Cooped Up? Get Uncooped.

Read online or download PDFs of classics like Darwin's The Voyage of the Beagle and Joshua Slocum's Sailing Alone Around the World through the awesome Ria Press. Free!One book available is one of my favorite adventure books of all time, The Sea and the Jungle by H.M. Tomlinson.  

read more

Let's face it: most beach pics are boring.It seems counterintuitive. Beach photos typically have everything going for them: spectacular colors, scantily clad people having fun, bodies of water that never look the same twice, shall I go on? Yet the majority of beach pics, even the ones featuring Hawaiian sunsets and lithe, sun-kissed surfers, call to mind a quote I once heard. The quote is attributed to a photographer whose name I forget; I'm probably...

read more

My previous photo series probably gave the impression of a vast, beautiful beach upon which one could frolic and splash in playful waves. This is a false impression. First of all, the series depicts three beaches that are part of Point Reyes National Seashore: North Beach, South Beach, and Drake's Beach. None of them are really fun-in-the-sun, let's-play-beach-volleyball-style beaches.  North has a particularly ominous reputation because the shape of the sea bottom creates a vicious...

read more

 A pumpkin donut with caramel-cream fillingA puckered...um...never mindA huge, curled-in sea anemone exposed at low tide If you poke one of these, it feels like a wet garbage bag filled wtih Jello. It's got a wobbly, fleshy, slimy, squishy consistency that is both disgusting and impossible to resist. Plus, when you poke a curled-up anemone, it spits water. Seriously. It's like when you poke it, you're saing "Hello" and when it spits it's saying "I don't like...

read more

A young Finnish kayaker put together this terrific site, using flash animations, to demonstrate many sea kayaking basicis such as rolling, rescues and the forward stroke. The English is a little off, but to my eye the color schemes are gorgeous, the animated illustrtations crisp, clear and uncluttered. Unfortunately, uncooped's upload function clips this sample image way off center, but I'm sure the tech guys will get that straightened out.  URL: kayakpaddling.net

read more

I came across this video from rock and sea productions showing the Brits' take on combining the seakayking cowboy scramble with a T rescue. The video's got good production values and includes bullet points. I did a mashup, published readers' comments, and added related links:http://paddlingtravelers.blogspot.com/2007/07/cowboy-t-scramble-rescue-british.html

read more

How about a cigar box beach sculpture? Just fill the bottom of the box 2" deep with beach sand (make sure it's dry and not infested with sand fleas) and stick interesting stuff in it. This one included sand dollars, several kinds of coral, sea sponges and sea fans. It would be super coolto put candles in it too...just make absolutely sure that nothing is close enough to the flame to catch fire.

read more

If I made a list of all the cool things I've found washed up on the beach, the list would be... pretty long. A few of my favorites:-a six-armed red starfish-an enormous tree, roots and branches and all, that was sun-bleached and water-smoothed so it seemed to be made of bone-a human skull-Just kidding, I didn't really find a skull. Wouldn't that be creepy?-half a dozen abalone shells -a rubbery, 10-foot-long alien tentacle*What's the most interesting...

read more