Just a little recommendation from me. I've recently purchased a new Current Designs Extreme. This is a fun boat in all meanings of the word. Its fun to paddle, tracks like a dream and still maneuverable. The Extreme is almost 19' long and 21.5" wide and is still reasonably stable. After my departed Expedition its volume is somewhat low (after hauling chairs, tables and watermelons anything else would seem low).

I would think Current Designs had fixed all of my requests on the Expedition and put them in this new boat. Cross winds are now nowhere near the problem as with the Expedition, stability has been greatly improved and the boat carves and maneuvers like a dream. In addition by lowering the deck the boat feels like its custom made for my form.

By moving the forward bulkhead back they've still been able to keep the volume up to 360 litres a quite a respectful amount. A friend that is a professional guide that gets the 'maximum' use of his boat loves it and it still holds everything he needs for extended 10 day trips.

The only shortcoming of this boat has been the finish. I heard several reports of the Gel coat cracking and I've even chipped mine on its first trip. Current Designs is aware of this problem and says they have addressed it.

Anyhow I would recommended this boat for any experienced paddler. You will love it.

BOATS

Here's a comparison between the Dagger Vampire Bat and Eskimo Gecko kayak polo boats based on experience at the 2000 West Coast Tournament. I paddled a Vampire Bat in 3 of the 4 games, and an Eskimo Gecko in the other game.

The Vampire Bat is a little heavier boat (maybe 1-2 lb). The plastic is heavier, and more rigid than the Gecko. The Vampire Bat does have foam bulkheads fore and aft, where the Gecko does not. The Gecko has rubber bumpers attached to the ends of the boat, the Vampire Bat has a rubber end cap (the plastic of the boat is actually squared off on the ends. The Vampire Bats had adjustable foot pegs (like the Red Gecko), but no thigh braces. My knees were sore (hell, my whole body was sore!) after playing a few games in the Vampire Bat. I would glue some thin foam along the cockpit rim where the knees rest.

I felt that I could edge in the Vampire Bat easier than the Eskimo. I could also stern squirt the Vampire Bat (slightly), which I couldn't do in the Gecko. The Vampire Bat rides lower in the water (for me). Steve liked the Vampire Bat, and didn't have a problem fitting (a consideration for you big guys who were having problems squeezing into the Geckos).

PADDLES

Paddles were another interesting problem. Any of you who have played with the aluminum/plastic Prijon paddles (red blades) we have know they are heavy and it gets tiring using them. Steve & Greg have been looking into carbon polo paddles.

The SF team players Steve stayed with (Tim Johnson) is a distributor for graphite polo paddles. Steve said he had paddles stacked to the ceiling of his garage. Steve will get the web address that shows what his current stock is. Anyone can probably get one of these in a few days.

The Sac team had a great idea for those of you without bottomless wallets. They use a paddle edging from Salamander that looks like cockpit rim edging (but smaller). He gave me a few pieces that I'll put on my Aquabound paddle. I'll bring it to the club meeting tonight as well as the polo game on Tuesday. I guess Sierra South has this stuff in stock, so we could get it quickly from them too.

The story of Los Angeles's purchase (or theft, depending on where you lived at the time) of the Owens River is fairly well known. The movie "Chinatown" tells a fictionalized story based on the facts that the San Fernando Valley is now part of the City of Los Angeles because LA needed the assessed value of the land to float the bonds to pay for the aqueduct, and that the people pushing the project were secretly buying land in the Valley that they could irrigate with the surplus water that LA would not need for decades. This land was later subdivided for homes (and sold at huge profits), contributing mightily to LA's sprawl and dependence on the automobile.

Maybe a little less well known is the story of San Francisco's damming of the Tuolumne River at Hetch Hetcy valley, which reportedly broke John Muir's heart. "Dam Hetch-Hetchy! As well dam for water-tanks the people's cathedrals and churches, for no holier temple has ever been consecrated by the heart of man," wrote Muir. Yet dam it they did. He died a year after Congress passed legislation allowing the City of San Francisco to drown what many considered a valley equal in beauty to Yosemite Valley.

Where water development in the West is concerned, these two events are merely the tip of a very big iceberg. In his fascinating, revealing, and partisan book "Cadillac Desert - The American West and its Disappearing Water", author Marc Reisner exposes the rest. This book should be required reading for anyone with an interest in water issues, which are at this very moment undergoing seismic changes in California.

"There's a thing known in Federal circles as the Iron Triangle. One side - depending on the week - is either the Interior Department's Bureau of Reclamation or the Army Corps of Engineers, rival bureaucracies dependent for their existence on the building of dams and related water facilities. The second side of the triangle consists of members of Congress, shamelessly wooing votes via pork-barrel projects. On the third side are beneficiaries of water projects - farmers, contractors, merchants, local politicians and a host of secondary opportunists. Link these together, and you have a greed machine, fueled by taxpayers, that for generations has been unbeatable." (NY Times Book Review, October, 1986).

When Jimmy Carter (who, by the way, was an avid whitewater canoeist with at least one first descent in the Southeast attributed to his name) came to office in 1976 one of his first agenda items was a "hit list" of questionable water projects. Carter proposed a critical review of 18-20 of the more expensive projects with dubious economic benefits. The uproar in Congress was immediate and deafening. President Carter had waded smack dab into the middle of the good-old-boy, you vote for mine I'll vote for yours, pork barrel network with the best of intentions, but disastrous (for him) political results. Reisner makes an effective argument the President Carter's lack of a second term in office had less to do with the economy and the Iran hostage crisis than it did with Carter's "attack" on the water power structure.

The stories go on and on. The scheme to divert Columbia River or British Columbia water to the Southwest financed by two hydroelectric cash register dams in the Grand Canyon (one can still see remnants of one of the proposed dam sites at Marble Canyon). The public subsidization of huge corporate farmers in California through the provision of water at rates that don't come anywhere close to the true cost of even delivering it, much less the capital cost of the dams, only to grow crops that other farmers in the Midwest are paid not to grow. The endless search for more dam sites, the best of which are long gone, resulting in increasingly expensive projects with lower and lower economic benefits (the latest one that will not seem to die is Auburn Dam on the North Fork of the American River, which will provide only about 200 - 300,000 acre feet of additional divertible water at an estimated cost of over $2 billion and which will flood up to 50 miles of currently free-flowing river canyons).

One of my favorites involves the damming of the Little Tennessee River. Environmentalists fought the Tellico Dam project for years. Finally, when the dam was 95% complete, the Supreme Court ruled under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) that the project would harm the endangered snail darter. Congress responded by passing a law that authorized a commission dubbed the "God Squad" that was empowered to override an ESA ruling when the benefits of doing so were clearly superior to the costs (environmental and otherwise). Congresses' own hand picked committed found that the benefits of this particular dam did not even warrant spending the 5% of the remaining cost to finish it, not to mention the 95% that had already been spent. After all of this, Congress passed another bill that included a provision authored by a Tennessee Senator and Congressman approving the completion of the dam despite the Court ruling, and despite the unfavorable recommendation of the "God Squad".

I could go on for days, but I won't. More than the stories of waste, the book is about the consequences to the national interest when government bureaucracies are encouraged to run amok by special interest groups in concert with the politicians whom they support. Suffice it to say that this was one of the most entertaining, enlightening, and disturbing books I have ever read. It has opened my eyes to an issue that I had always taken for granted, and one that is as important now as it ever was. After you read the book, check out the four part mini series produced by PBS. It's almost as good.