René's old blog
Whatever I feel like posting, whenever
This site goes back some twenty-five years, so it is bound to be full of stale links and irrelevant information. It is, at best, updated irregularly.
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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,…
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The Elagoonephant revealed
The elephant sculpture in the lagoon now has a father too – the sculpture is made by the Dutch artist Serge Van de Put. The Elagoonephant The Angry Elagoonephant
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End of Season at the Diadora
Today we had the end of season event at the Diadora rowing club, where I should have spent a lot more time this summer. Most of the morning was taken up by ‘social’ regattas for each of the types of…
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Vogando di nuovo
Last year I started rowing Venetian style, voga alla veneta, where you stand up in the boat, looking forward, pushing on the oar to move forward. I continued Venetian rowing when I returned to Venice this spring, but then work…
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Spooky Venice
Photo from evening paddle on October 24th, 2009, taken in Rio di S.Giovanni Laterano.
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Vogata with VIVA
Last Sunday I was supposed to meet with Angela Nickerson, an American travel writer I’ve met via the social networking site Twitter, to talk about Venice and kayaking and much else. Two other ‘Tweeps’ were invited too, Nan McElroy and…
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Uncharted Venice – part II
A couple of weeks ago I made a map of the rii of Venice where I had never been paddling – I had made a few mistakes which I have updated on the original post. Since then I have looked…
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High Water Gondola Rowing
Rowing a gondola at high tide requires some special skills. The higher water makes for lower bridges, and a gondola is not a low profile boat that’ll just go under anyway. The gondoliere have to do all sorts of weird…
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Uncharted Venice
Venice is said to have some 150 canals, and on top of that a lot of canals were interred in the 19th century for various reasons. I was recently asked if I had paddled all the canals of Venice, and…
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The Buddhist Gondoliere
In July this year, I saw this gondola stopping to let clients disembark at Campo San Barbaba in the Dorsoduro sestiere, and it immediately caught my eye as different. Watch the foredeck, and in particular the little figure often placed…
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End to End
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The Angry Elagoonephant
The local above average size lagoon mammal can have a bad day. If the weather is foul, he is foul too.