Soaring

So my partner Rebecca has a nice little habit of buying be life threatening presents for my birthday. These presents are usually in direct alignment with some of my major life goals and this is a very good thing! Past incarnations of this gift include paragliding from the top of Grouse Mountain in BC to bungee jumping from a tower crane over the Ottawa River. This year she bought me an introductory glider flight at SOSA, the local gliding club that happens to be 12 minutes down the road from our awesome new house.

Becoming a pilot has ALWAYS been on my life list but it wasn’t until today that I realized how close that goal actually could be. My Grandfather was a pilot in the war and eventually a glider pilot but I have to admit, like most of “those things”, I had no idea really what that meant (until today). Sure, I have seen gliders soaring up there on thermals and it looked interesting but that was pretty much that. I was too “busy” caught up in the day to day of life down here on terra firma. One day I would become a pilot and somehow I was happy with that reality.

Well, “one day” turned out to be today as we pulled up to the field in Rockton ON on a BEAUTIFUL Thanksgiving weekend fall day. There were people and dogs and gliders and tow planes everywhere. Not at all like a normal airport where humans are securely insulated from any and all forms of danger. Here, if you weren’t on constant lookout I am pretty sure that you would be mowed down in a heart beat. Me, I like scenes like that. I am a firm believer in natural selection and felt immediately at home.

Right away I knew I was in the right place as the field “field manager” turned out to be my original open water scuba diving instructor. He was one of the best instructors I had and I really liked him. Bit of a coincidence there but then I thought about it and realized, not really, as adventurous spirits tend to gravitate towards adventurous things (like gliding and scuba). Paul sorted me out and before I knew it I had upgraded my “tourist” single sight seeing flight to a more realistic 5 flight package leading directly into flight school and solo pilots license. Makes sense to me!

The first flight was amazing. Once we cut loose from the tow plane and the soaring world became quiet and all I had to do was point the stick in the direction that I wanted to travel. Magic! Not many thermals today but I got hooked on just what I had for that brief time up there. Man and machine become one and get to soar like a bird. Awesome!

By the end of the day I had three flights under my belt and I felt like I started to understand some of the stuff the instructor was saying. Things like:
-relax - let the plane fly itself.
-2 fingers! It only takes two fingers (and a thumb) on the stick to fly.
-Stop yelling so much, you’re hurting my ears!

Yes, it was awesome. I am hooked and I can safely say that I have another expensive hobby to contend with. I am on the path towards becoming one with the skys. I’ll add that to fire and water. What a terrific Thanksgiving and a wonderful birthday present. Thank you Rebecca and thank you life for providing oh so much fun!

Scuba - Why?

What is it about scuba diving that gets me so excited? Yes, there are periods of time where I put it away on the shelf and don’t do it for a while but then I always come back to it. And it seems with more vigour and passion than before. This summer for instance I was forced to abandon my relatively new hobby (no, wrong word - lifestyle...no, headspace...no, REALITY - perhaps that’s it). I was so busy with this schoolhouse project and my work with Circus Orange that I was starting to crack. Something had go go for a while and scuba drew the short straw. Unfortunately until scuba pays the bills for scuba (and everything else) then it won’t be top of the food chain time commitment wise. That is fine. It is nice to go away and then come back again. I can look at it with new eyes. Like now. I am looking at them through the eyes of a homeowner who doesn’t live in Toronto, a ten minute drive to Humber Bay on Lake Ontario. I still dive Humber but it is an hour drive and that is just fine. I spend an hour thinking about the dive before hand and then digesting it afterwards in the truck. I will also seek out other sites both near and far to satisfy by dive bug. I won’t take what is close and handy but rather what I want to do. Tobermory, for instance, has been on my radar huge with two weekend visits over the past month.

I look up at my goals wall and there is a 14’ Zodiac and an Aquatica housing for my 5D. Now that I feel I have transitioned from the beginner diver level it is time to start adding layers. I will start to fold in some of my other passions, like photography, into the mix. A boat seems a natural progression so I can dive where and when I want.

Yes, scuba is here to stay. I look forward to seeing where it takes me over this next year. And the year after that and...

Real Estate Investing - Talk About Scary!!!

I think that one of the scariest things a person can do is attempt real change in their life. Well, this is the path that I am presently embarking on. Oh don’t worry, I’ll still blow stuff up, climb up scary mountains and get my cave diving certification (this year!!!). However, another thing that I am going to accomplish is to become a professional real estate investor. I guess I am at that point in my life where I am starting to think about the rest of my life and the idea of some security and cash flow seems like a sensible idea. Boy, didn’t that sound all growed up. After all, how else am I ever going to afford the luxury or some of those real hardcore adventures that I have planned without some serious cash behind it to make them a reality? I mean, come on, a scuba diving rebreather setup is $15,000 just for a start!

How does one become a professional real estate investor? Well, I started out with a boat load of books (and I read them too!). Stuff like Rich Dad, Poor Dad and other general financial planning, investing books. I then transitioned to more specific stuff like David Lindahl’s Multi Family Millions that told me how to buy whole apartment buildings and transition them from money loosers (or break eveners) to cash generating machines. All purely hypothetical at the moment but exciting to read about and imagine.

I am the kind of guy that when I get into something I send out as many feelers in as many directions as I can. I asked everyone I knew who I thought knew a thing or two about real estate and I got some great leads and information there too. The internet is a great place to search for this stuff so I did a bunch of looking there as well. It wasn’t long before I came across this group based in Edmonton called Fast Track To Cash Flow. They provide real estate investing seminars and training among other things. Next thing I know I am here in Edmonton trying to pull myself together after sitting all day in a conference room in a hotel. A group of 125 of us spent the day listening to a whole bunch of diverse speakers who filled our heads with strategies, advice, and experience. I feel like a balloon about to burst and there is still one more day of it. Sitting on my butt in a conference centre all day is not my first idea of fun but believe it or not I am very excited. Really looking forward to getting back home to start to put it into practice. First step, start finding real estate deals. Second step, find a group of investors who want in on these deals and start buying property. Very crazy and scary and I can’t wait!

I set up a web site for this new endeavor (of course). No, not much there yet but it will be the place to go to find out what Big-Wheel Investments is up to. I’ll keep you posted on this and all the future adventures that this new career path sponsors. And hey, if you have a real estate deal or want in on an investment let me know!

Ice Flow Racing - Another Strange Thing to Do in Canada

Yesterday I participated in the Peterborough Ice Flow Race sponsored by the Ontario Underwater Council. This is one of those strange side line kind of things that scuba divers from Canada do to while away their winters and make things more exciting. Basically you get a team together and push giant-ass ice flows down the river wearing wet or dry suits, fins and scuba BCDs. It is not diving at all but you are in the water and kicking like mad.

To be honest that only real reason I took part was because this event sounded totally ridiculous and I just love that. There is nothing I enjoy more than seeing the blank looks on people’s faces when it comes up in conversation that I did ____ (enter ridiculous hobby or event here) on the weekend. The idea of pushing huge chunks of ice down a half frozen river fit this category nicely.

The teams could be anywhere from 8-16 members. Our team, The Frozen Frogs, had just 8 as that was as many folks as we could talk into the madness. The ice flows were twenty feet square and twelve to sixteen inches thick. This maybe doesn’t sound like much but if you consider the weight of a piece of ice this size you get some pretty impressive numbers. Ice weighs 92% of what water would weigh. If the ice flow was made of water and was 20’ X 20’ X 12“ it would weigh 24,971 pounds. As ice it would weigh 92% of that coming in at 22,973 pounds or just over 10 tons. Pretty impressive! It was stressed to us by the organizers that we really didn’t want to get caught between the ice flow and anything in its path. Good call!


The race was a staggered start with the seven teams leaving at five minute intervals with best overall time winning the prize. It was our first year so we really didn’t know what we were doing but we were told that the more you keep your ice flow in the current the better. Makes sense - let the river do the work. The starting position was sheltered just below a lock north of Peterborough Ontario and when we started it was all human power to get out in the river and catch the current. There was a bit of stress at the start as we were not sure if we would get out past the marker buoy in the river and if we hit that we would have been disqualified. We just squeaked by and were off. Once we were in the current and underway things steeled down a bit. We kicked pretty much the whole way through to the finish but also spent a lot of time moving around the ice flow to change our direction and steer. It was pretty hard work and by the time we crossed the finish line 59 minutes later I was definitely ready to stop kicking.

The winning team came in at just over 42 minutes and we were 5th overall which we felt pretty good about as it was our first year. Thanks to everyone involved particularly the OUC, my team led by the mighty Davis, Helen and Neil for putting us up and cheering so loud and to my darling Rebecca who gracefully volunteered to cook hot dogs that she can’t even eat for a bunch of ornery divers.

All the photos in this post are by Neil Muscott. Thanks Neil!

Different Kinds of Diving

On my way back home from vacation in Cozumel Mexico. What a great time it was. I had the opportunity to do 13 dives in my 10 days away and, though all of them were wonderful, safe, fun dives there were some distinct differences. Most of my diving was on the colorful reefs off the south west portion of the island. This type of reef diving is what attracts so many tourists to this area and I can see why. From my first reef dive to the last I was blown away by the color and diversity of life down there. Bare in mind, I live in Toronto and I am not a fair weather diver. I dive where I live which is usually in the great lakes, the St. Lawrence river and Tobermory. We dive all winter long and it is awesome! Sure, there is lots to look at back home but mostly we dive on ship wrecks and other various sites that certainly lack the diversity of life and color found here.

There are literally hundreds of dive companies on the island of Cozumel and I dove with two of them. Basically you get to the peer with all your gear, load on a boat (cattle boat) and head out to the site with a dive master and 6-12 other divers you may have never met before. Rebecca doesn’t dive so I am almost always on my own paired up with someone on the boat. There is not a lot of time to get to know your new dive buddy and before you know it you are all in the water descending towards the reef. Everyone will have basic training and a “C” card but probably not much more. Many of these folks only dive on vacation which is probably once or twice a year and let’s just say that many of them could be a little more fit. Though diving is not particularly strenuous things can happen down there where you will require good fitness. Diving is physical and the best divers I have met are always in good shape. It helps with pretty much everything about the dive from your efficiency in the water to the bodies ability to off gas the absorbed nitrogen. The gear is very safe but let’s face it, you are breathing underwater and that should never be taken lightly.

On my reef dives I almost always felt a little rushed, a little un prepared and usually unsure of my buddies skill level. This adds stress which in turn detracts from the dive. I witnessed dive masters yelling at a boat full of clients to “just get in the water and get down now” to tanks falling off BCDs underwater (that were put on by the dive company) and even two instances of decompression illness. Most of the dive companies schedule the first dive as a deep dive (80-130’) and the second a shallow (30-60’). We always take a “surface interval” between dives to allow the body to off gas nitrogen but this is often shorter than it could be. My buddy who got decompression Illness got separated from his group at over 100’ so he came up (maybe a little to quickly). When he was up he saw the group below so he descended to meet up with them, finished the dive and promptly felt tingling limbs and fainted. He spent 5 hours in a decompression chamber and is fine but it didn’t sound like a good experience. At the end of the day each diver is responsible for their own well being but I think the dive operators could possible be doing a better job as well. My buddy was diving in the morning and afternoon so he was basically doing deep, shallow then deep dives again which is not good. He should have known better (and did) but perhaps the dive operator should have had a chat with him too.

My other dive here was my cavern diving experience. My guide spent over an hour briefing me on the dive at the cafe before we headed out and we spent a bunch more time at the cenote discussing everything about the dive. By the time I was in the water I knew exactly what to expect so I saw a lot more along the way. There was no rush at all and I was put in such a relaxed, confident state that I had my best dives ever and I felt that I dove better than I had in a long time. The difference was that I felt great, relaxed and I was in exactly the right state of mind for the dives. I will admit that cavern diving is a whole different deal than ocean dives but I don’t think either should ever be taken lightly. You can die on any dive and it is so important to dive consciously. That means being prepared for the dive, no matter how “easy” it is. Not drinking your face off the night before, eating too much for breakfast or not hydrating yourself. I believe that you should stay fit and healthy and practice, practice, practice. Good diving doesn’t happen by accident. If you haven’t been in the water for a while do some pool dives at home before getting back in the water.

My advice is to dive safe and dive often. Dive with god dive operators who come with references from folks you respect. Spend time on the dive forums (here is mine) and become part of a conscious community. Don’t dive if it doesn’t feel right. Thumb (end) the dive if anything feels wrong in the water. Get a good buddy and if you are diving with people you don’t know get to know your new buddy. Communicate! Stay fit and stay hydrated! I strongly believe in practicing skills and drills. Don’t get paranoid but spend some time thinking about things that could go wrong and then mentally run through how you would deal with them. As my friend Will Gadd calls it, “the positive power of negative thinking”. Rehearse bad situations in your head and practice your responses to these situations. Do this over and over. You can do it anywhere and it is an invaluable exercise. On a plane, waiting for a taxi, wherever. This mental rehearsal combined with physical drills and practice will make you a much better diver (or anything else) and more capable with whatever the waters send your way.

These are my thoughts on diving as I sit in the departure lounge at Cozumel airport. Goodbye 79 degree water and colorful reefs full of fish, sharks, turtles and chorals. Hello Humber Bay and 34 degree winter dives. Bring it on!

Never Say Never - Cavern Diving Rocks!

I remember quite distinctly a few years ago watching some documentary on Mexican cave diving and saying that that must me the craziest, stupid, scary thing ever. Certainly something that no sane person like myself would ever attempt (this coming from someone who once made a living juggling chain saws). That was before I was a diver (obviously) but I figured that even if I was to dive I certainly wouldn’t do a thing like that.

Guess what I did today? Tough one huh... Yup, I went on a cavern diving tin Mexico and IT WAS AMAZING!!!

We are staying in Cozumel and the cenote (mayan for well or cave opening) diving is mostly on the main land south of Playa Del Carmen. It was a bit of an adventure to get there with all our gear. Taxi to ferry, ferry to Playa Del Carmen, cab to Puerta Aventuras to meet our guide then a pickup truck ride to the cenote.

If you don’t know much about cave and cavern diving let me just say that it is pretty much the bleeding edge of diving right now. The main gist of it is that you can’t fuck up as you are in a water filled cave deep in the ground. With most open water diving situations there is always the option (though usually not a good one) to surface and get back to where the air is. Not so much with cave and cavern diving. Therefore safety, redundancy and skill mastery are foremost with this kind of diving. You surface at the cenote opening and deal with what ever happens under water. Fix it or die!

Cave diving is a very serious undertaking and involves a bunch of intense training and loads of certifications. The difference between cave and cavern diving is that with cavern diving you can basically always see the light from the opening so that you can therefore always find your way back to the exit point (surface). There are some other things too like you can’t go more than 200’ linear feet from the surface, you can’t go deeper than 70’ and there has to be 50’ of visibility. Let me make one thing very clear - I am not a cave diver. I am actually not even a certified cavern diver as that involves a three day course that I didn’t have the time for this trip (already making future plans though..). What I did today was a cavern tour. I hired a certified guide, Natalie from Diablo Divers and she made sure I got back in one piece. I had to have decent skills under water like good buoyancy and trim but she did all the hard stuff like make sure we didn’t die etc. That being said, she was kind enough to drill into my head the path home even if she vanished through some mole hole in the space time continuum or whatever and I found myself in there all alone.

The first site was named Ponderosa and is basically just a dirt road off the highway. The road leads to a parking lot and a hole in the ground full of fresh water. It felt great to get in the water and escape the heat. Once we submerged a whole new dimension opened up and it was diving like I had never experienced before. The viz (diver slang for visibility) was awesome as the water is so pure and clear. Everything took on a dreamy etherial quality with shafts of light streaming down through holes in the cavern roof. Air expelled from previous divers is pooled in little pockets on the ceiling that looks like shimmering mercury. We follow a set guidline that leads us of a tour of the cavern. Along the way we go up and down and pass various other openings in the cavern rooftop (other cenotes). We don’t surface at these other openings but enjoy the amazing light show they provide for us below the surface. At times the roots from the mangroves above can be seen extending down into the clear water. Spectacular!

The highlight of the dive for me had to be the halocline. It is a long story but basically the lower depths of the caves are salt water and the upper levels fresh. The halocline exists where these two densities of water meet. Most of the cave is clear but this couple of foot deep layer of cloudy water exists between the two. Natalie described it best when she said it would look like swimming through vaseline. Sure enough, she dropped into the halocline and her form pixelated before my eyes. She was “fuzzy” and it felt like my senses were seriously messed. If I hadn’t been told about this phenomena in advance I would have freaked. When I dropped into the halocline everything went really weird. I couldn’t read my dive computer a foot in front of my face and all I had to follow was Natalie’s goopy, distorted form in front of me. Once below the halocline everything jumped back into focus and the water got warmer. It was amazing!

One of the rules of cave diving is the rule of thirds. We budget a third of our air for the trip in, a third for getting back and a third for any emergency should one come up. Therefor once I used up a third of my air I signaled Natalie and we turned around and headed back the way we came in. Simple.

Back in the truck and of to Tajma ha. Another cavern site in the middle of nowhere. This time the dive involved a lot more ups and downs and slightly tighter quarters. Loads of formations (stalactites, stalagmites etc.) and fossils. Oh yeah, and another one of those wicked haloclines. When we got back to the surface there were a whole load of dorky tourists standing there staring at us. That was kind of weird.

I have to say that the dives today were two of my my favorite dives ever and the whole experience ranks right up there with pretty much anything else I have done. It was a spectacular day and I am so thankful to have had such an amazing trip. It just goes to show you. In life never say never. I have to say a heart felt thank you to our awesome guide Natalie and to Rebecca for coming along for the ride.

I do apologize for the picture quality of the dive pics. They are just video stills from helmet cam. I didn't want to take still camera along on this first experience as I find it distracts from diving that that was my focus today. I'll upload video upon my return to Canada and post here.

Scuba Diving - Cozumel VS Canada

Happily for me today I find myself scuba diving in sunny Cozumel Mexico. Last year Rebecca and I to our first vacation ever (Cayo Coco Cuba) and a yearly trip to the sun has become a tradition. Nice! Before the trip last year I took scuba lessons as I was worried that I would be bored sitting on the beach. I am not sure that I would have been bored at all but I sure am happy to have taken up scuba diving! Today was dive number 70 and I truly love it. The diving was the reason we chose to come here. I guess to be honest I chose as Rebecca doesn’t dive. She does like to snorkel and loves the quantity of fish here. Cozumel has some of the best, most easily accessible reef diving in the world and it is just a short plane ride from our home in Toronto. Perfect!

Before this trip I had a grand total of 2 salt water dives under my belt. I have to say the diving here is much different than diving in Canada. In my short diving career I have embraced diving Canada’s cold waters. After the Cuba trip last year I immediately bought a dry suit so that I would have the ability to “dive where I live”. It just made sense to me. I have met too many divers who live in Canada and only dive on their once or twice yearly vacations. That makes no sense to me. If you love something wouldn’t you want to do it as often as possible? I would and do.

Last weekend we were diving Humber Bay just west of downtown Toronto. It was 34 degrees fahrenheit and there was pretty much nothing to look at but a bunch of concrete blocks. Somehow we had fun and I enjoyed the dive. Today it was 79 degrees F and so far on my trip I have seen huge sea turtles, nurse sharks, massive lobsters and crabs, sea dragons, rays and many, many more colorful fish than I could ever hope to learn the names of. The reefs are teeming with life and color and we drift along on the current and fly through these foreign landscapes. It really is spectacular!



At home we look at perfectly preserved wrecks of ships from the last couple hundred years or as I like to say “broken rusty machines underwater”. Here is is nature at its best. Both are amazing and what I find even more amazing still is the contrast. If I didn’t dive at home I probably wouldn’t appreciate this quite so much and vice versa. I certainly wouldn’t be as experienced of a diver as I wouldn’t have nearly the dives that I do. I make a point of telling my dive buddies on the boats here what the temperature was of my last dive back home and you should hear them erupt. They simply can not believe it. I can’t imagine not doing it this way.

More Pictures HERE.

My Take on the Vancouver Olympic Opening Ceremonies

So the opening ceremonies of the Olympics turned out pretty much like I thought it would. A little underwhelming but what wouldn’t be after Beijing? Even in comparison to Torino or Athens though this was a bit of a sleeper opening ceremonies. Yes, I am biased as they did not hire my company Circus Orange but I feel that I have a lot of perspective on events such as this as this is the field that I am in. I have watched most of the opening and closing ceremonies over the years and there is always those magical visual moments that I will remember forever. I think back to being a kid and watching the LA 1984 opening and seeing the guy fly in on the jet pack and how much that blew my mind. I am sure it somehow changed the course of my life. I remember that vertical wind tunnel effect from Torino and how incredibly awesome that was. Huge scale gags these never get presented as performance outside of these events. Not to mention the pyrotechnics! If Olympics ceremonies mean anything they have come to mean serious pyrotechnics. Athens was HUGE, Torino was amazing and Beijing, well... let’s just say the Chinese invented black powder and leave it at that (even if they faked the footprints). Somehow this scale of performance and spectacle was sadly lacking in Vancouver and I found it upsetting. I understand times are tough and that it was a covered venue and all the rest of it but if these ungodly expensive events are meant to happen at all they should seriously kick ass!

BC Place had to be a very difficult venue to work in and I will say that they did a fantastic job of making that 25 year old dinosaur look somewhat elegant. The roof did not collapse and they made the room look a lot bigger than it actually is. That snowboard fly through to snow/talcum powder bomb effect was original and nice. It made for some great stills but it really didn’t sustain. Rebecca liked the northern lights bit and the aerial thing was sort of OK. Obviously there were HUGE problems with the cauldron and four way flaming ice crystal gag at the end but that is the nature of technology. I am surprised that they pulled it off with just three crystals and I commend them for what must have been harrowing “on the spot” fixes.

My big beef had to be the lack of connection between performance, technology and the overall show. The humanity of the performance just didn’t come across and aren’t “people doing amazing things” what the Olympics are supposed to be about? When the performers were not Native they all appeared to be dressed in GAP costumes. Perhaps this is what best represents many Canadians but it is most certainly NOT what I want to represent my country on the world stage.

Overall the show was better than I feared it could be. It looked good but somehow lacked real soul. Perhaps the closing will be a little more kick ass. We’ll see.

Get Me Away From The Olympics

So I have to admit that the Olympics is pissing me off a bit. I’ll be honest, I’m more than a little bummed that my company is not taking part in some aspect of the performance and celebrations that are soon to be taking place in Vancouver. The city I was born in and what would have been a perfect stage for our stuff.
Our Ring Gag Proposal

My only consolation is that I really do feel like I gave it my best shot. From three years ago through to last year I met with key people in Vancouver on three separate occasions. I had good, solid introductions and presented our company overview and proposals representing original content that we could offer the event. Mainly I was after a coveted opening or closing ceremony spot but there were certainly many more opportunities to be had. For a while things were looking promising but it just didn’t go anywhere.

Processional Ring Gag Intro Proposal

Now here we are on the cusp of the great event and I am forced to watch from the sidelines. I hope for a truly spectacular show and I just pray that some of the old school “Canadiana” gets passed by. I remember my horror watching the handoff ceremony in Turin four years ago and how disgusted I was at how, culturally, Canada always seems to get distilled to ski-doos, mounties, maple syrup and hockey. Let’s broaden our horizons Canada. I know we can do better than that. I’ll be watching (from the beach in Mexico)!

Ice Climbing & Scuba Diving

Working hard going from one adventure to the next these days. Isn’t that what life is supposed to be about? Mine sure is! Splitting my leisure time between two fairly intense pursuits - ice climbing and scuba diving. Yes, some would say opposites but somehow strangely complementary. Here’s why...

Clawing my way up a frozen waterfall wielding ice tools with crampons strapped to your feet may seem completely different from exploring the depths of Lake Ontario (yes, we dive there) but these two activities actually work really well together. Take the last two days for instance. On Saturday Jonah and I drove the three hours north from Toronto to Bancroft to check out the ice there. We climbed all day and had a ball and by the end we had pretty much toasted out arms and calves from the exertion. We left elated as we finally found a decent sized piece of near vertical ice in Ontario to get some good runs in on. Since Colorado all we have been climbing is road cuts and little frozen dribbles here and there and, quite frankly, we were starting to get bummed out. Funny how I started climbing ice after I moved to Ontario from BC. Whoops! In Bancroft at least there were a couple descent pitches and we could feel like ice climbers again and that was awesome!

Sunday morning is a dive training day so by 8:00 am there we were under water down in Humber Bay just off downtown Toronto working on buoyancy skills and trim for as long as we could stand the cold. The water was 34F and the outside temperature was -10C (I don’t know why we measure water temp in F and air in C but that just seems to be the way of it). Davis was helping me find my way in the water and is very patient (thanks D - sorry you missed the waffles). Even after 63 dives I still struggle with my trim (horizontal position) in the water. I gravitated early on in my dive career to a more technical style of diving and that means a big double tank setup with redundant everything in case of emergency. The diving style we follow is known as DIR (Doing It Right) as set out by the Global Under Water Explorers. They are a bit like PADI only with a much more holistic approach to the sport. Way more emphasis is placed on excellence, fitness and skill mastery and I find it really resonates with me personally. Heck, their last newsletter had a whole section on yoga for divers. Nice! I like diving with GUE trained divers like Davis mostly because the tend to be darn conscious divers and really good at what they do. They are also really safe as they constantly practicing drills so that if (when) anything ever does go wrong they (we) will be ready.

So I took up both these adventure sports within the last year. Both are super intense, physical, mentally demanding. Each endeavor can be scary or ecstatic depending on the day... or second. Both would be considered dangerous by some and crazy by others. Both require terrific physical fitness in order to get to anything but a basic level and both require constant practice in order to improve at all. On dive days I get to rest my forearms and calves and ice climbing affords me copious amounts of fresh air and perspective. In short I am really grooving on both my new adventure sports and I plan to write all about both a whole bunch more in posts to come. Here are some of my goals for both activities and I’ll keep you up to date with my success and possible failures with each.

Dive Goals For 2010:
-Get up to 150 dives under my belt.
-Do my GUE fundamental training.
-Dive the wreck named the Comet as that is my name.
-Dive in a cave - something I never thought I would do or want to do (now I want to do this)
-Dive on three salt water wrecks - so far I don’t have a lot of experience in salt water.
-Master my buoyancy and trim.
-Learn to fin backwards.
-Master all basic skills.
-Learn how to take fantastic photos underwater.
-Get an awesome “hero” dive portrait for my inspiration wall (and blog).

Ice Climbing Goals For 2010:
-Do at least 3 multipitch ice routes.
-Get on some sustained WI5 routes and climb them with confidence.
-Get to the point where I can lead WI4+ with confidence.
-Get on a bunch of mixed routes and become a better mixed climber.
-Get an awesome “hero” ice climbing portrait for my inspiration wall (and blog).
-Ice climb in the rockies.
-Go ice climbing with Will Gadd (part of my philosophy of “why not learn from the best”)

WinterCity Show Successfully Completed

So we wrapped up the winter pyro season last night at Nathan Phillips Square with our big WinterCity show. We did this event last year as well and it always scares me a little. A large-scale pyro show outdoors fired from multiple building rooftops in Canada late January. Yikes, anything can (and usually does) go wrong.

The day before the show it was brutally cold with high winds. That would have been a deadly combo if our show had been scheduled one day earlier. For one, high wind kills proximate pyrotechnics especially when the site has such a minimal fallout zone as City Hall does. Secondly, hypothermia kills pyrotechnicians (it can). I have an awesome team who work for me at Circus Orange but in order to make a pyro show happen it involves hundreds of little 22-gauge wires that need to be twisted together on connected in various ways. These are the electric matches, or e-matches, that ignite the actual pyrotechnics. It is impossible to do this hook up work with gloves on so when it gets really, really cold you literally make one connection then put your gloves back on to warm up the fingers. You can see how this could impact efficiency during a process that is already extremely time sensitive.

The other thing about these shows is that I never really know how much work it will be on site to make it go. We design the show in our warm little office and come up with all kinds of creative ideas for elaborate layouts and new effects that we think will look amazing. This is all fine and dandy but there is really no way to know exactly how long it will take to set it all up “on the day”. Experience tells me how long it should take but then there are many wild cards like weather, technology failure, access issues, site politics and possible crew issues that have the potential to throw serious monkey wrenches into my carefully designed machine. Get two or more bad things thrown at you and a nice show experience can rapidly spiral down to what I often describe as “going to war” (not that I have been to war but I can only liken this level of stress and exertion to what I imagine war to be).

The nice thing about the City Hall site here in Toronto is that we have done close to twenty shows of this scale there between 2004 and now so I am pretty familiar with the potential problems. This means that we can push the design a little more aggressively on this site then we would on a new site that we hadn’t worked before. This is why we do things there like pyro zip-line between the two towers and rappel off with huge friggin’ backpacks loaded with explosives (in the winter).

This show was a little more experimental and I played with non-symetery. Usually I fire symmetrically from both tower rooftops and/or the podium roof below and directly in front of the towers. To be honest this was a creative way to deal with a slightly smaller budget than usual but is retrospect I am really happy to have done this experiment. I cast the towers as siblings battling for supremacy growing up. Like a movie, each had their own unique soundtrack. They each had different colors and styles of effect. Older Brother - loud, obnoxious. Younger Sister - artsy, soft, gold etc. This made the design fun and set the foundation for a very distinct show.

Show day dawned bright and sunny and best of all, no wind! It was cold (-12C) but not crazy cold. My crew was all there ready for action and we had at ‘er. No major issues during set up. A few problems with our output modules (the boxes that the e-matches hook up to that in turn attaches to the computerized firing system). The “mods” have built in batteries that run the addressing system and some of them were dead from the extreme cold. They had to be trickle charged in order to get their addresses and work. The other issue occurred twenty minutes prior to show which is always stressful. At that point I have two radios to communicate with front of house, my team and a clear-com to talk to the person calling the show. One of my mods on the east tower rooftop stopped testing. During test we run a very small current through the e-matches (not enough to set off the matches obviously) to see that the system is communicating and the matches are hooked up properly. This mod mysteriously went off-line which ment it probably would not have fired anything from that position. At the last minute we had to run a spare module up and swap it out. No big deal but this is one of the reasons why we do tests throughout the day and right up to show. If we had not caught the problem there would have been a noticeably large hole in the show. Good thing we fixed it!

All in all the show and the experience was awesome. Everyone was happy with the show and it felt good to get to paint the sky in downtown Toronto again. Happy to be inside today in the warm eating waffles and staying warm. Should have the video up soon.

The Difference Between Saying and Actually Being...

I don’t intent for this to be a place where I harp on about things that bug me but one thought that I wanted to get off my chest is what I loosely call “the difference between saying and actually being.” I come across this phenomena often as I am someone who leads a passionate, adventure filled life that often involves doing “dangerous” and different things. I do things that a lot of people don’t so it is always exciting for me when I meet someone who has similar interests, knowledge, experience etc. The trouble is that in this age of arm chair adventurers I find the quantity of people who claim to know something and those who actually do know something to be quite low. It is especially important when lives are on the line to “under promise and over deliver”.

Let’s take, for example, an aspect of my profession - rigging. I am constantly being sent resumes from folks who want to work for my company which is great (keep ‘em coming). A few years ago when I had a lot less rigging knowledge than I do today I would often be in a position of needing to hire these types of people to get jobs done. I would conduct an interview, ask a few questions, explain the work and then I would assume that this ”rigger“ had all the knowledge necessary to make the job happen. It wasn’t until a few stressful situations involving deadlines and screaming clients (no falling bodies) that I realized that my personal self classification as ”non-rigger“ was in fact a hell of a lot more knowledgeable than many of the people who claimed to be riggers. It was around that time that I started taking courses, found some terrific rigging mentors and built up my own skills and the skills of my team so that we could often do the work ourselves. I still make a point of hiring folks who are way, way smarter and more experienced than I am whenever I can in order to increase overall safety and glean even more valuable knowledge. The difference now is that I can easily see who these people with real knowledge are almost immediatly. This is really important for someone like me who flies human bodies off building roof tops. Even so I feel that it is a skill that I still need to work on and not take for granted. Gee, I wonder how many less rigging resumes I’ll get in my inbox this week?

I used rigging as an example but I can think of many more. It seems to me that the more exotic the sport or discipline the more a certain type of person wants to be associated with it. I think that is great to want to be a part of something and learn but I fear that there must be a lot of people who get hurt every year because, for whatever reason, they claim or are perceived to be more proficient at something than they really are. I, in fact spent a good deal of my younger life pretending to know a lot of things. Eventually I became a little wiser and realized that this was boring because I wasn’t actually learning anything at all. Now I go about things the opposite way. Even if I feel that I know something (or a lot of somethings) about a subject I will still go out of my way to find mentors and ask way too many questions from people I deem to have more knowledge. How else can I claw back all that time that I spent pretending to know it all myself. I’m 38 years old and I need to take any legitimate shortcuts to success that I can. I am finding that it is also a lot more fun this way!

WinterCIty Prep

So it is definitely time to get back to work now. Out big WinterCity pyro show at Toronto City Hall is this coming Friday and there is loads to do still (like blog about it...?). Like most large-scale pyro shows, we get the contract a month or so in advance. We then work like crazy to create the soundtrack and then have that signed off on by the client. Next it is a day or two of solid scripting which involves sitting in front of the computer playing short sections of the soundtrack over and over while imagining colorful explosions in the sky. You would think that this would be a lot of fun and sometimes it is but then there are other times when it doesn’t come as easily. This design process is a very delicate balance between creativity, budget, safety and what is realistically possible for the site. Sure, it would be easy if there were infinite resources and I had a small army to implement these pyrotechnic dreams. That is rarely the case so I am forced to create the very best show that I can with what I have. I often draw out the entire show in storyboard and past all the frames on a sheet of cardboard to see how it all flows. I find this helps me a lot with the overall design.

The next trick is to continue to make aspects of the show new and exciting because for me, I need to be entertained as much as my audience in order to feel good about my job. When the script is near done I invite Bryce over and we go over it with a fine tooth comb looking for possible gaps or misplaced items. Keep in mind that it is all still just a database on the computer. The computer doesn’t know the layout of City Hall or anywhere else for that matter. It just places markers for virtual pyrotechnics at points on timecode. It helps a lot to have a second brain at this point as it is really easy to get tunnel vision looking at the fields of text on the screen scroll by as the music plays. There is no visualization aspect to the software so that part of the process takes place in our heads. I can get quite animated explaining a sequence to Bryce as it plays and often add my own sound effects and passionate gestures.

We then have our finalized show so we output a script. From that we create our orders that get faxed or emailed off to our various suppliers. They call back and tell us what they have and don’t have, we make changes and lock it all in for delivery. The next few days after that are spent on my favorite aspect of the show - the paperwork. I fill out all the forms, apply for the pyro permit, line up my crew and basically spend another 3-4 days sitting in front of my computer. Once all the pre production is done I promptly forget about the show and get on with other aspects of my work, other jobs, scuba diving and ice climbing etc. All the important stuff...

Well, that was all a couple of weeks ago. Now it is time to really jump back into show mode and focus. This week is the critical week where it all has to come together. I make certain all my paperwork is in order from insurance to permits etc. We carefully track the FedEX DG (dangerous goods) shipments and hope it all gets here on time. It usually does. I’ll double check with my crew and we will start work once all the shipments arrive.

I’ll write more on the rest of the process later in the week (in all my spare time...).

Ice Climbing in Ouray Colorado

So I just returned from a 10 day trip to Ouray CO where I had an amazing time ice climbing. We started ice climbing at the very tail end of the season last year and by the time we figured out how to put all the gear on and get up something all the ice melted. Bummer! This year we figured that we would start things off right and go to the ice capital of the US. This little town of 800 had a leak in their water system 17 or so years ago and this created a small ice pitch. Some locals got savvy and they, started climbing it AND went to the hardware store, bought some plumbing and industrial shower heads and farmed some ice. Now today there are 183 ice pitches within a 10 - 20 minute walk from town and this town is at the forefront of the ice climbing scene in the US.

It was a 4:00am start New year’s Day which was tough. Particularly so because of the stupid underwear bomber and the heightened security. It took a full 3 hours to get through all the security to the gate. Whatever! They do what they do and I don’t let it stop me from having a good time... I slept pretty much the whole way to Montrose where it was a 45 minute shuttle to Ouray. Jonah and Sabrina were already there so they showed me around. The ice was spectacular! Never seen so much in one place and I couldn’t wait to get out there and climb it.

Spent the next 10 days re aquatinting myself with the water ice reality. Had some spectacular climbs and probably learned more there than I would in 2-3 years of Ontario ice climbing. Another aspect to the Ouray trip was that from January 7-10th was the 15th annual Ouray Ice Festival. During this time we climbed less but probably learned even more. Took some fantastic clinics with folks like Will Gadd and Clint Cook and had a fantastic time watching the competition.

During the festival I had the good opportunity to hook up with Will Gadd. Will had won the competition in years previous and was challenging himself in a different way this time around with an epic charity fund raiser he entitled Endless Ascent. This was a spectacularly crazy idea where he proposed to climb one pitch of ice over and over for 24 hours straight to raise money and awareness for the DZI foundation. We ran into him on the Wednesday previous to his Saturday event while he was training on a pitch of ice adjacent to where were were climbing. We were actually set up that day on the pitch that he was going to climb for his event and I can still remember how I felt climbing it just once. Obviously Will is in a whole different place with regards to experience, skill and training but I still can’t for the life of me wrap my head around how he managed to to keep climbing that near vertical pitch for 24 hours. I had to see it for myself so I volunteered to be one of his belayers. He had 23 of these over the 24 hour run. I was 1-2am and since he started at noon the previous day I really just got to see him a little over half way.

It was truly surreal up there that night. A beautiful walk through the empty ice park up to the Pick of the VIc (Will’s pitch) where the lights were up and a few folks were gathered to heckle and hoot from the bridge as Will continued to yo-yo up and down the ice. I had watched him that afternoon and his pace had barely changed after 13 hours. Amazing! As for belaying him, I assumed that he would want a nice slow lower to rest and eat up some time but no, as soon as he arrived at the top it was all business. A quick hello and then he wanted a fast drop to do it again. From 1-2 am Will progressed from lap 109 to lap 120.

I was scheduled to fly out Sunday morning before Will’s noon finish. At 7:00am waiting for the shuttle I had a few minutes so I ran back up the hill to see how he was doing. There he was, still sailing up and down that ice pitch. He had been there the whole time while I packed, slept, ate breakfast and did all that normal stuff. I tracked his progress throughout the day via my iphone and was very happy to get the twitter update that told me he succeeded in reaching his goal of climbing for 24 hours straight. The final tally was 194 pitches for a total elevation gain of something like 29,000 vertical feet. They are not sure of the actual total as they are still working it out but... who cares! It is a hell of a lot of vertical ice in a short period of time. More than many climb in a lifetime. Congratulations Will!

So Ouray Colorado was an amazing trip and a spectacular way to start off the new year. I hope to go back there again really soon!

For more pictures from this trip go HERE.