Venice has been a conspicuous absentee from Google Street view for a long time.
It’s not really odd as the photos for street view are collected by special cars, and Venice is a mostly pedestrian city.
Consequently, Google now relies on pedestrians for taking all the photos for street view in Venice.
Ever since I moved to Venice I have wanted to do more rowing Venetian style, voga alla veneta, where you row standing up and looking forward while pushing the oar, basically like you see the gondolas being rowed around Venice.
When I lived on the Lido a few years back, I went rowing at the Diadora rowing club, and learned the basics there, but for the last couple of years Venetian rowing sessions have been few and far between, not more than once or twice a year.
I’ve toyed with the idea of joining one of the many rowing clubs around Venice, but most of them have limited opening hours, managed by volunteers, and my working hours are too unpredictable and changeable for the two to meet regularly.
Now, a few weeks ago, a friend of mine posted on Facebook that he wanted to sell his old s-ciopon.
Venetian boats come in many shapes, sizes and types.
The gondola is the flagship model and by far the best known type of Venetian boat, but it is but one of many.
I’ve read somewhere that there was one at least two hundred different types of boats used in the lagoon of Venice, on the inland rivers and on the upper Adriatic Sea, but that at most one third of these are still in existence, and many of those are just a few surviving examples. The Venetian association Arzanà tries to salvage as much as possible of the quickly eroding heritage.
Of the still common Venetian boats, the sandolo family is the largest, with maybe some fifteen still existing types, with names like sandolo buraneo, sanpierota, mascareta, pupparin, and s-ciopon. While varying a lot in size, from over ten metres in length to little more than five, they have much in common. Originating as lagoon working boats, they all have a low profile, a pointed horizontal bow, often decorated by an iron spear, and a cut stern mirror, varying from almost vertical to a steep angle under the boat. Some were originally used for transportation, like the large and spacious sandolo buraneo from Burano in the nothern lagoon, or for fishing, like the sanpierota from San Pietro in Volta on the Pellestrina island, or as show boats for the rich, like the elegant pupparin, the only sandolo with an asymmetric hull constructed specifically for a sole rower.
The s-ciopon is the smallest of the sandolo family, usually around 5-5½m long, 1.15 over the beam with a low board, and it was used for hunting ducks and geese in the lagoon. Armed with a huge shotgun, up to 3m long, which rested on the bow and the single cross board, the sole hunter would paddle the boat slowly through the reeves close to the birds, fire the gun into the flock and then standing up, row around picking up the dead and wounded birds.
The initial approach to the prey was done crouching in the back of the boat, slowly paddling forward using a single blade paddle, much like a Canadian canoe paddle. After the shot, the hunter would revert to rowing standing up, using two oars alla valesana, to find and pick up the birds.
The shotgun was more like a small cannon. Three metres long, with a calibre of 7cm or more, it would be loaded with black gunpowder and pellets, shrapnel or gravel. When fired it would cover an area of several metres in width, wounding and killing dozens of birds, and the recoil, cushioned by a sack full of straw, would push the boat back as much as ten metres. I’ve never seen such a shotgun, but I’ve heard some restaurants have surviving examples on display as decorations. Neither have I ever seen one of the paddles.
This kind of hunting was outlawed in the 1970s.
The s-ciopon we’ve bought will be used for shooting, but not for hunting. I’m very much looking forward to rowing around the lagoon with my camera, shooting at anything that moves.
This particular boat is some forty years old, made of wood (as opposed to marine plywood which is ever more common), and the previous owner has had it and cared for it for over twenty years. We have forcole (oarlocks) and oars suitable for rowing alone with one oar (like the gondolas), alone with two oars (alla valesana) or for rowing two persons with one oar each.
I haven’t updated this blog for ages, too much work generally, which naturally gives me no right to complain. To compensate I have picked a one or two photos from each month of 2012, showing a bit of what I’ve been doing this past year.
In January I was back in Denmark to see family, and also to see ‘my’ dog from back when I lived there. Jamil, a beautiful eight year old beagle, is now living with my ex-wife, but he is being taken good care of, and even if I already knew that would be the case, it was nice to see him again after several years.
The Italian sea kayak association Sottocosta has a yearly meet-up of the Italian sea kayak coaches, and I was invited to participate even though I don’t have an Italian coaching award. The meeting was held on the Island of Elba, which is a marvel of Mediterranean beauty, and I got to know a lot of the Italian coaches.
Since I moved to Venice several years ago I’ve been living in a lot of different places, rented rooms and apartments, on informal or short-term contracts, but in March I finally found a home. By a lucky stroke I found a small and affordable apartment smack in the middle of Venice, on one of the most beautiful historical squares of the city, the Campo S.S. Giovanni e Paolo. It is so very nice not being a nomad any more.
Kayaking season in Venice usually starts in late March or April, depending on the date of Easter. Last year we started doing tours in earnest in mid April, and we continued doing tours until November. By now I’ve been paddling down the Canal Grande several hundred times, and I’ve had many thousands paddlers from all over the world with me.
The main rowing and paddling event in Venice is the Vogalonga, which usually happens in May. This year I didn’t participate myself, but stay on the Certosa island to send people off and take over when they came back in again. In there 2012 Vogalonga there were over 1800 boats registered, and some 6-7000 persons.
We were rather unfortunate in June last year. A tornado (EF2) hit parts of Venice and a bunch of lagoon islands, including ‘our’ island of Certosa. Where the were no damages in the marina, our gear took a straight hit, and when I came out to the island later, the kayaks were strewn all over, some tossed as far as 50m, and others thrown up into the air to come down as missiles on the other boats. We lost a few boats, and still have damages to repair on some, but we were very lucky and we were back to work two days after the tornado.
I haven’t had a summer holiday for years, since I started Venice Kayak, but this year, thanks to the concerted effort of my partner Marco and our guide Loretta, I had the chance to go to Canada to see my good friend Steve Lutsch, participate in the Great Lakes Sea Kayak Symposium, and get around to see a tiny bit of the fantastic country that is Canada. The photo above is from Flowerpot Island, near Tobermory on the Bruce Peninsula in Ontario.
Having found an apartment and finally having a bit of stability in my life, next step was to adopt a dog, and I was very lucky to find Stella up for adoption in Venice. She was one year and a half old, but since her first owners hadn’t been too bright, she’d had cubs twice in her short life. She is now sterilized, slightly overweight but fairly happy, I think. I still need to teach her to not eat all the rubbish she finds on the alleyways and squares in Venice.
The Regata Storica – the Historic Regatta – is one of the main events in September, but after five years in Venice I still hadn’t seen one. Last year we finally paddled down there, found a good spot and enjoyed the show and the races.
Later the same month we went rowing ourselves, with a Dutch group of paddlers from Zwalker.nl. I’ve always enjoyed Venetian rowing, but too much moving around meant I haven’t rowed much for several years. That is definitely one of the things I want to chance in 2013.
Venice Kayak regularly ends up in the press around the world, but not all papers are equal. In October Venice Kayak was featured in the Sunday Times travelling section, and it can hardly get much bigger than that.
October was also the month when I met a beautiful girl who just so happened to drop by on the Certosa island with her friends (this photo is from December in the Tivoli garden in Copenhagen).
Living in the middle of Venice brings a wide variety of experiences. Last year saw several occasions of high tide flooding the city, including the sixth-highest level ever measured. The damages caused by the high water are immense, and go far beyond the nuisance of walking in knee deep water to get milk, or tourists swimming and diving in St.Mark’s square. This photo shows people getting about their daily affairs in the Via Garibaldi. Not glamorous at all.
In December I was back in Denmark again for a very short visit. After the tornado had damaged my favourite kayak and I had tried a Valley Pintail, I had ordered one from Valley, through Kajakhotellet in Copenhagen. The Pintail is no longer in production, Valley stopped taking orders at the end of August, and my new Pintail in the colours of the flag of Venice is probably the last Pintail to be ever made. Since we had room on the car for more, we also picked up a Valley Nordkapp LV. I’m so looking forward to paddling this beauty around Venice in the coming years.
In July I was on a brief visit to Canada and Michigan where I participated in the Great Lakes Sea Kayak Symposium.
On one of the tours I was on there was a beautiful three-part almost golden Valley Pintail, and the owner, a local coach named Belinda, let me have a go in it in the waves.
It was such a fantastic boat.
A few weeks later, again back in Venice, I spotted a notice on a British blog that Valley Sea Kayaks would terminate a bunch of older Valley models, including the Pintail:
Valley Sea Kayaks have just announced that they are intending to rationalise their range of sea kayaks. … The result of this rationalisation process is that certain models are to be discontinued permanently.
The last date for placing orders with Valley is the 31st of August this year so anyone considering purchasing one of the soon-to-be discontinued models has just over a week to make a decision and place an order.
I wrote to them, and Joshua from Valley answered by email:
Yes this is true, the Pintail will be discontinued at the end of this month.
So, I had a few days to decide if I wanted a Pintail or not.
There’s no Valley dealer in Italy, which complicated matters a bit, but in the end I ordered a Pintail through Kajakhotellet in Copenhagen, and they were very fast in getting the order in before closing time.
Hopefully I’ll get it in the colours of the ancient Venetian flag, which is orange and wine red, with lots of glitter, so it’ll be really flashy when I’m paddling down the Canal Grande at sunset 
I had already started to gloat just for the anticipation of it
Then, just the other day, Anders of Kajakhotellet posted this on my Facebook:
Hi René, just wanted to let you know that we talked to the Valley Sea Kayaks guys at the Paddle expo in Nürnberg, and your new Pintail (in Venice colours) is the last Pintail in the world!
They threw in a Kevlar keelstrip just to celebrate…. and then they chopped up the mould
So apparently my Pintail will be the very last ever made.
It will be a historic boat in a historic city.
The Redentore feast is one of the main popular celebrations during the Venetian year. It is held on the third Sunday of July to celebrate the end of a devastating plague epidemic in the 16th century, which lead to the construction of the Redentore Church on the Giudecca island.
On Satuday evening there is traditionally a huge display of fireworks, lasting almost three quarters of an hour.
This year we went to an ad-hoc party on the Giudecca island, so we had prime seats on the shore front to enjoy the fireworks with the Salute Church and St. Mark’s as a backdrop.
David H. Johnston of the Paddling Instructor blog have published an interview with me in the series “I Want Your Outdoor Job” series on the blog. I’m deeply honoured.
via I Want Your Outdoor Job: René Seindal, Owner of Venice Kayak | paddlinginstructor.com.
As seen from a vaporetto window
At this time, five years ago, I came to Venice for the first time to kayak. I had only been to Venice a two previous occasions, and only for short one day visits.
Being married at the time to an Italian, most holidays would automatically go to Italy, and I had been searching for interesting places to go paddling in Italy for a while. One day in 2006 I was looking at online maps of Italy, following the coast line starting from the west, taking notes about interesting places to go paddling, and at the very end of this virtual journey my finger reached the northernmost part of the Adriatic coast.
My interest and curiosity was immediately arisen.
Everybody has an image in their head of this iconic city, and as soon as my mental image of Venice, and my wish to go kayaking in interesting places connected immediately and I couldn’t let go of the idea of kayaking in Venice.
An initial search for outfitters, kayak rental places, local kayaking clubs and such found nothing. After a very persistent search I finally found names and email addresses of 6 or 7 persons, and I wrote an email to all of them. The only one who answered my email was Marco, my now business partner in Venice Kayak.
Marco lent some equipment to me and my friend Jes, and we came down too Venice for one week in late June 2007. We stayed in a camp site on the Lido di Venezia which Marco knew about, and he gave us some maps and a bit of instructions before we set out on our little adventure.
We moved slowly the first day, and we just paddled around the islands closest to the camp site, Sant’Andrea, the Vignole and Certosa where Venice Kayak is based now. We only ventured into the very closest parts of Venice, the area around San Piero de Casteo.
The next day we paddled around the Lido, and we didn’t even get close to the city. From the camp site we paddled around the northern end of the Lido into the Adriatic Sea, fifteen kilometres south and back into the lagoon at Malamocco, returning north on the opposite side of the Lido. It was rather longer that we had anticipated, and we returned around the time of sunset after a paddle of some 35km.
On the third day we took the vaporetto into the city and walk around, doing normal touristy stuff.
Thinking back, we must have been a bit intimidated by the prospect of paddling into the city centre. We certainly took our time. It seems silly now that I spend so much of my time roaming around the canals of Venice in a kayak, but the first time wasn’t that easy.
Only on the fourth day of our stay here did we finally venture into Venice centre by kayak. Looking at the photos now its quite amusing how many of the interesting places we found straight away. We paddled past the old cathedral San Piero de Casteo, past the Arsenale, in front of St. Mark’s, had lunch at SS. Giovanni e Paolo, did a good deal of the Canal Grande, up to the station and Piazzale Roma, down the Canale Giudecca, past some of the squeri (gondola shipyards). We came back with loads of photos, some of them are still among the best I have, and a good deal of video which we later used to promote the first tours we made to Venice the same autumn.
Based on the photos that I have, we must have spend some eight or nine hours paddling that day, criss-crossing the city.
After our Venetian padding adventure, we headed for the islands north of Venice. First to Burano to look at the glass works there, which left much more of an impression on Jes than on me, and from there north to Mazzorbo and Burano where we had a short walk to enjoy the spectacle of the multi-coloured houses of the island. Burano has ever since been one of my favourite places in the lagoon.
That was the last day we paddled in Venice that June. The day after we took the vaporetto to the Vignole islands to check out a trattoria we had spotted paddling by the day before. It was quite good, and became a common stop on our evening paddles in the following years.
We went home with thousands of photos, and a good deal of video, which we used to promote a second tour to Venice in September 2007. There was only a handful, but that too went well, and with more experience, photos and video, we started promoting tours for September next year. Those tours were sold out in early January.
That left me with a problem. I had promised to sort out the logistics of equipment and accommodation, and we needed gear for 15 persons for two weeks. I couldn’t find that anywhere, so in the end I decided to buy the equipment needed, and thus Venice Kayak was born.
In the five years I’ve lived in Venice, I haven’t had any one home for long. It’s been a lot of moving around, and basically camping out in the various places, hauling along a bare minimum of stuff to reduce the burden of the next move. Every time I thought I had found some kind of stability, something happened to mess up my plans.
I have lived for periods in a tent on a camp site, with a friend on the mainland, in a shared room in an apartment in Venice, in a small apartment on the Lido where the rain came in through the outer walls, and in a shared apartment where my flatmate suddenly left for whatever reasons, and left me with a double rent for the remainder of the contract duration.
A home is a basic thing in life, and living for prolonged periods without the stability and certainty of knowing where you’ll sleep the next night, or next week, or next month, can be very burdensome.
I have now, however, found a place I believe will be a home for the next years to come. At the very least I’ve signed a contract for a place I like, in a fantastic location, for a rent I can pay.
The location is in the centre of Venice, on the Campo S.S. Giovanni e Paolo (shown in panorama above), which is one of the major squares in Venice, and one of the most beautiful too, in my opinion.
The apartment is small, but on the third and top floor, accessed from a courtyard on the main campo, with windows on an internal courtyard. That means light, air and little noise, all properties that are very hard to find in Venice, at least at an affordable price.
The previous place I lived was on the first floor, windows on a calle about 1 metre wide, where drunk tourists often roamed up and down, howling as they fought to find their way around the labyrinth of the calle, rughe and salizade of central Venice.
None of that here, though. The only noises in my new home are the nearby church bells a few hours a day, and my landlady across the courtyard singing along with the radio or trying to get her kids to do their homework.
The building itself is old, even by Venetian standards. It originates in the 14th century, and was originally the embassy and hostel for tradesmen from Brescia, hence the name Bressana of both the front courtyard and the adjacent calle.
(this painting is from the mid 18th century – little has changed)
Most important, I have a contract for at least two years, and extendible to four years.
Its good to have a home.
Danish by birth, historian by education, paddler by passion and incurable italophile.
Venice Kayak is currently where I put most of my effort, trying to start a kayak business in the fabulous city of Venice.
Venice Kayak Paddling Planet