Meet Bubba

bubba-straw-close
Originally uploaded by Microship.

It's mid-afternoon on election day as I write this, and it's all I can do to not reach for the emergency vodka. Hopefully, I'll look back and laugh at myself for being all nervous, but I really don't think Lord Halliburton and company are going to give up without a fight, regardless of the popular will.

Anyway, the best therapy when liberty is in crisis is to focus on magic carpets, so I'd like to introduce Bubba. Long-time readers of my random ramblings already know about this, but the new medium has shifted the demographic somewhat, and besides, the old one is still not properly archived...

Bubba is the manifestation of a curious full-circle phenomenon. The Microship project started in 1992, when I was on a speaking tour with BEHEMOTH and met a lovely lady at the Interop trade show in Washington, DC. During our summer romance, she turned me on to kayaking, and it was immediately obvious that it was time for me to retire the bike and move to water. That epiphany launched me on an obsessive exploration of all things kayak-related... eventually leading to the early Microship designs and the 10-year project that culminated in Wordplay and Art Throb (both of which are now sitting here in the lab awaiting their next adventure).

But consistent with my career of technomadness, I tend to be easily affected by the seductive allure of Creeping Featuritis and the dreaded BEHEMOTH Effect, leading to the formulation of the Roberts Law of Applied Mobile Gizmology:

• If you take an infinite number of very light things and put them together, they become infinitely heavy.

And so it came to pass that I have a pair of highly complex boatlets that are deliciously alluring to fellow geeks but too much trouble to take out for a quick daysail... well-suited to gonzo expeditions and hard-core technomadics, in other words, but not to simple things like ridding the mind of noise for an afternoon. The solution? Back to kayaking.

Bubba is a 19-foot Aire Sea Tiger inflatable, slower than a hardshell of equivalent length but in almost every other respect more pleasant: comfort, logistics, load-bearing capacity, stability, and overall ease of use. Naturally, I couldn't resist adding a bit of technology: solar power, packet radio and APRS for campsite email and live tracking, high-brightness LED navigation lights, and a decent GPS. I wrote an article about all this, including harsh-environment packaging, that was published recently in CQ VHF magazine. I've done lots of short local trips including a multi-stage circumnavigation of Camano Island, and towing bails have been added to both Microships so that Bubba (along with Jeannie's matching Stella) can bob along behind us as "shore-support pods." Even Microships need dinghies now and then.

If you're a paddler here in the Pacific Northwest and would like to join our motley crew of non-macho kayakers, please let me know! It's the best therapy I have ever found for days like today. Coming up: a circumnavigation of the north half of Whidbey Island, various river trips (not whitewater), and a 2-3 day jaunt to Port Townsend with overnights at Cascadia Marine Trail campsites.