June 21, 2015
Common Loon Adult And Chick, Lac Le Jeune Provincial Park, British Columbia, Canada, and the Wilderness Systems Tsunami 125 Kayak

This image is from yesterday morning when we spent a lot of time photographing the Common Loon (Gavia immer) adults feeding their two chicks on Lac Le Jeune. The chicks are getting older so the adults are changing the way they feed the chicks to start teaching them how to hunt. I returned to True Outdoors in Kamloops, BC, three days ago to buy a kayak. I sat in a Wilderness Systems Tsunami 125 again, a model that's slightly larger than the Tsunami 120 that I had rented and which I thought was too big to use as a photography platform. I found that the deck in front of the cockpit isn't too high like I thought it was and it was much more comfortable than the 120 because the cockpit is larger. That makes it much easier to enter and exit with my not-so-good left knee and I can position my legs such that neither of my knees start to hurt after 2.5 hours in the boat. :) I was sold and easily discarded the option of buying the beaten-up 120 that I had been renting.

Because the deck ahead of the cockpit is higher on the 125 than the 120, I made a new camera platform to mount my Wimberley Head II on the deck in front of me at roughly the same height as it had been on the 120. I have some minor modifications to make to the camera platform and then I'll paint it camo green so it'll blend in better with the bright red kayak. :)