a mere lad is a one piece basswood number I made myself. I wood burned a set of wolf tracks up the middle of that paddle.

Now I know what to call it, when in polite company.

W is for Lake Waubesa

Lake Waubesa is one of the four lakes found around Madison. Kegonsa is the lake closest to me. It connects to Mud Lake and then Waubesa through a short segment of the Yahara River that is one of my favorite places to paddle.

Lake Farm County Park, A Dane County park, is on Lake Waubesa. I think it is one of the best kept secrets in Dane County.

V is for Vast

My childhood years were spent in Duluth, MN. For those of you that flyover the Midwest, Duluth is at the tip of Lake Superior. Trivially speaking, Duluth (and Minnesota) lay claim to the world's largest sandbar, aka Park Point. Thanks to the ongoing grinding of the hinterlands, occurring even now as I write, performed by the relatively unknown St. Louis River. Park Point is one expression of the river delta and estuary that the St. Louis has created as it empties into Lake Superior.

Back in the day when I was a mere lad, some would say prior to global warming, Lake Superior was too cold for swimming, unless you were a lake trout, or possibly a lamprey. Nonetheless my mother would take the three of us bored kids down the hill from our sunny house on the inland plateau and treat us to a day on the beach at Park Point. This beach was (and still is) huge and beautiful. Sometimes it was even warm, to the point where the hot sand would hurt your feet. So we would run to the water to cool our burning feet, which of course would immediately freeze our feet. So back we would go, to the hot sand which still hurt. Eventually we found a good middle ground standing on the wet sand at the strandline. At some point in our childhood we learned to wear shoes. Things were primitive back then, going barefoot still happened on occasion.

As a child in the 70s, a college student in the 80s, and a father in the 00s, standing on that Park Point beach and looking out over the lake taught me the meaning of "vast". That beach was the only place I've ever been, where I could watch a ship sink out of sight due to the curve of the earth and still have one foot on land and the other foot in fresh water. We're small, the planet is big. Lake Superior is simply vast.