René Seindal

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.

January

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.

February

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.

March

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.

April

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.

May

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.

June

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.

July

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.

August

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.

September

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.

October

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).

November

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.

December

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.

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.

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.

From above  (or below)

If it is possible to truly love a kayak I love my Skim Dex. It is probably the seat I sit in the most from April to October.

Its very hard doing justice to the experience of paddling down the Canal Grande after dark, with only a cheap point-and-shoot camera, but I’m not going to bring my SLR in a kayak.

Somehow myself, Steve Lutsch from Canada and my friend Loretta from Venice, end up in a Canadian-French TV programme, called “À faire en Italie – La liste de Françios-Etienne”.

I’ve only seen this little bit, so I have no idea what kind of figure I cut in the rest of the show.

For almost four years I’ve been doing my kayaking tours of Venice from a camp site on the Lido di Venezia.

It has been, and is, in many ways a good launch spot close to Venice, but it is not without its drawbacks.

The shore there is a road which is 1-2m over the water level, depending on the tide, so we launch one at a time from an inflatable platform.

For many of our your guests it has been an almost intimidating experience. One of the busiest shipping lanes in the lagoon passes just in front of the place, and the waves from each passing boat rebounds from wall causing the platform to bounce up and down.

Even if the waves are at most 1-2ft, they rebound and intersect, making it look violent and dangerous for the inexperienced holiday paddlers that often come for our tours. I’ve seen many scared face there in the last four years.

It isn’t really dangerous, but it looks so, and often perception is just as important as reality.

What can at times pose a risk is the 2 knot tidal current in from of the place, which can easily cause people to drift away before we have the last of the group on the water.

Once everybody is in the boats it is necessary  to cross the shipping lane immediately, heading for the calmer waters across the canal. This too can be intimidating for inexperienced paddlers.

For the last month or so I have done the tours from a beach on the island of Certosa, just on front of the old launch spot. We can easily see the 500m across, but it couldn’t be more different.

Its a shallow beach on those calmer waters we head immediately for from the other side.

Launching from a beach like that does have its advantages.

There is practically no fear factor. Little could be and feel safer than a beach without waves.

Launching is so much faster when you can line the boats up on the beach and send them off simultaneously or in very fast succession. Likewise, getting people in, out of the boats and the boats back in storage is way faster too.

The passage from the beach to the first stretch of open water is a canal following the shoreline of the island, separated from the shipping lane by sand banks where most waves break. The area in front of the beach is therefore very sheltered and safe, so there’s little problem in launching ten beginners before I myself get in the boat.

There are some disadvantages too.

When people feel safer they also act more by their own accord. It is not necessarily a bad thing, but it makes it a lot harder keeping a check on what is going on. It is, for example, more likely that somebody very eager will just set off, without lifejacket or spraydeck.

Also gear and persons tend to get quite a bit more dirty when launching from a beach full of sand, mud and algae.

The water is very shallow at times, and if people don’t land in the right spot they can run aground rather far from the beach, and if the land on the wrong part and step out, they’ll be in the mud to their knees.

In any case, the minuses are minor and nothing more that can be handled with a bit of well placed instructions.

I still don’t know where operations will be for the rest of the season. Nothing has been decided yet.

When paddling around Venice we often see slightly weird boats around — different shapes, odd names, alternative behaviour — but the other day I encountered something in a category of its own.

I tried to get a good photo of it, but waterproof point-and-shoot cameras aren’t always that great for taking photographs, so this was the best shot I got.

We have some of the usual mix of boats here.  There’s the gondola, the taxi, the cargo boat and a building barge:

Then in the middle there’s this unidentified floating object

It appears to be the workmen from the barge in front of Palazzo Grassi, who got the sudden urge to cross the Canal Grande on a rather busy stretch, using some kind of steel box and shovels for paddles.

They did get across, but I’m not quite sure it qualifies as safe paddling

Yesterday we had one of the first acqua alta‘s of the winter. It wasn’t exceptionally high, reaching a level of 100cm above the historical average water level, but it was just enough to wet a few places around the city, and more than enough to ground all but a few of the gondolas of the city.

The basis of the tide is the gravity of the sun and the moon, which gives the astronomical tide. In Venice the astronomical tide is from approximately from -40cm to +70cm at spring tide, and from 0cm to +50cm at neap tide. The astronomical tide is predictable and can be calculated for years in advance. A year’s worth of tables are available on the city’s web site.

On top of the astronomical tide comes the meteorological tide. Sustained strong E or SE winds in the Adriatic Sea push more water up into the Adriatic and then into the lagoon when the tide is rising, and impede the water flowing out with the falling tide, causing both lows and highs to stay above the level of the astronomical tide. The meteorological tide can be forecast for several days in advance.

The municipal tide forecast office publishes updated forecasts several times each day, for three day periods.

Yesterday’s high tide consisted of an astronomical high tide of +41cm, and a meteorological tide of +59cm. The wind in the lagoon was F4 NE in the morning, rising to F5 NE in the afternoon.

We went paddling, at bit with the hope that we could have a bit of fun on St. Mark’s square in a kayak

A couple of hours before the expected high the water was already at the edge of some campi, like here at the Campo dell’Arsenale. I often take people under the the bridge behind the lions, but there was no chance of doing that today, so we paddled back out to the Bacino S. Marco to enter the next canal.

At the Campo SS. Giovanni e Paolo, or Campo Zanipolo in Venetian, the water was also at the edge of the square, without spilling over.

We had timed our arrival at St. Mark’s to match the highest point of the tide, and as we arrived under the Ponte di Paglia (from where you can see the Bridge of Sighs), the water was washing over the pavement on the left.

The wind didn’t make itself much felt inside the city, but outside it had a free reign. In the city there were no gondolas about, because the level of the tide blocked their passage under most bridges. This was the only gondola we saw working all day. It does look like its can be a cold, wet and rather hard job being a gondoliere in Venice.

The tide was not enough to paddle across St. Mark’s. There were maybe 20cm of water on parts of the square, but the parts closest to the bacino are higher, just about the 100cm mark, so there was no water just behind the gondolas, unlike further in towards the basilica.

This building in Rio S. Zulian, just behind the basilica, was clearly build when the level of the city was higher and the tides lower.

The Campo di Guerra had a bit of water on it.

The Fondamente della Regina in the Rio Baratteri had the water up to the edge of the fondamenta.

This gondola in Rio delle Procuratie is not going anywhere with this tide,

and neither will these

There are some low lying areas around the Rialto too

including the Erbaria where the cafés often have tables outside, only today their guests would have gotten wet from above and from below.

The Ca’ d’Oro is on the best preserved Gothic buildings on the Canal Grande, dating from the 15th century. It is a nice portico towards the canal, albeit a bit humid today.

Not many have done this before

The inside of the Ca’ d’Oro is a museum, where they have boats too, and water on the floor.

Two hours after the highest level of tide the water was still high in the Cannaregio area, as here on the Rio della Misericordia. Normally in Venice you’d step down into a boat, but here you’d step up into it.

When we started heading back home it quickly became clear that the NE winds in the lagoon were well above their remaining strength, so I decided to tow the two boats back, and let the couple return to the camp site with the vaporetto. It was a bit complicated towing two boats down narrow canals in a headwind, but at least I was moving forwards. When I arrived in the Canale S.Pietro and the Rio Quintavalle, which leads out of Venice in a NE direction, the wind was so strong that I only managed to move forwards at a snail’s pace.

In front of me I had the Canale delle Navi, which is one of the busiest canals around Venice. It is the main passage from central Venice and the Lido to Murano and the airport.

The time was about an hour before sunset. Light was waning, the sky was overcast and it was raining a bit. The canal in front of me was full of two feet waves with white foamy crests.

I would have been foolish trying to cross it into a F5 headwind with two empty boats on a rope, moving at less than a knot, with vaporetti and taxis moving up and down the canal around me.

Consequently, I entered a little harbour on the island of Olivolo, where I hauled the two kayaks up and tied them safely to a railing, before I took my own kayak and started the paddle back to the Lido to meet the other two.

Without the two kayaks behind me I made good progress and crossed the Canale delle Navi quickly, only meeting a couple of vaporetti. They crew pointed at me and made some gestures that probably meant they didn’t think I were in any kind of sensible place and situation at that time. They might have been right, but I still made it to the other side.

Just as I came across the canal and passed the elephant sculpture in front of the Certosa island, lightning cut across the sky over the Lido. Thunder followed a while later, indicating the lightning was some two kilometres away. Somehow the weather forecast for the day had let that part out, or I would have cancelled the tour completely.

I paddled around the Certosa island as close to the shore as I possibly could for wind and waves, and found some shelter in a small canal behind the Sant’Andrea fortress. A few more lightnings greeted me along the way, now a bit closer.

I waited a bit, and spend the time finding some headlamps and glowsticks in my hatches, while I counted the time between lightning and thunder until I had the impression that the thunderstorm was moving down the Lido over the sea, away from me.

The crossing from Sant’Andrea to S.Nicolò is only about 250m, but its the main canal from the sea to Venice, used by everything from small motorboats to fifteen storey tall cruise ships. I paddled as fast as I could, it was now very dark, looking left and right to make sure any other traffic would spot my blinking headlamp and avoid me. There were nobody else stupid enough venture out, it seems, because I saw nothing.

I was more or less in the middle of the canal, when my phone rang (playing one of my favourite Leonard Cohen songs), lightning blasted across the sky and thunder roared simultaneously. The thunderstorm had turned around and it was now straight above me. I sped up (and didn’t answer the phone).

Once across, I hauled by kayak out of the water, carried it into the camp site and started taking my inflatable platform up.

My guests called back, came back after a while, and we got the last few things in order before I closed the gate and headed back home. The couple were as wet as me, and probably more tired. We all got a bit more adventure than we had bargained for.

I still have two kayaks tied to a railing on the Isola di S.Pietro, and will have to go and fetch them tomorrow.