December 31st - Discovery Island (#101) and Mike's 2020 year of Paddling

Dan and I went for our last paddle of the year around our favourite islands. Conditions were excellent, which was a pleasant surprise after yesterday's wind and waves. I saw the usual suite of birds (https://ebird.org/canada/checklist/S78336984). I love to see ancient murrelets at this time of the year. they are so cute!

One of the pear cactus patches on "cactus islet"

We ran into a couple of other groups in "cactus islet inlet" on East Chatham and had a nice chat. You can see from the track that we had a pretty good boost from the current as we went across Baynes 

I took an old Canon S1IS camera that I found was still working and had a waterproof housing out with me today as i want to have a camera ready to take pictures of some of the birds I see. It has a 10x zoom (400mm 35mm film equivalent) which may help me get some good ID shots. Here are few that worked out. Shooting telephoto from a kayak is tricky!

Glaucous-winded gull - click to enlarge

a group of glaucous-winged gulls - click to enlarge

some of the Steller sea lions off Seabird Point - click to enlarge

click to embiggen!

17 km, YTD 905 km

Mike's 2020 year of paddling

Due to being home in Victoria from March onwards, I managed to get quite a bit of paddling in, easily exceeding my more recent goal of 50 paddles and 500 km. I am happy with 101 paddles and 905 km. This is the end of my 15th year of bloging every paddle and the totals are adding up! Over 1400 paddles and almost 15,000 km logged. I am sure that having the blog helps me get out on the water more often than I might otherwise.

Year #	Year	# paddles	km total	km per paddle
1	2006	77	1273	16.50
2	2007	66	1098	16.60
3	2008	75	1080	14.40
4	2009	116	1381	11.90
5	2010	124	1214	9.80
6	2011	105	1217	11.60
7	2012	87	1001	11.50
8	2013	92	1063	11.60
9	2014	98	911	9.30
10	2015	120	1025	8.50
11	2016	129	1076	8.30
12	2017	86	728	8.47
13	2018	69	548	7.94
14	2019	57	427	7.49
15	2020	101	905	8.96
	Totals	1402	14947	10.66

I hope to get lots of paddling in during 2021 as I am not expecting to get out on ships for a few more months.